Pastors and certain other church workers are allowed to deduct that portion of their salary used for housing from their taxable salary. That “housing allowance” amounts to a huge tax break. As we blogged about earlier, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has challenged that provision
Ruth Marcus, writing in the Washington Post, notes that today bad behavior is thought of in terms of “addiction” and the need for “treatment.” She prefers the concepts of sin and absolution: The arc of modern scandal is depressingly familiar. Transgression followed by exposure, perhaps
Two interesting phenomena: Men who falsely claim to be ex-SEALS and men who go to great lengths to prove them to be fakes. In Louisiana, a man duped the governor into believing he was the lone survivor of a Navy SEAL team ambushed in Afghanistan.
One of the 25,000 or so e-mails that Sarah Palin’s detractors are making fun of is this one that she wrote to her family about how her new baby Trig has Downs Syndrome: The One Sarah Palin E-mail We Cannot Stop Thinking About | VF
As we’ve blogged about earlier, President Obama, in his participation in the war in Libya, has ignored the 60 day deadline for the engagement of American troops without Congressional approval as stipulated in the War Powers law. Now ten Congressmen, a coalition of both liberals
My old friend Karen Swallow Prior has some interesting observations about the excuses of both Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner and their underlying gnostic assumptions. The good news is that the public is no longer buying it: Media coverage of the story and the public’s
More political madness that prevents good government: We don’t allow our politicians to change their minds, even though they often need to. A politician who is open to persuasion is condemned as a flip-flopper. So observes Kathleen Parker: A politician may be able to survive
A blog entitled “A Gay Girl in Damascus” by an Arab-American lesbian named Amina Arraf attracted quite a bit of attention with her accounts of living in the oppressive and dangerous society of Syria, chronicling too the “Arab Spring” of the populace rising up to
A mash-up of weird biology and invasion of the body-snatchers: Last month, three insect and plant disease researchers in the University of California system reported a discovery about the tomato spotted wilt virus. As its name suggests, this virus infects and damages tomato plants. It’s
I watched the New Hampshire debate between the Republican presidential candidates. Pawlenty is articulate; Bachman sounds like a good campaigner; Paul makes a lot of sense; Gingrich is a fountain of ideas; Santorum seems solid; Cain sounds like a good guy; Romney sounds more conservative
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