I sometimes wonder if the increasing frequency and quality of these Ricochet get-togethers will prompt my doctor to announce that they are bad for my health.   Anything this enjoyable, this edifying, and this stimulating is bound to run afoul of a law or six at some point, for it seems that every time I think it can't get any better than the most recent meet-up, I'm proven wrong by the next one. When RushBabe49 announced that she was planning a get together in Seattle, I began dropping subtle hints to my dispatcher -- subtle herein defined as me saying, "Please, please, please, oh pretty please, ya gotta get me to Seattle!"  

As it turned out, Hillsdale College was conducting a seminar at the Seattle Sheraton on the subject: "Looking Ahead: U.S. National Security," and several Ricochet members were on hand to hear the collected thoughts and wisdom of speakers ranging from Hillsdale President Dr. Larry Arnn, to Andrew McCarthy, Bill Gertz, National Review's John O'Sullivan, and Garry Kasparov. To my eternal regret, I wasn't able to be there for the seminar, but I did manage to deliver a load of potato chips in Portland and then make a beeline to Seattle in time for the Ricochet contingent's festivities, scheduled for 6PM.   

The standard having been set by previous gatherings, I wasn't in the least surprised to find myself in the company of the sort of people whom Rush Limbaugh accurately termed as the smartest in the room. And speaking of rooms, Providence smiled on us because we were provided with a separate room, away from the noise and commotion of the restaurant, in which to enjoy a good meal and conversation. The effect of this simple arrangement can't be over-emphasized. Freed from the competition of a hundred other voices, the conversation broadened from the usual clusters of disparate discussions to a single conversation in which everyone in the room could, and did, participate and address everyone else.  

The topic of the main discussion, in which everyone participated, was whether or not attendees counted themselves as encouraged or discouraged about the country's future. Without exception, each person had a unique and compelling point to make, each from a unique angle. That people were "fired up," to use the President's jargon, was obvious. That they were fired up in the cause of liberty and limited government must be terribly disconcerting to the statist, though it surely excites the autocratic impulses of the IRS, DHS, TSA, EPA, NEA, NLRB, ATF, DOJ, FBI, FCC, FDA, USDA, EIEIO, all the King's horses and all the King's jackasses. Fine. Americans have stood up to omnipotent governments on other continents, and we can handle one on our shores as well.  

I can't remember all of the names, but as always, it was a pleasure meeting everyone. Professor Morrissey from Hillsdale College was a pure delight, his wisdom bursting like so many sunbeams into the conversation. My undying admiration goes to Ricochet Member Foxfier, whose dedication knows no bounds, bringing as she did three wonderful children, one of them only a month old and already better behaved than many adults I know.  

Photos and a brief video of the festivities were handled by RushBabe49 (her post on the evening's happenings is here), who did a positively masterful job of orchestrating the entire event, right down to the name tags. If this gathering is any indication, and I tend to think it is, a national gathering of Ricochet members will be something you won't want to miss.  

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court agreed to review a Second Circuit decision holding that a town in New York State violated the First Amendment by opening its Town Board meetings with prayers. The Second Circuit's decision is a twofer, constitutionally speaking: an attack on both religious freedom and states' rights. It should be overturned. 

The case, Town of Greece v. Galloway, involves a town in upstate New York that has a policy of inviting citizens -- clergy or not -- to give opening prayers at Town Board meetings. All faiths are invited and over the years they've had prayers by Catholics, Protestants from several denominations, a Wiccan priestess, the chairman of a local Bahá’í congregation, and a lay Jewish man. And yet, because the majority of the prayers were Christian in nature, the Second Circuit held that the town's practice amounted to an implicit "endorsement" of Christianity in violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.

This is just wrong. First, it conflicts with the Supreme Court's own precedent in the 1983 case of Marsh v. Chambers, in which the Court upheld an opening prayer tradition at the Nebraska State Legislature based on the long tradition of legislative opening prayers going back to the Founding era and before. The Court specifically held that legislative prayers were not to be judged by the "endorsement" test, which is used in other Establishment Clause cases. Granted, SCOTUS can overturn its own precedent, but the Second Circuit has no business ignoring Marsh.

Second, and more importantly, the Second  Circuit's decision exacerbates the problem in our Establishment Clause jurisprudence; i.e., that the courts have forgotten that the Establishment Clause is a federalism provision that allows states and cities to accommodate religion as they see fit. It is not a command for extreme secularism. Just look at the text: that famous metaphor -- "wall of separation" -- is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the clause bars Congress from making any law "respecting" (i.e., with respect to) an establishment of religion. In other words, each state can decide how to accommodate religion without federal interference. 

Nobody on the Supreme Court -- other than Clarence Thomas -- is likely to revive the original meaning of the Establishment Clause. However, decisions like Marsh at least recognize some residual sovereignty in states and cities to run their legislatures as they see fit. If the Second Circuit's approach is upheld, it will be yet another victory in the "progressive" movement to banish religion from the public square.

