Update: Michael Brendan Dougherty - like me, a Catholic eyeing Evangelical developments with interest - has a more positive take on the document.

Update: Frequent commenter DivGuy writes:

Franc's analysis of 2008 presidential donors is fatally flawed because the FEC only requires the disclosure of personal information for donors who give more than $200. You can see this quite easily by searching the site for any name or city, and you'll find that all are people who gave in excess of $200.

Barack Obama has received at least 80% of his donations (43% of his total funds raised) from small donors who gave less than $200 and who are not listed in the FEC database, or on the HuffPo site that uses the FEC data.

For instance, Franc said that Republicans had more contributions from waitresses. If you search for "waitress", you'll only see 30 donors - that's obviously far too few, and should have tipped Franc off to the incomplete nature of the data ... Not only that, but of the 14 waitresses who gave to Republicans, 13 gave to Ron Paul.

I would take issue, though, with Massie's willingness to forgive the new adaptation's screenwriters their apparent intention to turn Brideshead into a story about how Catholicism can ruin your life - because, he writes, "there's little necessity for an adaptation to be faithful to the original author's intent." Well ... up to a point, Lord Copper. Of course it's possible to take considerable liberties with an adaptation and produce something that's as good or better than the original - or at least something that's more trashy and fun. But especially where classic (and somewhat politically-incorrect) novels are concerned, the more violence an adaptation does to the central themes of the source material, the more likely you are to end up with something like this.

(Though admittedly, I'm someone who absolutely loathes Julie Andrews' cheery take on Mary Poppins because it's a betrayal of everything that makes the novels great, so maybe I tend toward a certain extremism on this point.)

Somehow, this clip seems appropriate:

I just went over to the FEC website and did a search for contributions from people who listed their occupation as "electrician" and I didn't come up with any donations to any GOP presidential candidates. Overwhelmingly, electricians seem to have given money to the IBEW PAC. I ran it with "carpenter" in the employer field and the overall contributions there seem to favor Democratic presidential candidates and a lot of the Giuliani donors don't seem to actually be carpenters but instead folks like Jeff Corben who have "Carpenter Hazlewood LLC / Attorney" in their employer/occupation field.

Maybe he's looking in the wrong place, but it would be helpful if Franc could provide some more details on his data.

Through May 1, the Democratic presidential field has suctioned up a cool $5.7 million from the more than 4,000 donors who list their occupation as “CEO.” The Republicans’ take was only $2.3 million. Chief financial officers, general counsels, directors, and chief information officers also break the Democrats’ way by more than two-to-one margins. The Democrats’ advantage among “presidents” is a less dramatic but still significant $7.2 million to $6.1 million. And this isn’t new: In 2004 all but one of these categories of top corporate officers broke just as dramatically for the Democrats, the “presidents” being the exception ... Wall Street firms, long a symbol of American elite accomplishment, also tilt decisively toward the Democrats ... Democrats also enjoy enormous fundraising advantages among well-educated professionals — lawyers, teachers, accountants, journalists and writers. They carry practitioners of the hard sciences ... Professors favor Democrats over Republicans by a nine-to-one margin ($3.7 million to $430,000) ... The “objective” media — reporters, journalists, publishers and editors — also breaks heavily for the Democrats ...

Who favors the Republicans? ... In this upside-down campaign season when populist GOP campaigners like John McCain and Mike Huckabee surprised the pundits with their primary victories or, in the case of Ron Paul, their fundraising prowess, it almost makes sense that the party of the country club set has been winning the fundraising race among the common man. That’s right. The white-shirt/red-tie brigade of Republican presidential aspirants holds a nearly three-to-one edge among janitors, custodians, cleaners, sanitation workers, factory workers, truckers, bus drivers, barbers, security guards, and secretaries. While Democrats command the financial loyalty of architects, Republicans successfully woo contributions from the skilled craftsmen who turn their blueprints into reality — specifically, contractors, hardhats, plumbers, stonemasons, electricians, carpenters mechanics, and roofers. This trend extends to the saloons, where the Democrats carry the bartenders and the Republicans the waitresses. The GOP field even secures more financial support from teamsters, steelworkers, bricklayers, and autoworkers.

There are two important points to be made about these numbers, and the deeper reality they reflect. The first, which you hear around these parts a lot, is that the GOP is now a working-class party (with class defined by education and culture more than income, just to be clear; there are plenty of skilled craftsmen who make more money than teachers and journalists and academics), and that it needs to start acting like one if it's going to rebuild its shattered majority. The second is that the GOP can't only be a working-class party; just as the famous Judis-Texeira emerging Democratic majority is built around the mass upper class and the poor but depends on winning some working-class votes to put it over the top, so any future "Party of Sam's Club" Republican majority is going to need to win back at least some of the mass-upper-class votes that the party has hemorrhaged during the Bush years.

That said, as far as Waugh's more serious novels go, my loyalties lie with the Sword of Honour trilogy, so the prospect of seeing a tarted-up Brideshead doesn't really faze me. Indeed, a somewhat trashy adaptation might be exactly the right approach to a book that Waugh himself allowed to be overripe, overnostalgic and overwritten.

I suppose I have to give the nod to Newt, since Zakaria at least admits that his list is "arbitrary and a bit silly." And to be fair, both pieces have something to recommend them: The Gingrich recommendations are absurd, but the Gingrich analysis of the GOP's predicament should be required reading for Pollyanish conservatives, while Zakaria, as usual, has various sane and measured things to say about the state of the world. But that makes it all the more disappointing to see him lapse into Friedmanesque blather about the casino and ferris wheel gap, and the necessity of demonstrating our commitment to the global order by joining the metric system, and the risk that having succeeded in our "great, historical mission—globalizing the world," the U.S. might forget "to globalize ourselves." (I'm not sure what that means, but I'm pretty sure I'm against it.) Maybe he's making a bid for Friedmanesque book sales - but if so, he should remember that it profits a pundit nothing to gain the whole world if he ends up stuck arguing that it's flat.

Who would now deny that the political ascendancy of the religious right has been bad for the United States? Its destructive consequences are plain for all to see. It has polarized the nation. It has injected theological certainties into public life. It has led political leaders to invest their aims and their deeds with metaphysical significance. It has made America a laughingstock in the eyes of the educated of the world. And it has encouraged devout believers to think of themselves as agents of the divine, and their political opponents as enemies of God.

I hesitate to dignify the deeply irritating "all reasonable people must agree with the self-evident truth of my argument" trope with a rejoinder, but since Daniel asks ... well, look, obviously if you disagree with the religious right's various policy objectives, you'll think that its rise ("ascendancy" seems like a little much, doesn't it?) has been bad for the United States. That's a perfectly reasonable position to take. But it isn't what Linker's arguing here. The "destructive consequences" he's talking about all seem to have to do with the nature of our political culture, not the shape of our public policies - specifically, the level of polarization, moral absolutism, and us-versus-them Manichaeism in American political life, with the damage to our reputation among "the educated of the world" thrown in for good measure.

On the last point, I imagine Linker could find some polling data to back up his argument, though I'm also pretty sure that European sophisticates were wont to look down their noses at American rubes long before Pat Robertson came along. As for the rest of his claims, the available evidence seems to run the other way. Perhaps Linker has a different timeline in mind, but I would date the modern religious right's rise to the late 1970s, and I would urge anyone who honestly believes that the level of polarization, absolutism, and Manichaean excess has risen in our politics since the Seventies to read Rick Perlstein's Nixonland and reconsider. The parties have grown more polarized vis-a-vis one another since then, true, but our politics in general have grown vastly more peaceful, even as arguments over civil rights and Vietnam have given way to arguments over issues like abortion and gay marriage. Which ought to suggest, at the very least, that there's no easy correlation to be drawn between the influence of religion on democratic politics and the tendency of democratic peoples toward division, self-righteousness and violence.

One could, of course, dispute the premise that the politics of the Sixties and the early Seventies were any less flavored by theological concerns and metaphysical yearnings than the era that followed; indeed, I would be inclined to dispute it myself. But that still doesn't provide any grounds for claiming that the religious right "injected" theology into politics in some uniquely destructive way. Rather, it suggests that what Linker sees as an alien and destructive innovation - religious conservatism's intermingling of politics and metaphysics - is actually a more or less constant feature of American life, and one whose consequences for civil order and national unity have been far less dire during the post-'70s culture war than in the supposedly-more-secular era that preceded it.

I have to admit, I’m a little bit baffled by the ire Ross displays toward superhero movies. If he were a purebred cultural elitist, I’d get it, but not from a guy who’s admitted to going through a Star Trek phase and who championed the last James Bond movie, which, in addition to being one of the most delicious pop pleasures of the past decade, is more or less a superhero film without the spandex. How he can maintain the posture of being both an advocate of smart genre and be disdainful toward superhero films as a class is beyond me.

He goes on to make all sorts of sensible points in defense of Iron Man specifically and the superhero film more generally. Let me clarify, then: My problem is not with the existence of superhero movies, but with their proliferation, which the success - both artistic and commercial - of Iron Man is likely to further dramatically. I love genre films as much as the next cultural populist, but it's possible to have too much of a given genre even when the movies in question are good. And having Iron Man and The Dark Knight and The Incredible Hulk (did we really need another one so soon?) as summer tentpoles, with quasi-superhero movies like Hancock and Hellboy 2 thrown in, feels to me like the equivalent of having three James Bond movies coming out at more or less the same time. Or, more aptly - since superhero films are more dissimilar from one another than than Bond movies are - it's like having a Narnia movie and a Lord of the Rings movie and, say, an Ursula K. Le Guin adaptation all being released in the same movie season, with countless more adaptations of lesser fantasy works in the pipeline for the next few years. Which is to say, it feels like too much of a good thing even if all the movies turn out to be good (which they won't), and I'd like to see some of the talent involved turn their attention to other genres for a while.