Rep. Davis last April at Village Hall. Held off until he ran for county board president (he didn’t) and then until he ran for mayor (he’s not doing that), presented now to voters in the Illinois 7th as maybe something to keep in mind when redistricting comes around . . .
Presenting Danny Davis, once gearing up to be future mayor of Chicago but for several weeks now not, as he presented himself last spring, when he was running for Congress and in process of winning 80% of the vote on Chicago’s West Side and several western suburbs.
He is his regular folksy self, tossing off more or less relevant observations in answer to questions, leaving connections sometime to the listener’s imagination. . . . .
What Chicago needs most from its first new mayor in 22 years is a clean break with the past.
While all the top contenders to succeed Richard M. Daley are political insiders of one sort or another, Rahm Emanuel is the most independent. He’s a product of Democratic politics but not of the City Hall machine.
Etc., including his being a mean s.o.b. (not quoting Crain’s) who will have to deal with others of his ilk. The public employees’ unions, for instance.
Meanwhile, Gery Chico unfortunately continues to pile up endorsements from those very unions, which is not a good sign.
Parish Coordinator of Religious Ed writes in the bulletin that an Old Testament reading is “in” (?) 640-609 BCE (BC). What the heck? No more plain BC (Before Christ)? And insistence on BCE (Before the Common Era), which has appeared before in the same bulletin?
Some fussbudget there is who doesn’t like that BC and has gotten to the parish staff. Or it’s the latest idea at the Institute of Pastoral Studies. Same with AD (anno Domini, Latin for year of the Lord), as in the second reading, Paul to the Corinthians, in 54 CE (AD), CE being, you guessed it, the Common Era.
We are being educated to do away with the B.C. and A.D. designations, before and after Christ, maybe so as not to offend the non-Christians who have been putting up with them for a long time but have finally decided they can’t take it any more. Maybe some other reason, one that makes sense.
From the Sycamore Trust, “an alarming recent study”:
[M]any students become pro-choice at Notre Dame. By the time they graduate, there are as many pro-choice students (42%) as in the general population. Among the reasons may be mixed signals from the faculty.
Though the University declared itself pro-life in the wake of the Obama episode, there is reason to think that a large proportion of the faculty is pro-choice, and prominent members of the Theology faculty have been outspoken in their dissent from Church teaching on abortion.
Indeed, the nation’s leading “Catholic” pro-choice advocate has welcomed the recent public dissent from Church teaching by one of Notre Dame’s most widely known ethicists.
Give Notre Dame a pro-lifer, get back a pro-choicer. Read about it here.
If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain, Judge Vinson wrote.
It’s a you-buy-this-or-else proposition, a no-go.
Now if it were being ordered to buy a good dictionary, I could be more open-minded. On second thought, not even for such an important item as that.
Bill Jimenez said the school noticed that black students were not performing as well as other students, and that research had shown that same-race classes with strong same-race role models led to better academic results.
Mr Jimenez admitted that no other students were divided by race at the school, but he added that academic data dictated the school take a different approach with its black students.
This is old research too. Shelby Steele‘s identical-twin brother Claude at U. of Mich. had results years ago showing that being with whites in class, that is, competing with them, threw black students off their feed. It’s here, I think, in a 1992 Atlantic article.
Or so I understood it at the time. Claude Steele chalks it up to stereotypes that are internalized by black students. A fair translation of that is their fear of competing because they don’t think they can succeed. Better that they be by themselves, at least some of the time, so they can relax and gain confidence.
The Sean Connery movie about the reclusive white writer who goads a young black kid to write well applies here. The Connery character pushed the kid, stood for no nonsense, and in the end stood up for him vs. white teachers. Standard white teachers, I may add, but the point is still a good one. Everyone has his demons, why not black kids?
The Lancaster principal is calling for a mere six minutes a day, 20 minutes twice a month, by the way. It’s not a full-scale preferential-treatment program in which one thing after another is tried, frantically by school administrators, teachers etc.
Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke today rejected the notion that she should recuse herself from deciding on the residency case involving mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel.
“Aren’t we beyond that? Women have minds of their own. We have spouses in every kind of business. Are we returning to the days of Myra Bradwell?” she said, referring to the Illinois suffragette who was initially denied the right to practice law because she was a woman. She went on to become the state’s first female lawyer.
She’s saying the husband would not be similarly advised if roles were reversed?
A couple wages a “constant battle” about whether to keep the door to the kitchen open: the man, it transpires, comes from a working-class family which habitually congregated in the kitchen; for the woman, the area was reserved for cooking, and the smell of food seeping into the rest of the apartment was deemed a “vulgarity”.
More to the point of daily life as we know it:
Touched upon (but sadly then forgotten) [by authors Billy Ehn and Orvar Lofgren] is the notion that routines of “doing nothing” have evolved from productive to consumptive ones. In the past, we might have sat with the embroidery or in the woodshed; now we are more likely to be found semi-comatose in front of the television.
On the other hand, a word for the assembly line:
Industrial society has provided plenty of scope for “doing nothing”. As the authors note, Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, enjoyed factory work because “I could daydream all day”.
To be perfectly frank, the mass does that for me, which is one reason I like it quiet and uneventful. Not quite daydream, but a sort of lightly reminding myself of its being the sacrifice for the sins of the world, including mine.
59. The reprobated practice by which priests, deacons or the faithful here and there alter or vary at will the texts of the Sacred Liturgy that they are charged to pronounce, must cease. For in doing thus, they render the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy unstable, and not infrequently distort the authentic meaning of the Liturgy. [italics added]
I like the reasoning, but I take special note of the date. This issue is neither brand new nor dating back several decades and so no longer current in the eyes of Vatican detectives and judiciary.
Definitely more later on this, as instances pile up. As I said before, for those who pay attention, it’s annoying, to say the least.
