Category: Blithe Spirit

Illinois a toss-up for U.S. senate

This race remains close:

The U.S. Senate race in Illinois is now a virtual toss-up, with Democratic State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias holding a slight 44% to 41% lead over Republican Congressman Mark Kirk.

Tough nut for Repubs to crack, this Illinois.  It’s also blue and heading for fiscal trouble.  Fear not.  The incumbent Dem governor has the answer:

SPRINGFIELD – — Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn pitched a 33 percent income tax increase Wednesday, framing the debate as a choice between finding more money or hurting schoolchildren.

Ah yes, the children.  Teacher unions too, but forget that.

In any case, we have here the marvelous religious-style faith in taking money out of private hands and giving it to our noble, trusted Bureau-Dems.

Nothing’s too good for children and poor people, you see.  But it’s a misplaced faith:

There is a distinct pattern throughout American history: When tax rates are reduced, the economy’s growth rate improves and living standards increase.

Good tax policy has a number of interesting side effects. For instance, history tells us that tax revenues grow and “rich” taxpayers pay more tax when marginal tax rates are slashed.

This means lower income citizens bear a lower share of the tax burden – a consequence that should lead class-warfare politicians to support lower tax rates.

This will never play with Dem netroots, SEIU, IEA and the like.  So?

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Illinois for Brady

Hello, everybody in Illinois and all the ships at sea: Brady is up by 10 over Quinn!

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters in the state finds State Senator Bill Brady leading [Gov.] Quinn 47% to 37%. Six percent (6%) prefer some other candidate, and nine percent (9%) are undecided.

It’s the first week there’s been a Republican candidate.  Brady won by a whopping 193 votes over an opponent who’s on board now with his candidacy.

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Spiritual things

I’m being dragged into things of the spirit, even of the (Holy) Spirit, running across (a) a blog like this [and (b), see below]:

Here are the readings for 3/4/10. [Micah 7, Luke 15]

I have been struggling with this reading for the last couple of days. I thought I had this great post all ready to type up. But then something happened…

Spiritual director

This is his “spiritual director,” and “This is what he look[s] like when I tell him I haven’t been praying,” says the blogger, “Louis,” of “Brooklyn, New York, United States,” a 25–year-old social work student who is “in the middle of applying [for entry into the Jesuits.”  They “can still tell [him] ‘No,’” he says.  (Hat tip, Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit.)

The blog is Momma said . . . What a waste. On it he quotes Joyce Brothers up front:

“Love comes when manipulation stops; when you think more about the other person than about his or her reactions to you. When you dare to reveal yourself fully. When you dare to be vulnerable.”

Not a Brothers fan myself, but the guy presents arresting commentary on Scripture and  bizarre and telling stuff to go with it — photo-shopped, he says — as of that curmudgeonly spiritual director above.

And this to go with the Canaanite woman’s plea to Jesus, “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters”:

Dpan743l

What’s (b)?  A facebook fellow who also cites Scripture.  He knows of me through another guy who ran county board president-elect Preckwinkle’s campaign whom I also have not met but with whom I exchanged pleasantries during her campaign, in which I supported her opponent O’Brien. 

I just hope this new “friend” doesn’t cite Scripture to his purpose, a la the devil per Antonio in “Merchant,” because he’s a “progresive” Democrat, it seems, with no purpose I can endorse. 

After all,

An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart:
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

Ah, the demands on one living in a pluralistic society.

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Wheeling Jesuit trustee moves to national post

One of the three trustees who ousted fellow Jesuit Julio Giulietti from the presidency of Wheeling Jesuit University last August has a new job.

University of Detroit Mercy President Gerard L. Stockhausen, S.J., Ph.D., will assume the position of Executive Assistant to the President of the Jesuit Conference and Director of Planning for the Jesuit Conference in Washington, D.C., effective this summer.

The Jesuit Conference serves as the national organization of the 10 Jesuit provinces in the United States.

In this new role, Stockhausen will serve as chief of staff, advising and working closely with the President of the Jesuit Conference and his staff to lead, direct, and coordinate a series of planning projects that will implement the apostolic choices made by the national and international Society of Jesus over the last few years.