I recently posted the third installment of my guest-blog for the Louis D. Brandeis Center blog. In light of the recent DOJ/ED mandate that expands the definition of sexual harassment to include constitutionally protected speech, I tease out the historical roots of 'harassment codes' as the primary vehicle used to silence speech on campuses. Here are the three main points from the piece:

1. Overbroad and vague harassment rationales have been the primary justification and legal theory behind campus speech codes since the 1980s. Many remember that speech codes came into vogue on campuses in the 1980s and 1990s; what they tend to forget, though, is that a great deal of them were based on expansive definitions of harassment. Starting in 1989 with Doe v. University of Michigan and continuing through successful challenges at my alma mater, Stanford University, and most recently at the University of the Virgin Islands, there have been a series of defeats in court for harassment-based speech codes over the past 25 years. In fact, the abuse of harassment rationales by universities was so bad that in 2003 the ED issued a clarification letter to instruct colleges across the country that harassment, properly defined, requires a serious pattern of serious conduct, and that harassment-based speech codes could not be used to censor and punish speech protected by the First Amendment. Notably, there is no mention of “free speech,” the First Amendment, or the 2003 clarification letter in the recent May 9 DOJ/ED joint letter.

2. “Harassment” charges have been the weapon of choice against unpopular, dissenting, or in some cases comparatively innocuous speech on campuses for decades now. While I provide maybe a dozen examples of the abuse of harassment allegations on college campuses in my book, it’s only a small fraction of the cases I’ve seen over the years. As I discussed in my Wall Street Journal op-ed, cases include one I previously mentioned at Tufts University in which a student publication was found guilty of racial harassment for publishing true, if unflattering, facts about radical Islam, and, more recently, a professor at the University of Denver who was found guilty of harassment because of the necessarily taboo topics covered in his class about, well, taboos.

One stunning example that got cut from the Wall Street Journal piece at the last-minute occurred last fall, when a student at SUNY Oswego was accused of harassment and faced suspension because, as part of a class assignment, he emailed local hockey coaches and asked for their opinion of Oswego’s hockey coach. A rival coach—not even the one in question—found the survey “offensive” because the student told recipients that they didn’t need to feel obliged to say only nice things about the Oswego coach. The rival coach’s complaint was enough to get the student suspended and kicked off campus. Fortunately, FIRE intervened and in the face of public ridicule Oswego changed course.

Then, of course, there are the “classic” FIRE examples of the student who was found guilty of racial harassment for publicly reading a book, the student who was kicked out of the dorms for making a joke about the “freshman 15,” and a student disc jockey who was found guilty for cracking jokes about his own mother on his radio show. The list goes on and on.

3. Harassment standards do not stay confined to sex. While I briefly make this point in my Wall Street Journal article, it bears repeating and emphasis: This is not just about failed attempts at flirting or unsuccessful requests for a date (though, by the plain language of the new standard, it can include these as well). As you can see from the examples above, harassment is used to punish everything from sophomoric, if tame, jokes, to what books students read, to what actually gets taught in class—all on the basis of the broadest possible definition of sex and gender, which inevitably expands to race, ethnicity, and religion. This has been an ongoing problem on campuses for decades, and the ED and DOJ stepped in to make the situation far more confusing and campus administrators far more likely to overreact.

You can read the whole thing here.

Those in the elite news gathering and pundit class often wonder how – and if – national news penetrates throughout the country. They often cite presidential popularity polls as their Holy Grail, since doing otherwise might require them to actually get on an airplane or into their cars and breach the protective New York/Washington bubble where they might just miss the correspondent's dinner or an episode of Mad Men or House of Cards with their friends

If they did, they might see scenes similar to what I saw last week outside big box sporting goods stores in both Wyoming and Iowa: Long lines of people – retirees, men and women wearing casual camo, even a young mother pushing a stroller -- waiting outside for the doors to open. The lines appeared orderly and civil, but curious to see mid-week. Why: Because the delivery truck containing ammunition was scheduled to arrive that day.

Beneath the radar of the current administration and its scandals, something notable and perhaps ominous is happening out here in the square states and across the country.

 According to an excellent Foxnews.com story  by Kristine Shevory:

At Dick’s Sporting Goods in Bee Cave, Texas, a line of 10 to 15 people wait in the early morning hours outside for the store to open every Wednesday and Friday despite the three-box limit. On those days, new ammunition shipments come in and though they don’t know what’s coming off the truck, gun enthusiasts still show up. Any ammunition calibers that are difficult to get, like 9-mm., .22, .45 or .223, are routinely bought within minutes, leaving shelves bare. Only shotgun shells can routinely be found…

With such little supply, retailers have slapped restrictions on the number of boxes of ammunition customers can purchase. In January, Walmart limited ammunition sales to three boxes per customer, per day. Dick’s Sporting Goods and Cabela’s imposed a three and ten box-restriction on purchases, respectively …

Ammunition manufacturers are reporting record profits and sales, with increases that number in the double and sometimes triple digits. Olin, which owns Winchester, reported last week the company’s first quarter earnings climbed 190 percent over the same period last year. Federal Premium Ammunition’s annual earnings for ammunition last year climbed 24 percent over 2011. 

