This strikes me as a straw man, but my mind is open . . . do you have, say, three or four data points that support your claim of 'growing Christian intolerance'?  What are you seeing that warrants fear of "persecution" at the hands of ... what exactly?  Some rabid Christian sect?  Where, pray tell, has this sect untethered the levers of State power from legal constraints against its arbitrary exercise, enabling it to "persecute" non-Christians?

In fact, aren't recent revelations of IRS malfeasance rather powerful evidence that Christians have legitimate reason to fear their persecution, not the other way around?  Who is asking of whom the content of their prayers?

Having asked all that, I must say again that it's entirely beside the point of this lawsuit in Federal court.  Town of Greece v. Galloway has nothing to do with your idiosyncratic belief that a State-sponsored Christian Inquisition looms on the horizon.  The question is whether the Federal government can direct the affairs of town councils in light of a Constitution that expressly prohibits it.

With respect, Skyler and Joseph, you have missed Adam Freedman's point (which was reinforced by MFR). This is not about whether prayer (of whatever flavor) is likeable. It's not about uniformity across governmental echelons. It's about that quaint old notion whereby the Feds are prohibited (in this case by the First Amendment) from imposing their will on matters our free citizens are meant to sort out for themselves at a local or State level.

We precisely do NOT need uniformity nor need to concern ourselves (again, at the Federal level) with the content of prayers said in every  hamlet across the land.  The Founders understood that if we are to keep this republic free and functioning, then upstate New York villagers cannot be forced by Washington to conform to the religiosity (or lack thereof) of upper West side Manhattan.  The good citizens of New York can have that argument in Albany.

I have a crazy idea. Radically simplify the taxation model and eliminate all the special categories which make peddling influence a tax-advantaged venture.  Let the marketplace of ideas be free from the corrupting influence of the votes-for-sale incumbency industry. 

Yes we did. And we Americans get the leaders we deserve. Democracies fail by choice.

After 12 years of post-911 government effort to ensure coordinated counter-terror operations by lavishly funded bureaucracies, the FBI had to ask the public who the Boston bomber was that the FBI itself interviewed some months prior.

At the same time, tax goons were busy looking into the prayer habits and reading lists of supposedly free citizens seeking nothing more than to lawfully exercise their rights.

This while the nation's chief executive tells us that we're silly conspiratorialists if we worry about the size, intrusiveness and competence of the Feds.

Again, we get what we deserve.

Ah, yes, the good old days of Obmamism . . . the cringe-inducing auto-hagiographical world of our philosopher King.  Yes, there’s this gigantic abstraction called "Muslims around the world" with which you, yes You, can start us anew, dispelling the benighted past with your radiant intellect.

The Left will keep clinging to this inanity, for to shed it means to admit they’ve perpetuated a fraud.   

It's moving from right to left, smashing into Earth, portending momentous change.

Am I correct that you're standing in the Stalinist steel complex of Nowa Huta, in Kracow, Poland?  If not, trust me, there's one in Nowa Huta too. :-)

If you want, you can drop the 'a' at the end of Ronald and Reagan . . . that's a case ending that goes with the meaning of the sign, which fully translated is: Central Square Named in Honor of Ronald Reagan.

Agreed, but the Greeks are still only in the first of the five stages of grief (denial) despite the fact this slow-motion crisis has been years in the making. It's going to take Mom and Dad (aka Germany) kicking them out of the house before they'll get around to exploring a different approach. Dependency is a hard thing to expunge from a national psyche . . . maybe even impossible (has anyone actually done it?  Thatcher made a good show of it, but look at David Cameron and ask yourself again . . .).  At best it's generational change we're looking at here. And, OBTW, since Euro membership means your brightest and most ambitious can pick up and go anywhere they want in Europe, the stay-behinds are a dimmer lot.

In the end, demographics rule.

Don't forget the Trillion$ of freshly printed currency spewing forth from every major central bank over the past five years.  We're awash in it. While even more "quantitative easing" isn't viable, it's evil twin "rampant inflation" is essentially inevitable. 

"Interesting" is one word for it.  We're likely to be quite surprised (in the way history repeating itself always surprises those too thoughtless to see it coming) at what nations will do when confronting the collapse of their living standards.

