At today’s Get Fuzzy.

Madison, Wisconsin’s city council voted down a resolution that would have allowed an exemption from the public smoking ban for cigar bars. The ban goes into effect July 1.

HT: Cigar Jack’s Cigar Blog

Read more on No Smoking in the Smoke Shop…

From the press release:

A new Web-based resource providing detailed information and evaluation of more than 200 nonprofit organizations in the United States is now available for use by charity managers, philanthropists and the public. The Samaritan Guide, developed by the Acton Institute’s Center for Effective Compassion, is a searchable database composed of applicants for the annual Samaritan Award and has organized the directory according to location and area of service.

Read more on Acton Launches Samaritan Guide…

Rev. Bernard Njoroge

During last week’s Symposium, Acton communication staff had the opportunity to interview two African religious leaders on a variety of issues facing their continent, including the $40 billion in debt relief proposed to the G8 nations.

Read more on Africans on Debt Cancellation…

D. Eric Schansberg, an Acton adjunct scholar, takes a look at the Social Security system, and concludes that “policymakers should address the oppressive taxes that Social Security imposes on the working poor, its pathetic rate of return, and inequities in its payouts.”

Read more on It’s a Wonderful Retirement?…

Can the new Batman movie provide moral lessons on business ethics and philanthropy? Ben Sikma writes that the film affirms “the value of traditional institutions more generally, such as the family, rule of law, and private ownership of the means of production.”

Read more on Business and Virtue in Batman Begins…

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at Mirror of Justice about Catholic Social Teaching and the Preferential Option for the Poor: here, here, and here.

Harvey Silverglate on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) blog, The Torch, passes on one explanation for why college tuition costs have been increasing at double digit rates for years on end. He writes in part:

Read more on Causes of Increasing Tuition…

“But not only did God make Sunday, He made Monday, too, and Tuesday, Wednesday…. So if God made all those days, he’s in all our days, not just the one you want to put him in.”

Read more on ‘But not only did God make Sunday…’…

This EducatioNation blog post contains the text of an incisive WSJ editorial, along with a sample curriculum that illustrates the idiocy outlined in the editorial.

In “Ethnomathematics,” Diane Ravitch writes, “In the early 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued standards that disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed on a calculator.”

Read more on Social Justice Math…