When guns and ammunition are being hoarded like never before by domestic federal government agencies on one side and the armed citizenry on the other, well ... that can't be good news, can it?

Today would be an excellent day for a document dump.

It's the Friday of a holiday weekend, and we've got three (three!) scandals on the hot boil in the White House. We all know there's lots they're not telling us -- new stuff seems to come out every day on all three fronts -- and we also know that the Obama team and the lickspittle press want to get to the "this is all old news" phase of this business as soon as possible.

So here's the question: Which scandal is going to get the biggest document dump today? (You can choose more than one, or none.) Bonus question: What do you think it's going to be?

We'll settle up Monday evening, after Memorial Day beers and BBQs.

Winner gets something cool. Not sure what it is yet. But it may involve Peter Robinson in some kind of costume.

Barack Obama, June 4, 2009, in Cairo:

I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.  Instead, they overlap, and share common principles -- principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

Elliot Abrams, writing yesterday at his "Pressure Points" blog for the Council on Foreign Relations:

There are many ways to measure the success of American foreign policy, and popularity is not necessarily the best one.

But when an administration and a president start out as Mr. Obama did, in essence reviling his predecessor’ policies in the Arab world and assuring Arabs that he had a new and better way, it is striking if the product is less popularity.

And that is the case in Egypt. A new Pew poll says that while [George W.] Bush’s popularity in Egypt in his last year in office, 2008, was 22 percent, today Obama’s rating has fallen even lower–to 16 percent.

Jennifer Rubin makes a compelling case:

Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “possible co-conspirator” in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails, a law enforcement official told NBC News on Thursday. The disclosure of the attorney general’s role came as President Barack Obama, in a major speech on his counterterrorism policy, said Holder had agreed to review Justice Department guidelines governing investigations that involve journalists.

“I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable,” Obama said. “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs.”

If this is accurate, Holder has no choice now but to resign. He engaged in a practice, if the president is to be believed, that the president disagreed with and is in contravention of Justice Department guidelines on surveillance of the media. As many mainstream media figures and legal experts have noted, he appeared to attempt to “criminalize journalism.” Moreover, it is impossible for him to investigate DOJ practices that he participated in.

It really is as simple as that. But, Rubin, notes, he's also in potential trouble for his own behavior in the James Rosen and Associated Press scandals.

The affidavit going after Rosen asserted that Justice had exhausted all means to get material from Rosen “because of [Rosen's] own potential criminal liability in this matter,” and asking for the documents voluntarily would compromise the integrity of the investigation. That same affidavit also laughably claims that Rosen might mask his identity or try to flee the country. So did Holder intentionally mislead a judge by signing off on that affidavit? Worth looking into, at least.

Secondly, Rubin says, Holder testified unbelievably that he'd recused himself from the AP investigation but had no recollection for when that happened and no evidence to substantiate his claim that he recused himself. That should be investigated, at the very least.

Holder frankly should have more concern about prosecution than Lois Lerner (who took the 5th and was put on administrative leave). But that will be his problem — after he leaves office, as he now must. He acted in ways supposedly contrary to the president’s direction, without informing him and in a manner that called into question the president’s and the DOJ’s integrity and respect for the rule of law.

Is there any defense for why Holder should stay?

Less than six weeks after the Boston Marathon bombing, President Obama is sticking to his campaign narrative that America is safer under his administration than ever before and that there have been no “large-scale” terrorist attacks on the United States since he became president.

“So after I took office, we stepped up the war against al Qaeda but we also sought to change its course,” said Obama at Ft. McNair’s National Defense University in Washington, D.C.  “We relentlessly targeted al Qaeda’s leadership. We ended the war in Iraq and brought nearly 150,000 troops home. … We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law, and expanded our consultations with Congress.

“Today, Osama bin Laden is dead and so are most of his top lieutenants,” said Obama. “There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.”

That’s right, folks, nothing to see here. Not in Boston, where two jihadists killed 5 people and injured 280. Not in Benghazi where Islamist terrorists, including the al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al-Sharia, killed an American ambassador and three others. Not in Fort Hood, Texas, where Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim radical, yelled “Allahu Akbar” and then killed 13 people and injured 32 others.

In the Benghazi affair, denials, misinformation, and lies are not only freely told (a la Jay Carney) but rewarded. The Obama Administration is seeking to promote Victoria Nuland, spokesperson for the State Department, to assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs despite her role in objecting to the initial set of talking points. Nuland asked that references to al Qaeda and previous CIA warnings about threats posed to U.S. diplomats in Libya be scrubbed from the document.

