1. This is useful, bookmark this and save the link: “A Simple Guide for Contacting Your Local Lawmakers (and What to Say to Them).”
2. Doug Muder on “The Fall of Governor Ultrasound“: “Once the wrongdoing begins, the McDonnells are such clumsy criminals that you may end up feeling sorry for them. (Sometimes a lie can be so obvious that it’s almost honest.) They conspire in email and text messages. They know their stock holdings look suspicious, so they sell in December, fill out the year-end form, and then buy the shares back in January. Who could possibly see through such clever subterfuge?”
3. You can tell when the powerful are worried that they’re losing control over the powerless — that’s when they start calling for “civility.”
4. “New York City Pantries Ran Out of Food After Food Stamps Were Cut,” Bryce Covert reports. Anyone surprised by that doesn’t know anything about food pantries or about the families who rely on them. Anyone surprised by that doesn’t care to know anything about food pantries or about the families who rely on them.
“Let private charity handle it” is always a statement of privileged ignorance and privileged disregard for others. I wish everyone were lucky enough to be that ignorant and that disdainful.
5. This is what passes for journalism in central Pennsylvania. A young couple is charged with murder and robbery. Hey, let’s find a self-proclaimed former “Satanist” who now works as a Christian motivational speaker and have her provide “expert” analysis of this “Satanic” crime.
I suppose Mike Warnke was unavailable for interviews.
Can we please stop talking about the Satanic Panic in the past-tense? It started in the 1980s as an off-shoot of the rise of Satanic-baby-killer politics. But it ain’t over.
6. Here is G.K. Chesterton in Tremendous Trifles:
Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.
That’s why children should be encouraged to read fairy tales rather than be “protected” from them. This is something that proponents of abstinence-only sex education don’t seem to understand.
7. “August sings Carmen.” (Whatever you’re expecting, this isn’t it. I don’t know what this is, but it’s not what you’re expecting.)
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