Faithful fans
Among religious groups, President Obama is most popular among Muslims, a Gallup survey of 88,000 Americans taken over the first six months of 2014 finds.
Among Muslims, he has 72 percent support.
The other groups that give him a rating above 50 percent are "other non-Christians" (59 percent), which does not include Muslims, Jews and people of no faith; Jewish voters (55 percent); and "no religion/atheists" (54 percent).
His highest support among Christians comes from Catholics (44 percent). Protestants (37 percent) and Mormons (18 percent) favor him less.
The Gallup survey found his overall rating was 43 percent, an amount that was weighed heavily by half the country that identifies as Protestants and about a quarter of the country that identifies as Catholic.
Giant step backward
It should be a hoot to find out the extent of the "culturally insensitive" attire that will be banned by the San Francisco Giants organization, which is in the final steps of adopting such a policy for fans.
"We want to make sure that our fans are respectful of each other," Staci Slaughter, senior vice president of the team, told KCBS, "and the different backgrounds that everyone comes from."
The policy stems partly from an incident at AT&T Park's Native American Heritage Night a couple of weeks ago, when two groups of fans disagreed over what was and wasn't proper attire. Two American Indian fans, according to the San Francisco Examiner, asked a third fan, who appeared to be Caucasian, to remove a headdress he was wearing.
Slaughter said the team is proud of its diverse fan base but wants fans to respect each other.
AT&T is the same ballpark where ushers routinely hold back fans from returning to their seats after going to the restroom or concession stand until a batter completes his at-bat.
If they're not judged culturally insensitive in this go-round, fans wearing T-shirts supporting traditional marriage, pro-life causes, meat, fur and any Republican will likely be the next victims of the apparel ban.
Nothing to see here
Just in time to stave off a threatened conservative boycott, Costco returned a book by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza to its shelves. His book, "America: Imagine a World Without Her," was inexplicably pulled from the shelves early last week after, according to an inventory control specialist in the book department of the wholesaler's corporate office, a nationwide "pull-order" was issued.
Once that happened, thousands of people took to Costco's Facebook page to let their feelings be known and said they'd boycott the stores. Soon after, Costco -- co-founded by a man said by talk radio host Rush Limbaugh to be "a major, major Obama groupie" -- decided that with the release of a documentary about the book, "there had been heightened interest by our membership and brisk sales at locations [where it was] still in stock."
It was nothing against conservatives, the wholesaler's Facebook post said. It's just that the company is always monitoring book sales and making decisions based on sales volume to pull some books off the shelves and replace them with others.
Right, and Lois Lerner will produce her "lost" emails this week.
Another Clinton speechifying
Unless she offers first-person testimony on the worst tiffs she's witnessed between her parents or until-now-hidden-from-the-tabloid tidbits about her father's affair with Monica Lewinsky, who'd want to pay Chelsea Clinton $75,000 per speech? Yet the New York Times reported last week that the daughter of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton can generate up to that amount with her speeches.
According to the Times, that amount is more than potential 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush and former secretaries of state Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright command.
Interestingly, a spokesman for the Clinton Foundation said 100 percent of the fees for the former first daughter's speeches go to the Clinton Foundation. But guess where Chelsea works? The Clinton Foundation, of course, where as vice chairwoman she works to improve "global and domestic health, creative service opportunities, and empowering the next generation of leaders."
So, essentially, the fees still go in one door at the Clinton Foundation and out the other.