Nuland’s promotion stands in stark contrast to the demotion of whistleblower Gregory Hicks, former deputy chief of mission in Libya, who was handed a desk job after standing up for the truth by meeting with House investigators and questioning claims that the Benghazi attacks were spontaneous.

As for the Fort Hood attack, the Obama Administration is still calling it a workplace shooting despite Hasan’s jihadist battlecry and his own statement that he wrote in a letter to an al Qaeda leader that “there are many Muslims who join the armed forces for a myriad of different reasons. Some appear to have internal conflicts and have even killed or tried to kill other U.S. soldiers in the name of Islam, i.e. Hasan Akbar.”

President Obama’s statement that America is safer because there have been no large-scale terrorist attacks during his presidency—in addition to the doubling down of lies in the midst of scandals—is not so much delusional as calculated and is reminiscent of the tactics of German propagandist Joseph Goebbels “to lie big and lie often.” Tell me if this bit of advice from Goebbels doesn’t fit the Obama narrative:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such a time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

By the incomparable EJ Hill:

Although AWOL a lot in the last week or so--I had a cluster of Uncommon Knowledge shoots for which to research, and not one but two graduations (one from high school, the other from college) and the associated festivities for which to prepare--but may I just say thanks to everyone?  The friends I've made here on Ricochet!  And the amount that I've learned!

As I say, folks:  thanks.

Readers and listeners to President Obama’s speech today at the National Defense University, billed as a major address on terrorism policy, could be forgiven for thinking the speech just a re-hash of old policies. Believe me, Obama seemed to repeat, I really, really want to close Guantanamo Bay.  It’s true, he stressed, I really want to capture, interrogate, and prosecute al-Qaeda leaders — despite his record of only one al-Qaeda leader captured abroad in five years and the example of the killing, rather than detention and interrogation of Osama bin Laden. President Obama has made these same claims before. Even his promise to restart the transfer of Yemenis from Guantanamo to their home country does little to change the basic architecture of the policies that he inherited from President George W. Bush.

But the one area where President Obama did signal a shift in policy that could have dramatic effects on U.S. national security is on the criteria for using drones. Following the news that his administration has killed four U.S. citizens in its time in office with drones, the president suggested that he will tighten the rules for using unmanned aerial strikes. Now, the U.S. will only use drone strikes against terrorists who “pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons,” where there is a “near certainty” that the target is present, and there is a “near certainty” that civilians “will not be injured or killed.”

The president risks rendering impossible the only element of his counterterrorism strategy that has bred success. An obvious problem is that there is almost never a “near certainty” that a target is the person we think he is and that he is located where we think. President Obama either is imposing far too strict a level of proof on our military and intelligence officers or the standards will be rarely followed. But worse, if the U.S. publicly announces that it will not attack terrorists if civilian casualties will result, terrorists will always meet and travel in entourages of innocent family members and others — a tactic adopted by potential targets of Israeli targeted killings in the West Bank. Neither of these standards — near certainty of the identity of the target or of zero civilian casualties — applies to wartime operations. President Obama is placing impossible conditions on the use of force for what can only be assumed to be ideological reasons.

But broader than even these problems is the pullout from Afghanistan that will accompany these changes in drone policy. Drones are only as good as the intelligence that directs them. If the U.S. lacks reliable information on the identity and location of terrorists, drone missions will become an exercise of shooting in the dark. Drones themselves don’t gather the intelligence — it comes from having boots on the ground in Afghanistan and, once upon a time, in Iraq. Human sources and networks provide the most reliable information for not just drones, but also our special-operations teams, to target the enemy. Without on-the-ground intelligence networks, our strikes will rely on second-hand reports, unreliable partners, and satellite and electronic surveillance, which provides less clarity against a decentralized network. By pulling out of Afghanistan prematurely, we may leave our drones flying blind, especially under the unrealistic standards announced today.

From Michael Isikoff at NBC News:

Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “possible co-conspirator” in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails, a law enforcement official told NBC News on Thursday.

The disclosure of the attorney general’s role came as President Barack Obama, in a major speech on his counterterrorism policy, said Holder had agreed to review Justice Department guidelines governing investigations that involve journalists.

...  Holder previously said he recused himself from the AP subpoena because he had been questioned as a witness in the underlying investigation into a leak about a foiled bomb plot in Yemen. His role in personally approving the Rosen search warrant had not been previously reported.

A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The law enforcement official said Holder's approval of the Rosen search, in the spring of 2010, came after senior Justice officials concluded there was "probable cause" that Rosen's communications with his source, identified as intelligence analyst Stephen Kim, met the legal burden for such searches. "It was approved at the highest levels-- and I mean the highest," said the law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said that explicitly included Holder.

Now, we're finding out what's in it:

Some employers are avoiding Obamacare penalties by offering “skinny” insurance plans that provide workers with minimum coverage like preventive care but little else, including benefits to help cover hospitals stays.

