Multipurpose napping

Weekends are tough around here. Somebody's got to hold Becca's study blanket down so it doesn't walk away.
Look! A cat in a box! I didn't know you could get those on Amazon...

Touche

Marriage may sometimes be an uncomfortable state, I can well believe that, and that is as it should be. Are we not also married to our conscience, and would we not often like to be rid of it because it is more uncomfortable than a husband or a wife could ever be.

From Elective Affinities, Johann von Goethe, reprinted in the no-fault divorce section of An Invitation to Family Law, Schneider and Brinig

Hope for tax students

Check it out! Wiki has a whole WikiBook on Federal Income Tax! I love it! Earlier this semester I pored over my casebook's utterly incomprehensible explanation of Alternative Minimum Tax and got more and more confused. Finally in desperation I looked up Alternative Minimum Tax up on Wikipedia just to see if I could figure out what some of the words meant. Within four sentences, I understood what was going on. *sigh* Wikipedia may be derided as open-source and non-authoritative, but at least some of the authors are real people rather than tax law professors.

lawful joinage

The issue of whether priests may be married has been a hot one lately, and some expect a Vatican statement about it. A lot of the Catholics I've talked to (and some of the non-Catholics) say they would hate to see the Vatican capitulate on this one, and it looks like they won't be disappointed. When it's framed as capitulation (to make recruiting priests easier, for example), I agree that it would be sad to see the Church give in. But at the same time, I think it takes a lot of courage to revisit an old rule and evaluate its continuing validity. It always seemed like a hard-line rule for something even Paul was slow to make black-letter statements about. But then, I'm not Catholic, so I approach it from a non-Catholic perspective. I think Catholics view the priests' role a little differently from how non-Catholics view the pastoral role.

And the burrito cases are rolling in...

Ordinarily when I poach from other blogs I try to repackage the story before reselling it, but David K.'s post on Irish Trojan defies improvement. You'll just have to read it yourself.

The abortion cases just won't go away.

ADF's Jordan Lorence posted a report on the Supreme Court arguments on the federal birth abortion ban with his predictions ("cautious optimism," for those of you too indifferent to click the link). We heard a similar report from Nik Nikas of the Bioethics Defense Fund, who was also present at the arguments. Nikas observed that we are likely to see another 5-4 decision, this time with Stevens as the swing vote. We'll see if he's right.

Don't forget to vote!

And don't let all the negative campaigning get you down. Everybody does it.

I'm voting for Samwise.

HT: Irish Trojan's Blog

Prosecutorial priorities?

Um, how come this lady hasn't been tried before now? I mean, I know it seems heartless to try a mother whose child just died, but don't you think there would be some kind of reasonable suspicion that something was fishy after her fourth kid died in such a short time? They would have nailed that in 30 minutes on Law and Order.

A Worthy Addition

Welcome the new link on the right to BJU prof Dr. Camille Lewis's blog, A Time to Laugh. I've always been shy about adding it because I never actually had Dr. Lewis as a teacher and I felt it would be a bit presumptious to claim a friendship when I can't recall that we have actually met. But I feel like I've had her classes by proxy since I have several friends I respect still raving about how awsome they are (and she is), so that has to count for something. Plus, now we're facebook friends, so we must be tight! Besides, A Time to Laugh is a fabulous blog that always makes me smile, or think, or cry, or all of the above, and I want to share it with you if you haven't already discovered it.