I’ve been on vacation for about 10 days, so I have some catch-up to do here.  Here are some stories I noticed over the break.  Others will get their own post.

"Young Men’s Christian Association" to be renamed "Young".  This is ostensibly to remain more inclusive, but it’s not like folks have been staying away in droves or anything.  Just some more political correctness, removing even the hint of anything Christian in our culture, even if only ever referred to by its initial.

Handing out the Gospel of John is now "disturbing the peace" in Dearborn, Michigan.  Four kids from a group called Acts 17 Apologetics face jail time for handing out the text and talking to people at a Muslim festival.  The link on their name goes to their YouTube channel.  I’ve watched some of the videos, and I just don’t see "harassment" or "disturbing" going on.

Christian beliefs are now "unethical" when it comes to counseling, according to Augusta (GA) State University.  They want Jennifer Keeton to agree to a plan that includes "diversity sensitivity training" and changing her beliefs before they will allow her to graduate.  Read the article and, even if you disagree with her, tell me that this doesn’t sound like Soviet Russia.

The "JournoList" situation really blew up while I was out.  Oh, that liberal media.  Kenneth Anderson said it best, "To all you non-JournoLister reporters out there, please be aware that your credibility has just taken a big hit, because we, your faithful readers, don’t actually know who is or who isn’t.  You can thank JournoList for that, you can thank Ezra Klein, and you can thank the Washington Post, which has done its outstanding professionals absolutely no favors in any of this."

When even Democrats are poised to revolt over taxes (however temporary that might be), you know there’s a problem

And an appropriate cartoon from Chuck Asay:

From the New Mexico Independent,

You know that lady Shirley Sherrod? The black USDA worker in Georgia who was forced to resign after a conservative website (the one behind the mostly debunked Acorn videos) screamed reverse racism while peddling a misleading clip of a speech Sherrod gave on race?

Hmmm. I’d say a rewrite is necessary. How about?

You know that lady Shirley Sherrod? The black USDA worker in Georgia who was forced to resign after an incompetent White House rushed to judgment, and threw her under the bus, even though their only evidence was an obviously incomplete video posted on a conservative website?

Since even the infamous FoxNews did not play the video clip until after the resignation, one has to wonder: Just how paranoid, of conservative websites, is the White House? Evidently, this paranoid:

On a sidenote, if we’re bending over backwards to claim that the Acorn videos are “mostly” debunked, then let’s at least note that Tea Partiers are “mostly” not racist.

Is there a turn in the tide regarding gun rights? As a result of the recent Supreme Court ruling on 2nd Amendment rights, a DA in Wisconsin will not prosecute certain state laws restricting the use or carrying of firearms. Some of the laws he will not prosecute include:

prohibiting uncased or loaded firearms in vehicles;  prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons, including firearms;  prohibiting the possession of firearms in public buildings;  and prohibiting the possession of firearms in establishments where alcohol may be sold or served.

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Besides not letting them learn to read, black slaves couldn’t own guns either. Justice Clarence Thomas likens restrictions to the 2nd Amendment to tactics used by racists. From his opinion on the McDonald v. Chicago suit,

Militias such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, the White Brotherhood, the Pale Faces and the ’76 Association spread terror among blacks. . . . The use of firearms for self-defense was often the only way black citizens could protect themselves from mob violence.

By the way, Otis McDonald, of McDonald v. Chicago, is black.

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And lastly, regarding the 2nd Amendment, a cogent and well thought out argument. Excerpt,

In no other country, at no other time, has such a right existed. It is not the right to hunt. It is not the right to shoot at soda cans in an empty field. It is not even the right to shoot at a home invader in the middle of the night.

It is the right of revolution.

Written not by a Tea Partier or Right-wing Gun Nut, but by a very liberal author at Daily Kos.

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Well, if we can’t ban gunsmoke, then how about… smoke?

Under the new law, smoking is prohibited in indoor and outdoor areas frequented by the public, including sidewalks, parking garages, bars, restaurants, stores, stadiums, playgrounds and transit centers. Lighting up outside is also banned in places that are within 20 feet of indoor areas.

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There won’t be any smoke around our family meal, though. In Family Meal as Therapy, we read,

…there is something about a shared meal–not some holiday blowout, not once in a while but regularly, reliably–that anchors a family even on nights when the food is fast and the talk cheap and everyone has someplace else they’d rather be. And on those evenings when the mood is right and the family lingers, caught up in an idea or an argument explored in a shared safe place where no one is stupid or shy or ashamed, you get a glimpse of the power of this habit and why social scientists say such communion acts as a kind of vaccine, protecting kids from all manner of harm.

At risk to my standing at my place of employment, I make it a point to have dinner with my family. It matters.

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What about Jeremiah 29:10? Never read a Bible verse; especially Jeremiah 29:11.