The minimum coverage qualifies as acceptable under the new healthcare reform law, so benefit advisers and insurance brokers are pitching minimum plans nationally, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Employers who offer the plans are recognizing they can avoid a $2,000-per-worker penalty by doing so, even though the plans often don’t cover basics like surgery, X-rays or prenatal care, let alone hospitalization.

As the story states, "employers could still face other penalties, but they expect them to cost less than the $2,000 per worker fine for opting out of Obamacare." More:

Would you like to have a “skinny” health insurance policy? Probably not. But if you’re employed by a large company, you may get one, thanks to ObamaCare.

That’s the conclusion of Wall Street Journal reporters Christopher Weaver and Anna Wilde Mathews, who report that insurance brokers are pitching and selling “low-benefit” policies across the country.

Wonder what a “skinny” or “low-benefit” insurance plan is? The terms may vary, but the basic idea is that policies would cover preventive care, a limited number of doctor visits and perhaps generic drugs. They wouldn’t cover things such as surgery, hospital stays or prenatal care.

That sounds similar to an auto-insurance policy that reimburses you when you change the oil but not when your car gets totaled.

You might ask how ObamaCare could encourage the proliferation of such policies. It was sold as a way to provide more coverage for more people, after all. And people were told they could keep the health insurance they had.

As Weaver and Mathews explain, ObamaCare’s requirement that insurance policies include “essential” benefits such as mental-health services apply only to small businesses with fewer than 50 employees. But larger employers “need only cover preventive service, without a lifetime or annual dollar-value limit, in order to avoid the across-the-workforce penalty.”

Low-benefit plans may cost an employer only $40 to $100 a month per employee. That’s less than the $2,000-per-employee penalty for providing no insurance.

“We wouldn’t have anticipated that there’d be demand for these type of Band-Aid plans in 2014,” the Journal quotes former White House health adviser Robert Kocher. “Our expectation was that employers would offer high-quality insurance.”

Oops.

Indeed.

After a devastating tornado in Oklahoma killed several children at an elementary school, Reformed Baptist minister and author John Piper tweeted this:

He later followed it with another tweet: “Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped” Job. 1:20.

Piper thought he was being comforting. He assumed other people who suffer respond just like he does -- by tearing their clothes, covering themselves with ashes, and recognizing God’s sovereignty. He was wrong, and the backlash was scathing as people outside of his ministry associated his tweet with God’s judgment of the Oklahoma victims.

In response to the criticism, Piper took down the tweets and offered the following statement on his website, desiringGod.org:

When tragedy strikes my life, I find it stabilizing and hope-giving to see the stories of the sheer factuality of other’s losses, especially when they endured them the way Job did. Job really grieved. He really agonized. He collapsed to the ground. He wept. He shaved his head. This was, in my mind, a pattern of what must surely happen in Oklahoma. I thought it would help. But when I saw how so many were not experiencing it that way, I took them down.

His website contends that Piper’s tweet was misunderstood because the second tweet was ignored.

The impression given by online sources is that only Job 1:19 was posted, an isolated tweet some critics have thought “crude” and “insensitive,” thereby neglecting the most important point made in the second tweet, of Job’s response, and why our sovereign God is still worthy of worship even in the midst of the most unimaginable suffering and personal tragedy.

Job 1:20 not only comes in the direct aftermath of a storm, but also holds out hope and comfort to Christians directly affected by tragedy today, reminding us that trust in God and worship of God are always right, even when we are kneeling in tears in the rubble left by a tornado. Job wept and he worshiped. God’s sovereignty over his suffering provided the basis of his grounds of worshiping God in the suffering...

As Pastor John has said in a sermon, “Satan proved to be wrong. Job did not curse God when he lost his wealth and his children. He worshiped and he blessed God. And so the superior worth of God became evident to all. Job’s steadfast response becomes for all Christians a model to follow in enduring suffering” (James 5:11).

Sadly, by citing only the first tweet, Job 1:19, online critics muddied the point.

In my opinion (and as a former student at one of the seminaries where he lectured), the one who muddied the point was John Piper himself. While his intentions were good, he posted the first tweet without any context—it is shocking when you initially read it and if you don't already know the context—and the second tweet would not have done much to illuminate his point to an audience unfamiliar with the book of Job and the many difficult doctrines it teaches. Psalm 23 would have been a better choice.

Regardless of Piper’s intent, it does seem to be a bad habit in some corners of the church for people to claim that specific events are a result of God’s judgment—something that has negative effects for conservatives in general as it feeds the narrative that conservatives, particularly social conservatives, are judgmental and don’t care about people. That’s certainly the message going around the internet in response to Piper’s tweet.

Whether it’s AIDS or 9/11 or mass shootings or natural disasters, inevitably someone says, in essence, the victims deserved it. And yet, Jesus himself taught that we shouldn’t draw such conclusions. When his disciples asked whether a man’s blindness was caused by his sins or his parents’ sins, Jesus clearly said, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

Do you think Piper was right in what he tweeted? Do Christians rush to judgment too much when tragedies occur? What effect, if any, do you think this has on the conservative movement as a whole? How do you respond to people who are suffering?

