Ttime to turn that mayor’s office red, says Glenn Reynolds.
INDIANAPOLIS POLITICS: “Current Democrat mayor Joe Hogwarts is having a rocky first term, with collapsing streets, thousands of massive, un-filled potholes, and what looks to be a third consecutive year of record homicides.
“If the GOP can scare up a candidate with more charisma than a dead tuna, next year’s elections are likely theirs to lose.”
Turns out sauce for Obama/Clinton goose, ain’t so for gander Trump.
Robert Mueller did his reputation for nonpartisanship no service by launching his indictment of Russia’s military hackers on the eve of what 99% of the media now say was a disastrous performance by President Trump in his summit with Vladimir Putin.
Explain yourself, Mr. Wall St. Journal columnist.
This is the same Mr. Mueller who, as FBI chief, sat for five years on the indictment of a Russian uranium executive when it would have been embarrassing to Mr. Obama’s own Russia rapprochement—and doubly embarrassing to his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, because of the connection of the Clinton Foundation to the Russian uranium business in question.
Nonetheless, this current indictment was called for, right?
Mr. Mueller’s timing on Friday was unnecessary. His indictment is only for show. The Russian culprits will never be seen in a U.S. court.
So?
It raises a question I did not expect to be raised: Should we now see Mr. Mueller as part of the retinue that includes former Obama CIA chief John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and (ambiguously) former FBI chief James Comey ? These men don’t like Mr. Trump or his Russia rapprochement; Mr. Brennan openly calls him a traitor.
Oh. Got any more on that?
Right here, he says, via Trump Delivers on Russia
Can of very big worms!
I ask you.
This fellow recounts his usual Old Mass experience in detail.
“And then I go to Sunday Mass,” he says, where the New Order prevails. It’s what he calls “the Novus Quodlibet: the New Whatever.”
I kneel and try to pray before Mass. I’m trying to say those preparatory prayers that used to be in the old missal, but seem to have been banished, certainly from the experience of the churchgoers, because the place is usually abuzz with conversation. Mainly I hear whispers from old ladies. It would tend to be old ladies, as their demographic opposites, young men, seem to have been wiped out in a massacre, and are nowhere to be found.
A woman ascends the pulpit. She says her name, then welcomes everybody. I do not want to know her name, and I am trying to pray. She announces the names of the readers, the Eucharistic ministers, and the altar servers. She announces the name of the priest. At one church, I am urged to get up (if I can; they make allowances for people with disabilities) and greet the people around me by name. I do not want to do this. I find it false. I do not remember the names of strangers, and I do not like to give my name out to strangers, either. It’s an act of aggressive etiquette, parading as bonhomie. I do not go to church for bonhomie. If I ever wanted it, I would go to a bar and order gin and tonic.
The choir, milling about up front, finally puts themselves in order. Then comes the hymn.
Here I am three and four times cursed.
I have read and taught poetry all my adult life. This is one curse. I know English grammar. That is a second curse. My family and I are versed in the long tradition of Christian hymnody; we collect hymnals from all traditions, and we have sung one or two thousand of them, sometimes in languages other than English. This is a third and most terrible curse. And we know our Scripture. Cursed a fourth time, cursed and damned to writhe in eternal pain. Well, not eternal. The pain is transient but real—pain mingled with frustration and disappointment, that well-meaning people should give their talents and energies to stuff that is so worthless, and sometimes worse than worthless. For sometimes it is flat-out heresy.
Well, I won’t sing heresy, and I won’t sing chloroform for the brain, and this means that I hardly ever sing at such Masses. (I say a quiet prayer of gratitude for the goodwill of the singers instead.) No need here to bring up, like ill-digested onions, the specifics. What strikes me, though, is the general liturgical lassitude. I don’t mean that there is not often a lot of energy, with drums, verses projected on the wall, and sometimes applause. I mean that there’s no plan to it, no aim. You are as likely to sing the peculiarly awful “Gather Us In”—well, that’s an onion, sorry—during Advent as in the middle of the summer, and if the choristers, or the lady at the piano, or the tenor at the organ likes it, you may be singing it twenty times a year. The hymns are chosen by the musicians for the same reason as the cartoon-like banners on the wall. Somebody who has wangled his way into the works likes them.
