You’re only Jewish if you hate Israel

How Blue America Subsidizes Red America. A very neat Aaron Carroll chart shows that, on average, conservative states feature more "dependency" on federal programs than do liberal ones. You can slice this kind of data in a variety of ways, but you always end up with the same aggregate pattern. It happens to be the case that the richest parts of the United States (think the San Francisco Bay area or Connecticut) favor Democrats and also that conservative areas of the country are overrepresented in the Senate. Transfers, on average, flow away from high-income and underrepresented areas and toward low-income…

Bin Laden’s theology a radical break with traditional Islam – CNN Belief Blog – CNN.com Blogs. Osama bin Laden wore the mantle of a religious leader. He looked the part and talked a good game, but his theology was a radical departure from traditional orthodox Islam.  The pitch to join al Qaeda did not start with an invitation to put on a suicide vest but, like other religious splinter groups and cults, took advantage of disenfranchisement and poverty.  Bin Laden had no official religious training but developed his own theology of Islam.

STUDY:  TERRORISM BY MUSLIM-AMERICANS DOWN IN 2010. A new study released today by the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security  shows that the number of Muslim-Americans who perpetrated or were arrested for terrorist acts declined sharply in 2010.  The study, “Muslim American Terrorism Since 9/11:  An Accounting,” reports that while 47 Muslim-Americans committed or were arrested for terrorist crimes in 2009, the number dropped to 20 this past year. h/t Faith in Public Life