Oh no who is that? Oh no it’s me

• I’ve spent entirely too much time this weekend surfing the many, many, many fine examples of #mcconnelling.

I’m clueless when it comes to video editing, so I wound up just muting the video on YouTube, then clicking through everything in my iTunes library. These aren’t the Top 10, or the only 10, but these are an excellent place to start:

1. “Adagio for Strings,” Samuel Barber
2. “Rock of Ages,” Def Leppard
3. “Shine,” The Newsboys
4. “Pasties and a G String,” Tom Waits
5. “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” Blind Willie Johnson
6. “Potatoes, Tomatoes, Gravy and Peas,” Terry Taylor
7. “Kiss Me,” Sixpence None the Richer
8. “Loser,” Beck
9. “Fade Into You,” Mazzy Star
10. “Word Up,” Cameo

Also too, absolutely anything by Prince and/or Arvo Pärt.

• I don’t know anything else about Marion L. Bines of Chesterfield County, Virginia, but based on this article, I’m a fan: “I would have probably cussed him out and given him a few choice New York words.”

• Trademark dispute could mean that the name “Schlafly” one day is associated with something other than ignorance and hate.

• Hemant Mehta and James McGrath both share a pretty funny video featuring “Cosmos for Creationists.” I liked it up until the end, where it misfires with a joke about “wafers and wine.” Ugh, no. Wrong. Really, really wrong — that’s like including a yarmulke in your Jerry Falwell costume.

Young-Earth creationists are fundies, and fundies ain’t eucharistic. These folks do not go to churches that administer sacraments involving wafers and wine. They go to churches that have communion once a month with Welch’s and Wonder bread and they tend to make kind of a big deal out of insisting that it’s just a symbol and absolutely not a sacrament … papist.

If you’re in a liturgical church with wafers and wine, then the odds are that nobody there has any problem with anything Neil DeGrasse Tyson has to say on Cosmos. Heck, if they’re Episcopalian, then they may even have the original series with Carl Sagan on DVD so they can use it in Sunday school classes.

• And while you’re over at Friendly Atheist, also see this post in which Hemant wears his math-teacher hat, explaining why paranoid right-wingers shouldn’t be trusted to give you the proper change at the coffee shop.

• And speaking of both the paranoid right wing and mischaracterizing religious fringe groups, John Aravosis is absolutely right that NPR’s Michael Martin blew it big time when he introduced Scott Lively as an “evangelical leader” and nothing more. Lively is beyond the fringes of beyond the fringe. He dwells in Fred Phelps territory and should be regarded in just the same way. It was unfair to listeners and unfair to evangelicals to mischaracterize Lively as an “evangelical leader.” Heck, it was unfair to right-wing demagogues like Bryan Fischer or The Liar Tony Perkins to lump them together with someone like Lively.

Of course, it’d be far less likely for mistakes like Martin’s to happen if mainstream evangelical leaders weren’t so timidly reluctant to condemn even the most extreme religious bigots. Mainstream evangelicals can’t expect reporters to differentiate between them and extremists like Lively if they’re not willing to point out that difference themselves.