For example, Beech-nut, PBM, First Juice and Nestle were cited for making claims on products intended for children under 2 years of age like “low sodium” and "plus vitamins & minerals." Such claims are not allowed because appropriate dietary levels have not been established for children in this age range.

Nestle was also dinged for implying that "Juicy Juice All-Natural 100% Juice Orange Tangerine" and "Juicy Juice All-Natural 100% Juice Grape" were 100% juice, when they are actually juice blends with added flavors.

Gorton’s Inc. was taken to task for boasting on the front of its package that its fish fillets have no trans fats, but failing to add a disclosure adjacent to the claim such as "See nutrition information for fat, saturated fat, and
sodium content.” (in this case, 19 g total fat, 4.5 g saturated fat, and 680 mg sodium per serving).

...equip you with top quality theological resources- both articles and audio talks. We believe that Christian theology is the most exciting thing possible since it’s simply about knowing God better.

And they do an excellent job. Don't let the fact that you're not a student stop you from mining the great resources available here.

Their latest offering is "Foundations", a ten week course for individuals or groups. I'd struggle to find a better basic overview of Christian doctrine than what is offered here. And it's all free!

Theology Network is headed up by Dr. Mike Reeves who I knew in London. He's an astounding guy and, not least, a phenomenal teacher of God's word in all its aspects.

Hie thee hence to Foundations.

When I was 6, I discovered that there was something wrong. I couldn't navigate stairways like the rest of the children in my family. My parents took me to a big children's hospital in Indianapolis, and they diagnosed me with muscular dystrophy. (The diagnosis was later changed to spinal muscular atrophy.) I was 14 years old when I went into a wheelchair. It was pretty traumatic, but I've got my parents to thank for helping me get through it all. My dad would not give up, and he wouldn't let me give up, either.

When I got out of high school, I attended college at Indiana State for a year, but I had to drop out. The difficulty in trying to navigate the campus in a standard wheelchair was pretty high. So I set out to design a battery-powered scooter. My uncles were all gearheads; they had racecars and motorcycles, and I just hung around them a lot and developed a mechanical aptitude from them. After about three or four months, I came up with my first scooter. I built it in my cousin's garage where he repaired tractor equipment.

Everyone told me it wasn't going to work. But when it comes to commonsense engineering, I'm very blessed. I think it is a God-given ability, because I feel I was sent here to help my cohorts who are disabled get mobility.

I got a job at a local automotive supply factory as a quality control technician. I was able to negotiate the factory very well in my new scooter. On the job, people would see my scooter and tell me that they knew somebody who needed one. I did this for eight or nine years, building them part time until about 1970.

My transportation back then was an old postal truck that I converted using a tailgate off of a pickup truck so that I could drive my scooter right up inside. But when they moved the factory farther away from my home, I had to find something more reliable. It just so happened that in 1970, Dodge came out with a new full-size van that had air conditioning and power steering and all this stuff. It was great.

I started to convert one of those so that I could drive it from my wheelchair. I designed the lift that is so common today on school buses and mass transit. Like the scooters, people heard about it and started saying they knew somebody who needed one of those.

Surely, however, a decade of subsi dizing renewable energy means that Ger many now produces substantial amounts of it, and has freed itself from dependence on foreign powers? No. Wind power represents about 6 percent of German electricity generation, and solar power is a mere tenth of that. Most German electricity is generated from natural gas, and Germany obtains 40 percent of its gas from Russia, a figure projected to rise to as much as 60 percent by 2020.

What about strengthening the middle class? Well, consumers have borne the cost of the policy. They paid over $100 billion to subsidize wind and solar power over the last decade, with the costs of the subsidies accounting for 7.5 percent of household electricity prices.

As for the climate effect, subsidizing green energy is an extremely expensive way of reducing emissions. The price for a permit to emit one ton of CO2 under Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme — the mar ket cost of reducing emissions — is about $20. Reducing emissions by subsidizing wind power works out to a cost of $80 a ton. For solar power, the cost is a staggering $1,050 a ton.

Finally, the policy has not even supported innovation. The study found that “claims about technological innovation benefits of Germany’s first-actor status are unsupportable: In fact, the regime appears to be counterproductive in that respect, stifling innovation by encouraging producers to lock into existing technologies.” Given that even Secretary Chu admits that we need “Nobel-level breakthroughs” in energy technology to have any hope of reducing emissions by 2050, locking in these existing technologies through green-jobs programs would in deed be counterproductive.

