Who exactly is Rachel Maddow anyway? How did she get a show on MSNBC?   A quick glance at her bio shows, let’s see, no journalistic credentials whatsoever.  This comes as no surprise.  And yet, considering that she has a Stanford degree in public policy, a Doctorate in Philosophy from Oxford, and (holy cats!) was a Rhodes Scholar, you’d think she might demonstrate those smarts by not making herself look like a total moron.

I’m talking about her screed against payday lenders.  Never mind the usual blather about being “legal loan sharks”.  Obviously, had the esteemed Dr. Maddow taken an elective class in economics, she’d realize that payday lenders fill a vital role in providing short-term credit to those in need, and what would happen if they didn’t exist.  However, the fact that she failed to point these facts out reveal her weak journalistic skills.  Oh, but I forgot, she isn’t a journalist.  She’s another academic who should know better.

The sanctimonious conclusion to her hit piece, however, is particularly revelatory.  She calls payday loan business model, “usury,” and demonstrates her spelling acumen by putting the correct five letters in the correct order, telling us that “it’s in the dictionary, and actually, also in the Bible.”

Alas, Dr. Maddow manages to demonstrate exactly why she isn’t a journalist.  If she were, she’d be able to actually look up the real definition of “usury” in the dictionary while properly interpreting the Biblical passages that refer to it.  Then she’d find they have no application to the issue and work an actual balanced story around it.

Here’s the definition of usury from a random Google search: (more…)

The Orlando Sentinel recently reported that President Obama wants to nix NASA’s moon missions and instead intends to spend funding for space ventures beyond earth’s orbit. Perhaps to Avatar’s beautiful planet Pandora?

Now what would make the president stray so far from JFK’s vision of lunar supremacy? Perhaps he wasn’t that thrilled to learn what I just did about what occurred on the first moon landing. My friend Eric Metaxas wrote a great book, Everything You Alwayhs Wanted to Know About God (But Were Afraid To Ask), and in it he recalled that Buzz Aldrin confirmed to him that he took communion on the Moon.

Nobody knew.  The live broadcast was blacked out at the time.  Here are Aldrin’s own words, as quoted by Metaxas: (more…)