On this Sunday today’s read is from CNS News. Here’s an excerpt:

The relics were described in a report in The Telegraph as a “personal gift” from the pope to the monarch.

At the request of King Charles, as reported in the British press, the two relics have been embedded in a silver cross that will be used to lead the procession at the King’s May 6 coronation in Westminster Abby in London.

More details here.

I have always been fascinated by two of the biggest unsolved crimes of all-time. First, Jack the Ripper, the subject of a CBS-TV mini-series in 1988 that starred Michael Caine.

And Lizzie Borden, the most notorious axe murder.

Recently the website Irish Central published a thorough piece on Irish woman Bridget Sullivan, Lizzie Borden’s maid, the only witness to Borden’s horrific murder of her parents. Here’s a portion:

A key witness was Irish maid Bridget Sullivan, part of whose testimony is reproduced here. It also gives an invaluable insight into the lives of Irish domestics at the time.

The facts as they are known are that wealthy Falls River businessman Andrew Borden had breakfast with his wife and made his usual rounds of the bank and post office, returning home about 10:45 am. The Bordens’ maid, Bridget Sullivan, testified that she was in her third-floor room, resting from cleaning windows when just before 11:10 am. she heard Lizzie call out to her from downstairs, “Maggie, come quick! Father’s dead. Somebody came in and killed him.” (Sullivan was sometimes called “Maggie”, the name of an earlier maid.)

Andrew was slumped on a couch in the downstairs sitting room, struck 10 or 11 times with a hatchet-like weapon. One of his eyeballs had been split cleanly in two, suggesting he had been asleep when attacked. Soon after, as neighbors and doctors tended Lizzie, Sullivan discovered Abby Borden in the upstairs guest bedroom, her skull crushed by 19 blows.

Police found a hatchet in the basement which, though free of blood, was missing most of its handle. Lizzie was arrested on August 11, a grand jury began hearing evidence on November 7 and indicted her on December 2.

She was found not guilty and the murders were never solved.

Bridget eventually moved to Montana and died there aged 66, never again discussing the infamous case. Here is Bridget’s opening testimony:

Read it all here.

MORE…

Like Jack the Ripper Lizzie Borden has been depicted in numerous media productions.

Elizabeth Montgomery portrayed Borden in a 1975 TV movie.

SPOILER ALERT: Here’s the conclusion…

text

Today’s read is from Theresa Brown. Here’s an excerpt:

In March 2023, a 10th-grade teacher (and football coach) at Churchill High School in Eugene, Oregon asked students to describe their sexual fantasies in detail in two separate assignments.  

 how is it possible for this situation to occur?  What kind of people are being hired to teach K–12?  Perhaps most importantly, why wasn’t the teacher following the school curriculum?

The frightening answer is that the situation occurred because Marxism has taken over America’s education system, and the teacher was, in fact, following the school curriculum.  

Read the entire column here.

Today’s read is from Kyle Roth (pictured left), the Director of the Men’s Program at 180 Ministries, a Denver Christian-based nonprofit residential treatment center where, since 2004, ex-addicts have been helping those struggling with addiction heal their destructive behavior. Here’s an excerpt:

We hear the horrifying statistics daily – over 106,000 drug overdose deaths in America in 2021, with nearly 30% deaths in people 15-34. 

These young people have their whole lives ahead of them, promising lives tragically cut short.

You or someone you know could soon be one of those desperately grieving parents of a dead child. 

Read the entire column here.

“(Ann) Coulter epitomizes the way politics is now discussed on the airwaves, where opinions must come violently fast and cause as much friction as possible. No one, right or left, delivers the required apothegmatic commentary on the world with as much glee or effectiveness as Coulter. It is almost impossible to watch her and not be sluiced into rage or elation, depending on your views.”
John Cloud, TIME, June 2006

John Hawkins is one of my favorites. Fine writer and master of lists. Check out one of his latest:

I haven’t heard a lot of other people say this, but in my humble, but absolutely correct opinion, Ann Coulter has been one of the most influential figures in the modern style of political discourse. Coulter, like Rush Limbaugh before her, combines a genius-level intellect, with brilliant research skills, a wicked sense of humor, and a knack for telling offensive and mean-spirited jokes that always seem to have her on the verge of being canceled by somebody on the Left or Right, even though her fans seldom seem to mind.