The story is the same in Spain, which set out to be the world leader in solar technology. A study by a team from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid led by Gabriel Calzada Alvarez found that the opportunity costs of public investment in renewable energy were very high, resulting not just in significant numbers of jobs destroyed or never created, but in unsustainable bubbles in the renewables sector...

In a regularly scheduled meeting of the Anglican Church in North America’s Executive Committee, the leaders agreed among other things, to strengthen the relationship between the Anglican Mission, the Province of Rwanda and the Anglican Church in North America currently defined by protocol. As a result, the Executive Committee will appoint a Task Force charged with continuing to carry forward all components of the existing protocol formally and canonically.

Two important changes are apparent. One is a significant drop in the percentage of seniors saying all abortions should be illegal. This fell from 32% in the earliest years of the trend to 16% in the first half of the 1990s, but has since rebounded somewhat to 21%. This long-term 11-point decline among seniors compares with a 9-point increase -- from 14% to 23% -- in support for the "illegal in all circumstances" position among 18- to 29-year-olds since the early 1990s.

As a result, 18- to 29-year-olds are now roughly tied with seniors as the most likely of all age groups to hold this position on abortion -- although all four groups are fairly close in their views. This is a sharp change from the late 1970s, when seniors were substantially more likely than younger age groups to want abortion to be illegal.

The mechanics of teaching were not always overlooked in education schools. Modern-day teacher-educators look back admiringly to Cyrus Peirce, creator of one of the first “normal” schools (as teacher training schools were called in the 1800s), who aimed to deduce “the true methods of teaching.” Another favorite model is the Cook County Normal School, run for years by John Dewey’s precursor Francis Parker. The school graduated future teachers only if they demonstrated an ability to control a classroom at an adjacent “practice school” attended by real children; faculty members, meanwhile, used the practice school as a laboratory to hone what Parker proudly called a new “science” of education. But Peirce and Parker’s ambitions were foiled by a race to prepare teachers en masse. Between 1870 and 1900, as the country’s population surged and school became compulsory, the number of public schoolteachers in America shot from 200,000 to 400,000. Normal schools had to turn out graduates quickly; teaching students how to teach was an afterthought to getting them out the door. Thirty years later, the number was almost 850,000.

In the 20th century, as normal schools were brought under the umbrella of the modern university, other imperatives took over. Measured against the glamorous fields of history, economics and psychology, classroom technique began to look downright mundane. Many education professors adopted the tools of social science and took on schools as their subject. Others flew the banner of progressivism or its contemporary cousin constructivism: a theory of learning that emphasizes the importance of students’ taking ownership of their own work above all else.

At the same time, well-educated women and racial minorities who once made up a core of teachers began to see that they had other career options, and in increasing numbers, they took them. That left the ever-growing number of teaching jobs to a cohort with weaker academic backgrounds. The labor pool was especially shallow in cities, which, abandoned by the middle class, faced perpetual teacher shortages. Nancy Slavin, the head of teacher recruitment for the Chicago public schools, described to me a phone call in 2001 that particularly alarmed her. A prospective substitute teacher wanted to know why she hadn’t been selected for an assignment. Slavin explained that her conviction for prostitution made her ineligible. “Well,” the woman replied, a bit indignant, “I’m in a teacher-training program.”

Traditionally, education schools divide their curriculums into three parts: regular academic subjects, to make sure teachers know the basics of what they are assigned to teach; “foundations” courses that give them a sense of the history and philosophy of education; and finally “methods” courses that are supposed to offer ideas for how to teach particular subjects. Many schools add a required stint as a student teacher in a more-experienced teacher’s class. Yet schools can’t always control for the quality of the experienced teacher, and education-school professors often have little contact with actual schools. A 2006 report found that 12 percent of education-school faculty members never taught in elementary or secondary schools themselves. Even some methods professors have never set foot in a classroom or have not done so recently.

