The morning read has two parts, I must add to yesterday’s Breakfast Challenge, pre– and at-breakfast. There’s coffee in both, but one is pre-walk, the other after it. Difference is, at the 2nd you take in heavier food requiring digestion, at the 1st lighter that is not so demanding on internal excretions. At the 1st, rather than imbibing newspaper-style stuff with coffee — one cup at most — you want what makes best use of your semiconscious state, such as poetry by Pound or, as now, criticism by Hugh Kenner.
His book on American fiction and poetry (A Homemade World, Morrow, 1975) lies now on the little reading table in the front room, far from PC and ‘Net. . . . .
The breakfast table challenge
Something new at Not for Attribution:
Have been groping lately for breakfast-table reading. Nothing autocratic, you know, a la the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes (the good one). Something to feed the mind without requiring Great Books-style concentration.
Groping, I say, because of the increasingly slim and flimsy offerings in my two daily newspapers, Chi Trib and Sun-Times, both as to interest-level (don’t care about this, don’t care about that, over and over, I say to myself), lack of imagination (dying for a good lede, even a good head), and even-handed, let-chips-fall coverage. . . . .
Little Jack Horner, corner, thumb, pie, I . . .
Here’s an amazing bit of Obama coverage you will never find in a U.S. sheet. It’s in a blog at UK Telegraph, whose D.C.-based Toby Harnden got a presidential email on the day O. got the Nobel Prize — and two more since then, Nobel-dropping indicating he’s not “even faintly sheepish about the award.”
“Surprising and humbling” O. found the news, which he’d got that morning.
“To be honest,” he continued, saying he felt he didn’t deserve it (lie) and the others who got it had “inspired” him, etc. (another lie: nowhere near how Rev. Jeremiah Wright had done so).
“I’ve always thought that when someone starts a sentence with the words “to be honest . . .” it’s a signal they’re about to lie,” said Harnden parenthetically.
A few more “faux-humble paragraphs” and Harnden concluded:
Obama apparently sees the award of the prize as his biggest achievement so far, with the possible exception of his election victory. Well, it sure beats actually doing something.
“All in all,” Harnden found it “a hilarious display of vanity and self-absorption masquerading ineptly as humility and selflessness” and asked,
What does it say about Obama’s character when such an empty symbol means so much to him?
Too much, I fear.
And: Would be delinquent in my duty to humanity were I not to say Instapundit led me to this item.
Our un-favorite filmmaker
Michael Moore, a very twisted guy, had this exchange, mostly monologue, with a George Washington U. student.
In it he’s relaxed and self-revelatory, maddening in his way. Loves France and taxes, claims to like competition, wants “democracy in the workplace,” etc. Very primitive, uninformed thinking.
SNAP’s long shot in Wheeling
SNAP not only wants Fr. Gleeson removed and investigated.
The group also wants an explanation about why he was appointed to the board despite allegations against him, and it is seeking a settlement involving him and an investigation into the original accusation.
Ah, but the Jesuits have never conceded anything in the matter. Not in California, where the accuser and the three accused functioned at the time, and not in West Virginia. Indeed, the three were reassigned but not demoted, one of them to Seattle, where he became a university vice president.
So SNAP is barking up an impregnable, unclimbable tree, or so it seems. They cite Catholic rulings.
“In 2002, the U.S. Catholic church adopted a national clergy sexual misconduct policy . . . . It mandates openness in cases of alleged clergy misdeeds, and it requires that a priest who is credibly accused of sexual abuse be suspended while the case is investigated.
“After that policy was adopted, many bishops re-examined earlier allegations that had once been ignored, dismissed or deemed unsubstantiated. Dozens of Catholic clerics who had been accused but kept in ministry were suspended. That is what we want to see happen here with Gleeson.”
But if the accuser was told by his California provincial to whine no more, as he claims, what will the Maryland provincial — Wheeling Jesuit is in that province — say? Butt out, is my guess, or nothing at all.
The million-dollar suit in 1999, keep in mind, was about workplace harassment, not abuse of a minor. The three kept hitting on this scholastic (seminarian) until, his complaints ignored, he bailed out.
The appeals decision was very important, in that it permitted the law to enter the seminary, jumping over the wall, as it were. Once the decision was rendered, on Dec. 1, 1999, the suit was enabled. The settlement was made during 2000. By August of that year, Gleeson was back in Maryland, his home province, on a new assignment in charge of a retreat house.
As reported below, he is currently on sabbatical from a similar assignment in Wernersville, PA.
Wheeling Jesuit trustee on the spot
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) is on the case of a Wheeling Jesuit U. trustee, one of three Jesuits who voted to fire Rev. Julio Giuletti SJ as president. They want him suspended from the much larger, lay-and-Jesuit board of directors, on which he has also been serving.
WJU’s interim president, Davitt McAteer, told AP the university is pleased with Rev. Thomas F. Gleeson — he’s been a director since 2004 — and has no plans to suspend or investigate him.