This week on Uncommon Knowledge, Economist and journalist Dr. Thomas Sowell discusses his book, "Intellectuals and Race," and highlights the pervasive racist views of the Progressive era. Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson is produced by the Hoover Institution for the Wall Street Journal.

Back in 2004 or so, I was visiting Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I was checking out some interfaith worship spaces there for research and attended a Sunday morning worship service. It was ... interesting. If I recall correctly, the text was Matthew 15, with the story of the Canaanite woman. The sermon, as has become a trend in recent years, was all about how Jesus was xenophobic.

Being that I come from a faith that confesses Jesus is the perfect Son of God, I found the sermon blasphemous. But to my credit or shame, I sat silently and took notes in my reporter notebook (my job at that time was not to discus theology but just observe).

So the next day I ran into the rector or some such and told him I'd been at services the day before. He began profusely apologizing and I was about to thank him when I realized that he was apologizing because, he said, the lighting in the sanctuary was not functioning properly.

Which brings us to the May 12 sermon delivered in Venezuela by the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church. When I read the initial reports of the sermon, I was sure someone was taking it out of context or had misunderstood what she was getting at. But you can read the entire sermon on the church's web site. It was not taken out of context.

The top of Anglican Ink's story on the matter:

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church has denounced the Apostle Paul as mean-spirited and bigoted for having released a slave girl from demonic bondage as reported in Acts 16:16-34 .

In her sermon delivered at All Saints Church in Curaçao in the diocese of Venezuela, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori condemned those who did not share her views as enemies of the Holy Spirit.

I have two thoughts. One is how fascinating it is that this week we saw the media flip out over Pope Francis' belief in the reality of Satan. Isn't it interesting that the Pope being Catholic is cause for huge headlines while Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori's full-throated rejection of St. Paul's exorcism of demons doesn't generate a single story in the mainstream press?

My second thought is more general. Later in the sermon she says:

We live with the continuing tension between holier impulses that encourage us to see the image of God in all human beings and the reality that some of us choose not to see that glimpse of the divine, and instead use other people as means to an end.  We’re seeing something similar right now ... as many people come to recognize that different is not the same thing as wrong.  For many people, it can be difficult to see God at work in the world around us, particularly if God is doing something unexpected.

OK, so different is not the same thing as wrong, fair enough. I'm curious, though, on what basis does she decide that views different from hers are wrong? She's definitely condemning the views of people who disagree with her, but I'm not quite sure what the basis for the condemnation is. Can you help me out?

The great Kyle Smith of the New York Post (and Ricochet) used the Twitter machine this morning to point us all toward the results of an awesome recent poll.

Public Policy Polling finally got around to asking: Do Republicans and Democrats like the same music?

Apparently not. PPP found "a partisan divide" in the favorability ratings of the biggest music stars of the past several decades:

There’s a massive 54-point party divide on Michael Jackson – Democrats have a favorable view of him at 59-30, Republicans are flipped and view him unfavorably by a 34-59 margin. The same with Madonna – Democrats narrowly view her favorably (43-41) while Republicans strongly dislike her (21-68). The party disagreements even extend to Favorite Beatle – Democrats choose John over Paul (39-36) while Republicans strongly prefer Paul over John (49-15) – it seems Republicans still haven’t forgiven Lennon for his strong political activism. Overall, Democrats (84-10) like The Beatles more than Republicans (66-24).

Wouldn't this make "Say Say Say" the most popular song of all time?

Let me note: While I usually can't stand Michael Jackson or Madonna, I feel very strongly that Paul is only the third best Beatle. 

Is there a place for a RINO like me in the big tent?

Glenn Greenwald has a typically lengthy item arguing that we shouldn't describe the unspeakably violent attack on a soldier as "terrorism."

An example:

The US, the UK and its allies have repeatedly killed Muslim civilians over the past decade (and before that), but defenders of those governments insist that this cannot be "terrorism" because it is combatants, not civilians, who are the targets. Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that's not "terrorism", but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism? Amazingly, the US has even imprisoned people at Guantanamo and elsewhere on accusations of "terrorism" who are accused of nothing more than engaging in violence against US soldiers who invaded their country.

He has all sorts of reasons for why he thinks that this is the wrong word to use. I care far much less about the word than the reality of the violence of this situation and the effect on the children and others who witnessed it.

One of the things that I do think is important to remember is the reality of the carnage of all warfare, whether it's engaged by drone or machete.

But isn't the important issue vis-a-vis terrorism whether it happens outside of established military protocols for violence? And isn't it almost always about exploiting the media to advance a cause?

In a Wikipedia discussion of the difficulty of defining the term, we learn that one scholar has come up with a list to distinguish terrorism from other types of crime. He includes:

• ineluctably political in aims and motives
• violent – or, equally important, threatens violence
• designed to have far-reaching psychological repercussions beyond the immediate victim or target
• conducted by an organization with an identifiable chain of command or conspiratorial cell structure (whose members wear no uniform or identifying insignia) and
• perpetrated by a subnational group or non-state entity.

