Month: April 2010

Republicans attack, Palin-panic reverse, NC swinging, Obama lied

Repubs on attack.  Gut-level stuff.

Palin-panic on the left reverses itself:   

The logo created for the conference [on right-wing radicalism] showed a swastika inside the international symbol of negation, reflecting the legitimate concern people feel over the activities, often violent, of neo-Nazi extremists.

Unfortunately, this logo created an impression that Brandeis and the conference organizers equated a range of organizations, including the Tea Party in the United States, with extremist groups on both continents.

That was not the intention of the [Brandeis U.] faculty, staff or students of the University who were involved in creating the conference, and Brandeis regrets the unintended association and pain this caused. The logo has been removed from the event page promoting the conference.

N. Carolina not so sure these days:

” . . . a lot of stirring out there,” said Rep. David Price  (D-N.C.). “A lot of the people who worked very hard to put the state in the blue column are still at it, but we know we’re a swing state. We know that there’s a lot of political diversity and we have a lot of work to do.”

Etc.

Wash Examiner has Blago-lawyers’ motion accusing Obama of lying in public statements, based on testimony by Valerie Jarrett and Tony Rezko:

President Obama’s public statements contradict other witness statements, specifically those made by labor union official and Senate Candidate B [believed to be White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett],” the motion said.

The former governor’s lawyers also claim that Tony Rezko admitted he violated federal election laws by personally contributing “a large sum of cash” to an unnamed public official believed to be Obama.

Blago’s lawyers also accused Obama of not telling FBI agents the truth when he said Rezko never relayed a quid pro quo offer from a lobbyist who wanted to hold a fundraiser for Obama in exchange for favorable legislation, and again when he denied having any conversations with Rezko about a license for a casino linked to the Chicago mob.

That said, we presume it’s a sideshow, except that stuff like this builds up.

(All of it following leads from Steve Bartin’s excellent News Alert.)

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Asking a question at Irving School

I rang the village president’s bell last night, unwittingly.  Discussion was of widening Eisenhower vs. extending the Blue Line.  50 or so in audience at Irving School, prez in audience with his two small kids.  I asked cost over the decades of the Austin Blvd. bottleneck (where four lanes each way become three) — the cost to us, I explained, the metropolitan area. 

Up popped prez (David Pope) asking for time.  You’re the prez, said speaker, a transportation expert and former village trustee, ceding the space.  Prez stood facing us and gave 5-10 minutes to rebutting a metro-area argument because it ignores special needs of the Austin community to the east and Bellwood, Maywood, and other towns to the west, some with economic development plans on which widening the Ike would put a kibosh. 

At one point he looked over at his two kids and with a word quieted them down.  I hadn’t realized he had kids with him and at first thought he was making like the Jesuit in Cincinnati who stopped his sermon in the university chapel to ask a woman to remove her crying baby.  (Later, chastised privately by a father of five, he admitted he’d been wrong.  And later became provincial!) 

David Pope, Elise

Elise Pope with David

At another point, one of the prez’s two came up and wrapped her arms around his legs, then, holding on with one hand, circumambulated him several times.  Didn’t faze him.  He continued, expanding on his main point by stating his preference for extending rapid transit, including to Oak Brook, with its many jobs (he said how many, but I forget), currently inaccessible to non-auto-owning residents of those towns — who presumably would remain unaffected by metro-area economic benefits maybe tied to a widening. 

The transportation expert had argued against its making much difference anyhow, taking the question seriously on its face.  But it had been enough for the Prez that I raised the concept of metro-area benefit, as if metro can take care of itself and it’s up to Oak Park and others to care for the economic also-rans — Austin, Maywood, etc. 

We are at the heart of something here, the belief that direct relief of, special attention to, a segment will help the segment and will do no harm to the whole.  It’s a belief felt wholeheartedly by some, even after decades of special attention that has produced no results for the segments — consider academic-gap programs in the schools and continuing economic malaise in the face of government aid and stimulus programs — and have one way or another been a drain on the economy and well-being of the whole, including the very segments we are talking about. 

I had no idea what I was about to stir up in the mind and heart of the village prez (whose fatherly instincts and behavior I greatly admire, by the way) when I asked the cost to the metro area.  But he apparently identified my question as signalling an approach to, even a philosophy of, how to achieve the best for the most which runs counter to prevailing concepts that call for special treatment.  It did, but it still deserves an answer.

(WBBM-AM’s Bob Roberts has coverage of an earlier part of the meeting, with discussion of rapid transit-Blue Line extension vs. widening of Eisenhower, or even in conjunction with widening it.)

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Blue-state blues

Public-employe unions have the answer to saving their pensions: raise taxes!

SPRINGFIELD —

Thousands of teachers and other union workers descended on the state Capitol on Wednesday and chanted “raise my taxes” to try to pressure politicians to avoid major budget cuts.

The vibe [sic] was the exact opposite of what you’d find at a tea party rally.

I’ll say.

Meanwhile, in the city that works,

Chicago taxpayers will be forced to dig deeper — and so will city workers — to bail out four city employee pension funds that will run out of money by 2030, a Mayor Daley-appointed commission has concluded.

