Minnesota is now the 12th state, following Delaware and Rhode Island, to legalize same-sex marriage, with its senate voting 37-30 in favor of it. The lower house had already passed it 75-59 and the governor signed it yesterday. It will take effect on August 1. [Read more…]
On Sunday, one or more gunmen started shooting into a crowd of people at a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans. They have not yet been captured though video footage exists of one of them firing into the crowd and later police identified one person they are looking for. [Read more…]
When the Heritage Foundation published its report on the huge cost of the proposed immigration reform package, there was criticism of its methodology. (See here for the background on this story.) One was that the report’s estimated net cost to the economy of $6.3 trillion was arrived at by projecting over the next fifty years and no one takes seriously such long-term projections. Even numbers ten years out are highly iffy. The suspicion was that fifty years was chosen to get a large dollar number that was scary and/or because in the short run there would actually be net plus to the economy due to younger immigrant workers contributing more, while the costs would increase when they became older and reached retirement [Read more…]
Anna L. Pierre is running for mayor of the city of North Miami. Her campaign poster says that she has been endorsed by Jesus Christ. [Read more…]
… I come across this news item.
Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned. [Read more…]
Following Boston, pressure cookers have now become suspicious objects. We have news reports of a student from Saudi Arabia being questioned by the FBI after neighbors reported seeing him carrying one. It turns out that he had cooked some food in it and was taking it to a friend’s house. [Read more…]
There is this curious belief by people who want to defend president Obama’s right to kill even US citizens abroad that US citizens no longer have the same rights under the US constitution once they leave the country. Charles Krauthammer is the latest person to make this claim, saying in a recent column that “Outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule”. [Read more…]
Naw Kham is the leader of a drug trafficking group suspected of a massacre of Chinese citizens who had been eluding Chinese authorities for a long time. Working with Laotian authorities, the Chinese authorities captured him when he went to that country, took him back to China, and he is now standing trial. What is interesting is that the Chinese government refrained from using drones to pursue him into the jungles of Myanmar and Laos and kill him even though they had intelligence pinpointing his location. They say that this was because they wanted to capture him alive and bring him to trial and also because of concerns that such an action would violate international law. [Read more…]
The reputation of Harvard University, especially the John F. Kennedy School of Public Policy, has been getting a severe hammering in the last month. We first had the Reinhart-Rogoff affair (see here and here) and now we have the Heritage-Richwine affair. [Read more…]
So Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body has been finally buried in a small private cemetery in Virginia, which I hope brings to an end a ridiculous chapter in the Boston bombing tragedy.
Martha Mullen, a woman in Virginia, hearing about the difficulty the family and funeral director were having in finding a cemetery willing to accept it, felt it was her Christian duty to help and so quickly organized a local interfaith group in her area to have him interred in a small burial ground. Her action has resulted in the predictable vituperation from local officials, neighbors, and the online community, as if she had committed a heinous crime. [Read more…]