Month: May 2009

Follow the bouncing taxes ball

The irrepressible Patrick Hickey comments on that maddening teacher-union radio ad:

The Teachers Unions have flooded the air-waves with a whiny voiced ‘Hush-talker’ posing as a teacher -” it’s a bad idea, Governor Quinn!” The ads beg for more revenue – more taxes.

If not -Illinois will lose quality teachers! Non Sequitur! The ad also whines that Illinois Public School teachers ‘only qualify for Partial Social Security Benefits!!!!’ Why is that Murial? Could it be that Illinois Teachers opted out of ‘paying into Social Security’ – their fair share – in order to allow tax-payer to buck up for their retirement?

Really.  Are we to believe that union members are better teachers than those recruited for charter schools, to give one example.  Or than (non-unionized) Catholic school teachers coast to coast?

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Our dubious ways

Look, Ma, we’re infamous.

“The Chicago approach to governing” is what Republican senator Judd Gregg calls the White House’s tactics on health-care reform: “You’re talking about running over the minority, putting them in cement, and throwing them in the Chicago River.”

That’s from City Journal’s David Gratzer on how legislative “reconciliation” as way to achieve health care revamp can turn and bite Obama.

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Out of the mouths of cardinals . . .

Cardinal George of Chicago gave a spicy account of his tete-a-tete with Obama last March 18.

“It’s hard to disagree with him because he’ll always tell you he agrees with you,” he [told 200 priests in Louisiana].  “. . . You have to say, again and again, ‘No, Mr. President, we don’t agree (on abortion).’

He told Obama he was concerned about his decision to rescind the Mexico City policy, which meant taxpayer money would go to fund abortion overseas.  He apparently said we were “exporting abortion” by that decision.

“He said we weren’t exporting abortion,” the cardinal said. “I said, ‘Yes we are.’ He would say, ‘I know I have to do certain things here.  . . . . But be patient and you’ll see the pattern will change.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, you’ve given us nothing but the wrong signals on this issue.’ So, we’ll see, but I’m not as hopeful now as I was when he was first elected.”

Why he was hopeful at any time escapes me, but if that was naive of him, the same simplicity, or at least directness, led him to provide a fascinating glimpse at the man who the inimitable Mark Steyn says “has the knack of appearing moderate while acting radical,” calling it, however, “a lethal skill.”

It seems from the cardinal’s account that he was not fooled.

 

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Obama prays alone

Obama will pray privately, as usual for him, says White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.  He will sign his proclamation of the National Day of Prayer but will let it go at that, reverting to how it was before GW Bush.

He did host a Passover Seder for family and friends in April, for a presidential first, but he took a pass on the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton, where 1,300 were expected.  Didn’t ask to come, said a Breakfast spokesman. 

If he had asked and did come to the Catholic breakfast, as GW Bush did, he would not have been allowed to speak, however, as Bush regularly did, because of

a 2004 directive from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops saying that public figures who have taken positions opposing Catholic doctrine should not be publicly honored. [! Except at Notre Dame?]

“We’d host him graciously, but we’d not give him a platform to speak,” [spokesman Joe] Cella said.

All major presidential candidates were invited to attend last year, he added, but none responded.

Catholic Obama-ites were invited this year — Biden and cabinet officers Sebelius, Donovan, Napolitano among them — but none responded, said Cella.

They might have gotten an earful from the keynote speaker, Archbishop Raymond Burke, formerly of St. Louis and now of the Vatican, who has recommended pro-choice Catholics such as Sebelius be denied Communion.

Justice Scalia was scheduled to speak.

Meanwhile, National Day of Prayer ceremonies were to be held Thursday morning in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill — without Obama.

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Da good guys, da bad guys generate “Heat”

Roger and me, we don’t always agree.  Once more, my hearties, to movie reviewing, this time of “Heat,” the 1995 remake of ‘30s public enemy #1 stuff — Muni and Cagney, move over.

“Heat,” shown last night on AMC, also gets to the human side of murder.  The Enemy, played by deNiro given an Irish name (!), is a lover of Amy the Judge, whom he does not force to stay with him as he heads for the lam, having created several widows while taking other people’s money.  Nice guy!  The Cop, played by Pacino, has a wife (his third), also quite fetching, aching to be loved, whom Pacino may split with for honorable reasons — married to his job and all that.

