It’s all about Al and his plans (again) for the City.

Headline Al Sharpton plans to spotlight people fighting violence in Chicago

should be “Race hustler camps out again.”

Quit school, that is, vs. Sen. Lightford’s promotion of compulsory schooling at ever lower ages.

When schooling is compulsory, schools are, by definition, prisons. A prison is a place where one is forced to be and within which people are not free to choose their own activities, spaces, or associates. Children cannot walk away from school, and within the school children cannot walk away from mean teachers, oppressive and pointless assignments, or cruel classmates.

The writer, Peter Gray, teaches at Boston College. He does not mention school choice, by way of vouchers, for instance, but it seems to me the freedom to quit is comparable to the freedom to choose one’s own school or other place of learning.

Illinois teacher union hearts same-sex “marriage.”

Had a chance today to spout off at a men’s prayer meeting, came out (up: hadn’t thought it before quite this way) with: The mass could be in sanskrit, it wouldn’t make any difference. Point is, it’s a group experience of people gathered together to be part of something big. The priest drones on, I tune out so as to tune in on the big event, renewal of Christ’s sacrifice for all of us.

It’s not bingo night. Everybody there knows that. God bless the priest who comes and does it for us. I appreciate that very much. I just find it better if I pay little or no attention to his articulation of a text, which I nonetheless consider important. I’m not an iconoclast (I don’t think), but after a thousand or ten thousand times I get what’s happening. And I like it.

Agency rogues or rogue agency?

In March 2012, the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s leading homosexual-rights group, posted the National Organization for Marriage’s (NOM) confidential 2008 tax returns, including the names of donors.

The disclosure of tax returns without permission is a felony, and NOM quickly cited evidence that allegedly pointed to an Internal Revenue Service official as the likely source of the confidential data.

But a year and a half later, after repeated inquiries elicited no satisfactory response from the IRS, NOM has filed a lawsuit demanding answers and damages.

So they have gone to court, as has been widely reported by NY Times, AP, and our other even-handed clarions of of what the heck is going on. NOT!!!!

NOM’s lawyer did get it on Fox News blog, however.

How they do it:

The Internal Revenue Service became another arm of the campaign and when Democrats called on it to take action against the Tea Party; it acted.

Lois Lerner received an email with a link to an NPR story in which top Democrats complained about Republican contributions and described a complaint that they planned to file with the FEC. Lerner, revealing her allegiances and informed by her FEC past, responded, “Perhaps the FEC will save the day.”

Lerner was not some rogue employee. She was reacting to pressures from top Democrats who were afraid of the rising strength of the Tea Party and worried about the consequences for the 2012 elections. The IRS was rotten with partisan figures like Wilkins and Lerner who were approaching the political contest from the standpoint of Obama employees, not employees of the United States government.

So? You have a problem with that? Get lost, Buddy.

San Francisco Bishop in America Mag: Poverty Must Join Abortion at Top of Church’s ‘Political Agenda’

However, regarding “poverty,” McElroy writes in his current piece:

Choices by citizens or public officials that systematically, and therefore unjustly, decrease governmental financial support for the poor clearly reject core Catholic teachings on poverty and economic justice. Policy decisions that reduce development assistance to the poorest countries reject core Catholic teachings. Tax policies that increase rather than decrease inequalities reject core Catholic teachings.

McElroy firmly concludes that “the categorical nature of Catholic teaching on economic justice is clear and binding.”

Foolish because he makes a certain tax policy as violation of “core Catholic teachings.

Foolish also because he does an apple-and-oranges equating of abortion and poverty, seeking to establish “poverty alongside abortion as the pre-eminent moral issues the Catholic community pursues at this moment in our nation’s history.”

Why? Because abortion is the direct killing of innocent people and poverty is an economic condition admitting of a variety of economic solutions.

Do bishops get economics courses in their continuing education program?

My friend Jake (not his real name) scoffs: “Continuing ed for bishops? What, you think they are professional men with standards to uphold?” (Shut up, Jake. It’s my blog, not yours.)

An economist compares minimum-wage laws, restricting or eliminating low-employability workers from employment, to Jim Crow-era banning of blacks from certain jobs.

Futhermore, there’s ample evidence that increases in the legislated minimum wage in the U.S. have a disparate negative impact on the employment prospects of blacks, and especially young blacks.

So even if such racial discrimination was not among Congress’s intended consequences of its minimum-wage legislation, ought not the “disparate impact” doctrine of Griggs v. Duke Power Co. – a statistics-based doctrine favored by the Obama administration – be used to find minimum-wage legislation to be a violation of the U.S. Constitution?

The economist can’t comment on constitutional issues here, only call minimum-wage supporters’ attention to their anomalous position.