Tim Townsend, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reports: ST. LOUIS — Rock singer Sheryl Crow ing home to Missouri this weekend to sing her polished, roots-rock songs at the Fox Theater to help raise money for children with cancer. But St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke was not interested in Crow’s altruism. He was interested in her activism — specifically her support for embryonic stem cell research, which the Roman Catholic church believes is akin to abortion. On Wednesday, Burke said...

Grand Rapids seems to be establishing a precedent for private corporations and individuals stepping up to the plate in the face of budget cuts and financial difficulty. The most recent example is the announcement that all six city pools will be open this summer, rather than just three. That means that the Director of Parks and Recreation is now looking to fill 160 new jobs (including lifeguards and water safety instructors) to man the parks. Why, when Michigan is facing...

In an Earth Day column last week that was skeptical about the gospel of global warming consensus, Glenn Shaw, a professor of physics at the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, expressed hoped that the climate change debate might spark a prehensive conversation about plex environmental responsibilities. In fact the opposite seems to be happening: the activist buzz over global warming is reducing the broader concept of environmental stewardship to a litmus-test on climate change. That’s why I wrote a...

Biotech giant Monsanto has added its considerable influence to the push to restrict or ban labeling of dairy products as free from added rBST, a monly used to induce cows to produce more milk. Christopher Wanjek, a columnist at , reports that Monsanto thinks that such advertising practice “scares consumers into thinking there’s something unhealthy about its human-made binant bovine growth hormone.” As I related earlier this year, Julianne Malveaux headlined a similar campaign against such labeling. The claim is...

Jerry Bowyer at NRO highlights a remarkable statistic with this “BuzzChart”: The unemployment rate among black Americans has fallen 2.7 percentage points since April 2003 (the e from the National Urban League’s annual “State of Black America” report). Bowyer chalks it up to Bush’s tax cuts. I’ve no doubt the tax cuts have had a positive impact on the national economy, but I’m not sure that the drop can be simply tied to that cause. Overall unemployment, for example, has...

“None of the above,” or NOTA, is a voting concept that would allow ballot-casters to express their frustration with the available candidates. It’s been a staple of voting procedure at the United States Libertarian Party for years. The Florida legislature is now considering an “I Choose Not To Vote” option. This choice is not the same as NOTA, since if it “won” a majority of votes it would not result in any necessary action. The candidate who gets the highest...

Anthony Bradley looks at America’s children of privilege and the influences that have put so many of them into crisis. “There is mounting evidence that we are faced with a new reality in America: educated, middle-class kids represent a new ‘at risk’ group, as both perpetrators and victims of peer-related violence,” Bradley writes. Read the rest of mentary here. ...

Today is Malaria Awareness Day. Today’s edition of Zondervan>To the Point has a plethora of related links (look under “Extra Points”). Be sure to also check out Acton’s award-winning ad campaign, which focuses in part on impacting malaria. ...

Despite strong overall growth, a number of internal problems, including excessive regulation, continue to limit wealth creation throughout Latin America, reports Samuel Gregg. The regulations Dr. Gregg examines include those on starting a business and on banking. Dr. Gregg explains that while it takes as few as 5 days to file the appropriate paper work to start a business in the United States, it takes an average of 152 days in Brazil. Dr. Gregg states that there are fewer loopholes...

An entire nation breathes a sigh of relief today, as Sheryl Crow has claimed that her proposal to restrict toilet paper usage to one square per restroom visit was a joke, as this blogger suspected. Unfortunately, Crow had no ment on the status of her “dining sleeve” device. You can count on the PowerBlog to bring you the latest news and updates on this important story as they occur. More: Iain Murray at Planet Gore notes that all things considered,...