Sarcastro, superhero-in-training who combats evil with “the razor-sharp sting of sarcasm”(from The Tick)

How can following Christ's own challenge-riposte be “un-Christlike”? Have these critics actually even read what Christ said? There is nothing in the Bible demanding that we should be like [C]hrist only when He was gentle, but not when He used riposte.

Orchard Park police are investigating a particularly gruesome killing, the beheading of a woman, after her husband — an influential member of the local Muslim community — reported her death to police Thursday.

Police identified the victim as Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37. Detectives have charged her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44, with second-degree murder.

[. . .]

Muzzammil Hassan is the founder and chief executive officer of Bridges TV, which he launched in 2004, amid hopes that it would help portray Muslims in a more positive light.

“A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.”

-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared “we have chosen hope over fear.” Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

[M]ore damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

I have read the Shack of Mack.
I have read this paperback.
I would not give it to my friends.
I might just spoil how it ends.

[. . .]

That Mack in Shack!
That Mack in Shack!
I do not like that Mack in Shack!

Instead of writing like his favorite authors, though, he simply asserts in his own sentences the effects that their writing has on him. The result is oppressive, as in the description of a tree that the character Mack crashes into: As he lies prone and looks up into the tree, it is said “to stand over him with a smug look mixed with disgust and not a little disappointment.” Take a moment right now, reader, to see if you can arrange your face into an expression that communicates smugness mixed with disgust and disappointment. You will find it “not a little” impossible, and you have greater expressive range than trees. This is typical of the way Young projects attitudes rather than actually describing anything.

[. . .]

Whatever religious readers may make of the theological Trinity in this book, the most heretical trinity is surely this trinity of the Foreword and the first chapter, wherein three personas speak to us in a single confused voice, crying out with a shrill faux-folksiness, “Please like me! Please like me! I’m ever so authentic!”

[. . .]

And the clichés became flesh, and they dwelt in the shack. Throughout this section, the worst narrative passages sound something like “By the time Mack woke up, Jesus already had the waffles a-cookin’, and the Holy Ghost had cracked a couple eggs.” That is not an actual quotation, but here is one: Papa, the woman who portrays God the Father, reflects on her tendency to love everybody by saying, “”Guess that’s jes’ the way I is.” And before the reader can finish rubbing his eyes in disbelief, three lines later Papa says “Sho’ nuff!” Though he comes perilously close, Young at least manages to keep his God character from saying “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout rulin’ no universe!”

Eugene Peterson
Said it was good as Bunyan.
He must have meant Paul.

[. . .]

My copy was free
But I almost lost my mind
Inside of the Shack.

There were splendid and massive frescoes, paintings, displays, statutes and bas-relief carvings. There was a massive pipe organ towards the back. There were numerous vestibules off of the main chamber to give homage to the various and sundry saints and “Our Ladies” of the Catholic history. I nearly broke out into peals of laughter (I managed to channel it into muted chortling) because of the number of different saints and titles that were displayed, reminding me of the silly role-playing games with dozens of characters and +1 abilities.

[. . .]

When we first entered, my compatriots (whom I'd instructed to alert me in case I started violating any unwritten rules of etiquette) dipped into the bowls of water near the doors and made the sign of the cross. (“Nyeehh...what's up, doc?”) Later when on the bus, one of them flashed a small travel shampoo type bottle: “Holy water, anyone?” Now what do you say to that? “Uh, no thanks, I'm good!” What the heck is holy water, anyway? Water blessed by a priest? Why not just bless the whole globe and be done with it? Or are there spatial limits on a priest's +2 blessing-casting abilities? Can he bless a whole pallet of bottled water? That would make shipping a bit easier...