(My bolding below)
** Eric Metaxes, drawing on the book by Christian Smith and Hilary Davidson, The Paradox of Generosity: Giving We Receive, Grasping We Lose,” notes:
“ What should come as a surprise is how few people actually practice generosity: Notre Dame found that that “only 2.7 percent of Americans give a 10th or more of their income to charity, at least 86.2 percent give away less than 2 percent of their income and nearly half give nothing.”
The book explains that generosity and happiness go hand in hand.
** John Fund points out:
President Obama’s approval rating among working-class whites has fallen to 27 percent as evidence that Democrats have forgotten the priorities of their party that made it the majority after the New Deal. Building the middle class has taken a back seat to the special interest agendas of elite liberal constituencies.
** Jay Nordlinger makes several notable observations. First on the remarkable fact that Al Sharpton retains influence in spite of his past unrepented record:
I see that President Obama has been conferring with Al Sharpton again. You may remember a little something — Steven Pagones does: Sharpton accused Pagones, then a young assistant DA, of raping a girl named Tawana Brawley. As Pagones held a press conference, Sharpton entered and bellowed, “Your accuser has arrived!” For ten years,Pagones pursued a defamation case against Sharpton — and won. Sharpton, who calls himself a “reverend,” has never apologized for his evil lie.
Second, Nordlinger points out the failure of Havana-based foreign correspondents to do adequate reporting. Instead, we find suppression of negative news coming out of Cuba. Guillermo Fariñas, the Cuban independent journalist, won the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament.
Last week, he {Farinas] was meeting in his home with some fellow dissidents. An agent of the state broke in and stabbed four of them. Two of the victims — members of the Ladies in White — were seriously injured. And, as the indispensable Mauricio Claver-Carone tells us, “not one Havana-based foreign journalist has investigated or reported on this violent attack.” Governments around the world have been largely silent, too. As always. Many years ago, I wrote a piece called “Who Cares about Cuba?” When I raised this issue with Jeane Kirkpatrick, she said that indifference to Cuba is “both a puzzling and a profoundly painful phenomenon of our times.”
** On the "Ferguson Affair," Jay Nordlinger praises Heather MacDonald for her piece which witheringly excoriates the New York Times' totally wrong-headed editorial. Nordlinger finds everything MacDonald writes to be magnificent.
The Times cannot bring itself to say one word of condemnation against the savages who self-indulgently destroyed the livelihoods of struggling Ferguson, Mo., entrepreneurs and their employees last week. The real culprit behind the riots, in the Times’ view, is not the actual arsonists and looters but county prosecutor Robert McCulloch.
Thomas Sowell also weighs in on the Ferguson affair. He notes that to Attorney General Eric Holder and others, "the truth was offensive, but the lie that it exposed was not."