Nearly 80 percent of classroom teachers received their bachelor’s degrees in education, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Yet a 2006 report written by Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College, the esteemed institution at Columbia University, assessed the state of teacher education this way: “Today, the teacher-education curriculum is a confusing patchwork. Academic instruction and clinical instruction are disconnected. Graduates are insufficiently prepared for the classroom.” By emphasizing broad theories of learning rather than the particular work of the teacher, methods classes and the rest of the future teacher’s coursework often become what the historian Diane Ravitch called “the contentless curriculum.”

When Doug Lemov, who is 42, set out to become a teacher of teachers, he was painfully aware of his own limitations. A large, shy man with a Doogie Howser face, he recalls how he limped through his first year in the classroom, at a private day school in Princeton, N.J. His heartfelt lesson plans — write in your journal while listening to music; analyze Beatles songs like poems — received blank stares. “I still remember thinking: Oh, my God. I still have 45 minutes left to go,” he told me recently. Things improved over time, but very slowly. At the Academy of the Pacific Rim, a Boston charter school he helped found, he was the dean of students, a job title that is school code for chief disciplinarian, and later principal. Lemov fit the bill physically — he’s 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds — but he struggled to get students to follow his directions on the first try.

After his disappointing visit to Syracuse, he decided to seek out the best teachers he could find — as defined partly by their students’ test scores — and learn from them. A self-described data geek, he went about this task methodically, collecting test-score results and demographic information from states around the country. He plotted each school’s poverty level on one axis and its performance on state tests on the other. Each chart had a few outliers blinking in the upper-right-hand corner — schools that managed to squeeze high performance out of the poorest students. He broke those schools’ scores down by grade level and subject. If a school scored especially high on, say, sixth-grade English, he would track down the people who taught sixth graders English.

He called a wedding videographer he knew through a friend and asked him if he’d like to tag along on some school visits. Their first trip to North Star Academy, a charter school in Newark, turned into a five-year project to record teachers across the country. At first, Lemov financed the trip out of his consulting budget; later, Uncommon Schools paid for it. The odyssey produced a 357-page treatise known among its hundreds of underground fans as Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)

I first encountered the taxonomy this winter in Boston at a training workshop, one of the dozens Lemov gives each year to teachers. Central to Lemov’s argument is a belief that students can’t learn unless the teacher succeeds in capturing their attention and getting them to follow instructions. Educators refer to this art, sometimes derisively, as “classroom management.” The romantic objection to emphasizing it is that a class too focused on rules and order will only replicate the power structure; a more common view is that classroom management is essential but somewhat boring and certainly less interesting than creating lesson plans. While some education schools offer courses in classroom management, they often address only abstract ideas, like the importance of writing up systems of rules, rather than the rules themselves. Other education schools do not teach the subject at all. Lemov’s view is that getting students to pay attention is not only crucial but also a skill as specialized, intricate and learnable as playing guitar.

At the Boston seminar, Lemov played a video of a class taught by one of his teaching virtuosos, a slim man named Bob Zimmerli. Lemov used it to introduce one of the 49 techniques in his taxonomy, one he calls What to Do. The clip opens at the start of class, which Zimmerli was teaching for the first time, with children — fifth graders, all of them black, mostly boys — looking everywhere but at the board. One is playing with a pair of headphones; another is slowly paging through a giant three-ring binder. Zimmerli stands at the front of the class in a neat tie. “O.K., guys, before I get started today, here’s what I need from you,” he says. “I need that piece of paper turned over and a pencil out.” Almost no one is following his directions, but he is undeterred. “So if there’s anything else on your desk right now, please put that inside your desk.” He mimics what he wants the students to do with a neat underhand pitch. A few students in the front put papers away. “Just like you’re doing, thank you very much,” Zimmerli says, pointing to one of them. Another desk emerges neat; Zimmerli targets it. “Thank you, sir.” “I appreciate it,” he says, pointing to another. By the time he points to one last student — “Nice . . . nice” — the headphones are gone, the binder has clicked shut and everyone is paying attention.

Lemov switched off the video. “Imagine if his first direction had been, ‘Please get your things out for class,’ ” he said. Zimmerli got the students to pay attention not because of some inborn charisma, Lemov explained, but simply by being direct and specific. Children often fail to follow directions because they really don’t know what they are supposed to do. There were other tricks Zimmerli used too. Lemov pointed to technique No. 43: Positive Framing, by which teachers correct misbehavior not by chiding students for what they’re doing wrong but by offering what Lemov calls “a vision of a positive outcome.” Zimmerli’s thank-yous and just-like-you’re-doings were a perfect execution of one of Positive Framing’s sub-categories, Build Momentum/Narrate the Positive.

