"Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."
If Chi Trib and Sun-Times kept up on blogs about guns, they might have had this on their sites’ front pages by 5:45 p.m. today:
At 9:15AM today the Illinois State Rifle Association filed suit against the city of Chicago for their ban on handguns; an NRA suit is already in the works.
Or they might have gone to the CBS-2 site with a 5:04 posting.
Mayordaley II lacks confidence in citizens’ ability to defend themselves when the police are still on the way:
The mayor said he would vigorously defend Chicago’s gun ordinance despite the Supreme Court’s ruling and feels the decision will make it far more difficult to protect law-abiding citizens. (AP)
No surprise here, but did you hear Big O. welcomes the decision, affirming individual right in the matter?
Apart from that, what about the damn hat?
Anti-Vatican Council 2 traditionalists have until June 28 to respond to an offer from the Vatican of reinstatement in the RC Church with their own bishops, parishes, and seminaries.
They would have to buy into Vatican Council 2, however, and cease objecting to the mass that came from it, reports Catholic World News.
Their founder — of the Society of St. Pius X — Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, “had accepted both of those terms before his break with the Vatican in 1986,” CW News said.
Their independence within the church would take the form of a “prelature,” says the Italian daily Il Giornale. Opus Dei has its own prelature, or is one, to be precise.
Speaking from my own experience with the the society, at its Oak Park church, I would be surprised if they take the offer.
Later: On the other hand, if they can stomach the Vatican 2 and new-mass conditions, they get not only legitimacy, which they do not require, they feel, but also lots of new worshipers — although one wonders what effect the big-church prohibition has had on deflecting them.
Nor do they lose autonomy within the big church, which means they go on as before, especially in recruiting and training priests and handling their own financials. This means also they could freely poach on big-church enclaves and in effect act as a reforming element.
Of course, many if not most big-church clergy and bishops would look on them as a cyst or tumor on the Mystical Body.
In any case, this would be the Catholic story of the year, religion-news-wise. I think.
Can anyone tell me why my “Playing Dumb,” blogged on Oct. 26, 2006, has all of a sudden become my hottest item, with 122 hits, or “views,” as WordPress says, in the last two days?
It’s about North Shore congressional candidate Dan Seals likened to the Big O. as a comer, with Seals downplaying it,
saying the only similarity is their complexion — both are African-American.
I note that the “boiler-plate analysis” provided by the Sun-Times writer would have made an o.k. lede, and that’s about it. How did this become so relatively (for me) popular?
Steve Rhodes takes the inimitable Dawn Taylor Trice to task for fatuous observations on “the air waves” the other night about the future of newspapers.
Can you imagine the civil rights movement without newspapers? Trice asked. If the Internet was around, certainly! [Rhodes commented] Can you imagine! YouTube video of Bull Connor and Internet fundraising for SNCC and MLK blogging directly to the people. Progress would have come much sooner.
He’s down on “Old World journalists” in general.
The very idea that the facts of a new media world – and the underappreciated facts of the newspaper industry’s gross negligence and essential journalistic malpractice of the last three decades – are still dawning on our nation’s newsrooms is just incredible. The time to ask how and why is long past.
This is in Rhodes’s Beachwood Reporter, which rocks — that is, pleases me greatly — and will you too, I bet.
I pass this on unvarnished, from a reader:
A biker is riding by the zoo, when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion’s cage.
Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the cuff of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, under the eyes of her screaming parents.
The biker jumps off his bike, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch.
Whimpering from the pain the lion jumps back letting go of the girl, and the biker brings her to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly.
A New York Times reporter has watched the whole event.
The reporter addressing the biker says, “Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I saw a man do in my whole life.”
The biker replies, “Why, it was nothing, really, the lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger, and acted as I felt right.”
The reporter says, “Well, I’ll make sure this won’t go unnoticed. I’m a journalist from the New York Times, you know, and tomorrow’s paper will have this story on the front page… So, what do you do for a living and what political affiliation do you have?'”
The biker replies, “I’m a U.S. Marine and a Republican.”
The journalist leaves.
