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Widely held religious beliefs that you can't talk about openly in America.

I've been thinking about the "Duck Dynasty" controversy and what it means for religious people in America, most of whom — or at least very many of whom — adhere to a scheme of beliefs that includes forbidding homosexual behavior. They're seeing how badly it can hurt your career and your social standing to express this belief.

How can there be a norm against the expression of something that so many people believe on a profound level?

But it is not unusual at all. There are many things that religious people believe that they also know they can't go around saying. You're not going to do very well in American society, for example, if you come right out and declare that people who don't follow your religion are going to hell. You'll be drifting toward Westboro Church territory if you talk like that. You sound like a crazy hate-monger. The fact that you truly believe it and that it's religious won't help your standing in the community.

So it's not unusual that some widely held religious beliefs aren't fit for expression to the general audience, only a bit surprising when something new crosses the line from fit to unfit. How did that happen? It happens! The culture changes. Think about how that happens.

Speaking of Westboro Church, I see those people are making a show of their support for Phil Robertson. Now, they are religious people who have thrown aside the interest in social acceptance. They've chosen to be in-your-face outrageous, and they seem to believe that God is giving them credit for enduring social scorn.

Jesus said: "Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

"Occidental College has been barraged with bogus allegations of sexual assault in recent days after two groups, one claiming to represent 'men's rights' set out to undermine the school's anonymous reporting system..."

According to Occidental spokesman Jim Tranquada, reports The L.A. Times:

The online campaign appears to have been fueled by misperceptions about how the college's anonymous sexual misconduct reporting form works.

"Feminists at Occidental College created an online form to anonymously report rape/sexual assault," a user wrote in a Tuesday post on Reddit's Men's Rights group. "You just fill out a form and the person is called into the office on a rape charge. The 'victim' never has to prove anything or reveal their identity."

In fact, the form was created by campus administrators in 2009 to encourage assault victims to come forward. Allegations reported to the site are reviewed by administrators and, if they occur on or near campus, should be reported to federal authorities in annual crime statistics. The anonymous reports can be used to track patterns and make inquiries but do not lead to formal investigations, Tranquada said.

There's also a controversy at Occidental about its failure to meet federal standards in reporting reports of sexual assault, so the school needs some kind of system for encouraging reports. But those who fear false reports are motivated to create pressure against any system that makes it too easy to make a false report. This particular protest, however, if it is what it appears to be, seems to entail making false reports as a way to demonstrate the harms of false reports.

"If you’re running a Hollywood studio, you may well think there are too many blockbusters."

"But that doesn’t mean there are too many of your blockbusters. You can only control your slate, and you want the other guys to cut back."

Mr. Spielberg, one of the most celebrated in Hollywood history, said that he had trouble finding a distributor for his acclaimed 2012 film “Lincoln,” which almost ended up on cable. And George Lucas, director of the original “Star Wars” franchise, said he had similar problems with “Red Tails,” an action adventure about African-American flying aces.

“You’re talking about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can’t get their movie into a theater!” Mr. Lucas said this summer at the opening of a new media center at the University of Southern California.

Why are these medicinally historical films considered blockbusters? I know it's because some grotesque amount of money was thrown into them, but why was that done? Because Spielberg and Lucas threw their weight into these projects?

How entitled they feel — how the rich assume they should get richer and richer by dumping vast sums of money into their work! Ironically, the film projects about which they feel so entitled are the ones that purvey their supposedly liberal values, challenge the privilege and entitlement of the rich. Rich other people.

As for the actual non-rich who exist in large enough numbers to make a blockbuster strategy work (when it works), they seem to prefer those stories about boyish adventurers in outer space.

Anita Elberse, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the recent “Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment”... that the blockbuster syndrome “turns out to be a winning strategy. It makes sense for the studios to spend disproportionately on a select group of the most likely winners.”...

“The marketplace for entertainment is extremely cluttered,” Professor Elberse said. “When there wasn’t a whole lot of competition, small movies worked, but with so many demands on our time, you really have to convince consumers that they need to see this on the big screen at the same time their friends are seeing it. You need the wow factor. That’s a tough challenge.”

Blast-off.

What word originated in the year you were born?

For me, it's blast-off.

Via Metafilter, where folks are a bit younger, since they're getting things like air guitar or downloadable.

"Blast-off" as a noun signifying the launching of a rocket doesn't appear in the NYT archive until March 1952, but there are many instances of the word pair "blast off" before then, mostly to refer to storms — "a blast off the Greenland coast" — and hits in baseball — "a blast off the right-field wall." The 1952 article is titled "'Space Fever' Hits the Small-Fry; If your boy talks gibberish or hisses like a boiler, don't worry -- he's just cosmic."

The hissing represents rocket-ship take-off, and the gibberish is space-ship argot.

In apartment-house elevators, space-talk breaks out in commands like "Blast off!" when a lift starts upward, and "Brake your jets!" as an elevator comes to a landing. On auto rides, small-fry lean out alternate windows shrilling "Blast the port tube!" and "Blow the starboard rocket!"...

The space-conscious don't say "Scram"; They say "Blast off, chum!" They don't call a companion "screwy"; they say "Steady your gyros." A reproof or tongue-lashing draws the remark: "Boy, did I get my tubes scorched!"; and anyone who wanders off the point is told, "You're way out of your orbit."

"Obamacare Is Falling Apart Before Our Eyes."

Writes James C. Capretta in The Weekly Standard.

I said it back in October 2012: "It's a slow-motion topple. We just haven't seen it go down yet."

