[VIDEO] Why I’m Boycotting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Posted: April 27, 2017 Filed under: Humor, Mediasphere, White House | Tags: Committee to Protect Journalists, Donald Trump, Hasan Minhaj, Pennsylvania, Samantha Bee, TBS (U.S. TV channel), Trump, Twitter, White House, White House Correspondents Association 1 Comment
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner has turned into a red carpet event for Washington’s media and bureaucrat elites. This year president Trump is not attending, which is a good thing. Fostering a little comity between Republicans and Democrats can bring the nation together, but a healthy democracy works best when there’s a frosty tension separating journalists and those in power. This weekend’s self-important gala encourages the executive branch and the fourth estate to get along; it would be better if we made them square off in paintball.
Mostly Weekly is a new comedy series on Reason TV written by Andrew Heaton and Sarah Siskind and produced with Meredith Bragg and Austin Bragg.
Music: Moonlight Reprise by Kai Engel
Chris Wallace Grills Jill Stein: Fox News Sunday Full Interview
Posted: December 4, 2016 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Democratic Party (United States), Donald Trump, Electoral College (United States), Green Party of the United States, Hillary Clinton, Jill Stein, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin 1 Comment
Dr Jill Stein Appeared on Fox New Sunday with Chris Wallace. Wallace immediately grills Jill Stein On the recount efforts asking “why not New Hampshire”. Why Only States that Clinton lost? Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace engaged in a pretty combative exchange today while discussing Stein’s recount efforts, with Wallace trying to get Stein to admit that there have been no recounts that have switched tens of thousands of votes.
Steven Crowder writes:
“At the end of the day, Jill Stein isn’t changing any hearts or minds over this. The longer this charade of a ‘recount’ continues, the more ridiculous leftists are going to look in regard to the election. Which is hard to do. At this point, Democrats are pulling a Usain Bolt in that they’re only breaking their own records. In this case, records in national embarrassment. They’ve already racked up the top ten highest scores. Looks like Stein wants to go for an even twenty.”
[more here – Chris Wallace Absolutely Roasts Jill Stein on Her Recount Scam]
The interview started with Wallace wanting to know why Stein hadn’t requested a recount in New Hampshire even though Hillary Clinton carried that state by a much more narrow margin than the three states she did request recounts in. Stein explained that it was because the deadline had passed for New Hampshire.
After Stein noted that she would look to expand the recounts to other states if they see a systemic issue regarding machine error and hacking, Wallace asked Stein if she knew the highest number of votes that had been switched via a recount. When she brought up a situation with Toledo in 2004 where 90,000 votes were erroneously marked blank — she has brought this up before — Wallace explained that officially, the biggest change had been roughly 1200 during the 2000 Florida recount in that year’s presidential election. ‘There’s not a chance in the world here, Dr. Stein, that the vote is going to change in those three states,” Wallace exclaimed, pointing out the margin in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Read the rest of this entry »
‘The Ecstasy of St Catherine of Siena’, 1743
Posted: October 4, 2015 Filed under: Art & Culture, History, Religion | Tags: Catherine of Siena, Franklin Institute, Holy See, Pennsylvania, Pompeo Batoni, Pope, St. Peter's Basilica, The Ecstasy of St Catherine of Siena Leave a commentBATONI, Pompeo
The Ecstasy of St Catherine of Siena
1743
Oil on canvas
Museo di Villa Guinigi, Lucca
More Titillated Than Thou
Posted: September 1, 2015 Filed under: Art & Culture, Reading Room, Religion | Tags: Amish, Anabaptist, Books, Eastern Mennonite University, Lancaster County, Leaving Lancaster, Mennonite, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Romance Novels, The Quilter's Daughter, The Secrets of Crittenden County, WGAL Leave a commentHow the Amish conquered the evangelical romance market
Ann Neumann writes: Peering out from a wire rack in a grocery store was a religious vision of sorts: a paperback romance novel that neatly summed up classic yearning, confining cultural norms, and the hazards of defiled purity. At the center of all this familiar masscult longing and inner turmoil was an unlikely heroine: a young Amish woman, barefoot, clutching a suitcase, her white-bonneted head turned away from a mysterious man in the foreground. Here, plopped down in a hormonally charged set piece, was a figure straight out of the homey folk tradition known as Amish country pastoral. Though this pious woman couldn’t seem more out of place, the book is called Found ; it is the third entry in a series called The Secrets of Crittenden County. There were other books, too, in the rack—The Quilter’s Daughter, Leaving Lancaster—clearly meant to evoke the remote corner of central Pennsylvania where we were standing.
