Your Brilliant Posts for the Day

George Weigel is witheringly scathing about the cardinatial closure of public comment.

Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling.

O’Reilly-Colmes Family Spat Shows Why There’s Fox News…And There’s Everyone Else.  Excerpts:

...Remember, O’Reilly is the LeBron James at Fox News: He’s the network’s highest-paid, most influential, most revered player on the team. He’s authored multiple best-sellers, he’s host of a program that destroys everything in the ratings and has since 2001, and is such an influential personality that he receives regular guest invites on CBS, NBC, ABC, The View, Letterman and Leno.

Yet here’s Kirsten Powers, a liberal contributor, a fellow employee at Fox News who gets infinite crap on a daily basis from fellow liberals for sleeping with the enemy, telling him he’s full of it on his own program.

You want to know why Fox is #1?

Let me answer a question with a question: Could you ever picture this scenario happening at MSNBC or CNN?...

Economic Injustice: A Case Study  (Spoiler: It's about Wal-Mart).

Simcha Fisher is brilliant. Excerpts:

...We hear a lot about young people heading into a marriage and seized with a sudden panic when they realize that they're binding themselves for a lifetime to someone they hardly know, hardly can know. What a risk! But what frightens me is not what I'm exposing myself to. What frightens me is that I will be exposed -- yes, even after fifteen years of marriage, at a point when my husband certainly knows me, and most certainly still loves me. Even after fifteen years, I'm afraid that for the next forty years, I will keep up a charade of being a good wife and mother, a decent person, someone who learns and improves throughout my life . . . until I am very old, and I no longer have the mental wherewithal to hide who I really am.

When my grandmother got Alzheimer's, she lost her words, she lost her good sense, she lost her ability to do anything. She even forgot how to swallow food. But one of the last things that lingered was her personality. She saw someone holding a peeled banana, and from the miscellaneous soup of vocabulary that her brain had become, there bobbed up a little expression of sympathy for the poor denuded fruit. "Poor thing!" she crooned. I showed up wearing jeans with a hole in the knee, and she followed me around, stooping and pawing at my leg, trying to piece the denim back together with her bare hands -- because that is what she did. She fixed things. She was fundamentally a sympathetic person, a healer, and this trait remained long after she was capable of actually being helpful.

What will come up to the surface when I'm no longer able to hide? This is the question that's been following me around this Lent, whispering in my ear like a malign old woman who knows me to the core and cannot stand what she knows. Selfish, selfish, and you'll never change.

I know this is not the voice of God....

As is Jennifer Fulwiler. Excerpts:

...It was only late in the conversion process that I came to see that I entirely misunderstood the significance of the idea that God is love. I was thunderstruck when I realized that these Christians weren't using an awkward phrasing to convey the opinion that God is a super-dooper nice guy; they were saying that God is, literally, the source and essence of all that we call love. To paraphrase a point that the Cynical Christian made in this excellent post, when we say that "God is love" we're not describing what God is, we're describing what love is -- Love is God.

It was a mind-blowing revelation, one that fundamentally changed the way I approached God and the search for truth. And the more I talk with fellow converts and potential converts, the more I've come to believe that this is the most important concept for a seeker to understand. Here are a few reasons why:...