Month: June 2010

An idea for NBA players

I think all NBA players’ salary should be placed in a trust fund until the player is 40 years old:

A Cook County judge issued an arrest warrant for one-time Chicago Bulls center Eddy Curry, who was a no-show at a hearing this month to pay what’s left in a legal settlement reached after he was sued, according to a source, for allegedly having sex with an underage girl when he was 18.

Says Sun-Times.

With strict administration of it as to size of allowance, etc.

Alg_curry_bench

Each should also be subject to curfew while living in college-like dormitories run by strict matrons of advanced age and proven virtue.

More on Mr. Curry, from NY Daily News [whence above pic]:

hush money payment linked to his six-month sexual relationship with an underage girl.

The warrant was issued by the Cook County sheriff after Curry missed the last payment in a sealed personal injury suit, authorities said.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported Thursday that the $197,495 was the final payment in a 2007 civil settlement between Curry and a 14-year-old sex partner.

Another idea would be compulsory completion of a Great Books reading and discussion course led by Joseph Epstein, a humanist of the first water who played baseball as a young man.

Tags:

Soccer ref explains

Koman Coulibaly, the ref that called it wrong in the U.S.-Slovenia World Cup match, has fallen in love with a wonderful guy:

“I am now sitting in my hotel room in Pretoria, South Africa, thinking about adversity. And how Nelson Mandela and I have faced so many similar struggles,” he writes on his blog.

How so?

1) We are both African. [So are lots of refs who don’t blow championship calls.]  Both Nelson Mandela and I suffered under the imperialist yoke of countries like Great Britain and America. And colonialism.

Ah.  That imperialist yoke.  And colonialism.  Surefire recipe ingredients for bad calls and subsequent refusal to explain them.

2) We are talented soccer experts. I heard Mandela considered playing left mid for Bafana Bafana before becoming an activist.

Highly irrelevant, one might say.  Mandela, for instance.

3) We are both kept from achieving our full potential because of racism. Mandela had apartheid. I face the racist Americans and FIFA. Do you think there would be so much doubt about my call if I was from Melbourne, not Mali? I don’t.

I do, somehow.  One hoped against hope that he would not talk that way.  Question: If U.S. were not imperialist, colonialist, and racist, would he have made his call?

4) We have both been imprisoned under horrible hardships. Like Mandela, I am a prisoner. Though there are no physical bars or concrete separating me from freedom, I have had to stay indoors since the US vs Slovenia game for fear of my safety. I guess apartheid whites and some American soccer fans also have things in common.

He guesses?  Why so tentative?  Will he elaborate on his fear?  We think not.  He does not elaborate.  Suffering from imperialism, and racism, he just calls them as he thinks them.  Why can’t we understand that?

Later: Reader D sees “a possible job opening in the White House as our Soccer Czar. He’s got the one necessary ingredient — a desire to cut the USA down to size.”

Tags: ,

Her pagan roots

Let’s hear it for Stonehenge in our post-Christian age (common era, you know):

“It means a lot to us … being British and following our pagan roots,” said Victoria Campbell, who sported a pair of white angel’s wings and had a mass of multicolored flowers in her hair.

The 29-year-old Londoner, who works in the finance industry, also said that “getting away from the city” was a major draw.

She was celebrating the solstice in an all-night party.  With her and others was

Gina Pratt, a 43-year-old housewife and a self-described witch, [who] said being inside the circle as the sun came up gave her “a kind of a grounding feeling (of) being in touch with the earth again, and the air we breathe.”

Is this what Browning meant when he wrote

Oh, to be in England

Now that April’s there,

And whoever wakes in England

Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England – now!

I doubt it, but probably not

Pratt, who wore a cape of crushed red velvet and wielded an amethyst-tipped wand [and] said the event gave rise to conflicting emotions.

“It makes you feel small and insignificant … but it makes you feel like you’re here for a reason.”

For more of Browning, go here.

For more about Stonehenge, scroll down in this same Christian Science Monitor article.

For more about the summer solstice, look out the window.

Mack the president

The long-legged Mack Daddy in the White House is going to get white people so riled up, they will riot, says Pastor Manning.  (HT: News Alert)

Mack Daddy?  Yes, Mack Daddy.  Look it up.

This is Rev. James David Manning, who has no truck with Obama, as he vigorously demonstrated during the ’08 campaign.

Among his complaints about Obama, it should be added, is that he’s never been in jail, as Martin Luther King and “even Jesse Jackson” were, and hence should not be trusted. 

Tags: ,

The summer when the sun don't shine for Dems

“I used to say I enjoyed taking his money, but now I think he’s taking mine.”

State Senator Bill Brady talking, about Obama the high-taxer, whom he used to play poker with in Springfield when O. too was a state senator.
 
“I think I could beat the president running for governor in Illinois today,” he told Politico, with reference to the bad economy but especially to this summer of discontent when Dems’ dirty laundry will be hung out to dry.
 
Obama would want to keep his distance from his home state: “How close does he want to be to his buddy Tony [Rezko] when he’s on the witness stand?”
 