Equal pay for equal work is something I think we can all get behind.  But feminism, at least on the liberal side of the equation, has come to mean that sexual equality is more important than nurturing as a mother.  Originally trying to get men to not think of women as sex objects, today’s liberal feminist is doing precisely that.

Lori Ziganto has the scoop: Empowerment: Women Now Choose Objectification Over ‘Creepy’ Breastfeeding.

When Sonia Sotomayor was questioned by the Senate before her confirmation as a Supreme Court justice, she sounded positively conservative.  As Don Surber notes:

A year ago, as senators were deciding whether to confirm her appoinment, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy asked: “Is It Safe To Say That You Accept The Supreme Court’s Decision As Establishing That The Second Amendment Right Is An Individual Right? Is That Correct?”

Then-Judge Sotomayor replied: “Yes, Sir.”

NewsBusters has the video.

However, she voted against individual gun rights a couple of days ago.

In her dissent against the finding that the city of Chicago’s ban on handguns is unconstitutional, Justice Sonia Sotomajor said: “I Can Find Nothing In The Second Amendment’s Text, History, Or Underlying Rationale That Could Warrant Characterizing It As ‘Fundamental’ Insofar As It Seeks To Protect The Keeping And Bearing Of Arms For Private Self-Defense Purposes.”

It does establish "an individual right" but doesn’t protect "private self-defense purposes".  Right.  I’m not a constitutional law scholar, but what tortured reasoning can you have in mind when you agree with the first statement, and then make the second statement?  Or is it just out and out lying? 

And now Elena Kagan is in front of the Senate, and Paul Mirengoff notes, "As with Sotomayor’s articulated vision, Kagan’s could have come from the lips of John Roberts."  Is this what we can expect from Obama nominees now and in the future; not just a resistance to being pigeon-holed, but being completely evasive to the point of mischaracterizing their own views? 

I hate to have to wind up with two justices that are not at all what they sold themselves to be in order to find out how true this may be, but this does point out how important elections are.  The enduring legacy of Obama, besides the enormous debt we’ll be saddled with, are Supreme Court justices that are entirely, 100% political, willing to say whatever it takes to get their job.

Capitalistic greed as our problem? I’ve been hearing a lot of that lately. Especially when traversing topics such as the BP oil spill or nationalized healthcare. Add to it the bit about inequality among the masses and you’ve usually put the cherry on top. Self-deprecatory statements, such as,

Moreover, I am also enraged by the sheer amount of greed, which exists in our country today—and not just our country, but it is passing onto other nations too.

seem to make it pretty clear – it’s the fault of those greedy, capitalistic Americans.

If greed was truly the problem, then we should all become sincere communists (I know, that’s an oxymoron). But greed isn’t the problem… it’s selfishness. Selfish rich, selfish poor, selfish capitalists, selfish communists, etc.

And there’s no human way around that.

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And about those rich folk… in the Bible. Interesting thoughts at Stand to Reason.

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NOTICE – No Guns Allowed A law, in New Mexico, is going into effect which will allow concealed carry weapon (CCW) permit holders to dine in establishments which have a beer & wine license. Restaurant owners do have the prerogative, however, to not allow such permit holders to bring their weapons into the restaurant, simply by posting a notice on the premises. From the Santa Fe New Mexican,

The law, passed by the Legislature this year, will allow people with concealed-carry licenses to take their guns into restaurants with beer-and-wine licenses. However, restaurant owners have the right to keep guns out of their establishments. All they have to do is post a sign.

Wow. I had no idea it was so simple to keep guns out of an establishment! Maybe someone should start posting these types of signs at bank entrances?

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Too bad they didn’t have a “no guns allowed” sign. From the Orange County Register,

Police are looking for a male suspect in connection with an armed robbery that took place in Yorba Linda on Sunday.

The robbery occurred around 12:54 p.m. when a lone man walked into the Round Table Pizza on Yorba Linda Boulevard near Lakeview Avenue, brandished a black handgun and demanded money from the cashier, Brea Police Sgt. Bill Smyser said.

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The unengaged president. Mark Steyn provides, as always, a good read. An excerpt,

To return to Cohen’s question: “Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?” Well, he’s a guy who was wafted ever upward – from the Harvard Law Review to state legislator to United States senator – without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. “Who is this guy?” Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. “What are his core beliefs?” It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It’s the “nothing else” that the likes of Cohen are belatedly noticing.

Remember that full-page ad that MoveOn.org took out to condemn General Petraeus (or as they called him, "General Betray Us")?  You may have forgotten, but MoveOn certainly does.  They kept that ad up on their website every since then.

Well, that is, until just the other day when it became clear that Petraeus would be replacing McChrystal.  Then all of a sudden >poof< the page itself, and one describing their rational for the ad, magically disappear from their site.  See, now that Obama has tapped him for a job, he’s not so bad after all.