“There is no low- or no-cost solution to this problem. . . . Deferring action is not a viable option,” said a draft of the final report, obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

It’s not easy being a tax-and-spend politician.  You have to make tough decisions, like going after other people’s money.

More precisely, in view of the socialist-leaning politicos in the White House, it’s not easy promising things you, that is, other people, can’t afford.

Promise them anything, but make them pay for it, yes.

Chi Trib’s John Kass has the answer to all of it. 

The Patriot Plan has two simple prongs. One prong involves Tax Day. The other prong involves Election Day.

Tax Day is when everyone writes out a check for his or her annual payment, which they owe in full because there’s been no withholding.  Election Day is the one after that, when voters have the previous day fresh in their minds.

You can vote on federal, state and county offices — with the exact sum of what you’ve paid in taxes still burned into your brain — while watching your politicians chase those last-minute votes.

How many blue-state emergencies would that solve?  All of them, guaranteed.

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Bishop has the property

Requiem for a Catholic academy, with worry about its neighboring Catholic university:

The Wheeling College campus was carved out of the Mount de Chantal estate back in the 1950s. If Wheeling Jesuit [University] and/or the Diocese [of Wheeling] had the funds, they could purchase this beautiful property, continue its use for educational purposes, and guarantee expansion space for WJU indefinitely into the future.

Alas, it is not to be. Mount de Chantal stands on 36 acres, a proud and picturesque 140-year-old school building now crumbling into brick dust, and a small, peaceful cemetery where generations of devoted Visitation nuns lay at final rest, mission accomplished.

The Mount could not survive into a new century when there are no religious vocations, so few girls from well-to-do Wheeling families seeking an exclusive education, the Linsly school [in Wheeling] poaching the few prospects who remain, and the economy of the Ohio Valley sinking slowly into ruin.

Farewell, Mount de Chantal, and let us pray that your neighbor, Wheeling Jesuit, is not destined for the same fate!

It’s an eloquent anonymous comment at Save! Wheeling Jesuit University, which since last August has been mourning and protesting the ouster of Rev. Julio Giulietti SJ as president, blamed by some as the work ultimately of the bishop of Wheeling, who wanted to buy the Mount de Chantal property but allegedly felt thwarted in that by Giulietti.

The comment was in response to news finally verified that Wheeling (Catholic) Hospital, a diocesan institution, was buying the property and planning to tear down the building which housed the already closed academy.

Fr. Giulietti gone, the diocese (the bishop) gets the property, which to many is not a coincidence.

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Married priests as third pole of influence

Add this to Sex & RC Church, as below — exchange with astute reader that goes this way, reacting to my perhaps overstated dissing of current permanent deacons as priest candidates.

Astute reader:

At least most are not gay and most of them have families and jobs so that they have their feet firmly attached to the ground in that respect.  Granted, they would be less trained in theology, but they are already providing the Sacrament of the Sick, Baptisms, Marriages, and preaching as well as visiting the sick. 

The damage that they might do as priests, they are already in a position to do and now they are totally under the thumb of the local pastor who may be twisted.  As fellow priests and future pastors, they might do no worse than the damage being done now — especially by pastors for whom the collection burns a hole in their pockets — always building or renovating, wringing his hands about the recession and lack of funds because he is a spend-thrift.

My response:

Yes, but they’d be 2nd-class priests, less equipped to push back.  Nor wld they be immune to demon greed, married or not. 

Ordaining married men is the way to go, I think.  Missouri Synod expects candidates to be married, I think.  Eastern Rite RCs have that requirement also, I am pretty sure — and are ruled out as bishops, by the way. 

But the married have to be on even footing with unmarried; theology study tells where the skeletons are buried.

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Scares you, huh?

Boo!

Obama jack in box

It goes with Pelosi’s saying they had to pass the bill before we’d know what’s in it, offered today by Patriot Post.

These were her famous last words before “ramming [it] through.”

I’d make the hammer and sickle a fasces bundle.  As Tom Roeser notes today, citing Ron Paul in a recent “lucid moment,”

Obama isn’t a socialist but a “corporatist.” . . .   What we have now is the federal government owning just under 50% of the private economy: and if that isn’t corporatism I don’t know what is.  Socialism is the takeover of industry; corporatism is the “investment” of government in industry such as the auto bailouts, the big bank bailouts. 

And a little bit of political history:

A pioneer of this kind of thing was FDR’s Rexford Tugwell whom I knew well (he guest lectured for me at the Wharton School). Tugwell went to Italy to interview Benito Mussolini, an ace corporatist, came back and  designed the NRA whereby big business would cooperate with each other in a government-tailored design to reach markets without cumbersome and what some liberals say is “wasteful economic competition.”  

I’ve been calling O. a fascist at least since my Wednesday Journal column that precipitated severe excretory shots at the fan in October of ‘08. in which I hearken to Alinsky’s “man of action,” as in Rules for Radicals, and expatiated:

The “man of action” business is particularly foreboding. It’s a staple of fascism, of course. . . .  [FDR’s] political appeal was based on admiration for the strong man who brooked no opposition.


