Well said, capturing why it serves the truth, giving equal time to the people who don’t own printing presses (or broadcast stations.

Nearly four decades after Broaddrick says Clinton raped her, she says that she feels like more people believe her story now than when she first came forward. Some of that is because of Donald Trump, who during the campaign described her encounter with Clinton using the word “rape.”

“When he said the word ‘rape’ on Hannity, it was like he was speaking directly to me. It was like he gave me permission to use the word too.”

The rest, she says, is because she’s learned to effectively use Twitter. She explained, “My statements aren’t filtered by the media. It gave me the power to do what I’m doing now. I’m not completely sold on President Trump tweeting, but I agree with him on fighting back against the media. That’s the part of me that says ‘keep up the tweeting!’”

Of course. It’s how he gets around the moguls.

via Juanita Broaddrick: Bill Clinton Is Why There Is A #MeToo Movement — And Why It Cut Me Out | The Daily Caller

I think this is the kind of miscreant behavior referred to by the chief in the item below.

A group of teens was seen pushing people into Lake Michigan near Navy Pier Thursday night.

The reports follow reported mayhem along beaches and Downtown streets last weekend as roving groups of teenagers caused trouble, forcing Chicago Police officers to try to corral their movements.

Go, CP officers.

via Chicago Sun-Times

Preventing their miscreant behavior seems even better idea. Stopping and questioning suspicious clusters?

via Chicago Sun-Times

Good man, Senator G. Focus on and doing his job. Iowa’s finest. Ongoing problem shows Dems in unusually bad light.

Very, very bad, that is, as opposed to very bad.

Senate Democrats have aggressively leveraged procedural mechanisms to slow the pace of confirmations, forcing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to limit the amount of Senate time expended on judgeships. Judiciary committee Democrats regularly exercise their prerogative to delay consideration of nominees by one week, while Democratic leadership has forced time-consuming cloture votes on many circuit court nominees, even those confirmed with bipartisan support.

For instance:

In one instance, Democrats forced cloture on the nomination of Donald Coggins Jr. to the federal trial court in South Carolina. Coggins was originally nominated to the post by former President Barack Obama. He was confirmed on a 96–0 vote.

I revise my very, very bad. Make it very, very, very bad.

via The Daily Caller

You wonder what’s going on at Mass? Inside worshipers’ heads?

Public opinion surveys have revealed that high percentages of Sunday Mass-goers do not hold, or perhaps never learned about, transubstantiation (the change of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist).

Depending on which faction of the Catholic fragment you belong to, you can chalk up that ignorance to either the collapse of Catholic schooling, the dumbing down of the liturgy, or even to the suppression during the 1970s of the “unconscious catechesis” that used to occur every time the most unlettered peasant knelt for the Host and reverently took it on his tongue from the blessed hands of a priest. 

Let’s hear it for correctly identifying a spade. Once you put the host on the hand, the mystery vanished.

via Catholic Thing

He got her going, she got him going.

He’d spoken of women out of control.

She:

“Who controls women? … You described yourself as a liberal and I think that a liberal doesn’t think that society controls women or men. … What is an out-of-control woman? What is this creature? How would we know when we’ve met one?” Ms. McElvoy shot back during a series of exchanges.

“I’m sure you met one in your life that acted towards you in a bullying in detestable manner,” Mr. Peterson replied. “It’s very difficult for women to cope with that because that don’t have any real recourse. And female bullying can be unbelievably vicious. It usually takes the shape of reputation destruction, innuendo and gossip. It’s well documented.”

“Only women? … Where is the data on innuendo and gossip?” Ms. McElvoy countered.

“Well, it’s among antisocial behavior among adolescents,” Mr. Peterson said. “It’s a well-documented field. People look at aggressive and anti-social behavior in women and in men, and in women it tends to take the expression of innuendo, gossip and reputation destruction. In men, it tends to take the form of outright physical aggression. There’s a whole literature on that. It’s not a surprise to anyone. This has been known for 30 years. [Italics added]

I saw this in the Jesuits (1950-1968), where non-violence almost always prevailed and there was a freedom of exchange among us that made some of us at times bolder than we would be where there was danger of being punched.

via Washington Times

“Under the radar” while talk is about arming teachers etc.

Demands to restrict firearms and beef up school security have dominated the debate following the shootings, but flying under the radar is the surge of interest in homeschooling as parents lose faith in the ability of public schools to protect students from harm.

And it’s not just the threat of school shootings. Christopher Chin, president of Homeschool Louisiana, said parents are also increasingly concerned about “the violence, the bullying, the unsafe environments.”

via Washington Times

Celebrating the dark side.

Philip Roth dead? Expelled, this genie of biting comedy? Inconceivable. He was always on the scene, and with each irrepressible new work seemed virtually to be making a scene. Uncontainable and unquenchable, he was a steady presence that could not be imagined as void.

Yet Stockholm shunned him. Of all the significant awards that could be conferred on Roth during his multilauded decades, only the Swedish dynamite inventor’s eluded him. Well, then: In the transformative perspective of Roth’s demise, let us reconsider.

It may be that the Nobel was never worthy of this iconoclastic satirist, wily cultural historian, sublime fictive ranter, comic tragedian, outraged citizen, contradictory wit, epic insulter and monumental imaginer.

How should those obtuse northland jurors, denizens of a frost-bitten society highly ranked for alcoholism and suicide, warm to the emotional temperature of the postwar Jewish Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, N.J., out of which the grandson of immigrants might emerge to become one of the most renowned American literary masters of his century?

It’s all in this vein, engaging to the end.

Roth’s shallow Jews, including his rabbis, are always and only creatures of sociology. And sociology, because it is collective, is caricature; and caricature is comedy; and comedy is zest. (When John Updike, catching up to the contemporary Jewish novel of that era, gave us Bech, a literary Jewish protagonist, it was a Jew wholly out of Roth—but without the zest.)

In life beyond fiction, Roth knew Jews of darker and denser dimension: the Israeli Aharon Appelfeld, who died earlier this year, and the Romanian, now American, Norman Manea, extraordinary writers and thinkers who as small boys of 8 and 5 were deported to Transnistria, a German killing center in Romania. Appelfeld and Mr. Manea met only as adult survivors, and it was through his singular championship of the suppressed and censored writers of Eastern Europe that Roth drew close to their fates. If Roth brought Kafka to Newark in one of his stories, it was because consciousness of Europe was already there.

In the loss of Philip Roth, we can hear a small sliding hisslike noise: the sound of a generation turning on its hinge. Gone are Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Malamud, Gaddis, Gass, Sontag, Wolfe, the household names, the headline names. Whoever comes next, there will be no one equipped with the dizzying laughter of Roth.

Not a wasted word.

Appreciation: Philip Roth – WSJ

Why does Francis keep having these conversations that has him saying something and not saying something at the same time?

Why doesn’t the Vatican press/news office deny what he’s supposed to have said? Why does Francis not lay into the supposed prevaricators? He’s generally not shy about laying into people.

How long will this kind of back-door point-making continue, assuming that’s what it is? And are we not justified in thinking that’s what it is. Again, he’s not shy about making points. Why not in these cases, denying or doubling down?

Shadow magisterium? Good turn of phrase, if nothing else. And it does not look like it’s nothing else.

via ‘Gay Doesn’t Matter’ Remark Continues ‘Shadow Magisterium’