Once you get beyond her presidential endorsements (you know, I love you, Ann, but oof), Coulter has a magnificent brain, a savage tongue, and a gift for picking apart liberalism that has been frequently imitated, but that has yet to ever quite be duplicated. Read these quotes and you’ll see what I mean.

40) “Just as we’re always told that schoolyard bullies are actually deeply insecure, liberals rationalize their own ferocious behavior by claiming to have been wounded somehow. What about the little guy our poor, insecure bully is beating the living daylights out of? How’s his self-esteem coming along? That is the essence of liberals: They viciously attack everyone else, while wailing that they are the victims.”

39) “What liberals mean when they complain about ‘attacks’ is simply that it is unfair to point out the things the Democrats believe.”

38) “Someone has got to make liberals stop telling us their ‘lives were threatened.’ Every public figure’s life has been threatened. If more than fifty people know your name, you have been proposed to, propositioned, and insulted and have had threats on your life.”

37) “When your party is controlled by a billionaire rootless international financier who expresses ‘no sense of guilt’ for collaborating with the Nazis, you might want to ease up on lecturing the rest of us about the evil rich.”

36) “Looking at the line-up of speakers at the (Democratic National) Convention, I have developed the 7-11 challenge: I will quit making fun of, for example, Dennis Kucinich, if he can prove he can run a 7-11 properly for 8 hours. We’ll even let him have an hour or so of preparation before we open up. Within 8 hours, the money will be gone, the store will be empty, and he’ll be explaining how three 11-year-olds came in and asked for the money and he gave it to them.”

35) “Liberals become indignant when you question their patriotism, but simultaneously work overtime to give terrorists a cushion for the next attack and laugh at dumb Americans who love their country and hate the enemy.”

34) “Liberals seem to have hit upon a reverse Christ story as their belief system. He suffered and died for our sins; liberals make the rest of us suffer for sins we didn’t commit. Their claims of how awful ‘we’ are never seems to encompass themselves in the ‘we.’ Saying America is a racist nation is never meant to suggest that the speaker is a racist — it’s his neighbors who are the racists.”

33) “Political debate with liberals is basically impossible in America today because liberals are calling names while conservatives are trying to make arguments.”

32) “A favorite liberal taunt is to accuse conservatives of clinging to an idealized past. Poor, right-wing Americans vaguely sense the world is changing and now they’re lashing out. What about the idealized past liberals cling to? They all act as if they were civil rights foot soldiers constantly getting beat up by 500-pound southern sheriffs, while every twenty-year-old Republican today is treated as if he is on Team Bull Connor. At best, the struggle for civil rights was an intra-Democratic Party fight. More accurately, it was Republicans and blacks fighting Democrat segregationists and enablers.”

31) “It’s an obsession with the Democrats to nationalize everything: healthcare, welfare, the speed limit, abortion, the drinking age — so there’s no escape. Like all totalitarians, the Democrats’ position is: ‘We thought up something that we know will work better than anything anyone else has done for the last 30,000 years. We don’t know why no one else has thought of it. We must be smarter.’ This is why the history of liberalism consists of replacing things that work with things that sounded good on paper.”

30) “It’s a perverse world when the most aggressive people are always wailing about their victimhood. In what other place or time have people boasted about how wretched they are? Isn’t it more natural to claim to be better than you are than to claim to be worse than you are? But instead of falsely claiming to be rich or of royal lineage, in modern America people seek rewards by falsely asserting they are victims.”

29) “But all liberals only have empathy for the exact same victims — always the ones that are represented by powerful liberal interest groups.”

28) “Liberals don’t believe there is such a thing as ‘fact’ or ‘truth.’ Everything is a struggle for power between rival doctrines.”

27) “Americans cannot comprehend how their fellow countrymen could not love their country. But the left’s anti-Americanism is intrinsic to their entire worldview. Liberals promote the right of Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and communists. They instinctively root for anarchy against civilization.”

26) “In the corporeal world, international law is whatever the United States and Great Britain say it is.”

25) “Democrats are at an advantage in the ‘should the U.S. go bankrupt or not?’ debate because, based on their economic policies so far, they obviously favor bankruptcy. This allows them to sit back and demand that Republicans propose all the spending cuts and then turn around and scream that Republicans have declared war on the poor and disadvantaged.”

24) “In response to skyrocketing gas prices, liberals say, practically in unison, ‘We can’t drill our way out of this crisis.’ What does that mean? This is like telling a starving man, ‘You can’t eat your way out of being hungry!’ ‘You can’t water your way out of drought!’ ‘You can’t sleep your way out of tiredness!’ ‘You can’t drink yourself out of dehydration!’ Seriously, what does it mean? Finding more oil isn’t going to increase the supply of oil?”

23) “Liberals don’t mind discussing who is more patriotic if patriotism is defined as redistributing income and vetoing the Pledge of Allegiance. Only if patriotism is defined as supporting America do they get testy and drone on about ‘McCarthyism.'”

22) “If it were true that conservatives were racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist, stupid, inflexible, angry, and self-righteous, shouldn’t their arguments be easy to deconstruct? Someone who is making a point out of anger, ideology, inflexibility, or resentment would presumably construct a flimsy argument. So why can’t the argument itself be dismembered rather than the speaker’s personal style or hidden motives? Why the evasions?”

21) “We get lots of overwrought predictions about racist Americans, but we never get the admission, ‘Okay, I overreacted.'”

20) “As French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel said of the left, while most regimes are judged on their records, only communism is judged by its promises. Similarly, modern liberals are judged on their motives; conservatives are judged on what liberals claim we really meant.”

19) “The reason any conservative’s failing is always major news is that it allows liberals to engage in their very favorite taunt: ‘Hypocrisy! ‘ Hypocrisy is the only sin that really inflames them. Inasmuch as liberals have no morals, they can sit back and criticize other people for failing to meet the standards that liberals simply renounce. It’s an intriguing strategy. By openly admitting to being philanderers, draft dodgers, liars, weasels, and cowards, liberals avoid ever being hypocrites.”

18) “If white people could be shorn of all racism overnight, it’s not clear how that would improve the black condition. On the other hand, if all black people woke up tomorrow with the cultural predilections of Korean Americans, all sociological disparities — income, crime rates, out-of-wedlock births — would vanish within ten years. Both thought experiments are unfair, but one at least has a practical resonance to it.”

17) “Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago.”

16) “Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots and on the matter of America’s self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant.”

15) “Much of the left’s hate speech bears greater similarity to a psychological disorder than to standard political discourse. The hatred is blinding, producing logical contradictions that would be impossible to sustain were it not for the central element faith plays in the left’s new religion. The basic tenet of their faith is this: Maybe they were wrong on facts and policies, but they are good and conservatives are evil. You almost want to give it to them. It’s all they have left.”

14) “While the form of treachery varies slightly from case to case, liberals always manage to take the position that most undermines American security.”

13) “It never occurs to anyone to simply return to the original rule: Unless a man is married to a woman when she gives birth to his child, he has no rights to that child, and unless a woman is married to a man when she gives birth to his child, she has no right to his paycheck or his time.”

12) “‘Diversity’ is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought.”

11) “Liberals never argue with one another over substance; their only dispute is how to prevent the public from figuring out what they really believe. Meanwhile, it is a source of constant alarm to conservatives that the public will not understand what they really believe.”

10) “Isn’t food important? Why not ‘universal food coverage?’ If politicians and employers had guaranteed us ‘free’ food 50 years ago, today Democrats would be wailing about the ‘food crisis’ in America, and you’d be on the phone with your food care provider arguing about whether or not a Reuben sandwich with fries was covered under your plan.”

9) “Government employees are even worse than welfare layabouts. In a triple-whammy for the taxpayer, they are: (1) hideously expensive, (2) impossible to fire, and (3) doing things you don’t want done at any price.”

8) “Now liberals compare their every riot, every traffic blockage, every Starbucks-window-smashing street protest to the civil rights movement — which was only necessary because of them.”

7) “To call racism the main problem in America would be like calling cholera the main health concern. The less we have of it, the more journalists claim it’s a crisis.”

6) “Back in the prelapsarian fifties, women worked if they happened to fall into the .01 percent of the population who are able to have interesting jobs or they retired in their twenties to raise children and, incidentally, do what all serious people would like to do anyway — be a dilettante in many subjects. As far as I’m concerned this was a division of labor nothing short of perfect. Men worked and women didn’t. So, when our benefactors come under attack as ‘patriarchs’ and ‘oppressors,’ I realize, someone has to put in a kind word for the oppressors. For cocktails alone, I figure I owe the male population several thousand dollars. So, I will be the one to step forward and say: ‘To the extent one gender is oppressing the other, it’s not women who should be complaining.'”

5) “Liberals hate religion because politics is a religion substitute for liberals, and they can’t stand the competition.”

4) “Hearing politicians tell us ‘we’ can’t ‘afford’ a tax cut is like listening to a glutton tell you he can’t ‘afford’ a diet. In no other context do people talk about ‘paying for’ money they don’t have. I can’t pay for your refusal to give me money because I need a yacht.”

3) “If you can somehow force a liberal into a point-counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you’ve said — unless you were in fact talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It’s like arguing with someone with attention deficit disorder.”

2) “This is liberalism’s real strength. It is no longer susceptible to reductio ad absurdium arguments. Before you can come up with a comical take on their worldview, some college professor has already written an article advancing the idea.”

1) “Liberals don’t care. Their approach is to rip out society’s foundations without asking if they serve any purpose. Why do we have immigration laws? What’s with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards – why not make heroin legal? Let’s take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens!”

Previously on This Just In…

Part Two:

Any media story on poverty in America is bound to be accompanied by a photo like this:

The above question in the headline is a good one. Is poverty too prevalent in America? Put another way, how poor are the poor?

To answer that question, here’s a blog of mine from 2007 that I submit still holds true today:

The federal minimum wage goes up Tuesday (tomorrow) from $5.15 an hour to $5.85, the first increase in the federal minimum wage in a decade. Minimum wage workers will get an additional 70-cent boost each summer for the next two years, ending in 2009 at $7.25 an hour. That comes to just above $15,000 yearly before taxes for a 52-week work year.

USA Today interviewed fast-food waitress Fawn Townsend of Raleigh, North Carolina who gets a pay raise Tuesday.

“My goal personally is to get a vehicle so I can independently go back and forth to work and maybe pick up extra work so I can have that extra income, because minimum wage is not cutting it,” said Townsend, who is 24 and single. “Being a single person, you can’t pay all your bills with one minimum wage job.”

I’ve got news for Fawn. The minimum wage is not intended to be, nor should it be a living, family wage.

Only about three percent of workers earning the minimum wage are single parents. Slightly more than one percent of all minimum wage workers were adult heads of households with incomes less than $10,000. About 60 percent of minimum wage workers are single individuals, many of them living with their parents.

Minimum wage workers are not parents struggling to feed their children. Rather, they are high school or college students living at home. The level of the minimum wage is irrelevant for most people in poverty. Only about 10 percent of poor people of working age have full-time jobs.

The minimum wage, along with increasing it, is a bad economic move for many reasons.

1. The vast majority of economists believe the minimum wage law costs the economy thousands of jobs.
2. Teenagers, workers in training, college students, interns, and part-time workers all have their options and opportunities limited by the minimum wage.
3. A low-paying job remains an entry point for those with few marketable skills.
4. Abolishing the minimum wage will allow businesses to achieve greater efficiency and lower prices.
5. When you force American companies to pay a certain wage, you increase the likelihood that those companies will outsource jobs to foreign workers, where labor is much cheaper.
6. Non-profit charitable organizations are hurt by the minimum wage.
7. The minimum wage can drive some small companies out of business.
8. A minimum wage gives businesses an additional incentive to mechanize duties previously held by humans.
9. Cost-of-living differences in various areas of the country make a universal minimum wage difficult to set.
10. The minimum wage creates a competitive advantage for foreign companies, providing yet another obstacle in the ability of American companies to compete globally.
11. The minimum wage law is just another example of government condescendingly controlling our actions and destroying personal choice. Citizens do have the ability to say no to a lower wage.

Poverty and the minimum wage are becoming a major issue in the Democratic presidential race. John Edwards and Barack Obama are emphasizing raising the minimum wage during their tours of impoverished areas.

I raise the following question: Just how poor are the poor?

The Heritage Foundation produced this report in January 2004. If you haven’t seen it, it has some surprising facts that Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards may want to consider before they embark on their next ghetto tour:

January 5, 2004
Understanding Poverty in America
by Robert E. Rector and Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D.

Poverty is an important and emotional issue. Last year, the Census Bureau released its annual report on poverty in the United States declaring that there were nearly 35 million poor persons living in this country in 2002, a small increase from the preceding year. To understand poverty in America, it is important to look behind these numbers–to look at the actual living conditions of the individuals the government deems to be poor.

