Now With 20% More Bells, Whistles:

  I've added some new functionality to Ask LBB. There's a new RSS feed, as well as an email subscription service. Your inbox, it burns us!

One Thing Athiests Never Do:
Pray for the deaths of people who disagree with them.

  When Wiley Drake, pastor of a Baptist church in Buena Park, California, used church letterhead and a church-affiliated radio show to endorse former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee's candidacy for president, it raised some red flags. Under federal tax law, non-profit organizations (religious or not) aren't allowed to endorse candidates. Those that do so risk losing their non-profit status, and the attending tax benefits.

  There's a minor piece of oft-ignored legal jargon called the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It's supposed to keep religious zealots from interfering in government, and vice versa. Despite the creeping theocratic bent of the current administration, maintaining federal tax benefits for a religious organization that endorses candidates is still a no-no. So, a group called Americans United for Separation of Church and State asked the IRS to investigate the church's non-profit status.

  Instead of defending his actions, Drake called on his flock to join him in praying to their god for the deaths of two of Americans United's leaders. While I'm pretty confident that there's no grumpy bearded man in the sky, grinding fresh points onto a pair of lightning bolts and aiming for Americans United's headquarters, it does raise some interesting questions.

  Drake is asking for help to petition the omnipotent creator of the Universe to kill two human beings. How is that substantively different from trying to hire a hitman? The question of there actually being an omnipotent creator of the Universe is immaterial; Drake believes a god exists, and he's asked that god to pop a cap in his enemies.

  It's the belief that is the key here. If I believe that I've hired a hitman to kill someone, I've committed a crime. It doesn't matter if my "hitman" is an undercover FBI agent, and my intended target was never in any real danger. I've engaged in a conspiracy to commit murder. In many jurisdictions, the penalty for this crime is on par with what I'd face if I'd actually done some killing.

  I'll say it again, because I think it bears repeating. Drake believes that he and his followers are asking an omnipotent (and not at all imaginary) being to kill his enemies. He has clearly shown the intent to cause the deaths of two people. This has to be a criminal act. If it wasn't all so laughably stupid, I'd say Drake should be prosecuted for his threats.

ReligionNewsBlog
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
LA Times (registration required)

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  I demand that you explain the unfathomable popularity of LOLcats. Get to it.
- Not LOLing

Dear Not LOLing,
  LOLcats and their spawn - LOLPresidents, LOLBots, even LOLJesus - operate on the two bedrock principles of Internet humor:
1) Anything you can do, I can do better. (Ur captions. Let me improov upon them.)
2) Nothing makes a mildly amusing joke more funny that beating it into the ground until the whole world gets sick of it, and it can come back as ironic on a webcomic t-shirt.

  Anybody who tells you that Web2.0 isn't a vast field of suck lit by vanishingly rare glimmers of talent is probably hoping to quit working in favor of blogging full time.

Random Internal Soundtrack

  Ever since I managed to wash my iPod in the pocket of my jacket, the soundtrack of my commute has been a collection of overheard conversation, transit engine noise, and the tinny buzz of music from out of the headphones of the future deaf community. On days when I forget to bring something to read, my brain often fills the background noise with snatches of poorly remembered songs. I can usually only recall a few bars or so, and that short bit invariably lodges in my brain like a tumor with ninja training, repeating on an endless, maddening loop until I get involved in some task or other.

  This morning, for some unfathomable reason, I got brain-smacked by the opening verse of the showtune Big Spender. I haven't heard it in years, but that's de rigueur for these random songbombs. What made it notable was that my stunted, malformed psyche managed to conjure up a version I've never heard before. I was hearing it sung by bathhouse-era Bette Midler. Loud, brassy, lungs that could power a small wind farm. I didn't even know that she'd recorded the song; thirty seconds on Google revealed 2005's Sings the Peggy Lee Songbook, containing Midler's recording of the song, a version arranged by her old bathhouse piano player, Barry Manilow.

  I haven't ever heard this version of the song, nor do I plan to, so I guess I'll never know how similar it is to the one my brain vomited up. I just found the whole episode mildly disconcerting, and I thought I'd share my disquiet with the Internet. Isn't this the kind of thing that convinces the credulous that they're psychic?