Gleeson is discussed in an earlier blog. He had been named as a defendant in a highly publicized sexual harassment suit filed by a former seminarian, John Bollard, a Jesuit in training. Gleeson was president of the seminary, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. Bollard told his story on “60 Minutes.”
Aside from [Rev. Anton} Harris [S.J.] sending suggestive pictures of naked men, he said, Gleeson, . . . asked Bollard to masturbate with him. [Another Jesuit, Rev. Andrew] Sotelo, a faculty member at St. Ignatius [High, where Bollard taught], suggested that they cruise gay bars, Bollard [said]. When he reported these passes to a supervisor [the provincial], he said, he was handed a coffee cup printed with the words “No whining.”
Bollard sued, asking $1 million, claiming workplace harassment. He won an appeals court case enabling him to do so. The Jesuits settled without going to trial. Gleeson, pictured here,
,
meanwhile has left his post as rector of the Jesuit Center at Wernersville, PA, for a September-to-December sabbatical. His replacement is filling in “until a certain unnamed long-term Jesuit replacement [be]comes [available], next summer.”
John Bollard:
Riding the CTA for free no more?
Look out, old-timers, they’re coming after us:
To avoid “very ugly” fare hikes and service cuts on the Chicago Transit Authority system, Mayor Richard Daley said the Legislature needs to end free rides for senior citizens.
Ugly? I’ll tell you what’s ugly. It’s you, Daley.
“They have to revisit everything,” Daley said. “And that is one of ’em they have to revisit. Definitely.”
Why? We’re old, we’re feeble, we’re crabby when we don’t get our own way, we’re more than you can handle, big guy.
The free-ride program was added to the 2008 CTA bailout by former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and later was extended to low-income riders with disabilities, disabled veterans and military personnel. The CTA figures free rides will cost it about $60 million in 201.
He did the Democrat thing, and now some other Democrat’s going to take it away. Look. Blago embarrassed Dems because he was so obvious about it.
He spent public money to get votes, he gave favors for private money (his own). OK, but he over did it!
Outrageous, eh?
This CBC-Sports lede puts the Rush Limbaugh-NFL discussion in perspective:
Limbaugh, an American radio talk-show host known for his outrageous commentary, is teaming with St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts and others in hopes of purchasing the St. Louis Rams from Chip Rosenbloom. [Italics added]
Known to whom, pray tell?
Mild-mannered opposition
Sen. Grassley sums up objections to the Baucus bill, boldface added:
First and foremost . . . [it] moves the nation to “more and more government control of health care.”
[It] would produce the biggest expansion of Medicaid since its creation; it will create an “unprecedented federal mandate” for insurance coverage, which the Internal Revenue Service would enforce; it increases the size of government by at least $1.8 trillion when fully implemented; it gives the Health and Human Services secretary the power to define benefits for every plan in America and to redefine those benefits annually. . . .
The bill “will cause health care premiums for millions to go up, not down,” Grassley said. He pointed to new insurance rating reforms as well as new fees and taxes that will end up raising premiums for million of Americans.
Big Daddy will love it. Individual responsibility and freedom will suffer.
And, what we know too well, it’s a Dem bill (with maybe [did I say maybe? Was never any doubt] Sen. Snowe to buy in). Grassley:
“I still hold out hope that at some point the doorway to bipartisanship will be opened once again. I hope at some point the White House and the (Senate) leadership will want to correct the mistakes that they made by ending our collaborative bipartisan work.”
Hope away, Senator.
Clear as mud
I’ve been meaning to say this for a long time, you have to believe me.
For all his flourish, President Barack Obama sure falls back on a few familiar phrases.
Make no mistake. Change isn’t easy. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks and false starts.
Those who routinely listen to the president have come to expect some of those expressions to pop up in almost every speech. (That includes you, cynics and naysayers, the ones Obama mentions all the time without identifying who is saying nay.)
Yet in the portfolio of presidential phrases, none is more pervasive than Obama’s four-word favorite: Let me be clear.
So I give a begrudging cheer to ABC’s [oops, AP’s] Ben Feller, who beat me and, I’m sure, many others to the punch.
My opinion? It’s part and parcel (chestnut there, sorry) of his overall dishonesty. (They all are dishonest, you say; but like the pigs in Animal Farm being equal, some are more so than others.) Those catch phrases are b.s., right?
Later: Oh my, Instapundit linked this, and now my neatly graphed WordPress ups and downs of hit numbers won’t mean a thing, will look uniformly flat as today’s and tomorrow’s shoot up. Oh well.
Later 2: Another winner, from Reader D, who hates it
when Obama says, “I said it once, and I’ll say it again . . .” Because then I don’t believe he ever said it once.
And few of us look it up at the time. It becomes a sort of creeping disillusionment if we once believed him or are generally loathe to disbelieve people, a shock of recognition (of a gifted liar) if we hadn’t thought about it.
