First, Jacob Weisberg argues that we don’t really need a major overhaul of immigration policy, and that the proposals currently on the table will likely make things worse. Second, Fareed Zakaria says that a permanent class of guest-workers without a path to citizenship is a bad idea, and un-American to boot.

Radley Balko writes at Slate on the troubling increase in the use of “no-knock” raids by police: In the 1995 case Wilson v. Arkansas, the Supreme Court for the first time ruled that at least in principle, the Fourth Amendment requires police to knock and announce themselves before entering a private home. In doing so,…

When the Spaniards threw out their conservative government after the March 2004 bombings in Madrid and replaced it with a left-of-center one that was promising, among other things, to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq, they were roundly denounced by U.S. hawks as “appeasers” (for some American pundits it’s always Munich in 1938). Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias…

This story is a bit sketchy about the actual content of a recently published translation of the so-called Gospel of Judas. The document was discovered by looters in the ’70s, but was just released yesterday by the National Geographic Society after having been authenticated. Previously it seems that it was only known through St. Irenaeus’…

Pastor Clint Schnekloth of the blog Lutheran Confessions has a good article in the Journal of Lutheran Ethics on a Christian ethic of eating. He discusses issues like justice and equity for those who raise and process our food, the ethics of enjoying and sharing our food as a gift, and vegetarianism as an option…

An overview of various groups who might fall under this umbrella term by Steve Waldman at Slate. It seems to me a lot of where you end up on the political spectrum may have less to do with having a particular political ideology than it does with what issues are the most important to you.…

From The Onion’s AV Club, Seven Songs with Factual or Logical Mistakes in Their Lyrics, featuring such gems as: 2. Young MC, “Bust A Move”Though Young MC is completely logical throughout most of this song––he’s absolutely right, in most situations, you should bust a move––things get a little confusing in the last verse. He raps:…

I’ve seen this quote attributed to St. John Chrysostom, mostly on various libertarian-leaning political sites. But I’ve never actually seen it in context. Does anyone know if a) St. Chyrsostom actually said this and b) what he meant by it? It certainly sounds cool, but I’m not sure I really know what it means.

Here’s an interesting series of maps breaking down the concentration of religious groups in the U.S., via Camassia. Unsurprisingly, our impending move to New England isn’t exactly taking us into the heart of Lutheran country.

Massachusetts is getting ready to implement a plan with a novel approach aimed at providing universal health care: “This is probably about as close as you can get to universal,” said Paul Ginsburg, an economist who is president of the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change in Washington. “It’s definitely going to be inspiring…