Well, the blame Israel first crowd is at it again. First one ship is boarded, after attempting to run a blockade which was established by Israel with international support, and several lives were lost when the supposedly peaceful passengers assaulted the Israeli commando team, attempting to wrench their guns away, throwing Molotov cocktails, and beating them with iron rods.

As most people are by now aware, Senator Ted Kennedy has died. As seems to happen with the death of any prominent person, there are a number of posts back an forth concerning the man's life. The mainstream media has begun pouring out its grief--some real, some not--at the man's passing; one can see him being considered as a sort of saint in their eyes. I fully expect there to be much ballyhooing about his life as a great liberal Catholic (the media tends to ignore conservative Catholics unless they can be portrayed as nutjobs), as indeed has already begun to occur in such papers America (a Jesuit-run magazine). Father Zuhlsdorf (of What Does the prayer Really Say) has already taken this article to task quite nicely, but it is worth noting a few things about the late Senator.

A New Hampshire court has ordered that a ten-year-old girl must immediately enroll full-time as a student in the public schools. That's right, she must go to public school--not a private school. She cannot continue homeschooling--in spite of the fact that she is academically superior to her peers as reported by standardized testing and the accounts of her teachers (she is already taking a handful of classes in the public school). Why would the court do this?