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 »

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 »

Last week the government and its lapdog news media were telling us how much safer we are now that Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents are taking pornographic photos and groping us at airports. This week they’ve been telling us how much less safe we are as a result of Monday’s leak of some 250,000 classified documents by the website WikiLeaks.

And, yes, I’ve provided a link to it (twice — in case you missed the first one). This is just the most recent link. The site has had to keep moving as a result of cyber attacks and being kicked off of servers by several hosts and domain name services.

I would have jumped on this story sooner, but I wanted to find out what’s so dangerous about the information that was leaked.

Let’s see, I learned that Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi is afraid to fly over water, never goes anywhere without his “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse, and likes to stay on the ground floor of hotels.

I learned that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia wants the U. S. to take military action to stop Iran’s nuclear program, and that some of the king’s friends are al-Qaeda supporters. He also wants to implant tracking chips in Guantanamo inmates when they are released.

I learned that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) has dealt with the Taliban. And that the U. S. has been secretly bombing jihadists in Yemen and letting the Yemen government take the credit or blame, depending on one’s point of view. And that U. S. officials believe Afghan president Hamid Karzai is “weak”. Read more »

A good argument can be made — and I tend to agree with it — that the Sixth Amendment, not the Second, is our last line of defense against tyranny. This is the amendment that guarantees that a criminal defendant be accorded a speedy trial by an impartial jury of his peers.

The government can do a lot of horrible things to you — imprison you, confiscate all your wealth, even kill you — but not until 12 of your peers, selected at random, have found that you violated a law that carries one of those penalties. Resorting to Second Amendment remedies should never be necessary as long as we have a Sixth Amendment.

However, when the defendant is a conservative Republican whose “crime” was taking power away from liberal Democrats, and those sitting in judgment were drawn from the most liberal jury pool in the state, the Sixth Amendment becomes a sick joke.

Last Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, was convicted of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering by a not-so-impartial jury of his not-quite peers in Austin, TX.

Here are the basic facts in this case:

DeLay controlled a political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC), which was focused mainly on electing Republicans to the state legislature. Some of the money raised by the PAC — $190,000, to be exact — had been raised from corporations. Read more »