I'll be away from the Web for most of today. We're taking our oldest daughter to Temple University to help get her settled into her new dorm and her next big adventure as a college freshman. Read more
I'll be away from the Web for most of today. We're taking our oldest daughter to Temple University to help get her settled into her new dorm and her next big adventure as a college freshman. Read more
This may all sound like 100-year-old history, but the sick part is that Delaware pulled the same trick a second time in the 1980s, lowering and abolishing its banking standards -- particularly usury laws and other consumer protections -- in order to lure the banking industry to the state. It worked again. And since banks are only bound by the standards of the state in which they are chartered, this had the effect of gutting usury laws and consumer protections in the other 49 states as well. Read more
It would be a positive thing if these moderate mainstream white evangelicals, these Very Nice People with their emphasis on civility, were able to provide a challenge to the vitriol, dishonesty and power games of the culture warriors. But unfortunately, that's not the role they play most of the time. Most of the time their smiling civility doesn't provide a challenge to the culture warriors, it provides a cover for them. Read more
Young-earth creationism and other big piles of poop. An old strategy for not listening to inconvenient women. Fluorine is a bad element. The Bible app even an atheist can love. Corporate team-building jingles. Watching the lunatic fringe become "mainstream." A very old joke, very well told. Read more
That's why it was so startling to hear one right-wing Republican member of Congress tell his constituents that there is no such thing as voter fraud or Medicare fraud or welfare fraud. Even more surprisingly, this conservative congressman called for the legalization of marijuana and prostitution, and for the immediate release of Bradley Manning. ... Read more
Alas, Onan's name has lived on in a flagrant misreading of this story. "Onanism" became something of a euphemism for masturbation, and this text has been, for centuries, cited as forbidding masturbation. Onan's name has been invoked in warning juvenile boys not to behave like juvenile boys. If they spilled their seed like Onan did, they were warned, they might go ow-ow-out like a blister in the sun. Read more
John McCain went to Rick Warren's Saddleback Church to try to get white evangelical voters to like him; Barack Obama went to Saddleback to show white evangelical voters that he liked them. I think they both succeeded. As such, I think McCain achieved something easy and Obama achieved something important. Read more
"America is on the verge of criminalizing the book of Genesis," says culture warrior Gary Bauer -- who founded the Family Research Council and once ran for president. For the record, no legislation has been introduced to do this. At least not as far as I can tell -- since I'm not sure what "criminalizing the book of Genesis" is supposed to mean. Would it force us all to buy replacement Bibles with only 65 books? Read more
Matthew 20:25-28: "But Jesus called them to him and said, 'You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.'" Read more
Under the present system, a worker's payroll taxes pay not for his retirement but for that of current retirees. Under a privatized system, your taxes would be diverted into an account that would be invested and from which you would draw your pension. Any attempt to switch between the systems, then, finds a current worker's tax dollars being promised both to the worker and to today's retirees. Read more
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