“It’s this positive wave; you can almost see it going across the classroom from right to left,” Lemov said. He restarted the clip and asked us to watch the boy with the binder. At the start his head is down and he is paging slowly through his binder. Ten seconds in, he looks to his left, where another boy has his paper and pencil out and is staring at Zimmerli. For the first time, he looks up at the teacher. He stops paging. “He’s like, ‘O.K., what’s this?’ ” Lemov narrated. “ ‘I guess I’m going to go with it.’ ” After 30 seconds, his binder is closed, and he’s stowing it under his desk.

All Lemov’s techniques depend on his close reading of the students’ point of view, which he is constantly imagining. In Boston, he declared himself on a personal quest to eliminate the saying of “shh” in classrooms, citing what he called “the fundamental ambiguity of ‘shh.’ Are you asking the kids not to talk, or are you asking kids to talk more quietly?” A teacher’s control, he said repeatedly, should be “an exercise in purpose, not in power.” So there is Warm/Strict, technique No. 45, in which a correction comes with a smile and an explanation for its cause — “Sweetheart, we don’t do that in this classroom because it keeps us from making the most of our learning time.”

The J-Factor, No. 46, is a list of ways to inject a classroom with joy, from giving students nicknames to handing out vocabulary words in sealed envelopes to build suspense. In Cold Call, No. 22, stolen from Harvard Business School, which Lemov attended, the students don’t raise their hands — the teacher picks the one who will answer the question. Lemov’s favorite variety has the teacher ask the question first, and then say the student’s name, forcing every single student to do the work of figuring out an answer.

All the techniques are meant to be adaptable by anyone. To illustrate cold-calling in Boston, he showed clips of four very different teachers: Mr. Rector, whose seventh graders stand up next to their chairs as he paces among them, lobbing increasingly difficult geometry problems; Ms. Lofthus, who leans back in a chair, supercasual, and smiles warmly when she surprises one second grader by calling on him twice in a row; Ms. Payne, whose kindergartners jump in their seats, clap and sing along when she introduces “in-di-vid-u-al tuu-urrns, listen for your na-aame”; and Ms. Driggs, a petite blonde with a high voice who calls the process “hot calling” and tells her fifth graders that the hardest part will be that they are not allowed to raise their hands.

But perhaps the greatest master of the techniques in the taxonomy is Lemov himself. When I first met him during the lunch break at the Boston workshop, he spent most of our conversation staring at the floor. He was perched on a windowsill in a small side room, hugging his large body close to him. “I’m a huge introvert,” he told me, explaining how, at Harvard Business School, he took a Myers-Briggs personality test that labeled him more introverted than all his other classmates. “It’s strange to me that I do what I do and that I like it as much as I do,” he said.

After lunch he returned to the main room to teach, and it was as if he had left the shy Lemov on the windowsill. A different man stood up tall and square-shouldered, with a presence that made all 30 of the teachers crane their necks toward him. When he told a joke, they laughed; when he pointed to the screen, their eyes raced after his finger. One teacher at my table, Zeke Phillips, from Harlem’s Democracy Prep Charter School, raised his eyebrows at a colleague and whispered, “This stuff is good.”

When Lemov began his project, he was working in the relative obscurity of Uncommon Schools. His decision to spend half his time building the taxonomy meant he had less time to carry out the network’s main business, opening schools. But his fellow managing directors made a calculation that the time spent building a vocabulary for teachers would be worth the slower pace. They were beginning to expand beyond their handful of schools, and they needed a hiring plan. Their first schools often relied on experienced teachers like Zimmerli, plucked from other public schools. They could continue to buy the best talent away from other schools, but as more charter-school networks emerged, the competition for the obviously great teachers was growing fierce.

They decided that rather than buy talent, they would try to build it. Today, Lemov’s taxonomy is one part of a complex training regime at Uncommon Schools that starts with new hires and continues throughout their careers. Lemov began expanding the taxonomy beyond Uncommon Schools only recently, offering workshops, like the one I attended in Boston, to a wider audience. His main clients are other charter schools, but they also include Teach for America and an immersive training program in Boston called the Match Teacher Residency that uses medical school as the model for preparing educators. His methods are also used at Teacher U, a new teacher-training program in which Uncommon Schools is a partner. Lemov is interested in offering teachers what he describes as an incentive just as powerful as cash: the chance to get better. “If it’s just a big pie, then it’s just a question of who’s getting the good teachers,” Lemov told me. “The really good question is, can you get people to improve really fast and at scale?”

Second Court of Appeals sets date for hearing

The Diocese has been notified that the Texas Second Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments regarding our Petition for Writ of Mandamus at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 14. This is very encouraging news.

We will be represented in the hearing by the Hon. Scott Brister, who stepped down from the State Supreme Court last September in order to return to private practice. The court is located in Fort Worth on the ninth floor of the Tarrant County Justice Center. Bishop Iker is calling all clergy and lay people of the Diocese to a day of fasting and prayer on the hearing date.

Attorneys representing the plaintiffs have indicated that they will be seeking a postponement. If the court revises its schedule, we will announce the change.

All proceedings in the suit against us, which were under way in the 141st District Court, remain stayed until the appellate court issues a ruling. If the appellate court grants our Petition, the rival diocese and corporation will be removed as plaintiffs in the suit. Please continue to pray for our legal team, for the 141st District Court, and for its judge, the Hon. John Chupp.

Dear Sarah,

On February 9th you published an article on Stand Firm entitled "An Exercise In & a Request For Intercessory Prayer." In it, you asked the community to pray for me during a very difficult period of my life. You closed with: "I can't even promise that Edward will agree to an update. And I certainly don't know that things will "improve" for Edward either."

The responses, prayers and comments stunned me. I still shake my head and wipe my eyes when I think of them. My situation has improved and here is an update on the past 5+ months. You already are aware of a lifeline from a fellow vet and I will say no more about it here.

I have a home. It's a small cabin perfect for my dog and I. The folks who own it are good Christians and have helped me settle in. I applied for and received a veteran's grant which in essence paid for the security deposit and first month's rent and I have managed to keep up with it. I'm still looking for some kind of part time job to even out my income but my service business is doing a little better than before which was zero.

Several of the folks who posted responses suggested I get involved with VA healthcare. I have done so. In addition to primary care, I have been seeing a really top-notch psychiatrist who has stabilized my meds and worked hard with me on my depression. It's still there and it's still ugly at times but I now know what it is and can better deal with it. All my meds are stabilized and the VA found the new generic of the very, very expensive one. It works.

In April, I joined one of their programs called MOVE which promotes physical fitness and weight control. It's pretty basic stuff but I have managed to lose about 14 pounds and now can walk the dog up to a mile at a time. That's about 9/10ths of a mile more than in February. My little office is in an under-the-eves room on the second floor of the cabin. The stairs are quite steep. I now look forward to going up and down.

The best news of all is that my daughter and I are back in contact and spent most of a day together a couple of weeks ago.

I still have great difficulty in social situations, even church. I'm quite frightened of any clamor and I can't handle stress as I used to.

And I'm still alone.

Over all, I'd call that a pretty darn upbeat update.

God bless you all,

"Edward"

Dear Sarah,
It's been nine months since I sent you an update on what's going on in my life. As is typical, especially as we age, there are good things and bad. I'm grateful for the good and dealing with the bad.
I'm still in the little cabin. As long as I promptly attend to his every wish, my dog permits me to continue as his housemate. I'm still struggling to keep up with the bills but so is the rest of the world and I have managed to keep my nose above water.
My daughter and I are doing wonderfully together. I think we have passed the point where the child becomes the head of the family. The parent is happy about the situation.
I'm involved with a group working with military families and it is very satisfying.
On the not so good side, I have been diagnosed with very early stage prostate cancer. Doing watchful waiting and getting a PSA every three months. So far no changes in those results. I acquired drug-resistant E. coli late last summer, spent a while in the hospital and a lot of time trying to get my strength back. Doing better now.
Still looking for a special woman but not too much lately.
Edward

The Lemba people of Zimbabwe and South Africa may look like their compatriots, but they follow a very different set of customs and traditions.

They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones.

