President Barack Obama's job approval numbers are back "above water" (where his approval rate is higher than his disapproval number), continuing an impressive rise in the polls which began in November of last year. This is the longest run of improved public job approval Obama has managed since he got elected. Obama posted a gain of almost two full percentage points in his approval rate in February, the third-best month he's ever had in this respect (and one of the two months he posted bigger gains in was the bounce he got from Osama Bin Laden's death). He wound up the month with his approval rating a full percent better than his disapproval rating, the best numbers he's seen since last June. But this trend could be flattening out, as he ended the month of February by slipping back a bit. So in the midst of plenty of good news on the polling front for Obama, there is reason for caution as well. Call it the dark lining to a very silver cloud, if you will.

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While everyone knew that the Republican primary candidates would all be displaying plenty of "Obama Derangement Syndrome" during the campaign, this week the rhetoric took a bizarre tangent which might be called "Apology Derangement Syndrome." The concept is not only laughable, it is easy to prove what rampant and stinking hypocrisy those espousing it are truly guilty of displaying.

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"When the going gets weird," Hunter S. Thompson famously said, "the weird turn pro."

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A tectonic shift is in process in American politics, and while individual incidents occasionally draw attention, the larger continental drift is usually not in focus. Because Democrats have started winning the so-called "culture wars."

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In other news, the Obama White House had rather a bad week... but again, we'll get to that in a moment.

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Mainstream American churches have, in the past, used Biblical passages to advocate the rightness of slavery. Mainstream American churches have also refused to allow blacks to join their congregations with the same status as white worshippers. Mainstream American churches have used the Bible to justify wife-beating, and corporal punishment for children. That is all fine and good (well, it's not, really; but it's legally all fine and good) -- the Constitution does not permit government to have any sort of sway over a church's beliefs in any way (except possibly if the church were mounting armed resistance to the government and calling it religion).

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You know what I have yet to see either on television or in print? A poll of the workers affected. Maybe that's too tough a thing to ask for -- polls are time-consuming, after all, and the debate hasn't been raging all that long. But I have also yet to see in the media even a single woman interviewed who actually works for a religious hospital or university. Not a single "woman on the street" interview, not a single union representative who speaks for these women, not a single spokesperson for the women themselves. Not one. No nurses, no janitors, no administrators, no security guards... nothing.

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[Program Note: I am taking the day off today. But I did want to post this link to a transcript of Martin Luther King Junior's "Drum Major Instinct" speech. This is the speech that was misquoted on his new memorial in Washington D.C., and you really have to read the speech itself to [...]

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What is hiding in Mitt Romney's tax returns?

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But just because the modern-day "War on Christmas" may not, in fact, exist does not mean that such a war never existed in America. The subject of Christmas was indeed at the heart of a previous bitter political dispute, but you've got to go pretty far back in time to find it. All the way back to the New England Puritans.

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