Month: February 2012

Obama friends plan campaign vs. Fox News

These Media Matters guys know how to play hardball:

A little after 1 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2009, Karl Frisch emailed a memo to his bosses, Media Matters for America founder David Brock and president Eric Burns. In the first few lines, Frisch explained why Media Matters should launch a “Fox Fund” whose mission would be to attack the Fox News Channel.

“Simply put,” Frisch wrote, “the progressive movement is in need of an enemy. George W. Bush is gone. We really don’t have John McCain to kick around any more. Filling the lack of leadership on the right, Fox News has emerged as the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole.”

“We must take Fox News head-on in a well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of news consumers.”

Now that’s what I call winning ball games.

via Media Matters Memo | Private Investigators | Fox News Employees | The Daily Caller.

Marty on raw power

You may have applauded the joint effort by Catholic bishops and evangelical Protestants in opposing the HHS mandate to provide birth control and abortifacients to hospital, university, and social agency employees, but to Martin Marty, it was a case of “radical embrace of raw political power by Evangelical pastors massed in militancy to join Catholics in reaction.”

This is the presumed detached observer talking (in “Sightings” for the day, “Protestant Accommodation”) and this is how he sees it.  Read what he says and see if he hasn’t tipped his hand with this colorful language.

Catholics conform

Sister tells of her conversion to religious life twenty years previously, has back of her hand for her then-fiance’s wanting 15 kids, depending on how many God decided they should have.  She chose religion for its structured prayer life and conferred ability to “love all,” not just one, failing to mention the other potential fifteen.

Parish school principal to parishioner gathering refers to “common core” curriculum and common report card eliminating A’s and B’s etc. in favor of something else, both “national,” omitting to explain who imposed the common core, etc.  U.S. dept. of education, it turns out.  He mentions the core only in passing, with no questions about what feds have to say about RC schools’ teaching and grading, except that the archdiocese has adopted this common core, etc.

Visiting scholar lectures at RC university to packed small-auditorium crowd of students, nuns, teachers, and others, elicits dismissive chuckles from students about rules for confessors in days of old as to how they were to deal with female penitents, all geared to protect chastity.  No one takes him up on this, which is at least mildly subversive of church as vehicle of grace and role of confession.

RC traditions about (a) family and role of Providence, (b) freedom of church schools from state interference, (c) academic respect for church practices prior to our own enlightened age — each ignored or dismissed by church representatives,  making three cases of bit-by-bit conforming to the age we live in.

Later:  The Common Core was adopted by 40 states including Illinois, whose board of ed explained itself in June of 2010.  The parish school principal assumed too much of his audience or at least of some parts of it.  The archdiocese sells the new report card in a letter to parents last June and explains it at length in a frequent-questions page here.  I can only trust that something similar was offered parish schools by their principals and staffs.

More on the Obama shell game

Spelling out the money issue: Insurance companies don’t print money:

They aren’t empowered to create money out of nothing the way the Federal Reserve is.

If they’re going to pay doctors, nurses, and pharmacists to provide these things then they are going to pay for them with money they got from someone else.

Who else?

Why! The very same churches, church-related organizations, and individuals who are otherwise paying.

 

 

Secularism’s Toll on Catholic Americans | Daily News | NCRegister.com

Chicago’s Fr. Robert Barron drops a “rhetorical bomb.”

The secularist state recognizes that its principle enemy is the Church Catholic. Accordingly, it wants Catholicism off the public stage and relegated to a private realm where it cannot interfere with secularism’s totalitarian agenda. I realize that in using that particular term, I’m dropping a rhetorical bomb, but I am not doing so casually.

via Secularism’s Toll on Catholic Americans | Daily News | NCRegister.com.

Catholic Bishops reject presidential accommodation

They would prefer not.

Catholic bishops said that they would not support the Obama administration’s proposed compromise on a controversial rule that requires most employers to fully cover contraception in their workers’ health plans.

Yes. Are Catholic universities, hospitals etc. simply to stand by and wash their hands of what their insurance carriers are doing?

What, me worry? is to be the stupid response Obama wants them to make?

He’s a snake in the grass, trying to lead them down a primrose path. (Some metaphor, eh?)

Obama the knife

Obama’s proposed penal law regarding Catholic institutions buying birth control and morning-after pill insurance (now immaculately accommodated) has sharp teeth:

Employers who violate the HHS mandate, and who thereby fail to provide the coverage HHS deems necessary under Obamacare, incur an annual penalty of roughly $2000 per employee. More precisely, as I understand it, the base penalty is $2000 x (number of full-time employees minus 30), and the base is increased each year by the rate of growth in insurance premiums. So, for example, Belmont Abbey College (one of the two plaintiffs already challenging the HHS mandate), which has 200 full-time employees, is facing an annual base penalty of $340,000. Colorado Christian University (the other plaintiff) has 280 full-time employees and is facing an annual base penalty of $500,000.

via Ethics and Public Policy Center: The HHS Contraception Mandate vs. the Religious Freedom Restoration Act 

For a school the size of Notre Dame? $10 million a year, a Becket Fund woman told Sean Hannity last night. (at 4:10 on tape)  Whoa, million here, million there, soon you’re talking real money.