The uproar over "gay" Christmas lights in Rome.

"A rainbow-flag theme has been selected for the traditional lights along the city's main shopping street, the Via del Corso. The lights run for almost a mile long."

The right-wing Fratelli d'Italia (Italian Brothers) party labelled the decision "provocative and ideological."

They called for the lights to be replaced with ones showing the three colors of the Italian flag, red, white and green.

Does the expression of Italian national patriotism have anything more to do with Christmas than celebrating the multiplicity of sexual orientations?

"He said I'm way over the top in referring to the Obama administration as the regime. It's over the top."

"And to say that we're in the midst of a coup d'etat, that's going too far. It's just going too far, that it's unpatriotic, and it's not conservative. I'm not conservative and I'm certainly not patriotic because I'm portraying myself and all conservatives as anti-government."

So begins a Rush Limbaugh monologue, from yesterday's show. The critic he's responding to is WaPo columnist Michael Gerson (who was a Bush speechwriter). Rush says:

It's really, really bad what the IRS is doing to the Tea Party, but that's as far as Gerson's willing to go.  He doesn't want to extrapolate it might mean anything.  But to me it does.  I don't know what he thinks about it.  I think he thinks all governments engage in excesses, and some governments have individuals who go outside the boundaries and this is par for the course....

Gerson said: "It is one thing to oppose the policies of the administration; it is another to call for resistance against a 'regime' and a 'police state.'" Rush read that and said:

Who did that?  He means armed resistance. That's what he's not saying. Nobody's doing that.

Rush doesn't like the way Gerson finds more in Rush's statements than Rush has literally said. But in order to say that, Rush must find something in Gerson's statements that Gerson has not literally said. And Rush is also going on about how President Obama is responsible for things that Obama hasn't literally said:

Herbert Meyer... the former national security official of the Reagan administration... described Hitler and Nazism, and he made the claim, 'cause his column focused on people hoping there's a smoking gun linking Obama to all of these scandals.  And Herbert Meyer said there isn't gonna be a smoking gun.  There is no memo.  Obama doesn't have to write a memo of instructions or desires 'cause everybody working for him already knows what he wants.  Everybody working for him is a miniature Obama, or a full-fledged Obama.  And as an example, Herbert Meyer used Hitler and the Nazis, and he said (paraphrasing), "Despite the fact that everybody knows that Adolf Hitler ran the Holocaust, you will not find one document where Hitler issues orders for the Holocaust to be carried out.  If we needed that to prove what Hitler was, we would never be able to prove it because it doesn't exist."

Rush goes on to complain about the mild-mannered campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney, whom he portrays as unwilling to go after Obama, and he's afraid that's where conservatives will do once again, as Jeb Bush lumbers onto the stage. Rush wants some tough dissent from the Republicans, but he must know that you can go too far with that and sound like a raving lunatic, which is what I think Gerson meant to say. Here's Gerson (from the second link, above):

Questioning the legitimacy of our government is the poisoning of patriotism. It is offensive for the same reasons it was offensive when elements of the left, in the 1960s and 1970s, talked of the American “regime.” 

And in Wisconsin, in 2011, when our duly elected Governor, Scott Walker, was protested by hordes of people who chanted "This is what democracy looks like" as they tried to interfere with what they'd convinced themselves was an illegitimate regime. And you'd better believe they compared Walker to Hitler:

"So the next time you see me sitting down during 'God Bless America,' don’t give me the 'hairy eyeball'..."

"... or say I’m un-American. In our great country, each of us has the right to his or her own religious beliefs, and we celebrate our nation’s diversity and plurality. My deeply held and sincere religious beliefs just don’t countenance this ritual."

From the Wikipedia article on the song:

Music critic Jody Rosen comments that a 1906 Jewish dialect novelty song, "When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band," contains a six-note fragment that is "instantly recognizable as the opening strains of 'God Bless America.'". He interprets this as an example of [Irving] Berlin's "habit of interpolating bits of half-remembered songs into his own numbers....

In 1938, with the rise of Hitler, Berlin, who was Jewish and a first-generation European immigrant, felt it was time to revive it as a "peace song," and it was introduced on an Armistice Day broadcast in 1938, sung by Kate Smith on her radio show. Berlin had made some minor changes...

The original lyric was "Stand beside her and guide her to the right with the light from above."

... by this time, "to the right" might have been considered a call to the political right, so he substituted "through the night" instead. 

Why Buddhism? Why truth? Why children?

I challenge Bob Wright about the way Westerners indulge in Buddhism and a few other things: