I'm a pessimist at heart. I just have no confidence this is making as much an effect as we'd like to believe.

2014 mid-term elections are more than a year away. That's a long time in election terms.

The rule I learned about later was in the game of Life. I used to play at my best friend's house, and he always told us that "Share the Wealth" cards were too complicated and we shouldn't play with them.

Later, I had the game myself and read the rules for Share the Wealth cards. They are not complicated.

Also, someone incorrectly taught us the fake Free Parking rule. This misconception was corrected by my lovely wife Amanda who loves Monopoly. I'll note that the free parking rule does exist in Horse-opoly.

When I was a kid, we learned about the auction first thing. We bought all the properties we landed on because we were terrified of it going to auction.

I play (or used to when I had time) mini-wargames. Memorizing the rules is practically required. Otherwise, how can you argue with your opponent over minutae of details until you're both red in the face, later to go and get a pint or two at the nearby pub?

Good times.

If I can also play devil's advocate a moment:

This is a problem of Germany's short-sightedness. Essentially, to prop up the modern welfare state in a nation of seriously declining birthrates, they invited Turkish immigrants in to work and support their social security systems. But now we're looking at generations past the initial invite and the population percentage is large enough that it is troublesome that the Turkish immigrant and their descendants still see their religion and thus themselves treated as second-class.

Given Germany's own history, I can see how it's a little insulting that Non-Muslim German's invite is, "Just as long as you play nice, we'll let you in the clubhouse."

As to the question: If we believe Christianity better than Islam, does that mean Christians are better than Muslims ... ?

The premise of the question points to a more Progressive mindset -- that one's beliefs make a person better than another. Progressives don't just believe they have better ideas; they believe they are better people. For example: Progressive analogies of AGW skeptics to Holocaust Deniers (because we needed another topic in this thread).

There are, no doubt, individuals and even some Christian churches who would make similar assumptions about their beliefs, but this is contrary to a better understanding of the faith. Of the essential themes of the faith is the idea that there is "no one righteous, not one" and that it is not anything we do, but rather what Christ did for us that justifies us before God. We are not better than anyone by our faith -- it is only the gift of God: salvation through His Son, Jesus Christ that we are called righteous before Him at all.

I hope I'm not too muddled there. I tend to be.

A few things which I hope will add ...

In Germany there's a church tax -- essentially exactly what it sounds. The government collects money and gives it to recognized churches based on what church you declare. It's primarily Catholic and Protest -- and the latter primarily Lutheran. Atheists aren't taxed at all. Unrecognized denominations are not tied to the church tax as well. For example, my church supported a German missionary whose father figured him for a deadbeat: after all, he was begging people for money when the state gave churches tax money. However, the missionary's work was outside any denomination so he received nothing from the state.

What Muslims are asking in Germany is for that recognition -- to be made official. In America we're a little spoiled by the freedom of religion. The state does not collect taxes for our churches, nor recognize certain churches over others. We more or less avoid that problem. We have predominant religions, but no official state religions.

As the Muslim populations grow in Europe, what is official, what is recognized, and how they address it can't be avoided forever.

Agreed. The Pop Ups are the ones that annoy me. I reasonably expect advertisement, but pop up ads have a way of being terribly intrusive and annoying.

Obama has lived a charmed political life. No one really challenged him until he assumed the presidency until '09. Then as he face opposition, the press covered for him for a long time. Even his pre-political career has been relatively free of real conflict.

I doubt the administration has any idea how to deal with this. They've been mollycoddled too long.

And that is the best line in this thread.

Secondly, rather than allow for a plot of nuance, J. J. Abrams keeps things black and white. Or, with the number of antagonists: Black, Dark Grey, Not as Dark Grey and white.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn picks up years from the end of the original episode, and had plenty of nuance. Kahn's vendetta against Kirk is due to a broken promise. They were supposed to check up regularly on Kahn and his penal colony; they did not. The technology stolen from the Federation is not intended as a superweapon, but a miracle of terraforming.

Kirk in the original is the protagonist, forced to deal with his own previous mistakes and oversights at great cost. He is less the angel as he is in the new one. Sure, new Kirk breaks the rules or makes rash decisions, but he does so for good reasons and it turns out mostly well.

I'm of two minds of this film --

Taken on its own, it's a fun film with excitement aplenty. The liberal nods were to be more or less expected. Star Trek in general has something of Progressive bent even at the beginning of the original series (that Original and Next Gen series tend to contradict each other at times is more an indication of the ever-changing nature of Progressivism), so yeah, I more or less can expect to see more of that. Cumberbach even compared the films plot to Bush-Cheney policy ...

However, rather than divest the film reboots from the original series, it seems it's more and more wedded to the original. As a result, I constantly see Abrams taking up old things and redoing them as he sees fit, rather than diverging into an entirely different direction as the supposed alternate timeline established by the original film would permit.

True enough. My brother - big Obama supporter - posted an article from the Economist stating that this is not Obama's fault. It's all the fault of the Bush administration who appointed those in the IRS and the fault of those wasically Wepublicans for making budget cuts that reduced the amount of staff in the IRS.

He, like others of his ilk, are constantly looking for anything that justifies whatever the president does.

Exactly. The CBO also projected Obamacare to be deficit-neutral, if I recall correctly.

I'm always suspicious about "Projections" too. They are basically making a prediction and whether it's correct or not depends on how accurate their data is and how accurate their interpretation of said data is. I suspect the latter is severely lacking.