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I didn’t grow up knowing much about Muslims. If you grew up in the United States (or most places in the West), odds are very strong that you didn’t know much about Muslims, either. I’ve discovered that most Muslims know just as little about us as we know about them. That doesn’t stop many people on both sides from hating each other with a passion, though.

For many people who become active in terror groups today, a radical version of the Islamic faith is a motivating factor. Some of those people come to hate those of any other faith. They’re willing to kill other people in the name of destroying anyone who doesn’t bow before their version of God.

As a result, some people in the West — some who claim to be faithful Christians and others who are just nominally or culturally Christian — have decided that all Muslims are evil. This makes no more sense than being robbed by a red-haired man and deciding that all red-haired men must be evil.

On Facebook Saturday night, one of my “friends” posted the following:

Muslims can all go to hell. They are evil bastards. There are no good Muslims, just good dead Muslims. I am a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant woman, and I have never flown a plane into a building or bombed anyone in my life.

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Have you heard about the Obama administration’s Christmas tree tax? It was all the rage to talk about it two years ago — and now it looks as though it’s back.

Some people say it’s not fair to call it a tax, but I think they’re arguing semantics. Let’s look at what’s really going on and why it matters.

The proposed fee right now is only 15 cents per tree. That doesn’t sound like an onerous amount to add to the price of a tree, but it’s another example of tiny increases that add up. Really, though, I’m bothered even more by what the fee is than by the thought of having to pay an extra nickel and dime per tree.

The federal government has set up various promotion boards over the years to be the advertising arm of a lot of industries, mostly agricultural groups. You know those ads you see for milk (“Got milk?”) that don’t promote any particular brand? That’s an example. You’ve probably also see ads for pork, beef, cotton and a dozen other things. Have you ever wondered who’s paying for those ads?

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Have you ever heard of the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC)? Unless you follow the minor leagues of college sports, the name is probably meaningless to you. The conference consists of 10 “historically black” universities stretching from Texas to Alabama.

Although the conference has its roots in Texas, it’s currently headquartered here in Birmingham. Why? Because the city of Birmingham hands the conference half a million dollars each year and supplies free office space, too. And what’s in it for the taxpayers who are handing that money over? That’s a harder question to answer.

For the last dozen years or so, the conference has had a championship football game here in Birmingham. It’s been played at a dump of an old stadium which was once a proud facility which was called “the Football Capital of the South.” But that was many decades ago. Today, it’s a pile of out-of-date junk. The stadium’s upper deck had to be torn down because it was unsafe, but it didn’t matter anyway, because the sort of events it holds these days don’t typically attract more people than a rather large high school crowd. (See the example below of the “crowd” at the stadium for a UAB football game.)

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