Their oral traditions claim that their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land about 2,500 years ago.

It may sound like another myth of a lost tribe of Israel, but British scientists have carried out DNA tests which have confirmed their Semitic origin.

These tests back up the group's belief that a group of perhaps seven men married African women and settled on the continent. The Lemba, who number perhaps 80,000, live in central Zimbabwe and the north of South Africa.

And they also have a prized religious artefact that they say connects them to their Jewish ancestry - a replica of the Biblical Ark of the Covenant known as the ngoma lungundu, meaning "the drum that thunders".

A majority of delegates attending a special March 6 convention meeting of the Diocese of Dallas at St. Michael and All Angels Church endorsed the Anglican covenant and rejected same-gender liturgies.
Delegates approved two resolutions, including one by voice vote that the diocese "endorses, adopts and enters into the Anglican covenant and thereby affirms our full membership and participation in the Episcopal Church and the world wide Anglican Communion."

The resolution, 2010 SCR-01, urged other dioceses, along with the Executive Council and General Convention, to do likewise. It directed "the Executive Council to form an Anglican Communion Commission to promote closer relationships with churches, dioceses and congregations of the wider Anglican Communion for mutual sharing of the fellowship we have in Christ, for expanding our common mission and ministry as a worldwide communion and for promoting active participation in the Anglican Covenant."

Bishop James Stanton had called for the additional gathering during the October 15-16, 2009 regular convention meeting, at which the Anglican covenant was studied and discussed. The second gathering was planned so delegates would have a chance to consider the covenant, he said during a March 11 telephone interview from his Dallas office.

It was a controversy tailor-made for the TV cameras: A lesbian couple in the liberal bastion of Boulder, Colo., had enrolled their children in a Catholic parish school, only to see those children denied re-enrollment once the parish priest learned of their home situation. When the story leaked last week, Boulder's vociferous gay-rights activists mobilized to protest the priest, the parish and the Archdiocese of Denver, brandishing signs outside the church that plaintively asked: "What would Jesus do?"

For the reporters breathlessly covering the story and many Catholics, the answer was obvious. Jesus would allow the children to stay in the school. He would tell the teachers not to worry about the conflict between their duty to teach Catholic doctrine on marriage and their desire to protect the feelings of students being raised by a couple that flouted that doctrine in a particularly obvious way. The solution, he would say, is simple: Drop the doctrine and focus on feelings.

At least, that's what the Jesus of our contemporary imagination would say. He has a habit of endorsing what we wanted to do anyway, especially when it comes to sex. And unlike that intense and unsettling figure in the Bible — the one who talked about marriage as the union of a man and a woman for life — this Jesus never talks about tough choices or objective truth. He's all about hugs, rainbows and doing what feels right — a sort of human Hallmark card in Birkenstocks.

Appealing as this Jesus may be, his do-your-own-thing dogma has its drawbacks in the context of Catholic education. For starters, it's difficult for Catholic schools to justify their existence when their organizing principle is fidelity to a milquetoast figure with such malleable teachings. And it's difficult for students at Catholic schools to understand why they should be willing to suffer ridicule for defending their faith when so many of their pastors, parents and teachers are not.

"I don't care whether it's a political biography or a daughter's memoir or a novel about baseball," she says. "I just like good writing, and the readers who share that taste have always found their way here." Always, that is, until last September.

"Starting last fall, I saw a hunted look in people's eyes," Dyer recalls. "There was a fear that went beyond being cautious or thrifty. It was as if people had lost faith in the most basic things. They were frozen. Nobody was buying at any of the neighborhood retail stores."

September bled into an equally grim October and November. Thanksgiving came and went, and the slump deepened. Now, with December performing worse than the average February, Dyer doubted she could keep her doors open through January. In the midst of this figurative storm, meanwhile, a real one now bore down on Portland: a once-every-20-years pelting of maximum winter that threatened to shut down the city, drive shoppers deeper into their devalued homes, and pound a final nail in what appeared to be Broadway Books's coffin.

"It was time," Dyer says, "to think about an exit strategy."

But first, she decided to phone Aaron Durand, her 28-year-old son, who was working for the shoe company Birkenstock USA in Novato, California. She needed to talk to Aaron about a book on music that he had asked her to find. But mostly, on that bleak winter morning, Dyer needed to hear her only child's voice.