"If the state bans speech that is offensive to some, where does it stop?"

"A person or persons’ right to speak does not end just because what they say or how they say it is offensive," said Governor Scott Walker, signing a bill that makes it less easy to require schools to change mascots and team names.

"What I love about the pope is he is triggering the exact kind of dialogue we ought to be having."

"People need to get involved in their communities to make a difference, to fix problems soul to soul," said Paul Ryan, quoted in a Buzzfeed article titled "Paul Ryan Finds God/How a backstage prayer in Cleveland and a new leader in the Vatican set the budget-slashing congressman on a mission to help the poor."

... Peter Flaherty, a devout Catholic and former Romney adviser who became close with the congressman during the campaign, said Ryan’s worldview has always been firmly rooted in Catholic teachings about the poor.

“Paul is someone who is very cognizant of the social magisterium of the Catholic Church… which encompasses everything from how we care for our neighbors to the idea that there’s hope and purpose and goodness in every human life,” said Flaherty, who recalled slipping away from the Republican convention in 2012 to attend mass with Ryan. “It also includes the ongoing duty of the strong to protect the weak — which I know drives Paul and his effort to help lift people out of poverty.”

"A federal judge in Utah Friday struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage..."

"[Robert J.] Shelby’s ruling is the first federal decision to address whether a state may ban same-sex marriages or refuse to recognize legal same-sex marriages since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision this summer that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act."

Camille Paglia says the Duck Dynasty debate really is about freedom of speech.

She said:

"I speak with authority here because I was openly gay before the 'Stonewall Rebellion,' when it cost you something to be so... And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech. In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as they have the right to support homosexuality — as I 100 percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right to religious freedom there … to express yourself in a magazine in an interview -– this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades. It's the whole legacy of the free speech 1960's that have been lost by my own party."

Meanwhile, some liberals are making the predictable narrowly legalistic point that freedom of speech has only to do with rights held against the government. This is a point I've strongly objected to over the years, most obviously, in debating the liberal Bob Wright (see "When did the left turn against freedom of speech?" and "[W]hat free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News"). Why is the left taking the narrow view of the concept of freedom? It's a general principle, not something you save for your friends. Like Paglia, I remember the broad 1960s era commitment to free speech. There was a special zeal to protect those who said outrageous things. Today, we're back to the kind of repression that in the 60s seemed to belong to the 1950s. What the hell happened?

"The Supreme Court of Canada has unanimously struck down the nation's anti-prostitution laws."

The Court said:

"The prohibitions at issue do not merely impose conditions on how prostitutes operate. They go a critical step further, by imposing dangerous conditions on prostitution; they prevent people engaged in a risky - but legal - activity from taking steps to protect themselves from the risks."

Why is Obama extracting Baucus from the Senate?

Baucus got the nomination for U.S. Ambassador to China. Why? It's all about the 2014 elections.

Someone must replace Baucus as Chair of the Finance Committee, and if that someone is Ron Wyden, it opens the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and if that goes to Mary Landrieu, who's up for reelection in 2014, she will embody a promise of favoritism toward the energy-producing state of Louisiana.

And Baucus has said he won't run for reelection. His seat is up in 2014, so if he leaves early, the Democratic governor of Montana will pick a new Senator, probably Lt. Gov. John Walsh, who'll then have an advantage in the 2014 election.

If you liked your insurance, but couldn't keep it because Obamacare caused it to get cancelled...

... you can... well, obviously not keep it, because you did lose it, but... how can we put this that might quiet the screaming for a little while?

Millions of Americans who had their health plans cancelled will be exempt from the Obamacare individual mandate, the administration said Thursday — a surprise move that comes just before Monday’s deadline to sign up for coverage starting Jan. 1.

The administration also said people who had their plans cancelled could get a scaled-back catastrophic plan, which has more limited benefits than those included in other Obamacare health plans.

Nothing is working, and the idea seems to be to orchestrate the catastrophe so it feels somewhat better.

With Obamacare, it's nothing but palliative treatment.

"For 20 years, I’ve served this church, and it has now put me outside."

"I find myself totally shunned, excluded. It just felt awful."

Was Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson fired after likening homosexuality to bestiality?

Drudge's main headline is "ROASTED 'DUCK' LEADER FIRED AFTER GAY RANT," which links to The Hollywood Reporter story "'Duck Dynasty's' Phil Robertson on Indefinite Hiatus Following Anti-Gay Remarks/The news comes after the reality star compared being gay to bestiality, drawing ire from LGBT groups including GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign."

First, is he fired? The whole next season is already filmed, so viewers will get all they want of Phil Robertson. But the network A&E has a corporate interest in distancing itself from him and appeasing the critics. If the show does well, he'll be back for the next season, and the controversy itself can be integrated into whatever new "reality" scenes they film. It's more PR. Everybody wins, including Phil, who isn't really being punished. These attacks work for him in that we see him standing by his religious beliefs even as he is attacked unfairly.

And the attacks are unfair. He didn't compare "being gay to bestiality." He put homosexual conduct — not the status of being gay — into a category of sins that included "sleeping around with this woman and that woman" as well as bestiality. We don't see the heterosexual men who enjoy multiple sex partners getting hotheaded over Phil Robertson. Why not? They're not organized to make political demands at the moment, but they haven't had to fight for the right to fornicate recently. So those who are organized and in the middle of a movement are taking Robertson's bait (or answering his duck call or whatever). It's "anti-gay." The "bestiality" business is forefronted.

This is the political game of the moment.

Babykins.

The term of endearment of the day.