Westboro Baptist Church plans to picket a funeral for seven dead Perry County siblings. The seven siblings were children from the Clouse family, who ranged in age from 11 years down to 9 months old—6 girls and a boy. They were killed in a house fire on a farm in Pennsylvania last Tuesday night. The fire was apparently accidental. If they do show up, they will be greeted by people who have signed on to create a human wall with soundproofing material between the protesters and the mourners.

A client sent a bill from a doctor’s office and asked why the bill was not paid. The client is an elderly woman from Highland, Indiana. I checked with the client’s insurance company. The bill was for a DATE OF SERVICE of 01/21/2009. The insurance company sent a check for full payment of the bill to the doctor’s office on 02/06/2009.

A new study has found that the states are spending far more money on incarcerating criminals than they are on educating students. Could there be a correlation between education and incarceration? Signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush and his contemporaries had an answer for this problem over 200 years ago…but we are much smarter than the men who founded this country, aren’t we?

I’ve always hated the stupid exercise of “spring forward, fall back” every spring and fall. I’ve always wondered if someone had ever done a study to actually see how much savings all this gyration results in…if any at all. It turns out the National Bureau of Economic Research has done a study of Daylight Savings Time and confirmed what most of us knew: any time the government “fixes” something, they make it worse.

Last week the homosexual activists and their “useful idiots” in the Maryland legislature were poised to defeat marriage and allow it to be counterfeited. But then something interesting happened: Christians got off their rear ends and started doing something. By the end of the week, the bill was down in flames. In a welcome change, we have seen the Church in Maryland get off its duff and prove the inverse of a famous axiom: All that is necessary for the defeat of evil is that good men do something.

The logic of climate change-driven policy continues to elude anyone with a rational mind who is actually concerned about the environment. If greenies truly wanted less global pollution, they would be pushing for eliminating corporate taxes on all items produced in the U.S. and encouraging the manufacture of goods in a place where dumping waste in the streams and the air is frowned upon, instead of places where it is accepted and ignored.

The idea that Christians are to bring healing into the world—the restoration of people and the reformation of systems that hinder them—seems reasonable enough (in thought, anyway). It is certainly biblical. Reality, however, is another story. The moment one ventures out into the world—either physically or through the lens of the media—you will no doubt be thrown back by the overwhelming suffering, injustice, and evil that frequently seems to rule the day.

South Dakota Secretary of State Jason Gant says people who are thinking about donating money in the wake of the deadly earthquake and tsunami in Japan should first “check out the charity,” and make sure that they are reputable and registered. Links are provided so you can verify South Dakota and national charity efforts for validity.

The more I hear about and from Herman Cain, the better I like him as a presidential contender in 2012. You can find out more about this conservative patriot at his website, but if you want to hear him articulate the kind of conservative views and policies we’ll need to save our ailing republic, check out these videos where he talks about the economy, energy independence, socialism, spending and cutting government, and more.

We’ve allowed demagogues preaching a false gospel of man-made global warming chanting songs of pollution hysteria while serving sacraments of social guilt to give our enemies a chokehold on our energy artery. The next time you pull into a gas station, as you pump your fuel look at the price. Remind yourself we have a Secretary of Energy who thinks the price should be at European levels and a President who has said energy prices will skyrocket under his programs. Now ask yourself, “If that’s their plan, what’s mine?”

To build real wealth, you need specific wealth management tools. One of these is opening the right accounts and using them correctly. Most families have less than half of the accounts they really need, and young newlyweds often only have a checking account. Here is a description of each wealth-building account, roughly in the order a young couple would need them.

South Dakota was once known as the state of infinite variety. Observing the Legislature over the past several weeks South Dakota is more like the state of infinite issues. From playing with the state’s abortion ban to raising car license fees were a couple of examples like this facing us. Still, there is another issue that has been on the back burner far too long. That’s the issue of the millions of tax dollars our state government is losing to Internet and catalog sales.

The best of the best articles from Dakota Voice last week including: The Myth of the Moderate Muslim; Pedophilia as a Sexual Orientation; Detailed Death Threats Against Wisconsin Lawmakers; Tea Party Cleans Up After Wisconsin Socialists; Supreme Court Shirks, States Proceed, on Presidential Eligibility Issue; DOJ: More Than 80% of Terrorist Convictions Tied to Radical Islam; and more!

