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About 15 years ago, I knew a couple from Latvia who had moved here and gone through the long process to become U.S. citizens. It was a big deal to them and it represented the culmination of years of hopes — dreaming of getting away from what had been a repressive government and becoming a part of the American experience.

For many of us, it’s always been a point of pride that so many people in other places wanted to become Americans. Some are like the 6-year-old from China, above, who are adopted here and don’t have much say in the matter. But most of the naturalized citizens are people who have struggled to get here and then struggled to make something of themselves in their new homeland. They’ve been grateful to have opportunities they couldn’t have dreamed of in the countries of their birth, in many cases. But I wonder whether that’s slowly changing.

The United States is still the “land of opportunity” compared to many places, but there are an increasing number of people who find the tax burden isn’t worth putting up for in exchange for U.S. citizenship. The latest example is Eduardo Saverin, a Brazilian-born c0-founder of Facebook. Saverin has decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship. It’s going to save him a lot of money as he becomes a very wealthy man by Facebook going public.

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We have a special treat this week for biblical scholars. A recently discovered painting has finally explained what Paul meant in Second Corinthians 12:7.

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If you need a router for your home, you probably head over to Target or Best Buy and pick up an inexpensive one for $30-50. If you have special needs, you might select a fancy one and pay $100 or maybe $150 — at the most.

But that’s not what the state of West Virginia did when it got a $24 million federal “stimulus” grant to put routers into libraries, schools and health clinics. Instead of buying inexpensive routers — or even high-end commercial routers for about $500 — the state paid $22,600 for each router. Instead of buying equipment designed for small institutions, the state bought 1,064 routers designed for large institutions serving tens of thousands of computers.

What’s worse, various technology experts working for the state warned about the overkill before the purchase was made, but the state bureaucrats didn’t listen. The excuse? The state bureaucrat who made the decision said that putting the same expensive router into every school, library and other institution was done in the name of “equal opportunity.”

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