"Prick is a much better word."

Pricking and searing... what's been going on with your conscience?

Bonus: A new Bible-based argument for same-sex marriage.

St. Paul contemned the bad religionists who "forbid people to marry," and — right at that point — said "For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving." Did God not create gay people?

Here we are "in later times." Is your conscience seared or pricked?

Recall candidate Kathleen Falk says: "It takes mom to get people back together. That’s how families do it."

More gender politics:

Falk characterized herself as a woman who has broken through anti-women barriers and glass ceilings all her life, a woman with a “big-tent” theory of bringing people together.

“We just want our opportunity to do what the men have had their opportunity to do,” the 60-year-old mother said. “That’s what’s fair. The fact that we haven’t had a woman governor in 164 years is a little bit lame. I say, if not now, when? But I believe I am the most qualified of all the candidates.”

Speaking of lame! That's the lamest argument I've heard in a long, long time.  Elect me, I'm the female?

You know, she actually does have credentials and experience, but apparently, the voters are too stupid to receive relevant information. Women, women, women. God help us. Have we become a nation of morons?

To be fair, she did also say she had an idea to create jobs "in the wood-pulp industry by finding new uses for that resource, including for jet fuel."

ADDED: Get on your jet plane. It looks like this.

"Hollande’s victory means the end of 'Merkozy,' the Franco-German axis that has enforced the austerity regime of the past two years."

"This would be a 'dangerous' development if that strategy were working, or even had a reasonable chance of working. But it isn’t and doesn’t; it’s time to move on. Europe’s voters, it turns out, are wiser than the Continent’s best and brightest."

Writes Paul Krugman, opining on the French election. Move on... I understand the impulse, but to what?

One answer — an answer that makes more sense than almost anyone in Europe is willing to admit — would be to break up the euro, Europe’s common currency. Europe wouldn’t be in this fix if Greece still had its drachma, Spain its peseta, Ireland its punt, and so on, because Greece and Spain would have what they now lack: a quick way to restore cost-competitiveness and boost exports, namely devaluation....

But that's not the right answer, per Krugman. That would be "highly disruptive" and "a huge defeat for the 'European project.'" (Can you remember what that is?) Krugman's solution is to abandon "fantasies of prosperity through pain" — "the confidence fairy doesn’t exist" — and grow the economy.

A 92-year old woman sold 1,300+ suicide kits in an "act of compassion" — without checking whether the customers were terminally ill.

Wayward do-gooder Sharlotte Hydorn faces a year in prison... for failing to file federal tax returns.

Agents who raided her home in suburban San Diego last year found checks that were not cashed and thousands of dollars in cash from buyers, her attorney said.

She wasn't in it for the money... unlike the federal government, which really does expect people to file their tax returns.  

Prosecutors said she took no steps to verify the physical condition, age, identity or mental state of her customers and therefore had no idea whether her kits were being bought by people suffering from depression or by minors acting without the consent of an adult. 

Which is all very relevant to the tax charge, no?

Investigators determined that the kits were sold to at least 50 people in San Diego County since 2007 and that four of those people last year used the kits to commit suicide. None was terminally ill, according to investigators....

You can be in the suicide business. Just pay your taxes. This is the world we live in.

“Goober is every man... Everyone finds something to like about ol’ Goober."

RIP, George Lindsey.



"Goober thought he had a talking dog... It revealed Goober's childlike qualities; it made you laugh and cry."

What if the "War on Women" is a War of Women... on men?

A question that occurred to me while reading this Wall Street Journal column by Carrie Lukas.

[P]olicies sold as protecting women can be used to bludgeon men, and they should spur greater skepticism of the idea that women need bigger government to succeed.

The War on Women rhetoric may be intended to derail specific candidacies, but it also derails needed public-policy debates. With trillion-dollar deficits, we need to make tough choices about funding priorities. Calling attempts to control government's costs an assault on women will only make deliberations less productive.

"Ponchos and sombreros: Partygoers don ‘insensitive’ attire despite student efforts."

Imagine! Student efforts failing to sear prick the conscience of the Mifflin Street Block Party people.

The student group that wants respectful seriousness and no horsing around on the subject of Cinco de Mayo calls itself Badgers Against Racism... or "BAR."

IN THE COMMENTS: pduggie said:

"sear the conscience" is the opposite of what you mean.