Another scholar has a definition that includes:

Terrorism is defined as political violence in an asymmetrical conflict that is designed to induce terror and psychic fear (sometimes indiscriminate) through the violent victimization and destruction of noncombatant targets (sometimes iconic symbols). Such acts are meant to send a message from an illicit clandestine organization. The purpose of terrorism is to exploit the media in order to achieve maximum attainable publicity as an amplifying force multiplier in order to influence the targeted audience(s) in order to reach short- and midterm political goals and/or desired long-term end states."

A soldier walking down the street in civilian clothes thousands of miles away from the theater of conflict seems close to a "non-combatant target" and the rather obvious exploitation of media from yesterday also comes into play, no?

I know that Greenwald is trying to make people think more about the nature of the military actions committed by American and British soldiers (and I share many of his concerns about our ongoing wars and the civilian casualties of our strikes, etc.), but I worry that the downplaying of this act as terrorism serves a few troubling functions.

For one, it legitimizes the idea that every street and every home in the United States, Britain, and throughout the world is in the theater of conflict. That means that typical civil liberties protections go away. For another, it can harm social order in that wartime relations between peoples are naturally more suspicious.

Does a Greenwaldian understanding -- that an unspeakably violent machete attack on an off-duty soldier walking down the street in front of a London primary school and scores of citizens isn't terrorism -- have more danger for civil society than classifying it as terrorism?

This technology gets more astounding by the day.

Six-week-old Kaiba Gionfriddo suffered from a rare lung obstruction called bronchial malacia that made it impossible for him to breathe:

With hopes dimming that Kaiba would survive, doctors tried the medical equivalent of a “Hail Mary” pass. Using an experimental technique never before tried on a human, they created a splint made out of biological material that effectively carved a path through Kaiba’s blocked airway.

What makes this a medical feat straight out of science fiction: The splint was created on a three-dimensional printer.

“It’s magical to me,” said Dr. Glenn Green, an associate professor of pediatric otolaryngology at the University of Michigan who implanted the splint in Kaiba. “We’re talking about taking dust and using it to build body parts.”

Kaiba's mother, April, rather wonderfully described the technology that saved her child as "pretty nifty". It is indeed!

Green, who has been practicing for two decades, and a UM colleague, biomedical engineer Scott Hollister, had been working for years toward a clinical trial to test the splint in children with pulmonary issues when they got a phone call from a physician in Ohio who was aware of their research.

"He said, 'I've got a child who needs (a splint) now,' " referring to Kaiba, said Green. "He said that this child is not going to live unless something is done."

Green and Hollister got emergency clearance from their hospital and the Food and Drug Administration to try the experimental treatment -- which had been used only on animals -- on Kaiba. The child was airlifted from Akron Children's Hospital to C.S. Mott Children's Hospital at UM.

"It was a mixture of elation and, for lack of a better word, terror," said Hollister, a professor of biomedical and mechanical engineering who has been studying tissue regeneration for more than 15 years. "When someone drops something like this in your lap and says, 'Look, this might be this kid's only chance' ... it's a big step."

Green and his team obtained a CT scan of Kaiba's lungs so the splint could be custom fitted. They used the scan to build a computer model of the splint and then fed the model into a 3D-printer. The printer constructed the splint out of a powder material called polycaprolactone, or PCL:

PCL is malleable; it can be fashioned into all kinds of intricate structures. When a splint is created using PCL, it becomes a sort of biological placeholder, propping up structures while the body heals around it.

PCL has been used for years to fill holes left behind in the skull after brain surgery, according to Hollister. As time passes, PCL degrades and is excreted out of the body, hopefully leaving behind a healed organ.

What followed in Kaiba's case was a painstaking process of creating the splint on the printer in layers. Information about each layer is transmitted from the computer to a laser beam, which melts the PCL into a 3-D structure.

"We can put together a complete copy of a body part on the 3-D printer within a day," Green said. "So we can make something very specific for a patient very quickly."

Green then took the splint, measuring just a few centimeters long and 8 millimeters wide, and surgically attached it to Kaiba's collapsed bronchus. It was only moments before he saw the results.

"When the stitches were put in, we started seeing the lung inflate and deflate," Green said. "It was so fabulous. There were people in the operating room cheering."

"This case is a wonderful example that regenerative technologies are no longer science fiction," said Dr. Andre Terzic, director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine, who was not involved in Kaiba's case. "We are increasingly ... finding new solutions that we didn't have before."

It's now fifteen months later and Kaiba is still breathing on his own. The splint is expected to take three years to degrade, during which time Kaiba's lungs should develop normally.

