This is a hoot. Richard Dawkins appeared on the BBC with a lefty parson, who set the atheist windbag up to make a fool of himself. Read on:

The transcript of the next minute or so only hints at how cringingly, embarrassingly bad it was for Dawkins.

Julie and the kids gave me for my birthday today what is likely to be the last wallet I will ever own.  It is a thing of strength and beauty, and I am so happy to own it. Dave Munson, the Saddleback Leather owner, put his card into the wallet he sent. The brand’s motto: “They’ll fight over it when you’re dead.” I bet they will. This thing is going to outlive everything but Cher and cockroaches.

They also gave me a pound of Louisiane coffee from La Colombe Torrefaction, the boutique coffee roasters in Philadelphia. Here’s a story from Garden & Gun about this blend. Excerpt:

“We started researching pre–Civil War coffee in the South, and it became pretty evident that some of the country’s best coffee was coming straight into New Orleans,” says Carmichael, who founded Philadelphia-based roaster La Colombe Torrefaction with Iberti in 1994. “We assumed it was all chicory, but it turned out the South was drinking coffee from Haiti two hundred years before chicory was even introduced to the region.” Now, after fourteen long months of development and eight trips to Haiti this year alone, Carmichael and Iberti have introduced Louisiane, a custom blend dedicated to the South.

Friends who bonded over coffee in Seattle in the mid-1980s, Carmichael and Iberti started La Colombe with the goal of producing “culinary coffee,” blends with depth and consistency that would work with, not against, food. They’ve since earned a following among high-profile chefs, including Eric Ripert and Daniel Boulud. But to create a blend for the South, they first had to track down the bean that was historically significant to the region. Using shipping records from the 1700s, Carmichael traced the original bean back to Blue Forest, a semi-wild heirloom ‘Typica’ variety grown in the mountains of Haiti, whose once-booming coffee industry had faded into near-dormancy. “Haiti had gone off the map for so long as a coffee producer you just didn’t even think about it,” he says. “But the beans and the potential are still there.”

I like my food to have a story behind it. But more than anything, I like my food to taste good. No kidding, this is some of the best coffee I’ve ever had. Now I have to figure out how to afford having it more often.

I spent a few hours today with my brother in law Mike, interviewing him for the book about his late wife, my sister Ruthie, who died of cancer last fall. Today was the root-canal of an interview we’ve both been dreading: the one in which we talked about her struggle with cancer, and her death. This was without question the most difficult interview I’ve ever done in all my 23 years as a journalist. I can’t possibly express my gratitude to Mike for giving it to me, and my admiration for him for having the staggering courage to relive that time this morning.

I will write about what he told me in the book, and I am absolutely confident that thousands and thousands of people will read about the love Ruthie and Mike had for each other, and the bravery with which they faced cancer together, and be inspired. Lives may change because of the life Ruthie lived, and because of the story Mike had the courage to tell this morning. I’ve known this story for a while now, and the power of it still shook me up this morning.

Today, on Valentine’s Day, let me give you this message: if you are used to complaining about your spouse, if you are used to taking him or her for granted, and picking and whining and grinching … you really should change while there’s still time. Ruthie and Mike had a beautiful marriage, from the beginning. Ruthie’s oncologist told me that they were so close that when you were talking to one, you knew you were talking to the other. Theirs was one of the most remarkable relationships he’s ever seen, he said. Cancer ended it, at least in this life.

Be kind. You never know what tomorrow is going to bring. I’m talking to myself here too, by the way.

Er, wow:

A little after 1 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2009, Karl Frisch emailed a memo to his bosses, Media Matters for America founder David Brock and president Eric Burns. In the first few lines, Frisch explained why Media Matters should launch a “Fox Fund” whose mission would be to attack the Fox News Channel.

“Simply put,” Frisch wrote, “the progressive movement is in need of an enemy. George W. Bush is gone. We really don’t have John McCain to kick around any more. Filling the lack of leadership on the right, Fox News has emerged as the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole.”

“We must take Fox News head-on in a well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of news consumers.”

What Frisch proceeded to suggest, however, went well beyond what legitimate presidential campaigns attempt. “We should hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors, senior network and corporate staff,” he wrote.

After that, Frisch argued, should come the legal assault: “We should look into contracting with a major law firm to study any available legal actions that can be taken against Fox News, from a class action law suit to defamation claims for those wronged by the network. I imagine this would be difficult but the right law firm is bound to find some legal ground for us to take action against the network.”

More here, at the Daily Caller. BuzzFeed has a 2009 MMFA memo; go to page 21 for the nauseating details.

A couple of things. One, I don’t believe the Daily Caller’s allegations that Ben Smith and others are shills for MMFA are worthwhile. Political reporters and commentators get story tips from partisan sources all the time. That they come from partisans doesn’t make these stories illegitimate. If reporters only got information from Girl Scouts and Maryknoll nuns, they wouldn’t have much to write about.

More importantly, this whole thing is disgusting, redolent of the UK Murdoch tabloids’ strategies and morals — and worse. It should frighten and appall all of us, left and right, that a partisan political outfit would consider attempting to gum up the works for a newsgathering organization by filing harassing lawsuits. Yes, it would be just as disgusting if a right-wing outfit tried to do the same thing to The New York Times. You do not have to be a fan of the Fox News Channel to see this as a chilling assault on free speech and freedom of the press. David Brock has become Richard Nixon.

