Category: Blithe Spirit

Wuxtry, school aide falls on sword

Reading about the Chi Public Schools apparatchik who took the fall for the little list of clouted applicants to elite schools, various noteworthy items:

. . . Duncan ordered admissions requests tracked over several years, creating a lengthy and detailed compilation of politicians . . .

Whazis, tracked?  Either Trib copy editor did this or was so challenged by it, he gave up.  I refer to this sequence:

The Tribune revealed earlier this week that Duncan ordered admissions requests tracked over several years, creating a lengthy and detailed compilation of politicians and influential business people who intervened on behalf of children during his tenure.

Look.  Can’t a newspaper be clear and concise and punchy?  Apparently not.

Then this, which seems to be a diminishing of the important story the Trib broke a few days ago:

The lists, used mostly in appeals cases, also show inquiries from politically unconnected parents. [How many?]

There is no evidence that principals were forced to admit unqualified students. Indeed, many applicants were still rejected after powerful patrons became involved.

Crazy.  A reader might ask, “So what’s the problem?” 

Care and prudence is one thing, pulling back Uriah Heep-like is quite another.

What also of this?

The girls were not accepted to Whitney Young, because of low test scores.

Were not accepted to?  Not by?  Or at, assuming by someone there, say, the principal?  Whazis accepted to business?

The quotes are good, supporting the obvious conclusion that this guy fell on his sword for his old buddy Arne Duncan.

The Rev. Susan Johnson, senior minister at Hyde Park Union Church who has known Pickens since childhood, said: “To sacrifice someone of his caliber and race and gender is just such a waste of talent.”

And gender?  What’s that about?  Race we get: it’s standard racialism away with which no white person could get.  But what’s the gender business?  Black male achievers so rare, or what?

Then we have an “unwieldy” bureaucracy at the Chi Board of Ed?  So stated by the reporters.  You can’t wield that bureacracy for love or money, it just won’t be wielded.  Instead “tangled”?  How’s corrupt and incompetent?  Politically infested.  Come on, Trib peoples, say something.  It won’t kill you and it could save a subscription or two.

More to the point of apparatchik falling on sword:

“David was a very honest and loyal lieutenant to Arne Duncan,” said Bill Gerstein, a high school principal and longtime friend of Pickens. “He was loyal to a fault and honest to a fault. In organizations, oftentimes the people who do the work and follow through on initiatives — they’re the first ones to go.”

I love the honest to a fault.  He didn’t lie. 

Then way at the end of the story, in hard, not digital copy:

Through a spokesman, Duncan declined to comment.

Of course not.

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"Wimpy" is good

Sister Helena Burns likes “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.”  Calls it

the best movie of 2010 so far. Everything about it is sterling: the acting, the story, the dialogue, the soundtrack, the pacing, the humor, the editing. Everything clicks and pops.

Having just yesterday bailed out from true-life attitude and behaviors to watch “Bounty Hunter” at the Lake — was well rewarded with untrue-to-life stuff as to cops, robbers, etc. (so what? who needs the real thing?) and with wise theme commentary on marriage and what makes it work: the Aniston woman and Gerard Butler quite good at this part of this basically feel-good movie — I am specially alert to this un-wimpy review.

“Diary of a Wimpy Kid” avoids all kinds of movie-making tropes, and is a surprisingly fresh and profound take on young people’s development of character. There is no snarkiness or smart-aleckiness. Just kids as kids trying to survive and make their way in life, getting involved in downright hilarious, yet not too impossible, adventures.

It is nonstop entertainment — including adolescent boy gross-out humor — but it’s never quick and cheap. It’s all expertly folded in to a fully-fleshed out story. Every scene deftly advances character and plot.

She’s not bad herself.  Her copy moves along, this puiling out stops of praise is not her usual approach, hence is more credible here.  I will have to catch a Holy Week matinee of it.  Does that mean I did not give up movies for Lent?  ‘Fraid so.  I’m not the boy I was in the early ‘40s, no.

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Health-scare

Beginning to clear out the augean stables of various note pads strewn throughout various pockets, desks, tables including dining room, shelves, and other points of interest:

* Old friend Bob K., Democrat leaning Socialist if not there already, quotes Scripture to his purpose of selling the then in ramming process now accompli Obama-scare, a.k.a.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act

 (not kidding), while dwelling also on plight of poor.  To him I say, as to old friend Joan, who buttonholed me on OP Avenue some months back and recommended my reading the Bible, your unimpeachable motivation should not be confused with strategy. 

You assume Obama-scare is good for poor people, even as public school and other public budgets are slashed because of a dearth of public money.  Tax more, you say, but there’s an end to that somewhere, as businesses cut back under tax burdens and the nation heads for big fiscal trouble. 

Bob, Joan, all you good Christian and other kind-hearted people, consider what you want done to the common weal.  Your commendable impulses are getting us all in big trouble, especially the poorest among us, as I told you, Bob, in our recent email exchange.  I won’t say “repent” — I’m not one to offer or demand that alternative — but I do say rethink your position.

* More later from the stables . . . .

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Root canal, anyone?