My sister and I grew up in the heart of Amish country, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. We came across these curious specimens on a routine shopping trip to a rural grocery store. Like people growing up anywhere, we share a complicated relationship with the customs of our homeland, but seeing them serve as the backdrop of a faith-based fiction franchise was a blow to our hard-won sense of place. It was a bit like what many rent-strapped single women writers in New York must have felt when they first encountered long-lunching, fashion-obsessed Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City fame, or how Appalachian teens might dissect descriptions of District 12 in the Hunger Games franchise.
[Order the book “The Quilter’s Daughter” (Daughter of Lancaster County) from Amazon.com]
My family isn’t Amish, but we’re probably the closest thing—we hail from nearly three hundred years of colonial American Mennonite stock: cussed true believers who moved from Germany to flourish in the free-thinking heart of William Penn’s settlement in the New World. Like the Amish, Mennonites are Anabaptists—adult-baptizing practitioners of an ardent brand of European Protestant pietism that often overlapped with Old World peasant political uprisings, but served in the American setting as a forcing bed for the Amish separatist quest for purity and the Mennonite traditions of pacifism and communal self-help. As the heirs to an easily misunderstood spiritual legacy, we feel protective of our Anabaptist background when it becomes a product label.
The commercialization of the Amish brand is, of course, nothing new. My sister and I have a long familiarity with kitschy Amish books: guidebooks to Pennsylvania Dutch country, Amish “wisdom” books, “Plain” cookbooks. But the strange cover of Found represented something new in this faintly comical face-off between the self-segregated communities of faith we knew and a cultural mainstream incorrigibly curious about what it’s done to offend pious Anabaptist sensibilities. For a tortured Amish conscience to be front and center on a mass-market paperback meant that the bonnet-clad and buttonless Amish were merging, however awkwardly, with more commercially tried-and-true narratives of tested devotion and romantic longing.
[Read the full story here, at The Baffler]
At a minimum, the novel was suggesting that the Amish represent something more than an exotic, out-of-the-way religious curiosity in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Shelley Shepard Gray, the author of the Crittenden County series, who sees her writing as a way to promulgate her more conventional brand of evangelical faith (she’s a Lutheran), seemed to be signaling that the Amish experience, long the object of prurient curiosity from an intensely modern (if only intermittently secular) American mainstream, was ready for prime time. The woman on the cover of Found could be an inspirational symbol of female spiritual self-discipline, or a cleaned-up lady on the make of the sort featured in endless Danielle Steel contributions to the bodice-ripper genre. My sister and I each purchased a copy of Found , agreeing that we would read it and report back.
Read the rest of this entry »
BREAKING: Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake Declines to Fire Self, Fires Police Commissioner Police Commissioner Anthony Batts Instead
Posted: July 8, 2015 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Anthony Batts, Baltimore, Baltimore Police Department, Federal Hill, Pennsylvania, Police commissioner, Riot, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake 3 CommentsBALTIMORE (AP) — Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has fired Police Commissioner Anthony Batts.
Rawlings-Blake announced the firing in a news release Wednesday afternoon. She said Deputy Police Commissioner Kevin Davis will become interim commissioner.
Rawlings did not give a reason, but the move comes amid a spike in the city’s homicide rate.
Baltimore was rocked with civil unrest in April after black resident Freddie Gray died one week after suffering a critical spinal injury in police custody. Six police officers have been criminally charged in Gray’s death.
Since the rioting stopped, the city has seen a sharp increase in violence, with 155 homicides this year, a 48 percent increase over the same period last year. [AP/Breitbart.com]
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake abruptly dismissed Police Commissioner Anthony Batts on Wednesday, hours after the city’s police union released a report sharply critical of the department’s response to rioting here in late April.
Ms. Rawlings-Blake announced the decision minutes before Mr. Batts was due to hold a news conference. She named Deputy Commissioner Kevin Davis as interim commissioner effective immediately. She was scheduled to address reporters later Wednesday afternoon.