For most Americans, the word “poverty” suggests destitution: an inability to provide a family with nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter. But only a small number of the 35 million persons classified as “poor” by the Census Bureau fit that description. While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity. Most of America’s “poor” live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few generations ago. Today, the expenditures per person of the lowest-income one-fifth (or quintile) of households equal those of the median American household in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation.

The following are facts about persons defined as “poor” by the Census Bureau, taken from various government reports:

• Forty-six percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
• Seventy-six percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, 30 years ago, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
• Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.
• The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)
• Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 30 percent own two or more cars.
• Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.
• Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.
• Seventy-three percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher.

As a group, America’s poor are far from being chronically undernourished. The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children and, in most cases, is well above recommended norms. Poor children actually consume more meat than do higher-income children and have average protein intakes 100 percent above recommended levels. Most poor children today are, in fact, supernourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier that the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.

While the poor are generally well-nourished, some poor families do experience hunger, meaning a temporary discomfort due to food shortages. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), 13 percent of poor families and 2.6 percent of poor children experience hunger at some point during the year. In most cases, their hunger is short-term.

Eighty-nine percent of the poor report their families have “enough” food to eat, while only 2 percent say they “often” do not have enough to eat.

Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs. While this individual’s life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians.

Of course, the living conditions of the average poor American should not be taken as representing all the poor. There is actually a wide range in living conditions among the poor. For example, over a quarter of poor households have cell phones and telephone answering machines, but, at the other extreme, approximately one-tenth have no phone at all. While the majority of poor households do not experience significant material problems, roughly a third do experience at least one problem such as overcrowding, temporary hunger, or difficulty getting medical care.

The best news is that remaining poverty can readily be reduced further, particularly among children. There are two main reasons that American children are poor: Their parents don’t work much, and fathers are absent from the home. (I wonder if Obama and Edwards ever mention this on their campaign trail?)

In good economic times or bad, the typical poor family with children is supported by only 800 hours of work during a year: That amounts to 16 hours of work per week. If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year–the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week throughout the year–nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty.

Father absence is another major cause of child poverty. Nearly two-thirds of poor children reside in single-parent homes; each year, an additional 1.3 million children are born out of wedlock. If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, almost three-quarters would immediately be lifted out of poverty.

While work and marriage are steady ladders out of poverty, the welfare system perversely remains hostile to both. Major programs such as food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid continue to reward idleness and penalize marriage. If welfare could be turned around to encourage work and marriage, remaining poverty would drop quickly.

—July 23, 2007

On one of his early TV specials, maybe his very first, Barry Manilow conceded in those early 1970’s he was born too late. Preferably he wished it was in the big band era,

I agree, but wouldn’t have argued with the American Bandstand 50’s soda fountain times.

When our family travels to Disney World (and yes we do so willingly and happily because we alway have a terrific time, but the accused Disney wokeness is not the the topic here) we try but depending where we’re staying on the grounds it’s not always possible to hit this place.

Today’s kids have no idea what they missed, unless mom and dad take them to Beaches and Cream at Disney World.

I love nostalgia. Beaches and Creams. Thumbs up.

Seems these places are hanging around.

Would love to see more pop up.

God bless the soda fountains!

Read more from the Associated Press.

I don’t believe every teenage girl who wears a crop top or short skirt is bad news.

However I get the following writer’s main point.

Reminds me of an old “Happy Days” TV episode where Joanie Cunningham thinks the Red Devils are “keen” and wears a new attention-getting outfit in an effort to be initiated into their club.

After Fonize and friends save Joanie from the uncomfortable initiation Fonzie advises Joanie that “if you put on an advertisement, someone’s gonna answer that ad.”

Today’s read is from Christopher Skeet. Here’s the obligatory tease:

As the seasons change and the weather warms, American adults are yet again being subjected to the uncomfortable spectacle of teenage girls wearing outfits more befitting a runway show than a school, a store, or any other public setting.  Every winter I hope the trend loses steam or reverses, but every spring it returns worse than the previous year.

I wish there were a way I could word this in a less tawdry manner, but I can’t, so I’ll just be blunt:  Mom and Dad, we can see the bottom of your teenage daughter’s ass.  And we shouldn’t be seeing the bottom of your teenage daughter’s ass.  At her age, the only one who should is her proctologist.  And it’s your fault that we’re seeing it.

Read the entire column here.