Crime and punishment

Question of the day for fiscal conservatives: Should Defense be immune from budget cuts? In defense of Defense, it's actually a constitutionally prescribed duty of the federal government, unlike a lot of the other nonsense that is funded these days. And keeping us safe from all the evil in the world is a complicated business, so the fear of cutting the wrong thing is justified. BUT. The cuts needed in government, especially i9n the short term, just can't be made without considering Defense:

Gee, ya think?

The chairman of the Business Roundtable, an association of top corporate executives that has been President Obama's closest ally in the business community, accused the president and Democratic lawmakers Tuesday of creating an "increasingly hostile environment for investment and job creation."

Don't want to spoil your breakfast or anything, but:

It might make a larger omelette but a bigger egg isn't necessarily a better one — and it certainly doesn't make the hen that laid it very happy.

That is the view of the chairman of the British Free Range Producers' Association, who says that if you want to be kind to hens, you should eat medium, not large or very large, eggs.

“It can be painful to the hen to lay a larger egg,” Tom Vesey.

Suggestion for the Allen County Public Library: Don't follow this example of the Bartholomew County Library Whatever the increase in fines collected, it will be more than offset by the bad feelings generated, especially if the agency uses some of the more notorious collection techniques:

The library loses about $50,000 a year in items that aren't returned. To recoup that money, they hired a collection company to bring in fines and books.

Lori Drew seems like a pretty despicable person. For her part in the hoax that led a 13-year-old girl to commit suicide, she deserves eternal condemnation. But it was clear that she didn't really violate the law. She was cruel, thoughtless and heartless, yes, but not a criminal. The prosecuting attorney in Missouri said as much when he declined to prosecute. But U.S. Attorney Thomas O'Brien didn't want to let her "get away with it," so succumbed to the Al Capone/O.J. Simpson Syndrome -- if we can't get her for that, we'll get her for something.

There are two church-state issues that can be in conflict: 1. Freedom of religion requires government to keep its distance and let people worship the way their conscienses dictate. 2. But religion can't give cover to practices that are clearly against the law of the land. It can be tricky to determine when the behavior is so unacceptable that the state is justified in stepping in. Remember the Santeria members who got in trouble for killing chickens because it violated laws against "animal sacrifices"?

Why wasn't this man in a casino or bingo parlor or at a horseracing park or lottery ticket outlet where he belonged?

Indianapolis metropolitan police arrested a second man they say was running illegal shell and card games during the Indiana Black Expo Summer Celebration.

A three-judege panel has ordered the death-sentence hearing tossed out and  reheard in the case of Christopher M. Stevens, whose murder of 10-year-old Zachary Snider led to Zachary's Law and creation of the Indiana Sex Offender Registry in 1994. The reason borders on the bizarre: