Boom! Bam! Biff! Pow! (How You Like Me Now?)

So it looks like straights have been snookered:

How many gay men and lesbians are there in the United States? Gary Gates has an idea but acknowledges pinpointing a solid figure remains an elusive task.

Gates is demographer-in-residence at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy, a think tank based at the University of California, Los Angeles. For the institute's 10th anniversary this week, he took a scholarly stab at answering the question that has been debated, avoided, parsed and proven both insoluble and political since pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey said in the 1940s that 10 percent of the men he surveyed were "predominantly homosexual."

Gates' best estimate, derived from five studies that have asked subjects about their sexual orientation, is that the nation has about 4 million adults who identify as being gay or lesbian, representing 1.7 percent of the 18-and-over population.

That's a much lower figure than the 3 to 5 percent that has been the conventional wisdom in the last two decades, based on other isolated studies and attempts to discredit Kinsey.

It's incredible how well propaganda can work, distracting everyone from what's important:

A core sample taken from the more than 70 features at this year’s Filmfest D.C. reveals films of even more significant and timely substance. This year the festival will feature two U.S. premieres: “Scientology: The Truth About a Lie,” Jean-Charles Deniau’s chronicle of L. Ron Hubbard’s organization and former devotees who spent millions of dollars before breaking free.

While “Scientology” doesn’t break any new formal ground, hewing to formulaic stock footage and talking heads, the film nonetheless provides chilling insights into a notoriously difficult world for outsiders to peer into.

Yeah, 69 films of crap, but the cult movie is "of even more significant and timely substance." I'm not surprised. Speaking of Scientology (kind of, since she's a supporter and popularizer of it) this is surprising:

When talk show queen Oprah Winfrey announced she was publicly supporting Barack Obama for president back in 2008, she shocked many TV insiders who had always thought it best for talk show hosts to keep their political views to themselves.

Now as the 2012 election process has officially begun, sources tell me this time around Oprah's support will be much more private.

"For 2012, much has changed for Oprah. She now has own cable channel called OWN that has been struggling to find an audience -- she isn't going to do anything to alienate them," a TV insider tells me. "Unlike in 2008, when a drop in ratings didn't matter as much for the queen of TV, Oprah is now fighting every day to get people to tune into OWN."

Oprah Winfrey's daily talk show ratings dropped in 2008 after her highly publicized political rally for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. An October 2008 Gallup poll before the rallies but after Oprah's public endorsement of Obama found that Oprah's favorable ratings had fallen from 74 to 66 percent while her unfavorable ratings jumped from 17 to 26 percent. Then came news that Oprah's TV ratings showed that her daytime audience, which was nearly 9 million at its height in 2004-05, had fallen to 7.3 million.

As much as Oprah may still love President Obama and may support him behind the scenes, do not expect to see the same public support you saw in 2008.

Yes, the Law of Quantum Failure has struck again. Good, because most conservatives blew it last time:

Don’t forget, her Obama endorsement came early on, in May 2007, just three months after he launched his campaign. She helped put him on the map against the Clinton machine when he was trailing by 40 points. I think conservative fans at the time probably gave her a pass because by the time the general election rolled around, the fact of her status as an O-bot had already long since been digested.

And speaking of clueless conservatives, Glenn Reynolds thinks this is an "interesting title for a book by an atheist":

Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity.

Yeah, like I, as a conservative atheist, haven't been saying that very thing for years. Of course, since I criticize him, Reynolds doesn't understand anything I say (while still posing as though he's informing his public of what the mainstream media leaves out. Conservative atheists defending Christians against liberals? Who knew?) Reynolds leads his readers to others, like S.E. Cupp, so he can link to them without worry. I think, as a Libertarian, he's spent too much time with the liberal opinions of so-called "new atheists".

I will not follow.