The White House says this budget will mean $4 trillion in savings over the next decade—but that’s a result of gimmicks and accounting tricks. Roughly $2 trillion have already been enacted, while Obama counts $1 trillion from money that would never be spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as savings. The White House also takes $1.2 trillion of cuts from last summer’s Budget Control Act, and replaced them with tax hikes — calling this additional savings.
Dolan decides: Obama go back
Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan of New York said Feb. 13 that President Barack Obama’s revision to the contraceptive mandate in the health reform law did nothing to change the U.S. bishops’ opposition to what they regard as an unconstitutional infringement on religious liberty.
via Obama’s revised HHS mandate violates religious freedom, USCCB president says.
My Leo High visit here
Media Matters matters to Dems
It’s where they find friends to protect them from Fox News.
Lay Catholics can do it, official institutions cannot. Oh?
What set Limbaugh off, as below.
At the prospect that institutions associated with the Catholic Church would be required to offer to their employees health insurance covering contraception and abortifacients, the bishops, priests, and nuns scream bloody murder.
But they raise no objection at all to the fact that Catholic employers and corporations, large and small, owned wholly or partially by Roman Catholics will be required to do the same.
Etc., via American Catholicism’s Pact With the Devil – Ricochet.com.
Catholic bishops economic nitwits?
Obama friends plan campaign vs. Fox News
These Media Matters guys know how to play hardball:
A little after 1 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2009, Karl Frisch emailed a memo to his bosses, Media Matters for America founder David Brock and president Eric Burns. In the first few lines, Frisch explained why Media Matters should launch a “Fox Fund” whose mission would be to attack the Fox News Channel.
“Simply put,” Frisch wrote, “the progressive movement is in need of an enemy. George W. Bush is gone. We really don’t have John McCain to kick around any more. Filling the lack of leadership on the right, Fox News has emerged as the central enemy and antagonist of the Obama administration, our Congressional majorities and the progressive movement as a whole.”
“We must take Fox News head-on in a well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of news consumers.”
Now that’s what I call winning ball games.
via Media Matters Memo | Private Investigators | Fox News Employees | The Daily Caller.
Marty on raw power
You may have applauded the joint effort by Catholic bishops and evangelical Protestants in opposing the HHS mandate to provide birth control and abortifacients to hospital, university, and social agency employees, but to Martin Marty, it was a case of “radical embrace of raw political power by Evangelical pastors massed in militancy to join Catholics in reaction.”
This is the presumed detached observer talking (in “Sightings” for the day, “Protestant Accommodation”) and this is how he sees it. Read what he says and see if he hasn’t tipped his hand with this colorful language.
To be shot or not to be shot? Hung or not? ????
An interesting discussion of twofold execution: The hermeneutic of continuity: On the prospect of being shot and strung up.
Catholics conform
Sister tells of her conversion to religious life twenty years previously, has back of her hand for her then-fiance’s wanting 15 kids, depending on how many God decided they should have. She chose religion for its structured prayer life and conferred ability to “love all,” not just one, failing to mention the other potential fifteen.
Parish school principal to parishioner gathering refers to “common core” curriculum and common report card eliminating A’s and B’s etc. in favor of something else, both “national,” omitting to explain who imposed the common core, etc. U.S. dept. of education, it turns out. He mentions the core only in passing, with no questions about what feds have to say about RC schools’ teaching and grading, except that the archdiocese has adopted this common core, etc.
Visiting scholar lectures at RC university to packed small-auditorium crowd of students, nuns, teachers, and others, elicits dismissive chuckles from students about rules for confessors in days of old as to how they were to deal with female penitents, all geared to protect chastity. No one takes him up on this, which is at least mildly subversive of church as vehicle of grace and role of confession.
RC traditions about (a) family and role of Providence, (b) freedom of church schools from state interference, (c) academic respect for church practices prior to our own enlightened age — each ignored or dismissed by church representatives, making three cases of bit-by-bit conforming to the age we live in.
Later: The Common Core was adopted by 40 states including Illinois, whose board of ed explained itself in June of 2010. The parish school principal assumed too much of his audience or at least of some parts of it. The archdiocese sells the new report card in a letter to parents last June and explains it at length in a frequent-questions page here. I can only trust that something similar was offered parish schools by their principals and staffs.
