G. Frink's

Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, is a global-cooling coal man.

Coal Land has linked up with Friends of Coal to bang his drum against greenhouse gas emission control and to bless coal-fired electric power plants.

He calls cap-and-trade, which provides economic incentives to curtail emissions and which was endorsed by President Obama last night, "a global warming tax." Yes, and "put the brakes on our already slowed economy."

(c)Fir0002/Flagstaffotos

Yes, I overlooked it (not a Leno fan).

No, I cannot/will not let President Obama's offhand diminution of Special Olympians pass. Or accept a staff-delivered apology as sufficient.

Not because I have children or grandchildren who are Special Olympians.

I don't. Not even close. Nor because I wish to harass the president. You know where my political sympathies lie.

Because some passing mistakes we make are so serious in their implications that they require sincere, personal apologies, and slights of the disabled are in my view among those mistakes.

Love E-Voting? Read Brad Friedman on the indictment of Clay County, Ky., officials for "chang[ing] votes at the voting machine" and showing others how.

Two nationwide polls show the French losing confidence in Pope Benedict XVI, and one of them found an overwhelming majority of French Catholics in favor of a change in abortion/contraception doctrine.

Hughes with his mother, Sylvia Plath not long before her death.

Nicholas Hughes is gone, by his own hand, leaving us behind to wonder what we might have done.

Almost inevitably in this stigmatizing culture [.pdf], more. For the son whose poetess mother took her life while he was still so young, the son who shared a passion for fishing with his poet father whom he loved -- more.

This is no judgment of his friends and family but rather a plea to a nation which still pervasively discriminates against and unjustifiably shuns the mentally ill.

The "low self-esteem, isolation and hopelessness" which are the fruit of our prejudice against mental illness are excruciatingly painful to the already besieged, and are exacerbated by self-enforced, societally encouraged silence.

That combination can be a death sentence [.pdf] for people who could have become well, productive and happy again. People who all share the neuroplasticity which can permit the sick to become whole again and which can make the well, ill.

Let us resolve make right together that which has for so long been wrong.

Was Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, speaking ex-cathedra?

Apparently unmoved by the Bush administration's history of manipulating conservative Christians like him, Dr. Land told the Houston Chronicle:

I don't think there's any question that the vast majority of Southern Baptists still strongly support this president and his policies.

In matters of imprisonment, the relationship between education, employment and recidivism is well known to social scientists. To legislators and the rest of us, often not so well. [Read More]

Is poor Sarah now broke along with the rest of us? How did January's $11-million book deal become March's legal defense fund (both still prospective)?

Ten "frivolous" (she calls them) ethics complaints down the road from her national political debut and, says the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska's "Gov. Sarah Palin owes more than a half million dollars to an Anchorage law firm."

U.S. Army Brig. General Gary S. Patton and Gen. Carter Ham are attacking the historic military prejudice against acknowledging and seeking treatment for psychiatric illness by sharing their experience with PTSD.

Our first black president-elect, whose campaign was fraught with both false and real issues of religion, has created for his inauguration a faith collage of the culture wars which have racked the nation for four decades.

Together, the voices he has chosen to pray and preach compose the elements of needed and otherwise unlikely dialog toward reconciliation. . . . [read the rest]