This anti-Coulter protester thinks she’s at the dentist:

Canadian girl

It’s in Ottawa, where

Concerns for “public safety” forced the cancellation of American conservative commentator Ann Coulter’s speaking engagement at the University of Ottawa Tuesday night.

Hate speech, you know. 

Celebrated author Mark Steyn [was] summoned [in December of ‘07] to appear before two Canadian judicial panels on charges linked to his book “America Alone.”

The book, a No. 1 bestseller in Canada, argues that Western nations are succumbing to an Islamist imperialist threat. The fact that charges based on it are proceeding apace proves his point.

Well if you don’t want a root canal, how about a little fascism?

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On the road to Rome

The Canadians are coming, the Canadians are coming!

A group with three churches in the Ottawa area has taken up the Vatican’s offer of a special legal structure enabling disillusioned Anglicans to return to Rome.

The Anglican Catholic Church of Canada — a denomination already closely aligned with Catholic precepts — is the first in Canada to approach the Vatican like this.

As with the others, they keep their liturgy, their prayer books, and their married clergy, operating under “a separate set of rules for the group, much as [has been the case] with Eastern Rite Catholics.”

For the latter, in Chicago go to the Ukrainian Catholic church just off Chicago Avenue, in Ukrainian Village, and have a chat with the Roman Catholic priest, as #2 Son and I did a few years back on Father’s Day, until he begged leave to get back to wife and kiddies at home, it having been a long day at the office, I mean in the sanctuary.

That’s Sts. Volodymyr and Olha, 2245 W. Superior, 312–829-5209.  There’s also St. Joseph the Betrothed, 5000 N. Cumberland, 773–625–4805.

The advantage of such a liturgy, behind giving a chance to brush up on your Cyrillic alphabet, is you don’t have to listen to a priest spelling everything out but can surrender yourself to the mystery of it all, mystery being the lost child of liturgical practice in the wake of Vatican Two.

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Catholics vs. Stupak: Bishops?

Brian Burch for CatholicVoteAction.org about Stupak’s giving in on abortion: “We were betrayed.”

Moreover, in a call to arms:

Over the next 7 months, we will be preparing for the November elections.

Any politician who supported this bill must pay a price. And that price is ultimately paid at the ballot box.

The backers of this health care bill never gave up. They fought for nearly a year against public opinion, and wore down their opponents until they got what they wanted.

We must resolve to do the same.

Remember what happened last night.

Remember how you feel right now.

November will be here before you know it.

This means opposing Democrats.  Will the bishops be aboard?

===============

Later: Not unless they debark the ObamaCare Express, to judge by what Cliff Kincaid says :

While commentators speculate as to whether Stupak was in favor of health care legislation all along and was always intending to vote for it, the real attention should be on the Bishops. They were playing the double-game, acting as if the legislation had to be toughened-up in order to be more pro-life, while insisting it be expanded to cover more immigrants. They were sounding conservative and liberal at the same time. All along they were active players because, in the end, they wanted to see national health care legislation passed.

Ouch.

(Thanks to Nicholas Stix for the heads-up on this.)

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Sunday afternoon at the Church of Nice

Caught Rev. Donald Senior yesterday at Catholic Theological Union.  Was one of 200 (I’d guess) devotees at this multi-religious-community seminary-cum-religious-ed-degree-granter to some 415 men and women, 115 of whom are men headed for priesthood.  It’s in Hyde Park, blocks from U. of Chicago.  Senior is a longtime New Testament scholar, president of CTU for 22 years, member of the Passionists.  Hence C.P. after his name, for Congregation of the Passion.

Genial fellow to beat all, clearly an excellent front man for an institution sponsored and supported by 32 religious communities, including his own, the Passionists — which has a paltry five seminarians in attendance, none of them American.  The Passionists have no American candidates for the priesthood, a fact that the priest (whose name I didn’t get carefully enough to give it to you), whose task is to ride herd on their CTU sems, was at a loss to explain.  In Latin America there are bumper crops, he said, standing in a third-floor reception area in CTU’s new building.

I noted that some conservative organizations and dioceses are loaded with candidates while the Chicago archdiocese, for instance, has very few Americans and fewer Chicagoans in its ordination classes.  But the Latin Americans are not conservative, this priest said, agreeing with me about Americans. 

Letting his hair down a bit, he complained somewhat about the new Passionists, who haven’t the same kind of dedication to religious obedience he and other older priests take for granted.  They have their preferences as to where they might be stationed and announce them, whereas the older ones generally have been willing to try something they hadn’t thought of at all, in the process learning they can do things they hadn’t thought of at all.

We visitors, lay people and religious sisters, average age 70 (Fr. Senior’s age) as a rough guess (with Irish faces everywhere: you’d think the boat had just landed, except for the evident prosperity), had heard Senior lecture in an hour of utter charm about the bodily resurrection of Jesus.  He shot down early in his talk the ballyhooed “Lost Tomb of Jesus” documentary contention by James Cameron, of “Titanic” and “Avatar,” fame, citing an Israeli archeologist who said the bones he found (for filming) of Jesus, Mary Magdalen and the kids, while gladdening the heart of Dan Brown of DaVinci Code fame, were anything but, then addressing the question, what if we had the bones of Jesus?  What if he didn’t rise?  (A hotter question than Senior admitted: some years back, a chair-holding Jesuit theology teacher at Loyola U., whom I knew quite well, hedged on the question in a telephone conversation — the last he and I had, unfortunately.)

