Category: Blithe Spirit

Anti-abortionism at Ascension

My guess is 50 showed at Ascension’s pro-life talk tonight, by Ill. Right to Life exec director Bill Beckman.  He’s a true wonk and delivered a lot of solid stuff, but I bailed out after an hour-fifteen or so: Ask him the time and he tells you how to make a watch, a la Ronald Reagan, per his son a long time ago.

Some arresting stuff:

* Sen. Durbin “lies” when he keeps saying abortion is not mentioned in the now probably moribund health care legislation: doesn’t have to be named.  point is, it’s not excluded.  It wasn’t in Medicaid legislation in the mid-70s when the late Henry Hyde wrote his amendment that forbade federal funding of abortion for Medicaid recipients.  Deceitful of Durbin, says Beckman.  I agree.

* National inconsistency bordering on schizophrenia (my designation) lies in how inheritance and murder laws in many if not most states (I forget) that say the child in the womb has rights — kill a pregnant woman and you do double homicide.

* Early feminists (suffragists) were pro-life.  Only in the early ‘60s did feminism become identical with pro-abortionism.  I remember asking a feminist in a 1970s press conference if feminists were all pro-abortion, and the woman said yes, looking at me as if I were not quite with it.

* It was a lie foisted on us by pro-aborts that five to ten thou women a year were dying of illegal, botched abortions: 39 died that way in the U.S. in one year under consideration at the time.

* Nothing surprising here: pro-life Dems don’t get anywhere.  They can’t advance.  Remember Gov. Casey of PA, who couldn’t get a spot at the podium at the 1992 Dem convention?

On the other hand, five of six current Republican gubernatorial candidates for Illinois are pro-life, most of the senatorial hopefuls, all of the lt. gov. candidates.  As I say, we know which is the abortion party.

* Illinois is the only state w/o a parental-involvement law, requiring notification or consent for a minor’s abortion.  It got one in 1995, but the Ill. supremes wouldn’t write the rules for the “judicial bypass” it required — an escape clause whereby the abortion-seeker could plead her case for non-notification to a judge.

In 2006 the Illinois supremes wrote rules and sent AG Lisa Madigan (D.-Mike), who so badly presented the Illinois case to the federal judge that he said come back when you know what you have or don’t have.

Last year the Illinois supremes, all seven of them, wrote Lisa M. ordering her to go back and do it right.  She did, and for a few hours last year, the bill was in force.  Enter ACLU with some sleight of hand and the original injunction was restored.

Beckman estimates 5,000 abortions a year on non-Illinoisans drawn by its lack of a parental law — too much business for relevant docs et al. to go easily into the dark night, as they see it, of pro-life-ism.

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All or nothing

“It is very important that progressives help defeat Coakley,” says Gregory Martin at Firedog Lake. “Please read my explanation.”

It’s about enabling the betrayers of the leftist dream, helping the “Democratic Corporate Suck Up wing of the party” grow in power. 

To do so

will, in fact, ensure that there will be NO progressive agenda. It was not the Republicans who failed us of late. It was the Democrats. We will never succeed as long as the Dem’s [sic] can talk liberal and vote corporate.

He’s right.  They have nothing to lose but their chains.  No, they also have elections.

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Clinton makes a point in Massachusetts

Bill Clinton campaigning for the endangered Dem candidate, commenting on Tea Party members from Rhode Island and New York campaigning for Scott Brown:

“I thought Massachusetts knew more about American history than anybody else, and understood the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against abuse of power, not against government itself.”

Good point, if you concede that they are not anarchists, as he would have it, but rebels against abuse of power.

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Ditka, Bears, banks, “reform”

Ditka and the Bears: Changing coaches is a start, but we have little to hope for until there’s a change of owners, dropping those who fired D. in 1993.

“I was fired out of jealousy, plain and simple,” Ditka said for the Beyond the Glory special. “I had become the Bears. The greatest moment of my life is when George Halas hired me. The lowest moment of my life was when a guy that shouldn’t have been there fired me.”

But he’s still there, at his mother’s side.

2) Obama vs. banks: New tax purely political, as Geithner made clear on CNBC yesterday on the Kudlow Report, John Harwood asking, “You know Wall Street . . . . Is there something morally corrupt about Wall Street institutions and the people in them?”

Geithner:

I believe personally [dodge word: how else would he believe?] that what you’re seeing happen across the financial system, what you saw happen that caused the crisis, even what you see now happening, is just causing a huger damage to basic trust and confidence of Americans in the fairness of our system.

Fairness an Obama word: he used it in the ‘08 campaign to justify tax rate increases that result in reduced tax revenues.

Geithner continuing:

It’s just very hard for people to understand with unemployment at 10 percent, you know [yes, we do know, now that you mention it], with millions of Americans–this is the United States of America [yes, we know that too]–with millions of Americans on food stamps, worst recession in almost a generation, that you could see compensation practice produce such huge returns to people who were at the center of this mess. It is unexplicable [sic]. People cannot understand why it is fair. And…

Harwood: “But you understand because you know this culture. Why is it happening?”

