Are you ready for some real gold? "The Judiciary: Overruling God," this afternoon's panel on the conference's pet issue, judicial activism, was a delight.

It opened with what I thought was going to provide me with a few moments' escape from the pretty frightening scene around me: Representative Todd Akin opened his speech by saying, "Imagine you are at a baseball game."

I can do this, I thought. I can picture pretzels and summer and no-hitters and all that instead of a room full of ridiculously backward Christianists. He took us through a guided imagery in which the umpire called a player with two strikes as out, and my mental picture went downhill from there as the umpire became a judicial activist and the baseball player a poor, oppressed Evangelical Christian or something like that.

The panel went downhill from there, too, getting further and further from saying what they all really meant: we don't like judges who rule based on the Constitution instead of the Bible. Because that was their basic message--they're not against ALL activist judges, because presumably the kind that approve of pharmaceutical refusal clauses are ok by them.

Apparently, Rep. Akin doesn't remember what being a public servant means, either: instead of considering his pesky constituents, he dreams up legislation by sitting around with his Congressional buds and thinking, "it sure would be a nifty thing to do to impeach a federal judge; we haven't done that in a while." Yeah, that's an actual quotation.

Phil Jauregui, Director of the Judeo-Christian council, agreed wholeheartedly--he preached that "the biggest problem in American politics is judicial activism." The failed war on terrorism and the quagmire in Iraq must have slipped his mind; so too must have any thought of meandering Katrina repairs and the millions of Americans speaking in the streets this week about immigration.

Fortunately, Jauregui provided a three-point plan to judicial success: prayer, appointments and accountability. Those last two as what he calls "two wings on an eagle--you need them both." Yeah. Like two wings. I see it now. So is prayer the head or the tail or what? Maybe I don't get it.

A bunch of the panelists also mentioned raising money for Senator Rick Santorum as part of some large-scale winning strategy, which was confusing for some pretty obvious reasons. He's not even on the Judiciary Committee! Whatever.

That's my growing attitude toward these people: whatever. I'm sitting here listening to people who assign a nasty, political agenda to Jesus and get standing ovations for it. In fact, they even get standing ovations just for walking into the room, or for quoting the Bible in the middle of a speech. Here's another important lesson learned: conservative Christianists LOVE standing ovations.

I've yet to mentally process the conference's final speaker, the down-right crazy Alan Keyes. Check back later for more after I regain a bit more sanity.