"I can't get that title for you," she told him.

"That's OK," he said. "I'm in no rush."

"You're not listening. I can't help you. My distributors don't deal with that publisher. You're just going to have to go online, do some digging, and order the book yourself."

"Mom?" he said. "Are you OK?"

"I'm sorry, Aaron, but I can't help you with this."

The next day, he shot his father an e-mail. "What's the matter with Mom?" David Durand broke the news to his son: Broadway Books was on the ropes.

Aaron was stunned. He had been 12 when his mother went into business. She was so devoted to the store that the family jokingly referred to it as her other baby. How could she stand losing it? Aaron wondered. He opened his laptop, logged on to his Twitter page, and, barely thinking, began to type.

If you're in Portland do me a favor??? Buy a book at Broadway Books. No wait, buy 3 of em...

He usually tweeted his friends on the song that he happened to be listening to or on the results of his latest round of disc golf. But now the words came harder. Then inspiration struck.

...I'll buy you a burrito the next time I'm in town, Aaron typed.

He and his friends used burritos as code. It was cooler to say "I'll buy you a burrito" than "I owe you five bucks." He didn't know where the idea came from to connect burritos to his mother's predicament, but he liked the way it sounded. He decided to develop the connection further on his blog, everydaydude. The site was lucky to receive 20 hits a month, and half of those came from his mother, but what sharper tool lay at hand?

The madness that is the current state of affairs in our economy honestly hasn't bothered me much...My CEO has promised openly that our company will not be letting go of anyone. Thus, I've just managed to go about my business as usual. I'm not afraid to spend money on things I want...I own no stocks, don't even know how to buy em. I generally live check to check and I like it that way...Sometimes it takes a slap in the face to wake someone up...Yesterday I was on the receiving end of the wakeup call.

Aaron typed on, explaining the importance of Broadway Books, both to the Portland community and in his mother's life. He related how he had learned that the store was in crisis. He reported that he had sat at his desk near tears, but then his despair gave way to anger and finally to resolve. He announced to the blogosphere that he had hit on a scheme.

So, here's the deal. I'll be in Portland to visit January 15-19, 2009. Meet me at Cha Cha Cha on SE Hawthorne in Portland on January 16 at 6 pm with a receipt from Broadway Books for over $50, and I'm buying your kind ass a burrito. I've got about a grand left on my one credit card -- told you I was a simpleton -- which equates to roughly 166 of you spending at least 50 bucks a pop....I'd never feel better about diving into a thousand-dollar hole...Pass this along. Getcha a free burrito! Support local independent business! Get off of the internet/your ass!

Aaron paused. He was no writer; in fact, despite his book-loving parents, he wasn't all that much of a reader. But he knew that his posting needed a clincher.

Understand that the economic sting will subside, will also fade into nothingness. If that seems a long shot, consider it optimism, a virtue I learned from growing up the son of my mother.

After logging the post, Aaron scanned the links lining the right-hand margin of his webpage: Jerk Ethic, Hidden Booty, huk lab, Kamp Grizzly, Ministry of Imagery, BikePortland, Woot, Hypebeast. Why not try to leverage his plea, beam it out directly to his friends in the Portland area? Even a few more sales would give his mom a psychological boost. She and the store could at least go down swinging. He returned to Twitter to put up a link to his blog entry, and within a few minutes saw that a friend in Portland had retweeted his offer. By that afternoon, it had been retweeted 30 times.

The story quickly jumped the firewall between private and public phenomena. Over the next three days, everydaydude hosted three times as many visits as it had received in the previous two months. Friends reported to Aaron that they had received the link to his blog posting from strangers. In the Portland offices of Nike and Adidas, the posting was pasted onto companywide e-mails. At the Portland ad firm Wieden+Kennedy, Jeff Selis, a producer and longtime Broadway Books customer, received an e-mail from his son's tutor containing a link to Aaron's blog. Selis immediately forwarded it throughout the company. Aaron's loopy, heartfelt plea, in short, had gone viral. Still, his mother remained ambivalent about the venture. "I wasn't sure I approved," Dyer says. "I was touched by Aaron's thoughtfulness, but at the same time I was sensitive about the state of the store."