I don’t–I don’t–I don’t understand it, really. I really don’t understand it. [Hand-wringing off camera]  . . . but what it underscores is why it is so important to make sure that we put in place tougher rules, the kind of reforms that’ll make sure that we can wake up in the morning and tell the American people that we have done what is necessary to protect them from the risk of this happening again.

A political goal.

Harwood: “Is it pure greed?”

Geithner:

John, it’s a complicated thing. I don’t–I don’t know how to explain it. I can’t explain it, I don’t understand it, [distraught] and I think it’s very important for those people running these firms, for their boards of directors, for their shareholders, to work very hard to try to earn back some basic sense of trust and confidence of the American people.

Like the trust and confidence in Congress? He’s worried about that too?  What about the sheer economics of it all?  Is he the treasury secretary, or a highly placed morale officer?

He continued:

I think it’s very important to do that. [Of course you do.]  And I think, as part of that, they need to not just make sure they’re making loans [with less available capital, of course] again to businesses and communities, helping solve the housing crisis [ditto], but . . . are working to support a package of strong reforms in the financial system that’ll be better for the country as a whole.

Vague, indecipherable, enough to drive a sane man nuts.

 

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The “Kennedy seat” looking Brown

In the Mass. race, Brown v. Coakley, keep your eye on the big guy:

“If the White House thinks she can win, Obama will be there,” the Democrat says. “If they don’t think she can win, he won’t be there.” 

Word is, they don’t think so and he won’t be there. 

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

Later: Word is wrong, according to The Hill:

President Obama will travel to Massachusetts on Sunday to campaign for Martha Coakley, according to sources.

Going for broke.

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What doth it non-profit a man?

Chi Trib reports big bucks paid to a non-profit affordable-housing exec — $685,000 in 2008, “at least three times higher” than comparables and judged “clearly absurd” by a specialist.

She and two fellow board members decide how much she gets, one of whom is a long-time Oak Parker and onetime exec director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Rev. Stanley Davis.

Davis heads his own non-profit operation, Interfaith Connections, aimed at promoting “interfaith understanding,” but his day job is with the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago, where he is co-executive director.

The affordable-housing exec is Christine M.J. Oliver, president of the Chicago Dwellings Association, which has no web site (!), but has a history going back to 1948, when it was created by the Chicago (public) Housing Authority as a private corporation to build housing “for moderate-income families.”

It built Midway Gardens, at 60th and Cottage Grove, with 318 units, and several smaller developments.  It has four buildings now, says Chi Trib.  These “also have become a lucrative income source” for Oliver.

She “also has taken out personal loans of nearly half a million dollars for her own housing purchases.”  This is a very iffy proposition.  Non-profits lend mortgage cash for employees whom they relocate.  Help them get started in a new city.  But Oliver has headed CDA since 1991, coming over from the CHA after two years, before which she was in DC with HUD since 1983. 

So she has had dwelling places in the Chi area for a long time — currently three of them, in fact — in an unnamed northern suburb, in Lincoln Park, and, oops, not even in Illinois but on Gasparilla Island on the Gulf of Mexico.  Chi Trib could not find out which dwelling the half million was for — maybe the one on the Gulf, where she probably relocates occasionally.

Look.  She works hard and does a good job, her office says, having saved CDA from bankruptcy.  One of her buildings, the one at 60th and Cottage, had things wrong with it, the city hauled CDA into court.  But they fixed the code violations, and all was forgiven.

But look again.  This lady is getting rich on this non-profit gig.  Please.

As for Oak Park’s Stan Davis . . . we don’t know.  He and the A.M.E. elder — making two of the cloth in this together — gave the O.K. to her salary, which combined with her O.K. made it official: $685G for ‘08, after $725G (!) in ‘05, plus $689G to fund her retirement in all.

Davis and the A.M.E. man, the other director, could at least explain, couldn’t they?  But they are as quiet about this apparent debacle — involving millions in public money, by the way, from HUD — as she is.  And she ain’t sayin’ nothing.

Back in the novitiate, novices would take long walks in the countryside, now and then meeting a knight of the road — I didn’t, but the novice master told us about it — who hit them up for a few nickles.  In the early ‘50s it was.  We have no money, novices said, “We have a vow of poverty.”  To which the hobo, seeing they were well enough dressed and fed: “Oh? Say, where can I get one o’ them vows of poverty?”

Where can I get one o’ them non-profit jobs?

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A decade of decadence

Steve Sailer has nailed an important newspaper datum:

All those boring end-of-year / end-of-decade articles that journalists phone in so that they can take the last week of the year off are finally over.

Wed. Journal of OP&RF had a head for its year-ender that got my attention: it had me thinking its villager of the year was being investigated.

Publicity-shy Kelly caught in feds’ spotlight

Until I remembered this was an issue I didn’t have to read. Year-ending thumb-sucker, you know.