Mussolini was crafty about it and inspired admiration in “progressive” circles in this country, as he had admired American pragmatism in Woodrow Wilson, the college professor-become-president with a yen for power that puts even today’s tenured radicals to shame. Then came FDR, the roaring pragmatist . . . . Progressives, later called liberals, yet later progressives again — the name changes keep them ahead of the awareness curve — love the man of action.

Now they have one. He’s The One, our smooth-talking Democrat presidential candidate with a yen for deciding how much you should earn before being hit with a tax hike-to “spread the wealth around,” as he unfortunately told that plumber in

Ohio.

 

I delete some references that show I was only, say, 80% right, the worst of them being my finger-in-the-wind, wistful, wholly mistaken closer, speaking of what he told the plumber, “Could this be the slip that sinks Big O’s ship?”  It’s stuff like that keeps me from scaling the heights of pundit-dom.

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Jesuit education

Herbie Ryan died.

Funeral Mass will be celebrated April 17 at 10 a.m. in Sacred Heart Chapel at Loyola Marymount University for Jesuit Father Herbert J. Ryan who died April 8 from complications of lung cancer at age 79.

. . . .

A member of the Jesuit order for 61 years, he was born in New York in 1931 and ordained by Cardinal Francis Spellman in 1962. Noted throughout his priestly career for his incredible memory and astonishing gift in languages, Father Ryan held graduate degrees from Loyola University in Chicago, in theology from Woodstock College and a Doctorate from the Gregorian University in Rome.

We were in philosophy together at West Baden (Ind.) College in the mid-50s, he a transplanted New Yorker among us Midwesterners.  Quite a bright fellow (even then!), he typified the Manhattanites who tended to give the impression that they knew more than the rest of us.

So what?  We Oak Parkers, South Siders, Cincinnatians, etc. rubbed shoulders and minds with people from all over the country and world, in southern Indiana.  Just by joining the Jesuits.  We educated each other.

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Sex and the Catholic church: adopting a position

How much of this by the ferocious wielder of the language and knife-sharp penetrator of fog and misinformation Ann Coulter do I have to read before I decide to read further?

Despite the growing media consensus that Catholicism causes sodomy, an alternative view — adopted by the Boy Scouts — is that sodomites cause sodomy. (Assume all the usual disclaimers here about most gay men not molesting boys, most Muslims being peaceful, and so on.)

This much should do it, even though I am hell-bent on doing other things right now.  Follow her lede here.  Hint: it’s about celibacy as promoting sex abuse.

However, and begin with the column’s very bad, i.e. misleading Town-Hall-dot-com title,

Ann Coulter :: Townhall.com Columnist
Should gay priests adopt?
 
 
I must demur from her implied defense of the celibacy requirement.  Implied but no more than that: she is primarily here shooting down an easier target, libs’ self-contradictory handling of SEX AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.
 
As for mandatory celibacy, I tentatively offer this concern, that it unduly protects priests from various realities such as living intimately with one other or in the case of children with more than one and surrendering other freedoms of a bachelor existence — summed up perhaps as having no one individually dependent on you as are wife and children.
 
Moreover, that it provides a social system in which the homosexually-inclined can more easily find and flock with birds of a feather.  Let me rephrase that: a system in which the legitimately (sacramentally) heterosexually active can have their say in ecclesiastical circles on equal footing with the others.
 
Two different things, you say.  Yes, but the internal politics of any institution has its poles and centers of influence.  Right now, there are two: gay and straight, or gay and non-gay, allowing for the same-sex-oriented (and it’s a matter of degree, I suppose) who remain neutral or band with the non-gays.  Permitting entry of the married would permit a third pole, diluting gay influence.
 
Enough for now.  As my old Latin teacher used to ask, is any of that clear?  But it may help to read this from New Oxford Review,

New Oxford Notes
Why Won’t Our Bishops Solve the “Gay” Priest Problem? — July-August 2004.
 
Meanwhile, far from shooting Ann Coulter down, I applaud her shots at her lib targets, especially among the mediums.  And thank her for (unwittingly) getting me to expose myself, as it were, in the above fashion.
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The trouble with Alexi

Saturday’s session at offices of Democratic Party of Oak Park was given to seeing what Dems can do for the troubled campaign (euphemistically speaking) of U.S. senatorial candidate and incumbent state treasurer Alexi Giannoulias. 

A video at Illinois Review gives “a brief history” of the troubles Alexi is seeing these days.

Watch it here.  (HT the ever reliable NewsAlert)

But you have to wonder what the fuss is about if you read and believe what’s said about him at his web site.  For openers:

Alexi Giannoulias was elected State Treasurer of Illinois on November 7, 2006, capping off one of the more improbable victories in Illinois politics. Opposed by the insiders from the very start, he won the support of voters by proposing bold new initiatives and turning his back on politics as usual.

Ending pay-to-play politics was Alexi’s first act as Treasurer.  On day one, he issued an executive order that enacted the most sweeping ethics reforms in the history of his office by banning contributions to his campaign from office employees, contractors and banks.

Etc. 

Right?

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