Trump supports [sic] pressure Marco Rubio to defy election results | Miami Herald

Chicago Newspapers

Miami Herald should be ashamed of itself. For its sloppiness, if for nothing else. (Alas, they have no shame.)

After longtime Trump ally and recent pardon recipient Roger Stone shared false claims of election fraud over the phone, Cubans4Trump co-founder Ariel Martinez addressed the crowd.

False? This is so sloppy. “False claims” makes another story, completely. You don’t toss it in there if you’re thinking beyond the newsroom. He “shared” (another weakling expression) claims (already distancing yourself from what he said) would do it without this unexplained editorializing “false.”

Don’t these reporters and editors go to school? As a onetime practitioner of the trade — and briefly a teacher of same — I am touched to the quick. Wounded. Offended. I’m become a snowflake ready to cancel someone or some thing somewhere somehow . . .

more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article248235505.html#storylink=cpy

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The Year in which Comforting Myths Were Ravaged

Our tale of woe.

Thanks in large part to Covid lockdowns, this year has left vast wreckage in its wake, with ten million jobs lost, more than 100,000 businesses and dozens of national chains bankrupted or closed. Up to 40 million people could face eviction in the coming months for failing to pay rent, and Americans report that their mental health is at record low levels. But the casualty list for 2020 must also include many of the political myths that shape Americans’ lives.

Perhaps the biggest myth to die this year was that Americans’ constitutional rights are safeguarded by the Bill of Rights. After the Covid-19 pandemic began, governors in state after state effectively placed scores of millions of citizens under house arrest – dictates that former Attorney General Bill Barr aptly compared to “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since the end of slavery.

Politicians and government officials merely had to issue decrees, which were endlessly amended, in order to destroy citizens’ freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of choice in daily life. Los Angeles earlier this month banned almost all walking and bicycling in the city, ordering four million people to “to remain in their homes” in a futile effort to banish a virus.

Futile indeed, if one is to believe drumbeat news stories, one after another, fueling the panic.

And the hell of it is, nothing has worked, but lockdowns go on and on and on . . .

Where Did Covid Come From?

Questions, the inquiring mind (rather, its owner) has questions.

The focus of the worldwide public’s attention on masks, lockdowns, infection rates, and vaccines serves to prevent any investigation of Covid’s origin. Did a disease of bats or some other creature mutate so that humans became susceptible?

If so, why was research on how to make pathogens more infectious going on at the University of North Carolina and allegedly at a US military lab and then transferred to Wuhan where it was financed by Fauci at N.I.H.?

Is the justification for this research—to prepare for a pandemic—a cover for covert bioweapons development? If so, why was Washington working with China on . . . ???

Well golly, hasn’t your local paper gone over this stuff ad nauseam? It hasn’t? Well golly, that’s a shame . . .

Read More Here . . .

Proclamation on 850th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket | The White House

Thrilling account of the Becket martyrdom and influence on civil law, and then this:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim December 29, 2020, as the 850th anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket. I invite the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches and customary places of meeting with appropriate ceremonies in commemoration of the life and legacy of Thomas Becket.

That’s Catholic, with or without a capital “C.”

Black lives do not matter in Chicago . . .

Chicago Newspapers

Where the weekend toll continues.

As this:

Saturday night, a man was found dead with a gunshot wound to the chest in Englewood on the South Side.

He was found in an alley about 10 p.m. in the 7400 block of South Stewart Avenue and pronounced dead at the scene, police said. A witness told investigators the man was talking to someone in a vehicle when shots were fired.

Wild west situation:

Hours earlier, a man was shot and killed while trying to commit a robbery on the West Side, according to police.

He walked in to a store about 6:50 p.m. in the 3200 block of West Chicago Avenue, pulled out a gun and demanded property, police said.

A store employee, a 29-year-old man, pulled out his own gun and fired shots at the robber, striking him in the chest, police said. He was taken to Stroger Hospital…

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Personal Liberty Sacrificed at the Altar of Covid Public Safety

These people are talking my language.

If science had been followed in 2020 – in all fields – we’d be much healthier and wealthier than we now are. But control freaks have used Covid-19 to justify still more government controls, still more statism.

Hot buttons: Altar of public safety, control freaks, government controls, statism. That last one, yes. “Holy mother the state,” said Dorothy Day ironically — or someone else? Tell me if you know.

Fr Hunwicke’s Mutual Enrichment: Mary Mother of God

Try this on for size, my hearties:

Once upon a time, a thousand years ago in the great basilica of Blachernae in Constantinople, high up on the ceiling near the Altar, was an enormous picture of a Palestinian teenager, that selfsame Girl who is such a lead-player in the Christmass celebrations. There she stood orans, Mediatrix of All Graces, as we Westerners would say, her hands raised in prayer, and in front of her womb, in a round circle, a painting of her Divine Son – his hand lifted in blessing. That image of Mary was called Platytera tou kosmou, the Woman Wider than the Universe. Mary was Great with Child; her Child was Almighty God. She contained the One whom the heaven of heavens is too narrow to hold. Can a foot be larger than the boot or an oyster greater than the shell? For Christians, apparently, Very Often. Mary’s slender womb enthroned within it the Maker of the Universe, the God who is greater than all the galaxies that stream across the firmament. The tummy of a Girl was wider than creation.

Then on the crisp night air came the squeal of the newly born baby. It came from the cave that was both a stable and a birth-place. That stable in Bethlehem, as C S Lewis memorably explains in The Last Battle, ‘had something in it that was bigger than our entire world’. The stable, like Mary, was great with child; very great, for that Child is God. And what is true of the womb of the Mother of God, and what is true of that stable at Bethlehem, is also the great truth of the Sacrament of the Altar. Bread becomes God Almighty; little round disks of unleavened bread are recreated by the Maker of the World to be Himself. As Mary’s Baby was bigger than all creation, than all the stars and clouds and mass of it, so the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is bigger than the Kosmos.

As you made your Christmass communion, glorious and loving Infinity came to make His dwelling in your poor body; so that, as you walked or drove home for the rest of Christmass, you were platyteroi tou Kosmou: broader than the Universe.

He spells Christmas with two s’s, you see. Not a typo. It’s what he thinks about the Mass.