A new study finds that children growing up in poverty in America are disproportionately more likely to be obese, compared to other income groups (HT: God’s Politics).

So, poor kids in the US are fat…and in this they are just like the rest of America: “The whole country is struggling with this,” said Virginia Chomitz , senior scientist at the Institute for Community Health at the Cambridge Health Alliance . “There’s a lot of factors in our environment and our lifestyle that are pushing us toward being fatter. It’s an uphill battle to push against that tide.”

Read more on Poor Kids in America are Fat…

Several weeks ago now I was offered a review copy of Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. After watching it on a cross-country flight in November I elected to let Gore’s expos’e sink in a bit before I pasted my thoughts more or less permanently on the web. Thanks in advance to Rachel Guthermann of Special Ops Media for being patient with me on posting the review.

Read more on Movie Review: An Inconvenient Truth…

Does St. Nick have insurance?

I have just returned from a week of holiday rest, and began tackling my 250 lb. email inbox. Flipping through a number of Christmas greetings and Fruitcake (Xmas spam), I came across a quick message from a dear friend, an email of the sort where the message is in the subject line, and the text is left empty (save for common signatures or disclaimers). My friend is a lawyer, I respect him very much, but I had to laugh at how his message was presented (which, I am sure, was unintended). It looked like the following (edited for privacy, of course):

Read more on Merry Christmas(*)…

Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks challenges perceived mainstream social orthodoxy in his new book, Who Really Cares: America’s Charity Divide – Who Gives, Who Doesn’t and Why It Matters. For generations it has been assumed that political and social liberals are generous towards the poor while conservatives are proverbial tightwads. At least since the days of Charles Dickens’ Scrooge this has been the popular view. Liberals continually remind us that they are the ones who really care about welfare since they promote the grandiose government solutions to the problem.

Read more on Who Really Cares for the Poor?…

Our 2006 year in review series concludes with the fourth quarter:

October

“Do You See More than Just a ‘Carbon Footprint’?” Jordan J. Ballor

It’s a fair question to ask, I think, of those who are a part of the radical environmentalist/population control political lobby. It’s also a note of caution to fellow Christians who want to build bridges with those folks…there is a complex of interrelated policies that are logically consistent once you assume the tenets of secular environmentalism….

Read more on 2006 in Review, 4th Quarter…

The Acton Institute’s offices are right across the Grand River from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum (and what will be Ford’s final resting place). Having passed these sites every day for several years on my walk to work, news of the ex-president’s death was especially poignant.

Read more on Remembering Gerald Ford…

The “10 years after welfare reform” articles of this past summer are old news, of course. Not surprisingly, indications were that, like any public policy, reform hadn’t been the all-time poverty solution, but that policies had, in fact, helped a significant number of people to move themselves to self-sufficiency. A recent Wall Street Journal series highlighted the broad range of issues related to moving out of poverty. A companion piece to the December 28 entry, “Economists Are Putting Theories to Scientific Test” notes that MIT has set up a center called the Abdul Latif Jameeel Poverty Action Lab focused exclusively on using experiments to study poverty.

Read more on Never a Countdown on Effective Compassion…

Go to this page to watch a short video highlighting the story of one man’s fight against Canada’s health system.

The film is focused on the defects of socialized medicine and so, naturally, does not deal with the serious problems existing in other systems (such as the United States). But it is an effective display of a problem that every attempt to manipulate prices encounters: how to make supply meet demand.

Read more on Single-payer Schemes=Supply Shortages…

Our series on the year in review continues with the third fourth of 2006:

July

“Isn’t the Cold War Over?” David Michael Phelps

I’ve got an idea for a new sitcom. Titled, Hugo and Vladi, it details the zany adventures of two world leaders, one of whom (played by David Hyde Pierce) struggles to upkeep his image of a friendly, modern European diplomat while his goofball brother-in-law (played by George Lopez) keeps screwing it up for him by spouting off vitriolic Soviet rhetoric and threatening all of Western civilization with his agressive (but loveable) arms sales and seizures of private oil companies….

Read more on 2006 in Review, 3rd Quarter…

In this week’s Acton commentary, I reflect on the past year’s developments for InnerChange Freedom Initiative, a ministry of Prison Fellowship. In June a federal judge in Iowa ruled against IFI’s work at Iowa’s Newton facility. In his ruling (PDF here), the judge wrote that the responsibility for combating recidivism is “traditionally and exclusively reserved to the state.” This means that since reducing recidivism is a “state function,” anyone working to combat recidivism is by definition a “state actor.”

Read more on Recidivism and Reform: Competing Views of the State’s Role in Prison…