7@9: The ‘really, really rad version’

1. Ari Kohen marks the 65th birthday of the Universal Declaration for Human Rights. And he has a good suggestion for how to celebrate the occasion.

2. Chad Michael Murray says the Left Behind re-boot will be a “really, really rad version” of the story. So either he’s in on the joke, or else he is the only person still using the word “rad” in an unironic sense.

Murray also said “he didn’t watch [the original movies] because he didn’t want Kirk Cameron’s acting to impact his own interpretation of the character.” And again I’m not sure whether the apparent irony is intentional.

3. Rachel Marie Stone responds to Dave Ramsey by quoting John Calvin (yes, that Calvin): “The Lord commands us to do ‘good unto all people,’ universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here Scripture assists us with an excellent rule when it inculcates that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of a person, but must consider the image of God in them, to which we owe all possible honor and love.”

4. Perpetually aggrieved direct-mail fundraiser Bill Donohue of the Catholic League gets into the Festivus spirit by airing his grievances on Fox News (where the airing of grievances is a year-round thing).

Donohue is on TV a lot as a self-appointed defender of Catholic honor. It’s interesting, then, that he was oddly quiet when his fellow right-wingers Rush Limbaugh and Stuart Varney decided to bash the pope for his forceful reiteration of Catholic teaching on wealth and poverty. Donohue hasn’t said a word about Limbaugh’s calling Pope Francis a “pure Marxist” who’s “ripping America.” His only comment on the right-wing backlash against Francis’ Gaudium Evangelii was a fundraising news release condemning “bogus” Catholics who dared to criticize Limbaugh.

You know what honest brokers look like? Bill Donohue doesn’t look anything like that.

5. Texas. Texas. Texas. Texas. Texas. Texas. Texas. Texas. Texas. Texas. Texas. Texas. Texas. (The first 10 are quite dismaying, but the last two are kind of awesome.)

6. Kevin Drum on the Republican attempt to sabotage Obamacare by wasting money and screwing poor people:

The refusal of Republican states to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion surely ranks as one of the most sordid acts in recent American history. The cost to the states is tiny, and the help it would bring to the poor is immense. It’s paid for by taxes that residents of these states are going to pay regardless of whether they receive any of the benefits. And yet, merely because it has Obama’s name attached to it, they’ve decided that immiserating millions of poor people is worth it. It’s hard to imagine a decision more depraved.

7. This is sometimes regarded as an angry or cynical Christmas song, but listen closer. The singer isn’t expressing that anger himself, he’s just quoting the group of kids who just mugged him. We only hear his perspective in the bridge — in which he doesn’t just forgive those kids who attacked him, but urges the rest of us to “remember” them and to share with them as well. That’s actually kind of Christmas-y, if you think about it: