In the World

Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party recently sent out a pair of direct mail ads against Republican state senate candidate Dan Hall. Both ads refer repeatedly to him as "Preacher Dan Hall." One (pdf) shows a man in a clerical collar wearing a pin that says, "Ignore the poor." The other (pdf) features an elaborate, old-fashioned angel holding a banner: "Blessed are the Rich."

An itemized income-tax receipt would say, “So you want to talk about reducing government spending? Talk about these things first.” Which would be a far more focused conversation than we’re having now.

So most Jews know where Jesus was born, even though few Christians know much about Buddhism. Jesus makes the cover of one general-interest magazine or another ever month or so, and it only takes a couple shopping trips between Thanksgiving and New Year's to accidentally memorize the words to "O Little Town of Bethlehem."

When the United Farm Workers announced their “Take Our Jobs” campaign this summer, I put it in my “maybe blog about this” folder and never came back to it. It’s a clever idea—legal residents are invited to replace migrant farm workers in the field—but the news media didn’t write a whole lot about it then, either. They are today.

According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 54 percent of New York State voters agree "that because of American freedom of religion, Muslims have the right to build the mosque near Ground Zero." That strikes me as a shockingly small majority—almost half don’t feel that “religious freedom” by definition applies to all religions, even when the question’s put that way?—but hey, glad to hear of majority support for basic American principles, right?