Sure it is.  In fact, it's the surest way to get growth.  It presumes a reasonably fair and stable trading environment, however, which in practice means a hegemonic power (or coalition) which imposes boundaries on self-interested behavior.  But it's both theoretically and practically possible for everyone to grow by trading with one another.

Cowardly, what?  Germany is not the author of European unemployment.

Sure, the Germans want a united Europe ... just not at any price the others decide to charge them for it! The Germans are idealistic about Euro-unity, but they're not going to let the Euro-socialists simply have their way with German taxpayers until the Golden Goose is well and surely dead.

Dissolving the Euro is becoming a necessity, not for Germany so much as for their fiscally irresponsible partners. By staying in the Euro zone, southern European countries can't apply the one sure 'fix' to the mess they are in: currency devaluation. It's painful, but it reduces the cost of your national goods and services, restores your competitive advantage, encourages (foreign) investment and gets you back on the road of economic growth. Instead of swallowing the nasty tasting medicine that will cure them, the Euro-profligates want to shame the victim into more bailouts. Germany should say "Nein."

This was inevitable. To believe that you can have a common currency without enforceable common fiscal & monetary policies is the equivalent of believing in anti-gravity: sounds good on paper, but it's "impossible except under contrived circumstances." The contrivance has been German willingness to underwrite others' profligacy.  Germany is shrugging. Can you blame them?  Their Eurozone partners are like teenagers denied their allowance . . . they'd convinced  themselves it's an entitlement and are damned mad that someone should behave otherwise. This quote from above pretty well says it all:

... France's Socialist Party hit out at the "selfish intransigence" of Mrs Merkel, accusing her thinking only of the "German savers, her trade balance, and her electoral future".

Yes, because of course the German Chancellor should be thinking about French Socialists' needs rather than her own voters.

You're right, Judith, it won't end well ... for Europe. But it could well work out to the advantage of the US. First we must rid ourselves of the socialists running our affairs, the ones hell bent on following the path so dramatically collapsing before our very eyes.

Question for Frank Luntz:  When what a company is selling is crap, do you blame it on the publicity or the product?  Maybe the Republicans can fire their customers and hire better ones!?!

Help!

My diploma conferring a BA in Economics was written on parchment with a quill pen. So, someone (Dr. Groseclose perhaps?) please help explain how this works.  Because this makes it sound like California has discovered the financial equivalent of the fountain of youth.

Can one really avoid financial catastrophe simply by making "it nearly impossible to foreclose on a mortgage"?  If it were that easy, wouldn't I be writing this in Latin while Rome still ran the world?**

Don’t those “tens of thousands” of non-performing mortgages have to be carried somewhere?  Where is that mess showing up?  Hidden in the bank bailouts?  In the bailout of Freddie and Fannie?

So, in other words, politicians stuck the bill for those mortgages on their grandchildren and great-grandchildren?  Let’s just chalk it up to inter-generational theft then?

**Come to think of it . . . the bread and circuses have been plentiful lately.

ANY Republican attempt to evade Obamacare allows the media to play its moral equivalency card.  If they can say 'both sides did it,' they ignore anything even related to that argument.  In this way the media display bias without it registering as such. In their minds, they are just being "fair."

The playing field is not level, so arguments like 'Yeah, but the Dems did that and more" are pointless . . . they won't get aired. If Republicans want to end Obamacare they'll actually have to do so, not merely play along with Dems in exempting a chosen few.

To do that---and this was my larger point---would have required a level of coercive force that neither we nor any other Western nation was or is willing to apply.  We don't have the stomach for it, as Western Chauvinist affirms above.  Put differently, nation building we can't do . . . a fallacy in concept and a failure in execution.  In Europe's imperialistic past there was a good deal of imposition of nationhood, but that's beyond our reach under present circumstances (some of the reasons WC highlights above, but that's a separate conversation).  Bush and others should have been able to discern the impossible task they embarked this nation upon.  I'm surprised more conservatives don't acknowledge this point, but instead seem to think---as you apparently do---we just didn't employ the right tactics.