Remember how the Soviets used to airbrush people out of pictures who had fallen out of favor with the Communist party?  You may have forgotten, but MoveOn certainly does. Inconvenient memory?  Scrub it away.

A typical reason couples live together before getting married is that, supposedly, this will allow them to find out if they are compatible and thus ensure their marriage lasts longer.  But a new study says, nope, they are less likely to stay married.

Read my lips; no new taxes on those making $250,000 or less.  Well, we may soon add to the many exceptions since that promise was made, “unless you own a home”.

The revolving door between the MSM and the Democratic Party.  Oh, that liberal media.

If the Gulf oil spill had happened on Bush’s watch, do you really think the environmental groups would be as virtually silent as they are now?  (Me neither.)

Remember how the UN climate change panel was supposed to be the result of boatloads of scientists in agreement?  Turns out the boat was a dingy.

And from the “Beware of Governments Bearing Gifts” department:

Churches and other faith-based organizations that receive government funds, beware. In an agreement that will be enforced by a federal court, government agencies in New York have agreed to monitor the Salvation Army to ensure that it doesn’t impose religion on the people its serves through its tax-funded social services.

The agreement just effects the Salvation Army’s social work in New York, but it’s more than a cautionary tale for religious groups in this era of government-backed faith-based initiatives. “With this settlement, government is watching out,” co-counsel Deborah Karpatkin of the N.Y. Civil Liberties Union said in a statement. “It will not fund religious organizations to proselytize to recipients of government-funded social services.”

The Salvation Army’s social services are intended to be an expression of faith in God and love for fellow man, but if they are prevented from doing the former while performing the latter, they’re being hobbled.  My suggestion has always been to avoid government money at all costs.

Well, some of us tried to warn our fellow Americans about Obama’s lack of experience.

“Barack Obama’s incompetence, if indeed he is incompetent, results directly from a flawed political and media process that allowed such a candidate to go forward. It’s a failure of quality control. It’s an indictment of the gatekeepers and of the media in particular. They didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth and now it turns out he’s wearing dentures. It wasn’t President Obama’s fault that he aspired to a job he had no preparation for: a man’s entitled to try for as much as he can get … will you give a billion dollars, please … but only a fool would let him. And the fools in this case would do well not to ask for him to try harder. At some point the only way they can redeem themselves is to stop digging and realize that they, not he, are to blame for this fix.”

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I suppose, then, we should re-write our founding documents?

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The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – the trailer is out.

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From the common sense department:

Women in always-intact marriages who worship at least weekly are more likely to have had fewer lifetime sexual partners than those in other family structures who never worship.

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Good guy wins another one. Let’s see, another attempted robbery, and another store-owner dispatching the would-be robber. And, again, this one is in Chicago, which means that the individual who engaged in self-defense could face prosecution. As they say, “better to be tried by 12, than carried by 6.”

It turns out that how well you know your basic economics principles correlates pretty closely with your spot on the political spectrum.

Who is better informed about the policy choices facing the country—liberals, conservatives or libertarians? According to a Zogby International survey that I write about in the May issue of Econ Journal Watch, the answer is unequivocal: The left flunks Econ 101.

Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic and I considered the 4,835 respondents’ (all American adults) answers to eight survey questions about basic economics. We also asked the respondents about their political leanings: progressive/very liberal; liberal; moderate; conservative; very conservative; and libertarian.

They describe the specific questions as well as their methodology, which breaks things down by incorrect answers, and where "not sure" doesn’t count against you.  I can see one of the questions that I might disagree with what they considered the correct answer, but you had to be positively wrong (so to speak), not just unsure, to get marked off.  The results?

How did the six ideological groups do overall? Here they are, best to worst, with an average number of incorrect responses from 0 to 8: Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate, 3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.

Ronald Reagan said, "The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so."  This shows how remarkably true that is. 

80 year-old man, with a gun, vs. an armed home invader: home invader loses. This happened in Chicago, where the current law forbids the ownership of pre-ban handguns. Do you think the intruder’s gun was registered?

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Hiker, with a gun, vs. an unarmed grizzly bear: grizzly bear loses. However, this hiker was armed with a .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol… not the best choice if one happens to run into a grizzly bear. This hiker was very lucky.

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Forget about the color of Obama’s skin… is it really that thin?

Barack Obama — a man who was as unprepared to be president as any man in our lifetime — has over the last 16 months shown that he is overmatched by events. His poll numbers continue to drop, his health care proposal is becoming less rather than more popular, the oil spill in the Gulf is badly eroding his image for leadership and competence, and his party has been battered in election after election since November. We have now reached the point where Democrats are running against Obama and his agenda in order to survive (witness Mark Critz in Pennsylvania).

That’s the good news, for all of us.  Crime is down pretty much across the nation, in all sorts of environment.  But Richard Cohen notes that this has some ramifications for an enduring liberal assertion.