Downstater Brady, who squeaked by in the primary for Republican candidate, has to concentrate on Chicagoland, where “They think they know me. They think they like me,” he said, based on his polling.
 
His Dem opponent, appointed Gov. Pat Quinn, will portray him as a right-winger, he said, but voters “are realizing that this state has been ruined by Chicago influences that have been in control the last eight years.”

 
And Tom Roesers envisions a “harpooning” of Dems by the Blago trial.
Tags: ,

Dowd vs. Obama

The Big O. is “yet another president elevating personal quirks into a management style,” says the personal-quirk-oriented Maureen Dowd, picking on him for not coming up with her version of a good manager.

She bemoaned predecessors GW Bush, Clinton, LBJ, and Nixon’s acting out in and from the White House — no Carter, note — but expected of this “psychologically healthy” Obama (this from a book she read).

He was “dazzling” as a politician but is “obdurately self-destructive about politics.” 

He is guilty of

failing to understand that Americans are upset that a series of greedy corporations have screwed over the little guy without enough fierce and immediate pushback from the president.

So this leftist commentator wants a tough guy in the White House.  I do too, but toughness is for beating back the many-tentacled bureaucracy that a president inherits.  Forget about it: he’s one of them.  He loves power.

But as I have said before, God writes straight (sometimes) with crooked lines, and the Dowd critique is quotable even allowing for her crookedness.  In his speech last night:

He appointed a “son of the gulf” spill czar and a new guard dog at M.M.S. and tried to restore a sense of confident leadership — “The one approach I will not accept is inaction” — and compassion, reporting on the shrimpers and fishermen and their “wrenching anxiety that their way of life may be lost.” He acted as if he was the boss of BP on the issue of compensation. And he called on us to pray.

A new last refuge for scoundrels here: prayer.

The rest is to the point, that he’s over his head in spilt oil, crying over it when he should . . .   What?

Waive the union-protective Jones Act, say people who also want action, among other things.  God, after all, helps those who help themselves, said B. Franklin (not God) in his 1736 version of Poor Richard’s Almanack, but Jewish wise men, Sts. Augustin and Ignatius Loyola and others have told us to pray as if all depended on God, act as if it all depended on us.

Assuming you really want that oil mopped up and do not approach it as an opportunity to rail at big business.

Tags: ,

Sex abuse discussed in Chi suburban parish

My debut column for Chicago Catholic News is up. 

(POSTED: 6/14/10) Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish in Glenview (OLPH) hosted a discussion of clergy sex abuse on June 7. Featured speakers were Michael Bland, a therapist and himself an abuse survivor and former priest, and Rev. Larry McBrady, a former vicar for priests in the archdiocese.

Bland had delivered a stemwinder of a speech about his own experience, an “impact statement,” in 2002 at the bishops’ meeting in Dallas, where he said movingly of his abuse experience:

My life was changed in ways I could never have imagined. I continue to be victimized because the perpetrating priest has something that was stolen from me — my youthful innocence and my priesthood. At times I am still plagued with questions starting with “what if . . .” — questions that can never be answered . . . .

Read the rest at Chicago Catholic News.

Tags: ,

I am a jerk

What next from the boy wonder?

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said he had a one-on-one meeting with Obama, in which President Obama told him that he was still a Muslim, the son of a Muslim father, the stepson of Muslim stepfather, that his half brothers in Kenya are Muslims, and that he was sympathetic towards the Muslim agenda.

“Ich bin ein Berliner” was one thing.  We got the point.  Kennedy was never confused with a German.  He could show solidarity with freedom-loving people.  But our man O, the simple tool of America Lasters?

He has something up his sleeve all the time.

(HT: News Alert)

Tags:

Tough sell in Phoenix

What a tough sell Bishop Thomas Olmstead of Phoenix AZ has to convince people it was not OK to abort an unborn to save a mother’s life.

Just this one time, say his critics.  For a good reason.  We won’t bother you after that.

It’s a bad thing in itself, he says.

What the heck are you talking about? they say.  What’s this bad-in-itself stuff?  Look, Bishop, with all respect, we decide things as we go along.  Why can’t you understand that?

That’s the issue, he said or could say.  If we decide as we go, it’s paddy-bar-the-door for all sorts of things. 

I’m not in the business of legislating or making executive orders or even of judging, he might continue — except in the court of conscience, mine first of all, in fact most of all, even exclusively in this case. 

I cannot say the hell with it in this one case, this one time, for this good reason.  Once I do, why not the next time, for the next good reason? 

I become Solomon dividing the disputed baby or — God save the mark — the Warren Court setting rules for the states: Thou shalt not . . .   Etc.  Etc.

You get my drift? he might conclude.

Later: He being Olmsted, not Olmstead, by the way, as Olmstead points out in his comment below.  So instead of Olmstead when you mean the bishop of Phoenix, write Olmsted.  I may have Olmstead take my stead next time I write about the Phoenix Olmsted.  His experience will stand him in good stead.  (sic)

Tags: ,