I don’t agree with Alec Baldwin, the oldest and most liberal of the Baldwin brothers, about much of anything. But there is one opinion we do share: we both love Wegmans. Or, I should say, his mother and I both love Wegmans. Back in May Baldwin told David Letterman that his mother loves Wegmans so much she refuses to leave her home in frigid upstate New York to move in with brother Billy in sunny southern California.

Wegmans is a regional supermarket chain based in Rochester, New York. Several years ago they arrived in Maryland, where they built a large store in the then-declining Hunt Valley Town Center.

It has become my favorite place to shop. The selection is huge, fresh meats, produce, cheeses and baked goods are consistently of the highest quality, the house brands are first rate, employees are always helpful and friendly, the store is clean, checkout lines are short, and prices are competitive.

About the only thing I’ve ever found annoying about the store is that sometimes I have trouble finding a parking space. That’s because many customers drive 30 or more miles just to shop there.

People all over Maryland literally pray that a Wegmans will open in their community. Which might make you kind of wonder why some Anne Arundel County residents are opposing the opening of a new Wegmans near Crofton.

Ostensibly, the opposition is due to the fact that the shopping center that will house the store is being built atop a site where Constellation Energy once dumped fly ash from coal-fired electricity generating plants. Two years ago the energy utility agreed to clean up the waste and pay damages to residents who found carcinogens in their wells. Read more »

It’s Christmas morning and my thoughts are on giving. And about who gives and who doesn’t.

It might surprise you — though it doesn’t surprise me — to learn that those who are loudest in trumpeting their compassion toward their fellow-man, namely liberals, “progressives”, social democrats or whatever you want to call them, turn out to be regular Scrooges in their personal giving to charity. Conservatives who, liberals claim, want to give tax cuts to the rich and care nothing about the poor and disadvantaged, give far more per capita than liberals, both absolutely and as a percentage of income.

This is actually old news, but I was reminded of it by Arthur C. Brooks’ op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Brooks was the author of a 2006 study relating people’s giving habits to their ideologies. In his op-ed, he reports,

The most recent year that a large, nonpartisan survey asked people about both redistributive beliefs and charitable giving was 1996. That year, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that those who were against higher levels of government redistribution privately gave four times as much money, on average, as people who were in favor of redistribution. This is not all church-related giving; they also gave about 3.5 times as much to nonreligious causes. Anti-redistributionists gave more even after correcting for differences in income, age, religion and education.

And it goes beyond just giving money. Brooks reports that the 2002 GSS found that anti-redistributionists were more likely to give blood, and also “to give someone directions on the street, return change mistakenly handed them by a cashier, and give food (or money) to a homeless person”. Read more »

The Book of Job is not a part of the Bible one usually associates with Christmas. This is not just because it is in the Old Testament; The Book of Isaiah figures very prominently in the Christmas story, and it is an Old Testament book. Nor is it because The Book of Job pretty thoroughly disabuses us of the notion that God is some sort of cosmic Santa Claus who materially rewards us when we’ve been good, and deprives us when we’ve been bad.

The Book of Job is considered one of the great masterpieces of world literature. It is easily the most philosophical book in the entire Bible, dealing as it does with the most fundamental questions of man’s existence and his relationship to his Creator. It is the earliest known work that deals with theodicy, the reconciliation of a perfect, good and all-powerful Creator with his imperfect creation.

Job was a pious and wealthy man who lived in a place called “the land of Uz” during the patriarchal age. He was a Semite, though probably not a Hebrew. According to the Bible (all quotations are from the New International Version),

This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. He had seven sons and three daughters, and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East. (Job 1:1-3)

Job was so pious that, whenever his children had a feast, he would offer sacrifices just in case one of them might have sinned. Read more »

This week FBI agents arrested Muhammad Hussain, née Antonio Martinez, as he tried to blow up a military recruiting facility in Catonsville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. Hussain/Martinez’ bomb, like the one Somalia-born Mohamed Mohamud tried to detonate at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon, two weeks ago, was obligingly supplied by the FBI. Fortunately, both bombs were fake.

Now Antonio Martinez is in jail. So is Mohamed Mohamud. So is Julian Assange. And Tom Delay has been convicted and is facing the possibility of life in prison. And the Department of Homeland Security is protecting us from buying unauthorized copies of copyrighted music by shutting down websites that were selling them. And agents of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are protecting airline passengers by looking at nude pictures and fondling toddlers and great-grandmothers.

There, now. Don’t you feel much safer?

Apparently, the only thing Martinez and Mohamud did on their own was to have evil thoughts. These thoughts became action only because the FBI encouraged them, helped them and even constructed their “bombs” for them, taught them how to “detonate” them, and provided the vehicles with which to deliver them. Traditionally, three elements are necessary to prove that someone committed a crime: means, motive and opportunity. Here, the FBI supplied both the means and the opportunity. Technically speaking, this is not necessarily entrapment. Realistically, though, it is. Read more »

Forget what’s in the latest WikiLeaks release of classified documents.

I’d like to see the communications between the U.S. and Sweden, the U.K, and Interpol that resulted in Julian Assange, the Australian who runs WikiLeaks, turning himself into British police after being the subject of an international manhunt on “rape” charges.

The charge of “rape” conjures up images of violence and forced sex. It would certainly tarnish the reputation of this international folk hero if it turned out that he doesn’t respect women enough to obtain their consent before having sex with them.

But, as it turns out, “rape” in Sweden means something else entirely. That enlightened, progressive and politically correct democracy defines “rape” as having sex without using a condom. After you stop laughing, you’ll realize it’s not such a laughing matter when you learn that the penalty for this is a minimum of two years in prison.

According to Assange’s accuser(s) — I’m not sure if there’s one or two at this point — the sex was consensual and he used a condom, or started out to use one. But it broke. So it looks like he’s facing a minimum of two years in prison for buying a cheap condom. And Interpol spread a wide dragnet to bring this cheapskate before Sweden’s bar of justice. Read more »