The rest of the policemen are kept fairly anonymous, including the dick played by Monk’s Captain Leland Stottlemeyer {Ted Levine}.  He is one of many officers of the law shot in hot blood (lots of it) in a huge city shootout and chase following The Bank Robbery.

During the robbery — a “score,” we hear several times from various good and bad guys, and that’s our main gonif-style patois for the night — the deNiro Irishman stands on a counter and reassures the dozens of customers that their money is safe because insured by the federal government: “It’s the bank’s money, not yours,” he announces from his FDIC script.

Earlier, we watched Pacino and deNiro talking lifestyles in a coffee shop — it was Pacino’s idea: he had pulled deN over on a city highway and suggested it.  From this conversation we realize that deN simply rejected the barbecue– and ball game-related life for the adventurous — hardly a dishonorable choice! — and Pacino had fallen in love with chasing bad guys — with two and a half shipwrecked marriages to prove it.

So it goes in Los Angeles, where the “PD” never sleeps and private lives take it on the chin.  Meanwhile, the plot sleeps.  It’s ragged.  That is to say, it has extremely sparse structure.  Its trademark is obfuscation.

This movie leads the viewer to think warmly of the acting abilities of various characters, while waiting for them to finish their scenes.  The viewer ends with commendations all around. 

Apart from the bludgeoning it provides by way of much shooting, much blood, and much heavy waiting for Things to Happen, it leaves him untouched, ungrabbed, and ready for bed.  That last is enough to recommend it.

And Roger?  He gave it an A-minus, offering this in re: the coffee shop conversation:

The scene concentrates the truth of “Heat,” which is that these cops and robbers need each other: They occupy the same space, sealed off from the mainstream of society, defined by its own rules.

They are enemies, but in a sense they are more intimate, more involved with each other than with those who are supposed to be their friends – their women, for example.

Blah, blah, blah: erzatz sociology-cum-glorification of schmucks by way of postmodern categorization.

Phew! Time for bed.

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Tortured by a report

An overwrought denunciation by the voice of the Catholic Left ends:

As our nation enters into what might be called a forced and fortunate moral reassessment, can we make this a personal moral reassessment as well? Or will expedience and our own personal moral blindness fashion another way? God is patient and forgiving, and God is not finished with us yet.

Once there was “Better red than dead.”  Now it’s “Better terrorized than compromised.”  This be pacifism followed logically.

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The root of our current difficulty

Affordable housing run amok:

A major lesson of Fan and Fred and the subprime fiasco is that no one benefits when we push families into homes they can’t afford. Yet that’s what Congress is doing once again as it relentlessly expands FHA lending with minimal oversight or taxpayer safeguards.

That’s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored lending programs asking a mere 3.5% down, vs. 10% minimum on conventional loans — with 100% tax-paid guarantee on defaults. 

Which guarantee “means banks and mortgage lenders have no skin in the game,” observes WSJ.  No-skin means no risk, means wotthehell wotthehell, let’s do it, why not?  (If this devil-may-care approach was good enough for that cat mehitabel, it’s good enough for us.)

The VA housing program, to site another way of doing business,

has a default rate about half that of FHA loans, mainly because the VA provides only a 50% maximum guarantee. [italics added]

Thus providing “a market test that the loan shouldn’t be made.”

As for the downpayment, the FHA minimum was 20% when the agency opened in the 30s.  In the 60s it dropped to10%, in 1978 to 3% — raised to 3.5% last year.  The road to national meltdown was paved with good affordable–housing intentions.

Among which was the “bizarre initiative” in 2007 and since then to help the FHA “regain market share” as banks chose en masse to go elsewhere, namely to proliferating subprime lenders.  So now we have what WSJ calls “the federal subprime lending program.”

Wotthell, it’s save-the-agency time.  Damn the default rate, full speed ahead.

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Go Bulls

This is so good, I simply pass it on (from John Falck commenting at WSJ’s Daily Fix):

I watched the Bulls-Celtics game with my up too late 5 year old son, who kept looking at the frequently tied scores and asking “what if nobody wins?”

As the overtimes kept coming my replies of “they keep playing until one team wins” started to sound a bit doubtful. “What if everyone fouls out?” was left unanswered.

I put him to bed during the third OT as he roused himself to say “tell me in the morning who won, if the game is over”.

I love it, I love it, I love it.

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