1. Washington Post Story On Romney Begins To Unravel

2. At Emory University, Darwin’s Bullies Smear Commencement Speaker, Dr. Ben Carson of Johns Hopkins

3. Obama’s new Ohio ad: just making stuff up at this point.

4. State Spending Not The Path to Growth

5. Where Is The Balance?

1. Washington Post Story On Romney Begins To Unravel

So yesterday morning the Washington Post runs a story detailing what kind of a jerk Mitt Romney was in high school. This is a surprise, right? A high school kid being a jerk. This has never ever happened before. Why, you might well ask, would the Washington Post devote valuable time and space to writing about this event? And why, you might well follow up, is this worth posting about when everyone should be talking about the environment?The answer is easy. It builds a meme and it translates Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage from a liability into a perceived strength.[Editorial Note: The Washington Post, overnight, changed the story without noting any changes to the story]Please click here for the rest of the post.

2. At Emory University, Darwin’s Bullies Smear Commencement Speaker, Dr. Ben Carson of Johns Hopkins

The serious problem of bullying in junior high and high school has received some overdue attention lately. Lee Hirsch’s documentary Bully is in theaters and highly recommended.But don’t think that bullying in academic settings is exclusively a phenomenon of adolescence. Adults also bully adults. That’s what is happening now at Emory University in Atlanta.You can be a brilliant, innovative pediatric neurosurgeon at a sky-scraping top medical school, in addition to being a generous philanthropist with an inspirational up-from-dire-poverty personal story, plus a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and a best-selling writer whose memoir was turned into a TV movie starring Cuba Gooding Jr.But in the hands of academic bullies, if you once shared your critical thoughts on evolutionary science and its moral implications — well, everything else about you suddenly dwindles to very little.Please click here for the rest of the post.

3. Obama’s new Ohio ad: just making stuff up at this point.

Let me present to you the amazing amount of scrutiny that apparently needs to go into a Barack Obama campaign ad, just to understand what it actually means.Please click here for the rest of the post.

4. State Spending Not The Path to Growth

I wanted to bring to your attention a short report released by The Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions (full disclosure: I am the president) focused on state spending burdens and their connection, or lack thereof, to economic growth.Adam Schwiebert, The Diehl Family Fellow at the Buckeye Institute, put together a short policy brief that uses a measurement know as “state spending burden” – comparing combined state and local government spending as a percentage of private sector Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – to look at the connection between spending and growth. The resulting chart, shown below, highlights that Ohio has a higher level of spending than growth states like Texas, South Dakota and Colorado.Please click here for the rest of the post.

5. Where Is The Balance?

In the past week, I’ve been called a bigot, a hater, had people wish I died, and had people wish Christians had died, been rounded up and killed, or experienced their own personal holocaust.All this came from proponents of gay marriage. The media won’t cover most of this. The media sees most stories as victims versus victimizers and those who support gay marriage are the victims. They get the positive media coverage.In reality, though, throughout this week I’ve seen a number of Christians engaged in as much hate filled rhetoric as gay marriage proponents, including the pastor in North Carolina who encouraged parents to beat up their gay acting sons.As a Christian, I cannot support gay marriage, nor can I accept practicing homosexuality as anything but a sin. At the same time, there are a lot of Christians out there who seem convinced they aren’t sinners. In fact, we are all sinners and as I have matured in my faith, I have a harder and harder time understanding how so many Christians can be so tolerant of so much sin, but treat homosexuality as some sin set apart from all other sins making it a worse sin than, for example, adultery.Please click here for the rest of the post.