“The church is not simply the prolife movement, and to the extent that every interaction between the church and our political system is held hostage to the demands of the most confrontational elements of that movement, the church’s social message, including its message about abortion, will be marginalized and ineffectual. The respect and honor owed the office of the president does not depend on any particular president’s merits (as Buckley often reminded his liberal critics). That respect is, among other things, a powerful affirmation of the willingness of Americans to live together peacefully, despite profound disagreement. Notre Dame’s invitation to President Obama is perhaps best understood in that light.”E.D. Kain: Pop Christianity...
Christianity in America has been weaved into pop culture much to the detriment of that religion. The co-opting of pop culture to try to make Christianity seem more “hip” to the times has backfired. Simply countering every Nirvana or Green Day with a Christian version of the same will not make teenage boys prefer the latter to the former. When cool becomes more important than sacred then we’ve got a problem. The fact of the matter is that secular movie makers will always be able to make more edgy films, and secular musicians will always be able to make cooler music, and the reason for this is they’re just trying to make movies and music - they’re not trying to make explicitly Christian movies and music.Josh Wimmer:
“It’s not fair for me just to single out the lyrics, because I also know I’m listening to Christian radio immediately because of the shimmery keyboards and amped-up major-key guitar lines — there’s a sound there that Christian pop musicians have staked out as their own, and I get why it sounds “Christian” to them, but it rings about as true to me as a heaven actually full of harp-strumming cherubs. Mainstream pop may suck, but at least it sucks in so many different ways.”Cato: Democrats Agree on Health Plan Outline: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid...
Given the problems facing our health care system-high costs, uneven quality, millions of Americans without health insurance–it seems that things couldn’t get any worse. But a bill based on these ideas, will almost certainly make things much, much worse.Atlantic:
Health care isn't a single good, nor, like food, is it easily defined in terms of a minimum to sustain life. Studying other countries' supposedly universal systems only demonstrates how fraught the concept of "health care" is: one bundle of services in British Columbia and a less-generous one in Nova Scotia, one in England and another in Scotland, one in New Zealand before the election and another afterwards. Arguably the U.S. already has universal care, in the sense that everyone can get some care-if only from an emergency room-for some things, and that citizens (a critical word in this context) without money are covered by Medicaid. The real issue is how you define "health care." What gets included is a matter not only of medicine and economics but of culture and politics.Politico: Budget cuts concern contractors...
Though the details of the $534 billion defense budget are still unknown, there are numerous signs that Gates could take the ax to a major defense weapons program as early as next week.Red State Update on legalization:
That has defense industry officials, whose fortunes will rise or fall on the outcome, madly trying to decode which programs are the most vulnerable and scrambling to defend them.
A U.S. unemployment map
Finally a true map of Europe
No comments:
Post a Comment