I have a journalist friend who, a decade ago, was breaking lots of news about his local Roman Catholic bishop’s failings in the sex abuse scandal. The journalist learned from a troubled insider that the bishop had hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on him — this, in hopes of learning information that could be held over the reporter’s head in an effort to stop his digging. I learned from another source that one of the bishop’s minions was shopping a personal story about the reporter around to competitors, in an attempt to discredit the reporter. This told me everything I needed to know about the integrity of that bishop and his chancery, for whom the ends justified any means they thought necessary. Similarly, this memo tells you everything you need to know about the moral integrity of Media Matters.

Is this what you have to turn into to be a player in national politics and media these days? If so, God save my children from ever becoming part of the world of Washington.

“Jon Meacham parodies himself,” says the Episcopalian friend who sent to me Meacham’s essay from Time, in which he praises Barack Obama’s HHS rule compromise in historical religious terms. Writes Meacham:

My own view is that conservatives who think Obama’s (admittedly poor) performance on the issue is a source of hope for deposing the President in November are probably wrong.

But then I would think that. I am an Episcopalian, an American adherent to the Anglican tradition, and Obama’s compromise is decidedly Anglican. The President’s solution of having insurers, not the Catholic institutions, provide the coverage separately is a wise discover [sic] of the via media, or middle way, which Anglican divines have long defined as a central strength of the Church of England’s Protestant tradition.

Given the undeniable fact that the Episcopal Church is in steep demographic decline, and the Anglican Communion is strained to the breaking point over the inability of its progressive and orthodox factions to agree on basic Christian sexual morality, I’m not sure the comparison is as complimentary to Obama as Meacham thinks it is.

Heather Mac Donald says California is in for a huge, demographics-driven economic shift:

California is in the middle of a far-reaching demographic shift: Hispanics, who already constitute a majority of the state’s schoolchildren, will be a majority of its workforce and of its population in a few decades. This is an even more momentous development than it seems. Unless Hispanics’ upward mobility improves, the state risks becoming more polarized economically and more reliant on a large government safety net. And as California goes, so goes the nation, whose own Hispanic population shift is just a generation or two behind.

The scale and speed of the Golden State’s ethnic transformation are unprecedented. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the most Anglo-Saxon of the nation’s ten largest cities; today, Latinos make up nearly half of the county’s residents and one-third of its voting-age population. A full 55 percent of Los Angeles County’s child population has immigrant parents. California’s schools have the nation’s largest concentration of “English learners,” students from homes where a language other than English is regularly spoken. From 2000 to 2010, the state’s Hispanic population grew 28 percent, to reach 37.6 percent of all residents, almost equal to the shrinking white population’s 40 percent. Nearly half of all California births today are Hispanic. The signs of the change are everywhere—from the commercial strips throughout the state catering to Spanish-speaking customers, to the flea markets and illegal vendors in such areas as MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, to the growing reach of the Spanish-language media.

The poor Mexican immigrants who have fueled the transformation—84 percent of the state’s Hispanics have Mexican origins—bring an admirable work ethic and a respect for authority too often lacking in America’s native-born population. Many of their children and grandchildren have started thriving businesses and assumed positions of civic and economic leadership. But a sizable portion of Mexican, as well as Central American, immigrants, however hardworking, lack the social capital to inoculate their children reliably against America’s contagious underclass culture. The resulting dysfunction is holding them back and may hold California back as well.

Read the whole thing.  Lots of startling information in the piece, at least startling to me. For example:

The University of California, California State University, and the community-college system already grant in-state tuition to illegal aliens. (Back in 2003, when then–UC regent Ward Connerly asked university officials why illegal aliens should get a $12,000 annual tuition break when, say, a citizen from Washington State did not, they answered: Our budget will be cut if we don’t go along.) This past October, however, Brown signed a bill going even further and granting illegal aliens taxpayer-funded tuition assistance and fee waivers. The so-called California Dream Act was not a popular bill, except among Latinos: 55 percent of voters opposed the law, and only 30 percent of whites supported it, but 79 percent of Latinos approved of it. In one generation, observes CSU San Jose political scientist Larry Gerston, California has gone from outlawing affirmative action and banning nonessential government services to illegal aliens to granting them free tuition subsidies, a change that “speaks to the growing pressure of Latinos on the legislative process.”

Mac Donald says in the piece that California’s future looks a lot like Mississippi’s present.

Today I am 45. Last night, as a birthday present, my daughter Nora gave me this drawing. “It’s you and me, and we’re walking around the world, and it’s shaped like a heart.”

Blessed am I, and grateful for another year spent with my family. I will never shoot Baby Girl’s laptop!

I will not be unfaithful to Diana Krall, but boy, after watching this performance of the UK soul singer Adele at the Grammys, I am sorely tempted. Man, this woman can sing! No wonder they gave her a standing ovation. I would have stood for a damn hour!

An astonishing speech by Baroness Warsi, a Tory cabinet minister and a Muslim, who calls for more religion in the UK’s public life. Excerpts:

But today I will be taking the argument one step further. I will be arguing for Europe to become more confident and more comfortable in its Christianity. The point is this: the societies we live in, the cultures we have created, the values we hold and the things we fight for all stem from centuries of discussion, dissent and belief in Christianity.

These values shine through our politics, our public life, our culture, our economics, our language and our architecture. And, as I will say today, you cannot and should not extract these Christian foundations from the evolution of our nations any more than you can or should erase the spires from our landscapes.

My fear today is that a militant secularisation is taking hold of our societies. We see it in any number of things: when signs of religion cannot be displayed or worn in government buildings; when states won’t fund faith schools; and where religion is sidelined, marginalised and downgraded in the public sphere.

She goes on to say that secularism itself isn’t a problem, but only becomes so when it intolerantly pushes religion and religious people to the margins. The Baroness will give her address tomorrow at the Vatican.