The move came hours after the city’s police union said officers lacked appropriate riot gear and weren’t allowed to stop widespread looting during the unrest.
“Decisions implemented by top commanders of the Baltimore Police Department left officers in harm’s way,” union President Lt. Gene Ryan said at an earlier news conference. “Equally as important, the lack of preparation put the very citizens that we were sworn to protect in harm’s way as well.”
Police-department officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the report. A spokesman for Ms. Rawlings-Blake dismissed the report as “no more than a trumped up political document full of baseless accusations, finger pointing and personal attacks.” Read the rest of this entry »
BREAKING: Lockdown: Shooting Reported at Tri-County Plaza in Rostraver, Pennsylvania
Posted: May 11, 2015 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, U.S. News | Tags: Allegheny County Jail, American Red Cross, Monongahela River, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rostraver Township, Westmoreland County 3 CommentsA man shot and killed one person inside an auto body shop in Westmoreland County.
[Also see – Tri County Plaza Shooting: 5 Fast Facts]
Investigators confirmed there were injuries at the scene in the Tri-County plaza in Rostraver Township.
Channel 11’s Cara Sapida reports a man wearing a blue hoodie shot one person behind the counter of an auto body shop, and shot another person who was taken to the hospital. Read the rest of this entry »
‘Groundhog Day’ The Musical Heading To Broadway: Will Bill Murray Return?
Posted: April 3, 2015 Filed under: Art & Culture, Entertainment | Tags: Andie MacDowell, Bill Murray, Broadway theatre, Danny Rubin, Groundhog Day (film), Harold Ramis, Matthew Warchus, Pennsylvania, Peter Darling, Punxsutawney, Tim Minchin Leave a commentGet ready to relive ‘Groundhog Day’– over and over again! On Apr. 2 it was confirmed that the Bill Murray film will be reimagined and brought to the Broadway stage as a musical! (read more)
Governor Christie Pardons Shaneen Allen
Posted: April 2, 2015 Filed under: Law & Justice, Self Defense | Tags: Atlantic County, Chris Christie, Concealed carry in the United States, Garden State (film), National Football League, National Rifle Association, New Jersey, Pardon, Pennsylvania, Ray Rice 1 CommentAt The Corner, Charles C. Cooke writes:
Herewith, a beautiful sight: This is Chris Christie pardoning Shaneen Allen, a single mother from Pennsylvania who had been prosecuted for taking a concealed weapon into New Jersey in violation of the law:
Allen has come a long way. At first it looked as if her mistake — she did not realize that her Pennsylvania concealed carry license wasn’t valid in every other state — was going to land her in prison for more than a decade, cost her her job as a medical practitioner, and take her away from her children.
But then something remarkable happened: Read the rest of this entry »
Why Islam Needs a Reformation
Posted: March 21, 2015 Filed under: Politics, Religion, Think Tank | Tags: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Conversion to Judaism, Criticism of Islam, Cumberland, Federal Bureau of Prisons, Islam, Maryland, Muslim, Pennsylvania, Somali people, United States Department of Justice 3 CommentsTo defeat the extremists for good, Muslims must reject those aspects of their tradition that prompt some believers to resort to oppression and holy war
Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes: “Islam’s borders are bloody,” wrote the late political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1996, “and so are its innards.” Nearly 20 years later, Huntington looks more right than ever before. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, at least 70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims. In 2013, there were nearly 12,000 terrorist attacks world-wide.
[Order Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s new book “Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now” from Amazon.com]
The lion’s share were in Muslim-majority countries, and many of the others were carried out by Muslims. By far the most numerous victims of Muslim violence—including executions and lynchings not captured in these statistics—are Muslims themselves.
“Let me make two things clear. I do not seek to inspire another war on terror or extremism—violence in the name of Islam cannot be ended by military means alone. Nor am I any sort of ‘Islamophobe.’ At various times, I myself have been all three kinds of Muslim: a fundamentalist, a cocooned believer and a dissident. My journey has gone from Mecca to Medina to Manhattan.”
