Author: Jim Bowman

Jim Bowman covered religion 1968-78 for the Chicago Daily News, since then has written books, articles, etc., mostly on corporate history but also on religion (Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968), and more recently on politics (Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters -- Lulu.com, Kindle). Longtime Oak Park, Illinois, resident, he lives now on Chicago's North Side, where four of his and Winnie's six children live close by.

The little fooler in the white house

The White House says this budget will mean $4 trillion in savings over the next decade—but that’s a result of gimmicks and accounting tricks. Roughly $2 trillion have already been enacted, while Obama counts $1 trillion from money that would never be spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as savings. The White House also takes $1.2 trillion of cuts from last summer’s Budget Control Act, and replaced them with tax hikes — calling this additional savings.

via Obama’s irresponsible budget – POLITICO.com Print View.

Lay Catholics can do it, official institutions cannot. Oh?

What set Limbaugh off, as below.

At the prospect that institutions associated with the Catholic Church would be required to offer to their employees health insurance covering contraception and abortifacients, the bishops, priests, and nuns scream bloody murder.

 

But they raise no objection at all to the fact that Catholic employers and corporations, large and small, owned wholly or partially by Roman Catholics will be required to do the same.

Etc., via American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil – Ricochet.com.

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.