So doing, he raised from the dead (and criticized the life out of) a controversy from newspapers of a few years back, along the way staking out more or less scholarly claims to what theologians once called “incarnational” theology.  By now, however, you’d think we Catholics, even septuagenarians with time for and interest in Sunday-afternoon mass and lecture, would be fully aware of ours being a religious faith that takes matter, i.e., this life, seriously.

But his was less a scholarly dissertation than a meditation on data and belief, a riff on various Scripture passages and commentary, ancient and recent, in no way bringing coals to Newcastle for his eager audience.  It didn’t hurt that he had the nicely timed quip down cold as can be, which with his winning smile (never far from his Irish face beneath perfect white hair) drew many laughs and smiles — “Holy mackerel!” he threw into a description of the risen Jesus cooking fish for the apostles.  On old joke, I’m sure, but the timing was perfect.

For the same scene, he had Jesus proffering “tender” forgiveness to Peter, who had denied him three times, three times asking him at this lakeside barbecue if he loved him.  Tenderness suffused Senior’s account, in the lecture and in  the 20–minute-or-so homily during the mass that followed, so much so that one drew from his depiction a near-feminine Jesus.

Indeed, the mass, at a simple table next to a makeshift pulpit which had earlier been his lectern, featured extended vocal performances by a young woman and flute accompaniment by another.  The service, which moved at a funereal pace, seemed geared toward softening any rampant masculinity that might still be lurking in the hearts of Catholic worshipers, as did the lecture, delivered as it was smoothly, even soothingly.  This was the very much the Church of Nice.

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Tea party on SW Side

Here’s my thought for the day: We Illinoisans, we Cook County-ans, we Oak Parkers are complicit in yesterday’s Historic Fiasco.  Our people are in the thick of it: Obama, Axelrod, Emanuel, Durbin, et al.  We make not a pretty sight, from coffees for Obama to Loop hotel fund-raisers, supporting the Left with nickels and dollars because that’s where the action is.  Tsk, tsk.

Not all of us, not all the time, however, and a different game is afoot, as Astute Reader reports from a Southwest Side Tea Party gathering yesterday:

The tea party fundraiser was spirited and friendly. Just down-home neighborhood folks, from different parishes, even a North Sider. Some NRA guys fighting Chicago’s gun law, some firefighters, pro-lifers, vets, one young conservative pro-life candidate named Carl Segvich, who will be running against Mayor Daley’s brother for some office in the 11th District in November. Very nice articulate guy who looks like a young Joe Mantegna.

There was an elderly gentleman there, John Walsh, who is funding two buses from this area to the April 15 Tax Day rally in Daley Plaza. His organization is Americans for Life.
 
The young woman who organized the tea party (with a great team of helpers with food and door prizes) is from my neighborhood — about 10 blocks away! She is great and is getting a bus together for both of Glenn Beck’s events coming up in the summer and has a block of rooms at DC hotels.
 
Have you heard of the book The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party? David Horowitz is one of the authors. A woman had it and let us read the last paragraph — part of the master plan. I’m going to look for it.
 
The spooky stuff is reality with Soros. It says he bought election officials — the position that determines election run-offs — in seven states where the vote would be close in the last election — and that’s how Al Franken won.
 
We all sang God Bless America at the end. (It ran right on time.) I was pumped. It was a 40s-50s spirit.
So there’s hope.
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Dems make history one way or another

Dem Dems come up with ‘em, don’t they?

Key House Democrat: “There Are No Rules Here … We Make Them Up As We Go Along”

Charitably, can we chalk that up to being unable to express oneself clearly?  On the other hand . . .

Carter made him a federal judge in 1979.  Two years later he

was charged with accepting a $150,000 bribe in exchange for a lenient sentence and a return of seized assets for 21 counts of racketeering by Frank and Thomas Romano, and of perjury in his testimony about the case. He was acquitted by a jury after his alleged co-conspirator, William Borders, refused to testify in court (resulting in a jail sentence for Borders).

He wasn’t off the hook yet:

In 1988, the Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives took up the case, and Hastings was impeached for bribery and perjury by a vote of 413-3. He was then convicted in 1989 by the United States Senate, becoming the sixth federal judge in the history of the United States to be removed from office by the Senate. The vote on the first article was 69 for and 26 opposed, providing five votes more than the two-thirds of those present that were needed to convict. The first article accused the judge of conspiracy. Conviction on any single article was enough to remove the judge from office. The Senate vote cut across party lines, with U.S. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont voting to convict his fellow party member, and U.S. Senator Arlen Specter voting to acquit.

It could have been worse for him:

The Senate had the option to forbid Hastings from ever seeking federal office again, but did not do so. Alleged co-conspirator, attorney William Borders went to jail again for refusing to testify in the impeachment proceedings, but was later given a full pardon by President Bill Clinton on his last day in office.

But not for his buddy Borders.

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