The Kind-Hearted Smart Aleck

According to a popular Christmas-time forward, which has been deemed as "partly true" by fact-checker Snopes.com (or partly false), conservative talking head and man voted to have a more boring voice than a robot by the name of Dullby - Ben Stein - had this to say about the holiday season: "I don't like getting pushed around for being a Jew and I don't think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat." Like many over at Fox News, it appears as if Ben Stein feels that there's an all-out "War on Christmas" in this country. To Stein and his ilk, saying "Happy Holidays!" to a person can be translated to, "God is not present among us!" What pu...

Here's a rule I've never fully understood. Why is it that players can foul out of basketball games, but not in other sports? I understand ejections, when a player's behavior goes way over the line and gets to the point of causing a major disruption to the flow of the game and intentionally risks serious injury to another through an over-the-top act of violence. However, an offensive lineman won't get kicked out of a game for committing five false starts. Hockey players will only see a couple minutes in the penalty box for such an occurrence. Why in basketball, when a player commits 5-6 fouls (depending on the level of play we're talking about), does he or she have to sit on the bench for the rest of the game? Why not force a player to be benched for 2 minutes after reaching a certain number of fouls, and sit another minute for each additional foul, or something along those lines? Fans go to these games to watch the stars play. They don't go to watch bench-warmer...

On Wednesday night, Republican Presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, said the following: "Now and then the president says I'm the grandfather of Obamacare. I don't think he meant that as a compliment, but I'll take it..." I'm trying to make sense of this man. In so doing, I'll attempt to run down the notable healthcare-related events chronologically and see if things start to finally click upstairs for me: 1) Romney signs Romneycare as Governor of Massachusetts 2) Obamacare, which is said to be nearly identical to Romneycare, passes 3) Upon receiving his party's nomination for president, Romney says his first order of business in the Oval Office would be to repeal Obamacare in its entirety 4) Romney later states that there are portions of Obamacare he likes and wouldn't mind holding onto 5) After hearing angry conservatives yelling at him and throwing feces at his bedroom window while cursing at him in jive, he states that he'll repeal...