The Warden

Which is problematic because, you know, the whole mandate issue is framed as a tax issue for constitutional purposes.

Mr. Zients: “Well, this is—” Mr. Garrett: “A moment ago you said there’s no tax increase.” Mr. Zients: “There aren’t.” Mr. Garrett: “So that’s not a tax?” Mr. Zients: “No.” Mr. Garrett: “That’s not a tax. Okay. I just want to be clear on that because that’s not the argument the Administration is making before the Supreme Court.”

New York City does not want churches and other religious groups meeting in public schools because they are concerned that impressionable youth will be confused and wrongly think that the public school endorses the church meeting there on Sunday mornings.

So it greatly surprised me to learn that the NYC Department of Education rents Roman Catholic schools to hold public school classes. On Sunday morning, I learned about P.S. 133 in Brooklyn, a public school that meets in a Catholic parochial school building. I was so surprised to learn of this, that I walked over to the school to see it for myself. This building has large crosses extending from the edges of the roof, yet NYC public schools hold classes there for children of all faiths.

Some coaches have wondered whether Lin, who is of Taiwanese descent, did not receive a closer look by recruiters because of his ethnicity. Coaches have said recruiters, in the age of who-does-he-remind-you-of evaluations, simply lacked a frame of reference for such an Asian-American talent.

Late last week, I came across a link at HackerNews giving some intriguing insight into how /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin came to be. Many of you will be surprised to learn that no, there is no divine plan behind all this separation.

Anxiety is not a policy. It might be and, I think, in this case is an admirable sentiment, and a useful way of focusing on the basic question of the use of force. But ultimately, having anxieties about the implications of one’s weaponry and one’s political leaders who make decisions about how to use it is not the same as actually making a decision about what to do. When anxiety has to give way to actually deciding whether to use a weapon, or whether to develop a weapon system, someone has to decide: is the possibility that political or military leaders might decide to unjustly to overuse a weapon a reason to not use the most precise weapon available to commanders? Or not to develop greater precision in the first place?

Romney, were he the nominee, could potentially make this generic map even better for Republicans. He has no obvious weaknesses in any of the swing states, at least as measured by head to head polling, which we fully grant is not necessarily all that predictive at this stage. Also, he could potentially make some of the competitive states harder for Obama: he could mobilize the not-insignificant Mormon population in Nevada to help in that state and play off his relative home field advantages in Michigan (his father was governor of the state he grew up in) and New Hampshire (he served as governor of neighboring Massachusetts and has built deep bonds with the Granite State, which paid off in his recent primary romp there). In fact, if Romney were the nominee, we’d likely switch New Hampshire to “leans Republican” from toss-up. While this only represents four electoral votes, consider this: take another five Obama states that went for George W. Bush twice (Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia) and put them in Romney’s column, and then add New Hampshire and all of John McCain’s states, and Romney is president.

Unlike Romney, we don’t see any competitive state where Gingrich would potentially perform better than a generic Republican. And, based on polling and our own thinking about the individual state-by-state contests, at this point we think he’d do worse than a generic Republican or Romney.

What’s more important? Reaching the lost or growing the reached? Over the past two weeks, the ongoing debate between discipleship and evangelism took center stage during one megachurch’s Code Orange Revival.

So apparently Santorum did win the Iowa caucus. Maybe. Eight precincts’ numbers can’t be certified.

…

getting the caucus vote margin right down to every last vote isn’t really necessary.  After all, the caucus vote doesn’t directly determine the number of Iowa delegates that the candidates will receive.   Even if the caucus vote did determine delegates, no voting technology is going to make the process perfect.  In fact, paper ballots and human counting might even be more accurate than more sophisticated kinds of voting technology.

Interested, unorthodox perspective.

Today, Google’s U.S. query page features an anti-Stop-Online-Piracy-Act statement from Google. Say that Congress concludes that it’s unfair for Google to be able to speak so broadly, in a way that ordinary Americans (including ordinary Congressmen) generally can’t. Congress therefore enacts a statute banning all corporations from spending their money — and therefore banning them from speaking — in support of or opposition to any statute. What would you say about such a statute? Again, I limit the question to those who think corporations generally lack First Amendment rights.

(via John Samples)