One of the attackers had this to say after hacking a British soldier to death in broad daylight on a south London street yesterday:

We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

There are a host of breathtaking aspects to this crime -- the fact that it took place within spitting distance of the Royal Artillery's London headquarters, for example, or the fact that it took 20 long minutes for the armed police to show up, or the fact that the murderers were inclined to stand around schmoozing with onlookers while awaiting the shootout that would take them down. I realize their object was to "start a war" and that the showdown with police was thus part of the plan, but they could have spent those intervening 20 minutes in further mayhem. Instead, fortunately for those long-delayed armed police as well as for the gathered crowd, the killers stood around chatting, gesticulating with their blood-soaked cleavers and machetes while speaking in local English accents. Surreal.

The Muslim community in Britain is responding early and loudly to condemn the attack.

Faith Matters is a charity that supports entrepreneurs in the West Bank through micro and small business loans, as well as providing support to Palestinian women. Fiyaz Mughal, the director of Faith Matters, said:

This is the kind of butchery we saw in places like Iraq and it’s appalling it is happening here.

The vast majority of Muslims in Britain will be truly sickened. We have to come out and shout out against this type of violence. We have to say enough is enough.

We have to make clear the line between voicing dissent and extremist violence. Muslims have to hammer home that anyone advocating this kind of horrific extremism will be shunned.

The backbone of extremism has gone. What you have are cells of a few people reinforcing each other’s beliefs who are disillusioned, mentally vulnerable and often out of touch with their families.

The Muslim Council of Britain stated outright that the killers' use of "Islamic slogans" indicated they were motivated by their faith. It went on to say:

This is a truly barbaric act that has no basis in Islam and we condemn this unreservedly. Our thoughts are with the victim and his family.

We understand the victim is a serving member of the Armed Forces. Muslims have long served in this country's Armed Forces, proudly and with honour.

This attack on a member of the Armed Forces is dishonourable, and no cause justifies this murder.

Akbar Khan of the Building Bridges conflict resolution organization said:

We totally condemn the killing of an innocent person in Woolwich this afternoon.

And we also condemn all forms of extremism wherever they are.

The thoughts of the Muslim community are with the family of the man who lost his life, and we pray for him.

Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation, which promotes moderate Islam and interfaith dialogue in the UK, said:

I wish to condemn the evil and barbaric crime carried out today in Woolwich.

Our immediate thoughts are with the family and friends of the victims. From whatever angle you see today's attack, it was at every level evil.

We must allow the police to gather all the facts before unnecessary speculation and wait for the facts before determining its impact on our country.

But what happens in the days to come, London and our nation will come together and will not be divided. The terrorists will never win and succeed in their evil plans.

But tonight we think of the family of that soldier killed.

As tempting as it is at moments like this, we simply cannot give in to blanket condemnations. One thinks not only of public statements like these, welcome as they are, but also of the less publicized instances of kindness and support the British Muslim community has extended to its neighbors in the UK, like this one:

For years, the Jews and Muslims of Bradford have lived in close proximity to each other: Bradford's only remaining synagogue sits just 500 meters from the city's main mosque in the inner city neighborhood of Manningham. But the two groups kept to themselves. That is, of course, until the synagogue's roof started to leak and Bradford's Muslim community stepped in as a surprise donor for the repairs.

“It was a true mitzvah,” says Rudi Leavor, the 87-year-old chairman of the synagogue, of the gift from the Muslim community.

...

Leavor says that the congregation was considering selling the building out of desperation, but enough members were opposed to that idea that they scrapped it. Instead, a new Friends of the Synagogue organization was founded, offering concerned citizens – both Jews and non-Jews alike – membership for 60 GBP a year. In turn, they received invitations to social events at Hanukkah and on other festive occasions.

Donations trickled in, but not as fast as the water from the leaky roof. Things looked very dire for the Bradford Synagogue until some concerned neighbors intervened.

Zulfi Karim, the 47-year-old secretary of the Bradford Council of Mosques, was at Friday prayers when he heard of the synagogue's plight...

“I was shocked to hear the news,” says Karim, who was born and raised a few hundred yards from the Bradford Reform Synagogue,” and I immediately reached out to others in the Muslim community.”

Within a few days, the community had raised GBP 2,000 for emergency repairs – 1,000 from a variety of individuals, and 1,000 matched by a donor who at first asked to remain anonymous.

Eventually Leavor discovered the donor was Khalid Pervaiz, the new owner of a textile factory near the synagogue. That same factory had previously belonged to the Strauss family, who were descendents of Bradford’s first Reform Rabbi.

“We have so much in common,” says Karim of the two Bradford communities. ”We both have a tradition of helping each other out in business, and strong entrepreneurial, family and community values.” He also acknowledges that in addition to their common Abrahamic ancestry, there are parallels between the anti-Semitism and Islamophobia both communities have endured.

Bu in the end, it was Karim's personal relationship with Leavor that helped connect the two communities.

"When I met Rudi, I felt like he was my father, or grandfather," Karim says. "If he were an elder in my community, I would be there for him in his time of need. So I felt – well, it’s my obligation to help him as if he were a member of my own family.”