All-bets-off boys and girls are on the job.

Also known far and wide as progressives.

​Here’s an articulate, well-written, often condescending, hard-nosed description of papal and Vatican politics by a true-blue liberal writing regularly for National Catholic Reporter.

I have no trouble believing (for the most part) this account of mutual counter-purpose in which Francis and Sarah are now positioned.

It’s good stuff, if without regard for the needless character of the conflict. My problem is with the conflict as needless. What does Francis have to lose by allowing Latin mass, ad orientem, communion on the tongue and all that?

Unless the novus ordo would be undermined and with it the social justice agenda. Or unless Francis just doesn’t like it; makes his skin crawl — a distinct possibility but something he could offer up in his Morning Offering — and become a better man for it.

Oh, another thing. Is the writer sure about his assessment of traditionalists’ numbers and overall strength? Seems sure of himself, but it’s a big claim. More later (I swear) of this fellow’s columns from Rome.

Oh. Robert Mickens is his name. Has impressive c.v., in addition to his very good writing.

Great was the fall of this once noble operation:

Founded in 1971 as a non-profit legal advocacy group, the SPLC began nobly, battling and winning against racist factions like the Ku Klux Klan.

But over the years, the SPLC began to shift ideologically and is now widely-regarded as “an attack dog of the political left.” Detractors allege that at its base, the center’s turn to the left is less about principle than it is about money.

Since its founding, “The SPLC has … established itself as the nation’s most prominent hate-group watchdog,” notes Politico writer André Chung. “It has also built itself into a civil rights behemoth with a glossy headquarters and a nine-figure endowment, inviting charges that it oversells the threats posed by Klansmen and neo-Nazis to keep donations flowing in from wealthy liberals.”

Their discoveries multiply, often with alarming miscalculation:

Cornell University law professor William Jacobson has condemned the SPLC for pursuing a decidedly partisan political agenda under the banner of civil rights. “Time and again, I see the SPLC using the reputation it gained decades ago fighting the Klan as a tool to bludgeon mainstream politically conservative opponents,” he said.

“For groups that do not threaten violence, the use of SPLC ‘hate group’ or ‘extremist’ designations frequently are exploited as an excuse to silence speech and speakers,” Jacobson notes. “It taints not only the group or person but others who associate with them.”

Bad cess to them in their current transmogrification.

This Michael Goodwin anticipating my very thoughts, more or less expressed moments ago an an email to a friend. I can show you the email, but it would show me writing hours AFTER Goodwin published.

That important point made, I can only congratulate him. The Donald is not gonna take s–t from losers — something like that. In any case, his Republican opponents have been asking for this. No need for him to fall on a sword for them.

What hath the electorate wrought? We can only ask, remaining confident that it’s worlds of difference from what we had the last eight years. Worlds.

How many besides me did not know that Kaepernick had split with his San Fran team

She died, we cried.

It is almost exactly 20 years ago to the day that Britain’s national character changed utterly. Or more precisely, it’s 20 years since it became abundantly clear that there had taken place a shift in the way we in the UK, and the Western world in general, conducted ourselves in the public sphere.

The now infamous ‘outpouring of grief’ over the death of Princess Diana that followed her death on 31 August 1997 came as a shock to many. Yet it was no aberration, no insignificant isolated incident, even if Diana herself has been relatively forgotten.

We went on a bender.

If [soccer-player] Paul Gascoigne’s celebrated tears in Italia ‘90 were, in hindsight, an early indication of the transformation of a nation’s psychology, Diana’s death seven years later put into sharp relief what had indeed changed.

It represented something quite profound: it signified the coming of a new era of emotionalism, and the twilight of the age of reason and rationalism.

We see it and its consequences all around today, from therapy culture, virtue signalling and the promotion of ‘self-esteem’, to hate-crime legislation, offence-taking, censorship, Safe Space and trigger warnings. September 1997 signalled the dawn of the age of feelings and emotion.

No coincidence his using “the dawn of the age.” It’s Aquarius, folks.

Read the rest.

43rd Ward and Chicago Republicans leader files info request, picks up a bundle of vote fraud evidence.

First reported by the Chicago City Wire, the Chicago GOP filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Chicago Board of Elections in January for a list of voters who had cast ballots in November. According to the party, the board responded with a list of 1,101,178 individuals, though its website reflects 1,115,664 votes cast.

“There should be never be more votes than voters—every ballot cast should be recorded against a registered voter,” Chairman of the Chicago GOP Chris Cleveland told Fox News, explaining that after receiving the data, the party “immediately” contacted the board for “clarification.” “This is either massive fraud or massive incompetence, but we have no way of telling the difference because they won’t give us the data.”

It’s a variation on the old “Why are there more horse’s asses than there are horses?”

This time . . . oh I don’t have to explain it, do I?

As here:

ROCKFORD, Ill. — A police officer in Rockford has delivered his son in a hotel parking lot in the northern Illinois city.

Not on your tintype. The mother did the delivering, he did the receiving. I know, having done same for loving mother of our second in an Oak Park bedroom 45 years ago the 22nd of this month.

We called her Kathryn after Kathryn O’Connell Bowman, my mother, who was still living at the time. The first Kathryn became Kate, ours became Katie.

That said, nice job, officer. You the best.

. . .  becoming a social agency or ally of political or military pursuers of justice.  From Ivereigh, Austen. The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope (Kindle Locations 2414-2423). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

The Society of Jesus declared itself a social justice seeker in its 32nd General Council in 1974 after the pope had warned them:

The decree had been driven . . . by a group of French-speaking Europeans and Canadians, for whom it was vital to see the struggle for justice not as something outside religion but integral to it.

For the Latin-American delegates, . . . the decree offered, . . . , little new. But [it] . . . appeared to have few safeguards against being turned into an ideology; it was the fruit of a last-minute amalgamation of two texts, and vulnerable to a selective reading.

Bergoglio [Francis] saw two risks with it: one was of forcing Jesuits into bed with political movements pursuing justice (by what other means or agency were “unjust structures” to be tackled?); the second was the loss of identity of which Pope Paul had warned.

Where did evangelization and priesthood fit in? Which came first? What stopped a Jesuit from being merely a political campaigner or social worker?

Whatever the other Latin-American delegates made of it, “Bergoglio did not have much sympathy for that Decree Four [which embraced social-justice seeking as essential],” recalls Father Swinnen [his successor as novice master at the time]. “When he was speaking to the novices he didn’t quote it.”

He took these distinctions quite seriously, Ivereigh tells us.