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) intends to purchase twenty-seven (27) REMINGTON BRAND MODEL 870 POLICE 12/14P MOD GRWC XS4 KXCS SF. RAMAC #24587 GAUGE: 12 BARREL: 14" - PARKERIZED CHOKE: MODIFIED SIGHTS: GHOST RING REAR WILSON COMBAT; FRONT - XS CONTOUR BEAD SIGHT STOCK: KNOXX REDUCE RECOIL ADJUSTABLE STOCK FORE-END: SPEEDFEED SPORT-SOLID - 14" LOP are designated as the only shotguns authorized for ED based on compatibility with ED existing shotgun inventory, certified armor and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.
The required date of delivery is March 22, 2010.

Last week, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., asked to pass a 30-day extensions bill for unemployment insurance and other federal programs. Earlier in February, those extensions were included in a broader bipartisan bill that was paid for but did not meet Sen. Reid's approval, and he nixed the deal. When I saw the Democrats in Congress were going to vote on the extensions bill without paying for it and not following their own Pay-Go rules, I said enough is enough.

Many people asked me, "Why now?" My answer is, "Why not now?" Why can't a non-controversial measure in the Senate that would help those in need be paid for? If the Senate cannot find $10 billion to pay for a measure we all support, we will never pay for anything.

America is under a mountain of debt. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a hearing last month that the United States' debt is unsustainable. We are on the verge of a tipping point where America's debt will bring down our economy, and more people will join the unemployment lines. That is why I used my right as a United States Senator and objected.

Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Bennett (R-UT)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Coburn (R-OK)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Gregg (R-NH)
Hatch (R-UT)
Johanns (R-NE)
McConnell (R-KY)
Risch (R-ID)
Sessions (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)

Bond (R-MO)
Brown (R-MA)
Brownback (R-KS)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Cochran (R-MS)
Collins (R-ME)
Graham (R-SC)
Grassley (R-IA)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Kyl (R-AZ)
LeMieux (R-FL)
Lugar (R-IN)
McCain (R-AZ)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Roberts (R-KS)
Shelby (R-AL)
Snowe (R-ME)
Vitter (R-LA)
Voinovich (R-OH)
Wicker (R-MS)

In a Corner post this past weekend called “Transformation,” I dissented from the heady palaver on the Right about how Democrats are headed for a November Waterloo. I think the Left has already factored in the inevitability of setbacks — perhaps heavy setbacks — in the next few election cycles. While our side swoons over the prospect, the statists coldly calculate that these losses are a price well worth paying in order to impose a transformative takeover of the economy.

It is a perfectly rational calculation for two reasons.

First, with a significantly bigger and more powerful government bureaucracy, there will be many avenues for leadership to reward Democrats who lose their seats after casting the unpopular votes necessary to enact the Left’s program. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who spent his post-Clinton wilderness months in a lucrative sinecure at Freddie Mac, knows well how this game works — and, under Obama’s command, the economy is becoming one big Freddie.

Second, and more important, Democrats know the electoral setbacks will only be temporary. They are banking on the assurance that Republicans merely want to win elections and have no intention of rolling back Obamacare, much less of dismantling Leviathan.

For my money (while I still have some), that’s an eminently sound bet. The Bunning battle, in which the GOP was nowhere to be found, is the proof. Bunning just wanted Congress to live within its gargantuan means. Yet, the Washington Post ridiculed him: “angry and alone, a one-man blockade against unemployment benefits, Medicare payments to doctors, satellite TV to rural Americans and paychecks to highway workers.” That’s outrageously unfair, but it is a day at the beach compared to the Armageddon that would be unleashed upon any attempt to undo Obama’s welfare state on steroids.

As it turns out, Republicans didn’t have the stomach for a fight over wealth transfers that plainly exacerbate the problem of unemployment. Why would anyone think they’d take on a far more demanding war, in which Democrats and the legacy media would relentlessly indict them for “denying health insurance to millions of Americans”?

Even if the GOP gets a majority for a couple of cycles, even if President Obama is defeated in his 2012 reelection bid, Obamacare will be forever. And once the public sees that the GOP won’t try to dismantle Obamacare, it will lose any enthusiasm for Republicans. Democrats will eventually return to power, and it will be power over a much bigger, much more intrusive government.

Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?