To have a seared conscience is to have one that is locked out from all claims of injustice.

I think you mean wound or prick.

He refers me to the New Testament, 1 Timothy:

¹The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. ²Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. ³They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. ⁴For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, ⁵because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.

I stand corrected. Prick is a much better word.

And by the way — I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice — there's a nice biblical argument for same sex marriage. St. Paul contemned the bad religionists who "forbid people to marry," and — right at that point — said "For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving." Did God not create gay people?

Here we are "in later times." Is your conscience seared or pricked?

AND: Though I've read the New Testament many times (though mostly the Gospels), my experience with searing the conscience is overwhelmingly from something written by Felix Frankfurter, in a passage I've used repeated in my constitutional law classes. The case is Baker v. Carr — a great Warren Court landmark — and Justice Frankfurter articulates what is, to me, the most memorable statement of judicial restraint in the Supreme Court reporters:

We were soothingly told at the bar of this Court that we need not worry about the kind of remedy a court could effectively fashion once the abstract constitutional right to have courts pass on a statewide system of electoral districting is recognized as a matter of judicial rhetoric, because legislatures would heed the Court's admonition. This is not only a euphoric hope. It implies a sorry confession of judicial impotence in place of a frank acknowledgment that there is not under our Constitution a judicial remedy for every political mischief, for every undesirable exercise of legislative power. The Framers, carefully and with deliberate forethought, refused so to enthrone the judiciary. In this situation, as in others of like nature, appeal for relief does not belong here. Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate. In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives. In any event, there is nothing judicially more unseemly nor more self-defeating than for this Court to make in terrorem pronouncements, to indulge in merely empty rhetoric, sounding a word of promise to the ear sure to be disappointing to the hope.

I'm quite shocked to discover Frankfurter misused the phrase! But then — did you know? — English was a second language for Felix Frankfurter, who was born in Vienna.

If that’s a loophole, then the entire state statutes are a loophole."

Scott Walker was able to raise a lot of money, and some folks think that's so unfair.

Weed Searing.

It's Meade versus weed in this searing story of a man and his blowtorch:

"The last five years have been wrenching and often lonely. Michael was the love of her life."

"When she married him, her sister asked, 'How does it feel to hit the jackpot?' In more than 30 years of marriage, she never heard him say an unkind word about anyone. He was an engineer, lectured at conventions, did volunteer work, belonged to a history book club, ran marathons. Now he can no longer speak, read, write or walk."

Frontotemporal dementia — it's not Alzheimer's.

"Whatever happens, we will go through this together. I will be there."

If you do "closet editing," do you have a rule about getting rid of anything that hasn't been worn in X years?

I see that I blogged about that back in August 2005. That dress that I hadn't worn in 15 years? I still have it, 7 years later, and I still haven't worn it, nor can I get rid of it. And I still can't defend it as "vintage."

"'I just want to be happy' is a hole cut out of the floor and covered with a rug."

"Because once you say it, the implication is that you're not. The 'I just want to be happy' bear trap is that until you define precisely, just exactly what 'happy' is, you will never feel it. Whatever being happy means to you, it needs to be specific and also possible. When you have a blueprint for what happiness is, lay it over your life and see what you need to change so the images are more aligned."

That's Augusten Burroughs, in a metaphor-crammed essay adapted from his new book, "This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike." (Here's the audiobook. I'm a big fan of the Augusten Burroughs audiobooks. He has that gentle male voice that I love to listen to when falling asleep. (My absolute favorite is Bill Bryson.))

"French voters elected François Hollande as president on Sunday, giving the country a Socialist leader..."

"... who has pledged to shift the burden of hardship to the rich and resolve the protracted euro-zone sovereign-debt crisis by softening the current prescription of austerity."

"We'll take out Scott Walker."

Says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

"'STABLE,' EH? Well, as they say at the Kentucky Derby: I’ll Have Another."

"Thanks for bringing me back, Glenn. Have a great vacation, as we guest horses attempt to inspire the disheartened crowd that many perhaps only partially fill the stands."

"Sorry about all the smoke, I just came from the tanning salon."

"I can't blame them for being jealous. I am alluring in a way they'll never be. Trust me, there are plenty of men in New Jersey who would love to snap into this Slim Jim."

Video here.