Not all of this violence is explicitly motivated by religion, but a great deal of it is. I believe that it is foolish to insist, as Western leaders habitually do, that the violent acts committed in the name of Islam can somehow be divorced from the religion itself. For more than a decade, my message has been simple: Islam is not a religion of peace.
“For me, there seemed no way to reconcile my faith with the freedoms I came to the West to embrace. I left the faith, despite the threat of the death penalty prescribed by Shariah for apostates. Future generations of Muslims deserve better, safer options. Muslims should be able to welcome modernity, not be forced to wall themselves off, or live in a state of cognitive dissonance, or lash out in violent rejection.”
When I assert this, I do not mean that Islamic belief makes all Muslims violent. This is manifestly not the case: There are many millions of peaceful Muslims in the world. What I do say is that the call to violence and the justification for it are explicitly stated in the sacred texts of Islam. Moreover, this theologically sanctioned violence is there to be activated by any number of offenses, including but not limited to apostasy, adultery, blasphemy and even something as vague as threats to family honor or to the honor of Islam itself.

Islamic State militants marching through Raqqa, Syria, a stronghold of the Sunni extremist group, in an undated file image posted on a militant website on Jan. 14, 2014. Photo: Associated Press
It is not just al Qaeda and Islamic State that show the violent face of Islamic faith and practice. It is Pakistan, where any statement critical of the Prophet or Islam is labeled as blasphemy and punishable by death. It is Saudi Arabia, where churches and synagogues are outlawed and where beheadings are a legitimate form of punishment. It is Iran, where stoning is an acceptable punishment and homosexuals are hanged for their “crime.”
“But it is not only Muslims who would benefit from a reformation of Islam. We in the West have an enormous stake in how the struggle over Islam plays out.”
As I see it, the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and law-abiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts.
[Read the full text of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s essay here, at Wall Street Journal]
It simply will not do for Muslims to claim that their religion has been “hijacked” by extremists. The killers of Islamic State and Nigeria’s Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct.

Muslim children carry torches during a parade before Eid al-Fitr, at the end of the holy month of Ramadan, on July 27, 2014, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.Photo: Getty Images
Instead of letting Islam off the hook with bland clichés about the religion of peace, we in the West need to challenge and debate the very substance of Islamic thought and practice. We need to hold Islam accountable for the acts of its most violent adherents and to demand that it reform or disavow the key beliefs that are used to justify those acts.
As it turns out, the West has some experience with this sort of reformist project. Read the rest of this entry »
Amish Buggy Sought in Pennsylvania Hit-and-Run
Posted: March 18, 2014 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: Amish, Crossover (automobile), Hit & Run, Honda CR-V, New Wilmington Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Wilmington Township Leave a commentNEW WILMINGTON, Pa. — State police are searching for an unlikely suspect in a western Pennsylvania hit-and-run accident: the driver of an Amish buggy.
Troopers from the Mercer barracks say the buggy twice hit a passenger vehicle at a crossroads on Route 158 in Wilmington Township, about 6 p.m. Sunday….Read more… CBS News

Groundhog Delivers Verdict: Chill, Go Watch The Movie, I’m Going Back Inside…
Posted: February 2, 2014 Filed under: Art & Culture, Entertainment, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: Aristotle, Bill Murray, Buddhism, Christianity, Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis, Ingmar Bergman, Jonah Goldberg, Judism, Michael P. Foley, NRO, Pennsylvania, Philsophy, Punxsutawney Phil, Roberto Rossellini Leave a commentA Movie for All Time: Groundhog Day
Re-running this Feb. 2005 cover story, year after year, is a tradition at NRO. It’s a thoughtful and entertaining review, for a beloved cult movie that’s gotten an unusual amount of attention, for a comedy, over the years, since its release in 1983. Both serious and funny (it’s funny first) Groundhog Day is also moral, and spiritual, in ways we don’t expect. Every religion, creed, faith, philosophy known to man claims the movie’s message as its own. In scholarly theological circles, no less, it’s generated a lot of ink, and a lot of discussion. This article is a good summary of all that.
Jonah Goldberg writes:
Here’s a line you’ll either recognize or you won’t: “This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.” If you don’t recognize this little gem, you’ve either never seen Groundhog Day or you’re not a fan of what is, in my opinion, one of the best films of the last 40 years. As the day of the groundhog again approaches, it seems only fitting to celebrate what will almost undoubtedly join It’s a Wonderful Life in the pantheon of America’s most uplifting, morally serious, enjoyable, and timeless movies.
[Groundhog Day at Amazon]
When I set out to write this article, I thought it’d be fun to do a quirky homage to an offbeat flick, one I think is brilliant as both comedy and moral philosophy. But while doing what I intended to be cursory research — how much reporting do you need for a review of a twelve-year-old movie that plays constantly on cable? — I discovered that I wasn’t alone in my interest.
Amish Buggy Horse Killed in Drive-By Shooting in Pennsylvania
Posted: November 26, 2013 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, U.S. News | Tags: Amish, East Lampeter Township Lancaster County Pennsylvania, Horse pulling, Lancaster County Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Reuters, Weaver 2 CommentsSigns of the Apocalypse?

JUDY BELLAH/GETTY IMAGES/LONELY PLANET IMAGE
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – A horse pulling a buggy with an Amish family aboard in rural Pennsylvania was struck by a bullet fired from a moving car and later died, police said on Tuesday.
No people were injured in the drive-by shooting, which occurred on Sunday in the village of Ronks in the heart of Lancaster County’s Amish country, said Lieutenant Robin Weaver of the East Lampeter Township Police Department.
The buggy was about a mile from home when the two adults and three children aboard heard a loud crack, police said.
“At the time, they believed it was a firecracker,” Weaver said. “They didn’t realize it was a gunshot.”
From the Department of Petty Controversies: Schools Cancel Halloween
Posted: October 18, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere | Tags: Charlie Brown, Education, Elementary school, Halloween, Nick Gillespie, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States Supreme Court Leave a commentOf all the conflicts to roil our educational system, this one is pretty absurd
Nick Gillespie writes: In the latest example of small-mindedness plaguing our educational system, schools around the country are attempting to ban costumes and candy on what is surely one of most kids’ favorite days of the year. The excuses range from vague concerns about “safety” to specific worries about food allergies to—get this—fears of breaching the wall of separation between church and state.
But whatever the motivation, the end result is the same as what Charlie Brown used to get every time he went trick-or-treating: a big old rock in the candy bag. What sort of lesson are we teaching our kids when we ban even a tiny, sugar-coated break in their daily grind (or, even worse, substitute a generic, Wicker Man-style “Fall Festival” for Halloween)? Mostly that we are a society that is so scared of its own shadow that we can’t even enjoy ourselves anymore. We live in fear of what might be called the killjoy’s veto, where any complaint is enough to destroy even the least objectionable fun.
Consider Sporting Hill Elementary School in Pennsylvania. Earlier this month, the school sent parents a note explaining that wearing Halloween costumes was was canceled because, well, you know, “safety is a top priority.” A spokesperson further explained, “We recognize that the education about, and celebration of, seasonal festivals is an important aspect of the elementary setting…[but] we must do so in a manner that is safe and appropriate for all children.” You’d think it would be easy enough to craft basic guidelines on what’s safe – only fake blood, no trailing ghost or ghoul fronds that might get tripped on– but such a simple task is apparently beyond the powers that be in Sporting Hill. Read the rest of this entry »
Teens chase kidnapping suspect on bikes, save 5-year-old girl
Posted: October 9, 2013 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, U.S. News | Tags: Bicycle, CNN, lancasterpennsylvania, Pennsylvania 1 CommentTwo teenage boys are being hailed as heroes after they chased a car carrying a kidnapped girl — on their bicycles.
Five-year-old Jocelyn Rojas was playing in her front yard in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when she vanished Thursday afternoon. Authorities believe she was abducted by a man who lured her by offering ice cream.
For two hours, neighbors and police scoured the area and asked if anyone had seen her.
Temar Boggs, 15, and his friend took off on their bicycles to search.
About a half-mile away, they spotted Jocelyn in a sedan. But the driver was elusive.
“Every time we’d go down the street, he’d turn back around, and then … we’ll follow him,” Temar told CNN affiliate WGAL.
The two teens chased the alleged kidnapper on their bikes for 15 heart-pounding minutes. The driver apparently knew he was being followed and gave up. Read the rest of this entry »