Chi Daily News’s Don Zochert used to call up clips and go to work isolating the important and the curious brilliantly. He’s a novelist and a stylist — and biographer of Laura Ingalls Wilder. His stuff I’d read, because it had surprises. Pleasant ones, not crash-bang accidents, horrifying but attention-getting.

Most not, however. Sailer, an expert on race relations, spots a decade-long trend that everyone missed, “a hidden key to understanding the two seminal events of the last decade—9/11 and the economic collapse.”

The factor linking the two big stories of the 2000s: George W. Bush’s sizable degree of culpability in both disasters:

Bush had Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta eradicate the airport security ethnic profiling system before 9/11. (Then he reappointed Mineta, a Democrat, for his second term!).

Bush repeatedly signaled the mortgage industry in 2002-2004 that zero down payment home purchases would be A-OK with his federal regulators.

Of course, those are by no means the only causes of the subsequent disasters. But shouldn’t we at least talk about them?

Sailer does, asking, “what links Bush’s two blunders” and answering, “George W. Bush’s Commitment to Diversity.

Here’s Governor Bush during his second debate with Al Gore on October 11, 2000:

“And secondly, there is other forms of racial profiling that goes on in America. Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what’s called secret evidence [sic]. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that. My friend, Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan, is pushing a law to make sure that, you know, Arab-Americans are treated with respect.

Which is related closely to this:

Michael Tuohey, the U.S. Airways desk clerk who checked Atta in that morning later admitted that he said to himself: “If this guy doesn’t look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does”. But, then “I gave myself a political correct slap”. And three thousand died. “[“I Was The One,” Interview with Oprah Winfrey, September 12, 2005]

Etc. Read the whole thing.

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Health Care Ted might turn in grave

What if the successor to Ted Kennedy were someone who did not vote for ObamaCare, leaving Dems with a 59–vote majority?

That prospect isn’t as implausible as it once seemed in that most liberal of states, as Republican Scott Brown has closed to within striking distance of Democrat Martha Coakley in the January 19 special election.

A Boston Globe survey released this weekend showed Ms. Coakley with a 15-point lead, but a survey by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling found the race a dead heat, with Mr. Brown up 48% to 47%.

The scary prospect for Democrats is that the race is even this close on their home ideological turf, and turnout is always difficult to predict in special elections.

Oh to be in Massachusetts, now that a Republican might win.

See also at the Washington Examiner:

* Michael Barone: Wow! Republican leads in Massachusetts

. . . a statistical tie, given the margin of error. Still, this is big, big news.

and

* Hugh Hewitt: A Massachusetts Miracle?

Scott Brown is an impressive candidate — intelligent, experienced, good-humored and handsome.

Brown’s record of public service is distinguished as well. Not only is he in his third term as a state senator, he served three terms before that as a state representative. More impressive than even that, however, is his service in uniform.

As his Web site, brownforussenate.com, puts it: “Senator Brown is a proud member of the Massachusetts National Guard, where he has served for nearly three decades and currently holds the rank of Lt. Colonel in the Judge Advocate Generals (JAG) Corps.”

Hewitt finds negatives, however:

He is a die-hard red Boston Red Sox fan.

He is a die-hard New England Patriots fan.

And he’s a Republican in Mass.

Which is not a deal-breaker this year, when, per Byron York:

The race to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts is shaping up as a referendum on health care reform.

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Jesuits for a free market

Free-market thinking seems to have got its start not with Adam Smith and his fellow Scots but with Dominicans and Jesuits at the U. of Salamanca in the 15th century.

Just price? The market decides that, etc. Such stuff does the social justice mantra in, or defines it in ways the world doth not dream of in these post-Marxist days . . .

has good material at Mises.com:

“We believe in free markets and free people,” he says, addressing a Mises Institute conference.
We stand for free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the oppression of collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities.

“So does this have anything to do with the Jesuit Luis de Molina?” asked Penny Ziemer Ford in reply to my Facebook posting.

Yes indeed.  Consider this from the Acton Institute:

” . . . in Molina’s writings on economics . . . he affirms the importance of individual liberty in free-market exchanges, opposes government regulation of prices and markets, condemns the slave trade as immoral, and upholds private-property rights theory.”
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Let’s hope they mean it

Three wise men: Which three of these candidates for county board president know that reducing excessive tax rates increases tax revenue?

“I’m tired of being treated like an ATM by machine politicians,” Republican John Garrido said during the 75-minute forum at the Hotel Indigo on Northwest Highway.

He — along with Democrat Terry O’Brien, president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, and the Green Party’s Tom Tresser — said during the political forum they’d immediately repeal the remaining half-cent sales tax hike passed in 2008.

“We need to stop taxing our way out of our problems, bottom line,” O’Brien said.

Other Democrats in the race — Cook County Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown and Chicago Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th) — have vowed to roll the sales tax back after some belt-tightening. [Italics added]

Sorry.  Time’s up.  Garrido, O’Brien, and Tresser.  Call them Friends of the Laffer Curve, which applies the law of diminishing returns to taxation.

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