Sky Pete: "There are certain requirements for being a open to all in the public - Commercial FDIC-insured bank..... "This must be one of them, methinks . " There seem to be at least two questions on the table: (1) Do existing laws or regulations prohibit religious displays in banks, or were these regulators just improvising? (2) If such laws or regulations do exist, are they constitutional? I don't know the answer to the first, but I'm fairly confident that the answer to the second is No. In any event, I can't put my finger on a passage in the Constitution that gives the federal government such power.

Of course. A sharia-compliant bank is free to close during Ramadan or have al-Jazeera running in its lobby. It just won't get my business. Not that my business would help -- a truly sharia-compliant bank wouldn't charge or pay interest, so it wouldn't remain in operation very long.

"I stand corrected...." Spoken like a gentleman.

Michael: Always glad to share what little I know. Except for a few screamers and robo-posters, we're all students here.

The birth of the Tea Party, the growing uppitiness of the little people, and an impressive string of electoral victories are all well and good. But Obama still has unions, the press, the bureaucracy, celebrities, and apparently inexhaustible sources of foreign funny money. He has a narrow House majority augmented by cooperative RINOs in both legislative chambers. Anyone who thinks that he or his toxic accomplishments will go away without a bitter fight is dreaming. By the way, in the U.K. Boxing Day is a bank holiday. Because Christmas fell on Saturday, today is the official Boxing Day.

Raymond and even Lon, below, have a point. Federal regulators who believe that religion has absolutely no place in the public square shouldn't simply drive by and bark orders. They should lead by example. They should work on weekends, which exist to keep the Christian Sabbath holy. They should work through holidays of religious origin, such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. Because New Year's Day is tainted by religion, they probably shouldn't observe that, either. They certainly should refrain from saying "goodbye" (from "God be with ye") or exclaiming "Bless you!" after a sneeze while acting in any official capacity. To be truly consistent, they ought to adopt new, secular names for myriad places such as San Francisco and Los Angeles and...

So if the _New York Times_ and HuffPo spike the story, it's made up? What a simple, cloistered life you must lead. KOCO, the ABC affiliate in Oklahoma City, did cover this sorry chain of events: http://www.koco.com/r/26162860/detail.html From there, the story spread without much involvement from the dinosaur media. The column lacks specificity. It's incorrect in that the bank's not in Oklahoma City, but in Perkins, about 45 minutes northeast and considerably closer to Stillwater than to OKC. Under intense public pressure (and stern glares from some members of Congress), the Fed reversed its order within a week -- again without notice from the government-media complex. But the columnist didn't invent this incident. You owe him an...

Handing out tracts or encouraging tellers to witness would probably be bad for business. But a bank is a private entity, and it is -- or should be -- free to do as it pleases, just as its customers should be free to register their disapproval by taking their business elsewhere.

Are you so insecure that you won't breathe easy until Christianity has been driven underground? Are house churches okay, or do you agree with the regime in Beijing that even that degree of nonconformity is intolerable?

Paying thousands of unelected, unaccountable, unresponsive, unfeeling, unproductive bureaucrats to sit in judgment of the "small people". . .