Who hasn’t heard the Marxists railing about those evil rich people and how, even though the top 1% of wage earners are paying 39.38% of the tax burden in America, they still aren’t paying their fair share? Well, Mary Katherine Ham takes them up on their offer. She takes us down a theoretical trail in which the “takers” of society get their wish, sticking it to those evil rich people like never before. And what is the outcome? Well, nothing even remotely like the takers imagine.

You’ve heard that elections have consequences, right? Well, is there some unnamed contaminant in the water in the Midwest that causes some politicians to temporarily (or otherwise) lose their ability to do the work they were elected to do? Instead of doing their jobs, some scofflaws from Wisconsin and Indiana just decided to skip town.

HB 1217, a pro-life bill in the South Dakota Legislature designed to help women be informed and protect them from undue coersion to have an abortion, has passed both chambers of the legislature and is now on Governor Dennis Daugaard’s desk. Despite threats from Planned Parenthood to sue the state if the bill becomes law, Daugaard says that although he has not made up his mind, he is still inclined to sign the legislation. Now a group of citizens is working to raise money to help defend the law against Planned Parenthood’s attack.

When a cherished liberty is exploited for a dubious purpose, do the perpetrators of that exploitation retain the right to exercise that liberty, or should the right be circumscribed “for the greater good?” The US Supreme Court answered this question last week with its ruling that the anti-military, anti-gay protest activities of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) are protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution. But try as they might to garner attention with their hateful words, the Westboro Baptist Church’s message will never resonate as loud as the message being sent by the Patriot Guard Riders.

The “Obamacare” health care reform drives up the cost of over the counter medicines by requiring that those who have flexible spend health care accounts get a doctor’s prescription for the non-prescription medicines if they want a tax break on the purchase. In my opinion, the “Obamacare” Health Care Reform Act was the most anti-senior citizen law that was ever passed or signed.

New Census data show that Hispanics in California, our most populous state, are now a minority in name only. The absence of real reforms coming out of Washington should be of particular concern to these youthful Hispanic Americans. All our growing big government failures, now being institutionalized instead of being reformed, will be dumped disproportionately into their laps. They should be a prime target market for a conservative Republican agenda.

It’s time for some comic relief from the week’s headlines. This is the latest Newsbusted, featuring:A political analyst predicts bad election cycles for Democrats in 2012 and 2014; Some predict the U.S. will soon drop to the 3rd largest economy; The pope says Jews aren’t to blame for killing Jesus; Palestinian women are joining the Facebook revolution…sorta; and more!

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) asks what might at first seem to be an odd question to ask of Kathleen Hogan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency, in a hearing on Appliance/Light Bulb Energy-Efficiency Legislation. He quickly determined that while the Left is pro-choice on the “choice” to kill your own unborn child, it is anti-choice on the basic, everyday, morally neutral choices and decisions Americans make about the things they buy and the things they do. “I find this antithetical to the American way,” said Rand.

Andrew Klavan and Klavan on the Culture takes us on a little field trip to see our public sector unions at work. We also have a quick lesson in economics, business and unions and how unions can get a bigger cut of the loot…until they make the business unprofitable and it goes out of business. In the public sector, the employer is we the taxpayer.

According to an article by Steven Emerson in the Jewish World Review and case data from the Department of Justice, over 80% of all convictions with ties to international and homegrown terrorist groups since 911 are driven by radical Islam. This is from a segment of our population comprising one percent of the total. Yet some seem outraged that Rep. Pete King (R-NY) would connect radical Islam and terrorism in his ongoing hearings.

The Social Security “surplus” that politicians love to talk about is a myth. While it is true that the system has collected more in payroll taxes than it has doled out in benefits in recent years, the resulting “surplus” is nothing but a stack of government IOUs. According to the latest Trustees report, by 2015 the federal government will have borrowed $3.25 trillion against the Social Security Trust Fund. The program is on the verge of insolvency and we must do something. Why not return to the private, free-market model that made America the most prosperous nation in all of history?

This video contains more examples of the kind of values and behavior that made America the greatest nation on earth: pettiness, childishness, self-centeredness, egocentrism, disrespect for the law, disrespect for the property rights of others, contempt for fiscal responsibility, disdain for the needs of community and country…Wait a minute. That’s only true in the mind of juvenile liberals who imagine the philosophy of “IwantIwantIwant!” is the height of nobility and reason.