We’ve been hearing a lot lately about California’s return to fiscal solvency thanks to a round of tax hikes; the ‘one percent’ of Californians are, we have been told, happy to pay their fair share and to participate in the rescue of the Golden State.That’s what the politicians say; some of the actual taxpayers dissent. […]

This is the twelfth day of Christmas and so the Yule Blog is drawing to a close for another year. As always, it’s a nice break from the regular blogging and a way to mark the holidays.The Christmas season ends on a high note, with the Feast of the Epiphany — also known as Three […]

President Obama was officially re-elected by the electoral college yesterday, but as he turns toward a new term, he is still haunted by one of the biggest failures of the first four years of his presidency: Israeli-Palestinian peace relations. At Via Meadia, we think that the President needs a better approach to get better results.Israeli-Palestinian peace […]

As the Christmas season draws to a close and the return of regular blogging looms, I’m looking back over this short period of intense religion writing and thinking about how writing on religion is and is not like writing on other controversial topics.There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s important to write about religion.  […]

When, on Tuesday morning, I finished reading David Brooks’s column in the New York Times, I scribbled two words at the bottom of the newsprint. First let’s hear how his typically excellent column, this one on the nature and scope of the debt we are amassing and are refusing to responsibly address, ended: The country […]

Connections between the adult Jesus, his childhood and the family in which he was raised aren’t easy to make. At first glance, the gospels don’t offer much; whatever the gospel writers had in mind, producing complete biographies of Jesus wasn’t it. Mark omits Christmas altogether, and starts with Jesus getting baptized and launching his career. […]

How much of the Christmas story is “real” and how much of both this story—and ultimately the entire record of the the Scriptures—is historically accurate? This is a much more complicated question than it may appear at first glance.

By now, the Three Kings are well on their way to Bethlehem, and the Christmas season is drawing to a close. But the Three Kings (actually, ‘wise men’ according to Matthew’s gospel) aren’t just bringing their famous three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. They bring with them another set of questions that we have […]

We must get rid of the IRS and the present tax system that goes with it. Next to money-leaking corporate and union lobbyists paying for politicians’ political ads and the inside-baseball influence of financial-sector plutocrats, nothing tilts the playing field in favor of the wealthy like the IRS code. So it needs to be the […]

After a lot of sturm und drang, the fiscal cliff has been put off for a couple of months. Some modest tax increases, no real spending cuts, and the US lurches forward for another 60 days.It’s not a horrible result, and it seems broadly in line with what the voters said in November: they are […]