The following morning the biker buys The New York Times to see if it indeed brings news of his actions, and reads, on front page:
U.S. MARINE ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT AND STEALS HIS LUNCH
Hawthorne and Emerson did not see eye to eye when it came to “what evil lurks in the hearts of men.”
In one of his stories, [Hawthorne] has the devil say, “Evil is the nature of mankind.” [he] didn’t go that far, but argued time and again for the “evil impulse” in us all. “Oh, take my word for it,” his devil taunted reformers, “it will be the old world yet!”
Emerson, on the other hand, found The Scarlet Letter a “ghastly” book, apparently recognizing it as an attack on his feelings-based morality.
Read all about it in The Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest, out today, with special attention to “three discarded Oak Park school namesakes” — these two plus James Russell Lowell, whose paean to June — “what is so rare”? — gets special billing.
There’s a “gotcha” quality to this AP story about torture in Iraq and Gitmo, and they may have got us with it:
“Some of these men really are, several years later, very severely scarred,” said Barry Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Fordham University who conducted psychological tests on six of the 11 detainees covered by the study. “It’s a testimony to how bad those conditions were and how personal the abuse was.”
But there are also qualifications:
One Iraqi prisoner, identified only as Yasser, reported being subjected to electric shocks three times and being sodomized with a stick. His thumbs bore round scars consistent with shocking, according to the report obtained by The Associated Press. He would not allow a full rectal exam.
Why wouldn’t he?
President Bush said in 2004, when the prison abuse was revealed, that it was the work of “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.” Bush and other U.S. officials have consistently denied that the U.S. tortures its detainees.
Gotcha. However:
Because the medical examiners did not have access to the 11 patients’ medical histories prior to their imprisonment, it was not possible to know whether any of the prisoners’ ailments, disabilities and scars pre-dated their confinement. The U.S. military says an al-Qaida training manual instructs members, if captured, to assert they were tortured during interrogation.
The U.S. military, yes. Can we trust it (them)? In any case,
Most former detainees are out of reach of Western doctors because they are either in Iraq or have been returned to their home countries from Guantanamo.
Which left the examining docs with the Abu G.-Gitmo Eleven here discussed. Docs are with Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass.
[Their] report came [at the same time?] as the [Democrat-controlled] Senate Armed Services Committee revealed documents showing military lawyers warned the Pentagon that methods it was using post-9/11 violated military, U.S. and international law.
Is there a skeptic in the house? Raise your hand.
Fr. Pfleger is saying he won’t change, now that he’s back in his St. Sabina pulpit. At any rate, he’s still going to bus kids and others downtown to protest what he apparently views as random acts of violence, as in this emailed announcement:
On Thursday, June 19, 2008, from 11 am – 12 noon, we will meet at the Thompson Center to continue our fight for Common Sense Gun Laws.
“To continue our fight”: Fight? What fight? These are junkets for people in various degrees of funk and frustration about the lousy neighborhoods they live in.
Does Fr. P. think these rote demonstrations make a particle of difference to the quality of life on their blocks or in the bosom of their families? Who in his right mind would think so?
On Monday, Ulysses Simmons a student of Beasley Academic Center was gunned down on 92nd Street.
By whom, for God’s sake? By a neighbor or at least someone who roves his neighborhood with impunity.
We must continue to fight for our children’s lives, we must end the
easy accessibility of guns on the streets.
There you go, the quick fix provided by government. Always look to the government to protect you from your neighbor and yourselves or for that matter from yourself.
If you need a ride downtown on that day call the Rectory, there will
be a bus leaving from the church at 10 am. The number to call is
773-483-4300.
No thanks.
Big O. practicing politics as usual — I’m shocked! — with this tit for McCain’s tat. Republicans, he said,
“helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9-11.” He said Osama bin Laden is still at large in part because of their failed strategies.
Now that’s pre-9/11 talk — a narrow-gauge approach to international criminals.
On the other hand, he must be happy for us all that there’s been no repeat of 9/11. It’s just that he thinks it’s because we’ve been stupid and lucky.
