The NFL is cracking down on churches that show the Superbowl on their big screens. See this article from the “Washington Post” entitled NFL Pulls Plug On Big-Screen Church Parties For Super Bowl.

Many churches that have sponsored these parties have received letters from the league forbidding the practice. Church spokesmen are complaining, saying that hosting congregational Superbowl screenings is good for fellowship and for reaching the “unchurched.” They are further irked that the law against public showings of sporting events exempts bars. Plans are now in the works to sue the NFL and to push for legislation exempting churches as well.

Public showings of copyrighted material ARE prohibited by law. This is why you keep hearing the message: “This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL’s consent is prohibited.” There is a big legal difference between viewing something in one’s home and viewing it in a mass public setting. The entitlement mentality is unseemly.

So I ask another question: SHOULD churches have the same exemption that bars do? And another question: SHOULD churches hold these kinds of secular events?

Charles Krauthammer has a provocative column on Clinton’s lust for a legacy, which he says motivates him to do ANYTHING to get his wife elected and himself back in the White House. The bitter irony, says Krauthammer, is that Clinton’s major accomplishment was to consolidate and institutionalize the Reagan revolution:

What clearly enraged him more than anything this primary season was Barack Obama’s statement that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that . . . Bill Clinton did not.”

The Clintons tried to use this against Obama by charging him with harboring secret Republican sympathies. It was a stupid charge that elicited only scorn. And not just because Obama is no Reaganite, but because Obama’s assessment is so obviously true: Reagan was consequential. Clinton was not.

Reagan changed history. At home, he radically altered both the shape and perception of government. Abroad, he changed the entire structure of the international system by bringing down the Soviet empire, giving birth to a unipolar world of unprecedented American dominance.

By comparison, Clinton was a historical parenthesis. He can console himself — with considerable justification — that he simply drew the short straw in the chronological lottery: His time just happened to be the 1990s, which, through no fault of his own, was the most inconsequential decade of the 20th century. His was the interval between the collapse of the Soviet Union on Dec. 26, 1991, and the return of history with a vengeance on Sept. 11, 2001.

Clinton’s decade, that holiday from history, was certainly a time of peace and prosperity — but a soporific Golden Age that made no great demands on leadership. What, after all, was his greatest crisis? A farcical sexual dalliance.

Clinton no doubt wishes he’d been president on Sept. 11. It is nearly impossible for a president to rise to greatness in the absence of a great crisis, preferably war. Theodore Roosevelt is the only clear counterexample, and Bill is no Teddy.

What is the legacy of the Clinton presidency? Consolidator of the Reagan revolution. As Dwight Eisenhower made permanent FDR’s New Deal and Tony Blair institutionalized Thatcherism, Clinton consolidated Reaganism. He did so most symbolically with his 1996 State of the Union declaration that “the era of big government is over.” And more concretely, with a presidency that only tinkered with such structural Reaganite changes as tax cuts and deregulation, and whose major domestic achievement was the abolition of welfare, Reagan’s ultimate social b¿te noire.

These are serious achievements, but of a second order. Obama did little more than echo that truism. But one can imagine how it made Clinton burn.

An updated version of the Three Little Pigs was turned down for a government prize in England because “the use of pigs raises cultural issues.” The Brits felt the story might be offensive to Muslims, who consider pigs to be unclean. But no Muslims even complained!

Note the progression from stifling oneself because of external fears to stifling oneself voluntarily for no good reason. Notice too how an earnest multiculturalism is destroying actual culture.

The woes of the credit industry that are dragging down the economy cannot all be blamed on the housing sector. According to this article, banks are finding it impossible to unload some $220 billion of corporate buyout debt. No one will buy those bonds, so banks are having to keep all of that debt on their books, making it harder for them to make other loans.