Great idea. I recommend the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (which, by the way, the United States, Somalia, and South Sudan are the only UN members not to have ratified).

I can't speak for B&N, but Amazon will let you "return" an e-book within something like 72 hours. May be able to get your $2 back.

Thank you for your heartfelt post, Phoenix. I see myself in your experience, especially in the bit about not taking responsibility for my own decisions until I made Big Decisions in ways that greatly differed from the way my parents, church communities, friends and family would have recommended or desired. Fortunately for me, I had never really internalized the whole fear of hell thing. I think I was never able to really believe it.

1) Started coming here somewhere in '05-'06ish, and quickly caught up on the LB Friday posts. 2) LB posts are still my favorite; I love Fred's ability to make connections and draw the bigger picture of just how vile L&J are. 3) I'm a person who wants to know more about the world I live in.

Great post, Ana. Thank you. I don't have much intelligent to say, but wanted to point you in the direction of a critique of the Evangelical Christian embrace of the Twilight books: “Why Are You Apologizing for Bleeding?” Confronting the Evangelical Embrace of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga

Sullivan just brought up that poll, too: That poll that Fred Hiatt ran this morning? Showing 2-1 Ahmadinejad support. It was taken three weeks before the vote, before the campaign took off, and it had one huge asterisk in it: The poll that appears in today's op-ed shows a 2 to 1 lead in the thinnest sense: 34 percent of those polled said they'd vote for Ahmadinejad, 14 percent for Mousavi. That leaves 52 percent unaccounted for. In all, 27 percent expressed no opinion in the election, and another 15 percent refused to answer the question at all. Six percent said they'd vote for none of the listed candidates; the rest for minor candidates.

I think there are times when violence is acceptable. (Killing Hitler leaps to mind.) I agree. Which is why I think it's clear that the 'pro-life' movement does not believe its own rhetoric. If every fetus, embryo and blastocyst carried equal moral value as a Jew in a concentration camp; if you really believed that Hitler lived next door and murdered people every day; if you believed that the government was so corrupt and incompetent as to be complicit in genocide - from that perspective, some pretty drastic action seems appropriate and proportional. The fact that pro-lifers aren't all rejoicing, the fact that they don't consider Dr. Tiller's assassin a righteous martyr, means that they don't believe their own propaganda (i.e. that abortion = murder). This is a good thing. I just wish they'd drop the invective - it's clearly confusing some people.