If you go to Mass every Sunday and every holy day during the year, and if four hymns are sung at each Mass, this gives you the opportunity to sing over two hundred different hymns. Need I say that, outside of the Christmas carols and three or four old Easter hymns, the typical Novus Quodlibet church boasts a repertoire of eight or nine? The same, the same, the same, like the drip, drip, drip of cold rain, without meaning, without artistic coherence, and without any feint toward the whole of the liturgical year and the history of salvation.
Many of them are narcissistic, rather like “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story. “Let us build the City of God,” really? I cannot build the City of God. I can be made, by God, into a stone for the building of that spiritual city, but the action is his, not mine. “We have been sung throughout all of history”? I haven’t been sung even once in my whole life, and if I ever were to be, I would surely want to slug the singer. “Here I am, Lord, is it I, Lord?” Why, who ever would have thought!
But as the music, so the rest.
Often the priest will, after the entrance hymn, arrogate attention to himself, and say hello to the people, and crack a joke, and there’s nothing evil about that, no. It’s all friendly, in a pleasant and shallow way, and it gives you the sure sense that you are there for this reason or that reason, whatever floats your boat. Sometimes the altar servers have nothing to do but stand by and look pretty, while lay people potter about. Everybody gets involved, right, except the churches aren’t full.
In Canada, we have been instructed not to kneel, no, except for the first part of the Eucharistic prayer. We do not kneel after the Agnus Dei. We are not supposed to kneel after communion, but are to remain standing, in solidarity with the other people in line at Tim Horton’s—I mean, in line for communion; and then when everyone has received, why, naturally, everyone sits down. There is no sense to this, no art of prayer. [boldface added]
I have registered such complaints and read others’. But he’s pretty good, isn’t he?
via Crisis Magazine
Had to dig maybe, but they don’t shrink from recognizing professionalism when it raises its head.
In the wake of l’affaire Putin, the usual suspects dumped on T. for being not sure he would not permit P’s people to question the man who was ambassador under Hillary when she was SecState and running money out of Russia for her and Bill’s so-called foundation. This guy erupts:
The irony of Hillary Clinton critiquing Trump’s lack of a strong defense of a U.S. ambassador was not lost on Benghazi survivor Kris Paronto. Paronto is a former U.S. Army Ranger and CIA security contractor who helped extract the body of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who lost his life when Islamic extremists raided his residence in Libya.
In total, four American lives were lost in the attack, including two members of Paronto’s team.
Paronto called Hillary “disgusting” for the comments. “Are you f*****g kidding m,e Hillary Clinton?!!!” Paronto tweeted, “You left Ambassador Stevens and us to die in Benghazi then spewed lie after lie to the family members of my dead teammates and to the world to cover it up and now you have the nerve to talk about defending diplomats?! You are disgusting!”
She’s just being Hillary, you know. You don’t? Work for the NY Times, do you?
via: The Daily Caller
Something like this makes me forgive Commonweal all its leftist faults. Read it, my friends, at Consider Me Lucky | Commonweal Magazine
. . . through his alter egos, the sock-’em-bustem Jesuit Spadaro and his Protestant partner in same from Argentina. His slash-and-burn friends who take no prisoners going after the demon prosperity, i.e. capitalism.
[Jesuit-run] ‘La Civiltà Cattolica’ rails against prosperity Gospel and its support for Trump [is] not shy about making the link between the prosperity gospel and the crisis of globalization — political, social and economic.
And how are things in Argentina, Your Holiness? Barter economy picking up, right? Here are the ladies at the barter market, for instance:
As inflation soars, Facebook drives trading in Argentina’s barter clubs
Most are women, some accompanied by children. Cardboard signs with their names scrawled in black marker hang from strings around their necks. They walk slowly around the old concrete platform yelling out the names of people they had agreed to trade with in a forum on Facebook (FB.O).
They are the face of a resurgent but little-reported phenomenon in the suburbs surrounding the Argentine capital – barter clubs.
The clubs have tens of thousands of members and are attracting hundreds more every week. They have become an unofficial economic indicator, showing the toll that soaring inflation and high unemployment are exacting on South America’s second-biggest economy.
Field hospital, anyone? What, no prosperity? I’ll be darned.
. . . while bishops slept, or rather found themselves putty in experts’ hands, knowing next to nothing about liturgy.
Blithe Spirit 