Scrolling around...June 24, 2013

Woman Writes of Abortion in NYTimes: "He died in a warm and loving place, inside me."
A Seattle politician who was pregnant with twins but had her son aborted because he would suffer in his life from a number of maladies writes of her abortion in The New York Times.

She's arguing against limiting the time a mother can abort her child. I am horrified by what she wrote. Just horrified. I know she believes that what she did she did out of love but I can't begin to fathom the kind of love that says things like this:

I felt my son’s budding life end as a doctor inserted a needle through my belly into his tiny heart. She had trouble finding it because of its abnormal position. As horrible as that moment was — it will live with me forever — I am grateful. We made sure our son was not born only to suffer. He died in a warm and loving place, inside me.

Julia Duin: Classical schools put Plato over iPad
...The students attend some of several hundred “classical” schools around the country - institutions designed to reflect the scholarship from the past three millennia of Western civilization, rather than the latest classroom trends.

Classical schools are less concerned about whether students can handle iPads than if they grasp Plato. They generally aim to cultivate wisdom and virtue through teaching students Latin, exposing them to great books of Western civilization and focusing on appreciation of "truth, goodness and beauty." Students are typically held to strict behavioral standards in terms of conduct and politeness, and given examples of characters from history to copy, ranging from the Roman nobleman Cincinnatus to St. Augustine of Hippo.

Parents like them, too; the number of classical schools - public and private - is growing. The curriculum has helped to boost enrollment at religious schools and inspired new public schools...The schools don’t just add a few Latin or Greek classes to a modern curriculum. Classical education methods are a revamp of what it means to be educated. Many modern classical schools divide learning into the trivium of medieval institutions: Grammar, logic and rhetoric....
First Things: Many Studies Link Religious Education to Tolerance

Abortion in Ireland
...Meanwhile, Ireland has maintained one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world. It is safer to be an expectant mother in pro-life Ireland than pro-choice America or Britain.

Ireland’s experience contradicts the “legal abortion makes pregnancy safer” logic, which perhaps explains why the pro-abortion movement has had its eyes trained on Ireland for so long. Ireland is an example of a healthcare system where the rights of both the baby and the mother are upheld equally—to the detriment of no one...

Anglican Dean of King’s College wins Ratzinger Prize
The 2013 Ratzinger Prize for Theology will be given to an Anglican minister and to the lay German theology professor who is helping publish the complete works of Joseph Ratzinger-Pope Benedict XVI.

The Rev Richard Burridge, an Anglican professor of New Testament studies at King’s College, London, is the first non-Catholic to receive the prize. The other winner, Christian Schaller, is vice director of the Benedict XVI Institute in Regensburg, Germany, which is publishing critical editions of the pope’s writings...

Planned Parenthood sues to block Kansas law telling mothers baby is ‘separate, unique, living human’ An abortionist and his local Planned Parenthood affiliate sued in federal court Thursday to stop a law that would tell women considering abortion that an unborn child is not a part of her own body and that unborn children can feel pain by the third trimester of pregnancy...

NYTimes works mightly to support the struggling Dr. Schori
One secular newspaper's "provocative" is an orthodox Christian's "preposterous"

Staten Island Sandy Victims Charged for Unused Water
Staten Island residents whose homes were damaged by Sandy say the city is charging them hundreds of dollars for water they haven't used since the storm...

IRS Sent $46,378,040 in Refunds to 23,994 ‘Unauthorized’ Aliens at Atlanta Address The Internal Revenue Service sent 23,994 tax refunds worth a combined $46,378,040 to “unauthorized” alien workers who all used the same address in Atlanta, Ga., in 2011, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA)...

Yes, IRS harassment blunted the Tea Party ground game
...The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes-more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 - 8.5 million votes compared to Obama's victory margin of 5 million...
Did the IRS Win the Election for Obama?

PA: Muslim man allegedly threatened to kill his mom because she served him pork

Loophole in Gang of 8 bill gives Napolitano wide discretion to allow almost anyone to stay in U.S.   One of the things I learned from Obamacare was that each section of the law could take many hours to understand because of cross-references to other sections and other laws.  Amendments make the problem even greater.

Put that problem into a 1000+ page  bill, and it is almost impossible to uncover all the mischief — intentional and unintentional — buried in the language, something we are learning after the fact with Obamacare.

The rush to pass the Gang of 8 1000+ page bill is another example.  As if that weren’t bad enough to start, Sen. Bob Corker last night unveiled his 1190-page amendment, and Harry Reid is rushing the first test vote to Monday.  We have seen this movie before.

There is one provision which has not received a lot of press...