Stockhausen SJ

Stockhausen chaired the five-man, infrequently convened Wheeling Jesuit board of trustees.  On last July 25 in an email, he called

a special meeting of the WJU Board of Trustees by conference call at 1:45 PM EDT on August 5. The only agenda item will be to discuss any action(s) taken by the Board of Directors at its August 5 meeting, and to take whatever action the Board of Trustees needs to as a result of action(s) taken by the Board of Directors.

At this meeting of the trustees — not attended by one of them (Giulietti on vacation) and apparently not by another (Edward Glynn, whose questions about both board’s intentions leading up to the meetings had gone unanswered) — the three-man majority, informed that the Directors had not fired the president, did so on their own.

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What did they hear and when did they hear it?

Here’s how Chi Trib told about three witnesses telling Cicero cops about the Valentine’s Day fire-setters, boldface added:

Two days after the fire, three people reported to Cicero police that they had heard Myers and Comier discuss burning down the building, authorities said. One of the witnesses agreed to wear a wire and record conversations between the two men, according to court documents.

Same thing, Sun-Times:

Two days after the blaze, three people told Cicero police they overheard Myers and Comier talking about their part in the fire. Investigators wired one person up, and that person recorded a series of conversations with the two defendants over five days, . . . .

Me, I read the Trib story first and wondered when they had overheard (more precise than heard, hence better communication) M. & C.  They reported two days after the fire, but they had heard?  When?

Then I read S-T, its overheard and talking about their part in the fire, vs. discuss burning down the building, as if they had yet to do it, and “of course,” I said:  They heard it after the fire.  And I continued with the story, which I found satisfactory if gruesome.

Another difference.  Trib on the perpetrators’ vulgarities:

“Where the (expletive) did you get that I’m going to get you $15,000?” Lacy quoted Myers saying. “At the best you get $5,000.”

and

In one taped conversation, [Comier] explained how he ignited the blaze with a mixture of gas and oil that would mask the accelerant’s smell, according to documents.

“I dumped it on there, threw a match and that was it,” he is accused of saying. “I thought this (expletive) out for too long.”

S-T, offering better detail:

Comier was recorded saying he set the fire “in a different way,” blending oil and gasoline, which he believed would hide the gas smell.

“I thought this s— out for too long, man,” Comier said, according to Lacy.

and

Myers and Comier apparently had different ideas about Comier’s compensation from the insurance money, according to the transcript Lacy read.

“Where the f— did you get that I’m going to get you $15,000?” Myers is caught on tape telling Comier, Lacy said. “At the best you get $5,000. At the least you get $3,000.”

Now.  Why make the reader supply the (fucking) expletive?  It’s a matter of smooth, rapid comprehension, which S-T facilitates.

Yet another thing, same exchanges.  S-T account is richer in detail and directness, which if you don’t see, I’m not going to bother to explain.  Composition by committee at Trib?  Could be.  Three bylines there are, plus two more acknowledgments at the end:

Stacy St. Clair and Gerry Smith are Tribune reporters. Victoria Pierce is a freelance reporter. Tribune reporter Ray Gibson and freelancer Joseph Ruzich also contributed to this report.

S-T?  Either somebody on rewrite is being overlooked or “KARA SPAK Staff Reporter” is Da Woman on this one, all alone, tapping out something readable. 

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Wheeling Jesuit in court

Wheeling Jesuit responds in Catherine Smith termination case [here and here]:

Wheeling Jesuit’s response, filed in Ohio County Circuit Court in February, argued the school is a private entity and receives less than 35 percent of its funding from the state and thus is not subject to whistleblower laws.

The school also denied misusing the federal grant money, saying that “… the federal grants were administered in accordance with and in compliance with contractual agreements.”

In addition, Wheeling Jesuit also denied allegations that the school consolidated departments as a pretext for terminating Smith’s employment. It denied allegations that Smith had been slandered by her superiors, that she had been unfairly terminated or that the school had acted with the intent of inflicting emotional distress.

Whistleblower law does not apply, no misuse of NASA funds, no wrongful termination.

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Rahm v. Barack's altar servers

Jonah Goldberg in Chi Trib discusses the clash of idealism and realism in the Obama White House, where the true believers clash with Rahm Emanuel. Obama

wants to be “transformative” like Ronald Reagan. But such a transformation requires an electorate willing and capable of being transformed. Obama and his acolytes misread the public, thinking voters were as worshipful as they were.

Some of us never were, but lots were. Trouble is for the true B’s,

Emanuel’s understanding of the political landscape puts him in the reality-based community. And that is a community the Obama cult refuses to join.

It’s just as well.  Either way, it’s bad for the U.S., whether more or less socialism.  The former is not passing, as we know.  The latter might, and that would be very bad.

Changing the Eric Zorn subject

‘Swipe fees’ a hidden tax on the poor, most of all,

says Eric Zorn in Chi Trib, according to his columnar headline, which engages me not, mainly because I find myself distracted by a theme that pops uncontrolled into my head, namely that so many things are hidden taxes on poor and rich and us in between that I cannot count them.

Start with inflationary spending and money-making, that is, printing of it, by federal govt.  It’s such an old issue that I hesitate to raise it in such august company as Eric Z., but inflation cheapens the money we have and we lose buying power, which I can safely aver is what the economy is all about.

I surely missed Z’s earlier column about inflation and when I get a minute or two I will find it . . . .

Inspired by experience

Sun-Times corrected this boo-boo, which can be found here, at a Google search page and was not wrong in hard copy: “It was Devine design.”

Yes, there was a state’s attorney named Devine, but no, it was not his design for Otis McDonald to become lead complainant in the case v. Chi’s gun ordinance in the U.S. Supreme Court.  McD had divinity in mind, not the immediate past state’s attorney.

He and the ordinance and why he’s fighting it with help of “gun lobby” people is told in a quite good piece today by Mark Konkol, one of S-T’s hard-at-work conveyors of hard reporting.

McD has had enough and isn’t taking it any more, that’s why.  He’s a 21st-century urban hero who looks back on his sharecropper mother in Louisiana who cashed in her piggy bank, all $18, to buy him a ride to Chi in 1951, when  he was 17, so he could find, that is make, for himself a better life.

He became a janitor at U. of Chi, making “waves on campus” by applying for a promotion to building engineer when no blacks were applying because it just wasn’t done.  Now in his S. Side, Morgan Park neighborhood home, where he lives with his wife and daughter and has grandchildren as visitors, he is standing up to be counted as one who would be armed.

As a kid in Louisiana — seven years old — he went into the woods and bagged all manner of wild creatures who could be eaten and skinned.

Out there by myself. I’d get me some rabbits, squirrels, ‘coons, opossums,

he told Konkol.

When a kid tried to break into his garage, he levelled his long gun at him and counselled him henceforward to stay away, which the kid did.

But when three guys blocked his car on his way to the Jewel, “cussing … saying, ‘I’ll put you down, you old gray-haired mothers-and-such; I’ll put you down,” because he’d done the good-citizen thing as Mayor Daley recommends, calling cops on gun-toters earlier, he had no way to defend himself.  He wants that to change, so it’s McDonald vs. the city (and my own Oak Park, piggy-backing on Chi) at the high court.

The mayor?  He wishes he could get him to “feel and see what” he sees.

”Maybe he could come here and spend the night, especially during the summer, and listen to what I listen to out my window. If he could, and he was open to that, he would see what’s really going on in his city … and maybe he would understand where I’m coming from.”

Something like that would win some votes too.  Daley should take note.

Let no person call it father

The longtime resident priest at our parish has his own way of saying the mass, subbing out references to God the Father, for instance, as in this “doxology” or invocation of the Trinity:

P: Through him, with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, in, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever.

To which the people say “Amen.” This is the “Great Amen” meant to affirm our trinitarianism.

The resident, however, says it this way, and the pastor today said it this way too, apparently brought around by the example of the older man:

P: Through him, with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, in, all glory and honor is yours, almighty God, for ever and ever.

This version sidesteps the fatherhood of God in favor of the politically correct non-reference to gender.  Irksome and annoying, to say the least.