This is a good news, bad news column. The good news is that crime is again down across the nation — in big cities, small cities, flourishing cities and cities that are not for the timid. Surprisingly, this has happened in the teeth of the Great Recession, meaning that those disposed to attribute criminality to poverty — my view at one time — have some strenuous rethinking to do. It could be, as conservatives have insisted all along, that crime is committed by criminals. For liberals, this is bad news indeed.

I have always wondered how this assertion has endured when there was a very clear, very stark historical example contradicting it.  If it was true, crime should have exploded during the Great Depression with so many folks reduced to poverty who weren’t there before.

Cohen asks the question:

What’s going on? A number of things, say the experts. As is always the case, the police credited the police for magnificent police work, while others cited the decline in crack cocaine usage. Those answers, though, are only partially satisfying because, believe you me, if and when crime begins its almost inevitable ascent, the very same police authorities will blame economic or social conditions beyond their control — not to mention the inevitable manpower shortage.

Whatever the reasons, it now seems fairly clear that something akin to culture and not economics is the root cause of crime. By and large everyday people do not go into a life of crime because they have been laid off or their home is worth less than their mortgage. They do something else, but whatever it is, it does not generally entail packing heat. Once this becomes an accepted truth, criminals will lose what status they still retain as victims.

Seems this economic explanation is more often a convenience used by liberals to create victims (and potential voters) of those they insist they care about.  Cohen wraps up, after a “West Side Story” reference you’ll need to Read The Whole Thing to see, with a conclusion that may be news to some, but shouldn’t be at all.

Common sense tells you that the environment has to play a role and the truly desperate will sometimes break the law — like Victor Hugo’s impoverished Jean Valjean, who stole bread for his sister’s children. But the latest crime statistics strongly suggest that bad times do not necessarily make bad people. Bad character does.

The good news is, crime is down.  The … good news is, it’s possibly another counter example that could (hopefully) soon fully discredit this liberal article of faith.

Back in the day, at my blog New Covenant, I would periodically run a set of posts highlighting various current events or issues at hand, known as Rusty Nails. Similar to Mark’s Things Heard and Doug’s Friday Link Wrap-Up, I’ll be starting up a Stones Cry Out version of Rusty Nails.

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I’m looking through you. So, Sir Paul is happy to have a President who knows what a library is? Has Sir Paul become a U.S. citizen or is he simply giving us some unsolicited opinion? Anyway, maybe our current President knows what a library is, but he also thought:  we have 58 states, Switzerland has its own language, England and the U.K. are interchangeable, the word “Orion” is pronounced “Ore-EEon”, the U.S. constitution was written 22 centuries ago, the word “corpsman” is pronounced “corpse-man”, and… Please, Paul, stick to singing.

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Why do I need to learn math, after all, I’ll NEVER use it! Maybe. Or maybe not. It seems that 20% of borrowers with poor math skills experienced foreclosure, while only 5% of those with strong math skills did.

The inability to perform simple mathematical calculations is likely to negatively impact a borrower’s ability to manage a household budget. In addition, such an inability may adversely affect the borrower’s ability to choose the appropriate type of mortgage given his or her current financial status and expected future financial situation. Both of these scenarios would likely put a borrower at risk of falling behind on his or her mortgage.

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Well, then, take a numeracy quiz. Better yet, have your children take the quiz.

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What happens when the populace has more guns? 14,000,000 guns sold in the U.S. in 2009.

Penn Jillette, magician, liberal, and critic of religion in general, has a program on Showtime where, among other things, he pokes fun and mocks all sorts of religions.  In an interview with George Lopez, he confessed that American Christians are "the most tolerant people worldwide", and admitted that he was shocked by that discovery.  (And this even when his attacks on said religion are riddled with falsehoods.)

Now why would that be?  Why would the perception of Christians be so far from the reality?  How would the word get out that Christians are such intolerant folks, if they’re not the ones doing it?

Oh, that liberal media!

Cities across the United States are officially boycotting the state of Arizona. Presumably because of its recently enacted state law, which enforces Federal law regarding alien status in our country. In Berkeley, a group of UC Berkeley students engaged in a hunger strike, ostensibly to force university administration to sanction illegal activity with the confines of the campus. It is, indeed, interesting to note this excerpt from the post,

Their initial protest target was Arizona’s new immigration law, which requires police to stop and question anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally.

No, the AZ law does not require police to stop anyone they suspect is here illegally. Consider this audio clip of an Arizona sheriff, regarding high speed pursuits during the past month.

The new AZ law is widely supported throughout the country, so one has to wonder why so many city governments are shoving their liberal views down the throats of their constituents?

Rest assured, politics is at play here. Is it no wonder, then, that we have Nancy Pelosi instructing clergy what to tell their congregants?