How easy is it for a 33 year old man to buy Plan B for his 15 year old “girlfriend?” Not too hard at all. In fact, the folks in this video from Students for Life don’t bat an eye – even when he makes it clear how old he is and how young his “girlfriend” is. Keep in mind that there is no state in the U.S. where it is legal for a 33 year old to have sexual...

Today at Ethika Politika, Elyse Buffenbarger weighs in on violence and voyeurism in The Hunger Games: Flipping between reality television and footage of the war in Iraq, Susan Collins was inspired to pen The Hunger Games. The dystopian young adult trilogy has been a runaway success both of page and screen: book sales number in the tens of millions, and in 2012, the first film took in nearly $700 million worldwide. (The next film, Catching Fire, releases tomorrow.) Initially, I...

An exceedingly honest woman called into an Austin, Texas, radio talk show, KLBJ, to discuss why she chooses not to work. She, her husband and three children rely on tax dollars for shelter, utilities and food. She admits that her parents did not work either, and that free money and programs were offered all the time. And what’s wrong with that? [product sku=1177] ...

I recently posted some thoughts at The Power Blog on “God’s Problem With Centralized Power”, which took a macro view of what I believe to be God’s clear disdain for mankind pursuing their own ends instead of His articulated purposes when es to how we organize munally. This time I want to highlight a specific, micro-level example of that same general idea. The story of Israel’s demand for a king inI Samuel 8contains so many relevant, interesting nuggets of insight...

Peter Robinson, host of the Hoover Institution’s mon Knowledge program, interviews playwright David Mamet about his book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture and his conversion to conservatism. The blurb on the video notes that, “Mamet explains how, by studying Jewish and Christian texts such as the Talmud and the Bible, he came to approach arguments from a new perspective that aligned itself with conservative politics.” Throughout the interview, which runs about 35 minutes, “Mamet discusses his...

Yesterday I was reading an article about Obamacare in the Washington Post. . . Whether they know about that financial help is a different question, as many have had trouble using HealthCare.gov to figure out how much insurance would cost under the Affordable Care Act. And the study does not include information on whether those subsides would lead to lower premiums for shoppers buying in the health law’s new exchanges. “There’s no question that when people get better coverage it...

The Obama Administration has stated that 106,000 people have managed to sign up for health care on the Healthcare.gov site, a site 3-1/2 years in the making. Both HHS Director Kathleen Sebelius and Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Henry Cho, have been grilled by mittees as to the incredibly poor performance of the website. What exactly went wrong? NPR’s All Tech Considered breaks it down. There are two popular methods of software development....

While we’ve grown accustomed to finding conservatives longing for a mythical Mayberry-era that never, in fact, actually existed, we expect those on the left to be perpetually forward-looking. So it’s rather disconcerting to see ‘progressives’ get nostalgic for the mostly mythical past. Usually such longing for the good ol’ es from ex-hippies missing the free love and cheap drugs of the 1960s. But on rare occasions the radical left dips back even further. Like to the 1930’s-era anarcho-syndicalism of the...

Even though the author of this essay in Catholic World Report is careful to make distinctions, this would seem to be the choice: Thomas Aquinas or Ron Paul. It is, in fact, how the indispensable Real Clear Religion website framed the debate this morning. pare a religion with an intellectual and moral tradition that goes back thousands of years with a quasi-political movement that is more known for what it is against than what is for is worse paring apples...

Kathryn Jean Lopez, at National Review Online, has interviewed Samuel Gregg, Acton’s Director of Research, on his newest book, Tea Party Catholic: The Catholic Case for Human Flourishing, a Free Economy and Human Flourishing.To begin, Lopez asks Gregg about the title of the book. KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Tell us about the title of the book. Does the Tea Party have anything to do with the Catholic Church? SAMUEL GREGG: Tea Party Catholic itself has very little to say about the...