The aborted ones:

“In New York City, home to the largest black population of any U.S. urban area, more black babies are aborted than born,” writes Jason Riley [in Wall St. Journal]. “In Georgia, where whites outnumber blacks 2 to 1, more than 53% of abortions involve black babies,” he adds. Mr. Riley argues that “if liberal activists and their media allies are going to lecture America about the value of black lives, the staggering disparity in abortion rates ought to be part of the discussion.”

It’s what Margaret Sanger had in mind.

Goes like this, says Maureen Malarkey:

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Just listen to me
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don’t need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free.
Paul Simon, Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover

The pope, too, has a pen and a phone. Has Francis’ motu proprio trumped the Synod? Or handicapped conservatives? Hard to say. But one thing now is certain: Marriage is indissoluble except when it is not. Put another way, indissolubility is revealed to be more soluble than we had previously understood.

Quick fix is in the mix.

Go neither west nor east nor north nor south, young man. Stay here and get a government job. You’ll be in the majority.

As of June 2015, Illinois had only 574,000 factory workers, compared with nearly 750,000 state and local government workers. That means Illinois had only 3 manufacturing workers for every 4 state and local government workers.

You’ll be in the money too, because govt is where the money is in Illinois.

On the other hand, Illinois’ money is running out . . .

Illinois, paced by Chicago, goes from powerhouse to poorhouse – The Orange County Register

Bible is full of hard sayings, but verse 18 here, from Paul to the Colossians chap. 3, is up there with the hardest, here from the official bishops’ page:

The Christian Family. 18* Wives, be subordinate to your husbands, as is proper in the Lord.o 19Husbands, love your wives, and avoid any bitterness toward them. 20Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing to the Lord.p 21Fathers, do not provoke your children, so they may not become discouraged.q

What’s the poor preacher to do?

A, culture differences. We are not first-century middle easterners. We are not 21st-century middle easterners or southeast Asians. In Oak Park and Bryn Mawr-Clark Street areas, I have seen woman walking behind their husbands. Not as a rule, but it happens. The husband and I passed each other first on Catalpa east of Clark, then I passed the wife, whom I expected to be glum and resigned. No. She had the nicest relaxed smile in return for mine. Husband loved her, I speculated, both were content.

Wouldn’t work for most people most of us know. (I have readers in mind.) But seemed to work for her and others I have seen in Oak Park.

B, the form that husbands’ love takes. In our time and place, it includes respect and mutuality and spirit of cooperation. Bingo. Respect, etc. took shapes that both were used to. He was to be kind to her in expected manner.

C, As for children obeying and fathers (and mothers, we add) not provoking their children, we require no explanation at this point — in a homily, that is. People will get it, that is.

The clincher is that (a) culture matters and (b) husbands’ love, or treating their wives lovingly, as Knox has it, is the key to discovering that pearl of great price, domestic tranquility.

More on the refugee problem, and not as humanitarian catastrophe.

Not xenophobic locals, however.

What a story in NY Times about contemplative Dominican nuns. Wow.

In case you missed this anti-Madigan blast from one of his foot soldiers, consider it:

“For [Speaker Madigan] to throw me under the bus like that is foul,” [Rep. Ken] Dunkin [(D-Chicago)] told Chicago Tonight over the phone. “I guess they took for granted that I was going to be there. I told them emphatically that I was going out of town. They knew damn well I was going to be gone.”

Dunkin confirms that he was in New York for both work and personal reasons: he first attended a work conference and then a funeral for the friend of his wife. He says he told the speaker and his staff that he was upset the bill wasn’t called a week earlier, and he sacrificed personal and family time to be at the statehouse then, and that he supported the bill at that time. But Dunkin says that his support for the bill eroded when he started asking more questions.

AFSCME had no time for him.

“This is such an unprecedented move by any union under any governor in this state’s history. I wanted to see what they were talking about,” Dunkin says. “I wanted to see the union’s position and where they were in negotiations in writing. I asked AFSCME for information on what specifically they were negotiating and they said, ‘We don’t typically share that information.’ I also asked the governor’s office and had to squeeze information out of them.”

SB 1229 proposed to send the stalemated contract talks with union workers to an arbitrator, who would then have to choose either the governor’s final offer or the union’s. The governor, fearing an arbitrator would most likely side with the union, called it “the worst legislation in Illinois’ history,” said it would cost the state $2 billion, vetoed it and campaigned heavily to prevent an override.

“Hell no,” he said.

When asked if Gov. Rauner did anything to persuade Dunkin to miss the vote or if he offered any sort of benefit in return, Dunkin said, “Hell no.” But Dunkin admits that the governor made the case that AFSCME had a poor record on hiring and protecting the jobs of minorities in state agencies. He says AFSCME flatly rejected that claim but offered him no evidence to the contrary.

House Speaker Michael Madigan Dunkin says Madigan went into overdrive mode to try and secure enough votes for an override, and that his motivations were purely political – to score a major victory against the governor.

“The speaker made this a super issue,” Dunkin said. “I don’t want to be a part of his political manipulations. I don’t know what he was thinking when he called the bill knowing he didn’t have 71 votes. He knew I wasn’t 100 percent on board anyway. I’m not in the pocket of Mike Madigan. I don’t work for Mike Madigan, I work with him. I don’t work for the governor. You can print that.”

“There are 47 other bodies that [Madigan] has worked with equally if not longer,” Dunkin said. “But I’m the cause of his self-manufactured defeat? Meantime, on Wednesday eight people were killed in Chicago. The schools are $480 million short. And this is the most salient thing we can talk about in Springfield? This bill meant nothing to the average person.”

After the defeat on Wednesday, Madigan held a press conference and would not answer whether or not he would politically retaliate against Dunkin for not helping with the vote. Dunkin seemed unperturbed.

“I don’t care what the hell he decides,” Dunkin said. “You have to ask him that. I’m not fearful of Mike Madigan or any other politician for that matter. My record speaks for itself.”

So what does Chi Trib’s Eric Zorn assume we all know about Dunkin to make his non-support of Madigan “an act of political cowardice and malfeasance that will become legendary”?

The Big O. showed his hand early in the game, and it’s been downhill ever since.

The completely unprepared Barack Obama, who was elected to be the nation’s top law enforcement officer, set the tone early in his presidency with a bias that was – at best – skeptical about the police. And his fellow Democrats either remained silent or joined the chorus when radicals in their own party called for less incarceration, fewer arrests and a pullback of police presence in high-crime communities. Well, you reap what you sow. The spike in murders and violent crime is an issue of the Democrats’ own making. And, oh by the way, pandering to government unions for endorsements isn’t the same as supporting cops on the streets.

Except he was prepared, by rootless life, upbringing fatherless by hippie mother’s parents, fostered in radicalism by the Hawaiian communist “Frank” as in his autobio, and subsequent stints on various campuses as beau ideal of leftist mentors and facilitators plus homing in on radical-chic preacher and putting in his time as Alinsky-style organizer — except where’s the record (wins, losses, draws) even on that?

He was made for a race man’s down-with-cops, up-with-streetwise main-chancers who talk the talk, loud and often.