The man knows how to argue. Keeps his eye on the ball, rarely misses.

Argument here for K. as a strong pick.

Obvious, but good, point.

“This police academy is a shiny object that Rahm Emanuel can point to and say, `I’m all about police reform.’ It’s for political purposes — not functional purposes,“ McCarthy said.

Thing is, I can, perhaps naively, think some of the candidates are capable of having non-political purposes, but not Rahm.

With my first Chicago mayoral vote ever coming up, I find myself eager to participate.

via Chicago Sun-Times

He’s been dipping into Robert Frost lately.

ROME – Closing an ecumenical encounter with Christian leaders from the Middle East, Pope Francis on Saturday said that “truces maintained by walls and displays of power will not lead to peace,” only a concrete desire to engage in dialogue will work.

Seriously, folks, can’t he come up with something not market-tested? OK words abound, do they not?

(Robert Frost? Here. He could do worse, I grant you. Yet and still . . . )

Also, how were them dialogs with Palestinians led (a while back) by the likes of Yassir Arafat and friends? Intransigents all.

via Pope: Truces imposed by force won’t bring peace to Middle East

When in curial appointments, as in its being Italian bishops uber alles.

via MondayVatican

Boiler plate stuff he comes up with periodically.

Incontrovertible but hardly in a class with his climate-warning rhetoric,

Pope Francis warns against turning Earth into vast pile of ‘rubble, deserts and refuse’

Which I liken to the long-bearded, white-gowned guy carrying an “End is near” sign. I swear, he’s made an act of faith in this business.

Yay.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled on Friday that Marquette University had wrongly fired a conservative professor after he criticized a colleague who he believed to be curtailing student discussion of gay marriage.

The court found that Marquette violated the academic-freedom clause in professor John McAdams’ contract when it fired him over a 2014 blog post accusing a graduate student of refusing to allow undergraduates to express opposition to gay marriage during her class. As part of the ruling the university has been ordered to reinstate McAdams and provide him damages, including back pay.

“The Wisconsin Supreme Court has struck a major blow in favor of free speech,” McAdams’ attorney, Rick Esenberg, of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Now what to do about the wretchedly wrong the decision-makers in this Jesuit-connected university? At the very least, they will bear watching.

via National Review

Meanwhile, Your Holiness, how’s that curia reform coming?

The “mafia” in question being the cabal of cardinals who met at St. Gallen, Switzerland before the election of Benedict. It’s a term one of them used jokingly for themselves.

They are described as having engineered the election of Francis, with a goal of remaking the church, in which they were thwarted by Benedict but are being helped by Francis.

They include . . . 

. . . ominously scandal-ridden figures like Cardinal Danneels, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick—the timeline was estimated at just four or five years to “make the Church over again.”

At this point,

October’s youth synod is about finishing the old business of the St. Gallen mafia. It will mark four years since Archbishop Bruno Forte crafted a manipulated synodal report on the “precious support” found in same-sex relationships—released the very day that two Italian political parties backed homosexual unions.

Pope Francis approved the text before it was published, and his homily that day excoriated “doctors of the law”—an “evil generation”—for resisting the “God of surprises.” Archbishop Forte, meanwhile, declared to the media that “describ[ing] the rights of people living in same-sex unions” is a matter of “being civilized.”

More here via Crisis Magazine.

. . . in a long article extremely well done, full of links to sources.

Just keep in mind, the church has survived worse. Though mostly from outside enemies, however.

One Jesuit to another: there’s something you left out.

So in a trenchant First Things review of the Martin book, Father Paul Mankowski, SJ, asks it:

Is sodomy a sin? Perplexed readers of Fr. James Martin, SJ’s latest book will want to put the question to him, if only to understand why he felt it important to write at all.

Remember, please, there are Jesuits and there are Jesuits. In this corner . . .

via Catholic Culture

Judge Raymond Kethledge an originalist, as in this recent opinion “with a direct invocation of originalism.”

“Faithful adherence to the Constitution and its amendments requires us to examine their terms as they were commonly understood when the text was adopted and ratified, rather than applying meaning derived years later that may weaken constitutional rights,” the opinion reads.

Which is to distinguish things that change from those that don’t. Key to our survival as the nation we have become.

via  The Daily Caller