• When Jesus met a prostitute, he commended her for the gift she gave him.
• When Jesus met a five-time divorcee, he asked her for a drink of water.
• When Jesus met an adulteress, he addressed the sins of her accusers.
• When Jesus met the pagan Roman centurion, he commended him for his faith.
• When Jesus spoke of the Samaritan, he commended him for his compassion.

When you have four children at your house for two hours, and only one hour of planned activities, what do you do? You play Nomic, of course!

Created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Sube, Nomic is an exercise in self-governance, quite literally. It begins with only one rule, that it takes a two-thirds majority to change the rules. Given that I was introducing it to a group of preteens who for months had been ending their weekly logic class with games like Munchkin and Pandemic, I wasn't sure if this game would fly, but it was very well received.

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According to reports I've seen on Google-Plus, Parkland High School in Allentown, Pa., needs a new mascot. Second the motion that it should be a wookie.You we

Heard about the latest round of political theater from James O'Keefe and his merry band?

Earlier this week, a young, white worker from O'Keefe's Veritas Project went to a polling place and presented himself as Eric Holder. Holder, incidentally, is our black U.S. attorney general. The poll worker didn't bat an eye, but reportedly was going to allow the man to vote. (He did not.) The incident is now under investigation for potential voter fraud. Several conservative members of a homeschooling e-mail list I subscribe to, have had their outrage on display.

One person, in an example of hyperbole that is becoming far too common these days, lamented that she doesn't know if this is America any more.

Honestly, what is the problem here? If Washington, D.C., does not require an ID of some sort for a person to vote, then the poll workers wouldn't have done anything illegal in allowing someone claiming to be Eric Holder to vote. It's also possible, even likely, that there is a means of checking a person's identity besides a photo ID, such as having to sign in. They do that where I vote, and they check my signature with the one they have on file. I presume if the two signatures didn't match, I wouldn't be allowed to vote.

If the person claiming to be Eric Holder is not in fact Eric Holder, then potentially he committed an act of voter fraud, and it is the legal obligation of law enforcement to investigate whether an illegal act was committed. That's hardly shooting the messenger; if the authorities failed to investigate, they would be derelict in their duty, and claims that our government doesn't care about voter fraud would have greater legitimacy.

It doesn't even bother me that the polling booth volunteer didn't bat an eye over the man in question looking nothing like Eric Holder. My name is David Learn, but that's also the name of a teenager a few miles from here. There's also a relatively accomplished artist named David Learn some 30 or 40 years older than I, and I once even had my picture taken next to a gravestone for David Learn. There's no reason in a city as big as Washington, D.C., that there shouldn't be more than one Eric Holder running around.

And really, this is James O'Keefe's organization we're talking about. O'Keefe may call himself an activist, but his past episodes of activism have included pretending to be offended by the allegedly anti-Irish stereotypes of Lucky Charms, impersonating phone repair workers so he could illegally hack into a Democratic official's phone system, and so grossly misrepresenting his reception at ACORN offices that prosecutors in California said his video portrayals of what happened on his "stings" bore no relation to reality.

O'Keefe appears to be someone who feels validated with outlandish stunts that appear to say a lot without saying anything at all -- which is what this particular attempt at manufacturing outrage looks like. He deserves about as much attention as Michael Moore.

As far as voter fraud goes, no one has established that it is a widespread, systemic problem here in the United States, and when the U.S. Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, there were good reasons for specifically not requiring voter ID, reasons based in history, in race relations, and in vote suppression. The goal was to encourage fuller participation in our democracy, and until it can be demonstrated that an ID requirement won't lead to the disenfrachisement of those voting blocs, I don't see a need for one because voter fraud is not a problem in this country as much as it is a specious political talking point.

How bad is the problem? Well, for starters the Republican National Lawyers Association compiled statistics by state on voting convictions from 2000-2010. During the 10 year period, 21 states had only 1 or 2 convictions for voting irregularities. According to The New York Times, from 2002 to 2005, exactly 55 people were convicted of voter fraud. That's hardly an epidemic of voter fraud turning us into a third-world nation with stolen elections, is it?

But maybe The New York Times is wrong. We still haven't forgotten the Jayson Blair incident, and we know how The Times likes to sleep around with the Democratic Party. Let's take a look at a staunchly conservative organization.

The Republican National Lawyers Association did us the favor of studying voter fraud in Missouri. From 2000 to 2010, 17 convictions for voting irregularities were observed -- roughly 1.7 voting irregularities per year. Still, let's assume that only one in 20 people who commit voter fraud is caught. If the other 95 percent get away scot-free,  then there are roughly 34 cases of illegal voting in Missouri each year.

The total number of registered voters in Missouri in 2008 was 4.2 million. Most people don't vote during a given election year, so if only 30 percent of these voters took part in the 2008 election, that means 1.26 million voted. If 34 of them committed voter fraud -- and remember, we're already multiplying the actual convictions by 20 -- that means the percentage of illegal votes cast under the current system, with no voter ID, is a stunning .0027 percent, or 500 times less than 1 percent of the vote in Missouri. This is likely less than the margin of error in the voting system itself.

In other words, a review of the vote probably would turn up more clerical errors than illegal votes.