Their Catholic identity?
Tag: Blithe Spirit
The good and the bad, emphasis on Trib and Sun-Times
Lefties clear deck for crushing the rebels against their big ideas
For 224 years it protected the rights of the minority party.
But yesterday, Senate Democrats killed it.
They didn’t reform the filibuster. They vaporized it.
The message is clear: Obama and Senate Democrats will soon open the floodgates and jam the federal courts and executive agencies with as many radical anti-life and anti-family [and
freedom-busting, federal bank-breaking] appointments as possible. [added]Left-wing radicals are growing impatient and many are now worried. With Obama’s approval ratings plummeting to record lows of 40%, their agenda is in jeopardy.
So it is not surprising they pushed for this extraordinary step of changing the Senate rules. And I suspect they aren’t done yet.
On to 2014 and “the battle for the Senate.”
(I love this statement, obviously; but Brian at Catholic Vote, “2014 has all the markings of a title wave“? Please.)
No Common Core in Packerland RC schools
“Our diocesan Department of Education worked diligently several years ago to create comprehensive academic standards. Their hard work, coupled with our faith integration model, provides our students with an exceptional academic education and formation in their faith.”
He stressed the need to “support what we have created,” while striving to improve the existing curriculum with the “best ideas available.”
Bishop Ricken noted that he hopes that the Common Core State Standards, which were created for the public schools, will help the local public school system improve. . . . ” [boldface
added]
Wishing the best for public schools, he notes the difference. The Catholic schools are quite different places.
– See more here.
Middle of September, Illinois pension reform was so close . . .
. . . said Sun-Times editorial filled with good will toward their beloved Dems.
They’re close, with the outlines of their plan already public. The moment has come to put on the finishing touches and that should include a last drive to lower the percentage of the state’s annual budget eaten up by pension costs.
There’s no reason this can’t happen this week, which would prod Democratic leaders Michael Madigan and John Cullerton to call a special session by the end of September. A last resort would be to move a pension bill during the fall veto session that begins Oct. 22.
Last resort? Gosh all hemlock, late November, and it looks as if something went wrong!
Enough to make a grown man weep.
The Democrats’ dilemma: Believe in Obama or their very own eyes?
Begin with Sen. Durbin of Illinois, advises Dennis Byrne in Chi Trib:
President Barack Obama isn’t the only politician who falsely promised that Americans could keep their health insurance under Obamacare.
Illinois’ very own Dick Durbin, the second most powerful Democrat in the U.S. Senate, adamantly and without qualification made the same promise in 2009 when the Affordable Care Act was being debated in the Senate.
Durbin was so vehement, so absolutely dismissive of any opposing view, that he could have been speaking with papal infallibility. He smugly intoned:
Etc. Read on. You will find no better an encapsulation of administration, shall we say buffoonery, and the witches’ brew that is our president’s trademark achievement.
Common Core: politicized and invasive . . .
. . . says researcher with Oakland CA-based Independent Institute:
Common Core reading recommendations, Vicki Alger contends, include material that is pro-Obamacare and pro-union; an example of the latter was woven into the civics curriculum for third graders.
But Common Core even politicizes math standards. Stanford mathematics professor James Milgram, who served as a member of the Common Core validation committee, complains that scholastic rigor was “compromised for the sake of political buy-in.”
That’s not all:
Alger notes that civil libertarians are increasingly anxious about Common Core’s threat to student and family privacy. Under a law called FERPA—the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act—private contractors, consultants, and other non-government personnel may become privy to data about a student’s family income, religion, student disciplinary records, and parents’ political affiliations.
Last month, Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) pressed U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to explain why, in at least one state, student Social Security numbers were given to a private data collection company.
But “as interesting as any official response would be, there is still no legitimate, much less Constitutional, reason for the federal government to be spying on American citizens or their children,” Alger concludes.
Illinois Republican gubernatorial contender Bruce Rauner is “not comfortable” with Common Core, he said in River Forest Nov. 14.
Kirk Dillard campaign losing major fundraiser
She is shifting to volunteer status. Why?
One source indicated there was general frustration by Dillard’s reluctance to make the number of fund-raising calls needed to survive in a four-way gubernatorial primary.
It’s a weakness for him:
At the close of the last quarter, Dillard reported $313,372 in overall contributions between his two political funds. He spent a combined $251,415 and had the least amount of any of the major candidates for governor left in the bank: $205,722.
Meanwhile, he came across confident in Bradley Saturday morning telling the Kankakee County Republican Women
that former governors Jim Edgar and Jim Thompson both identify him as the one candidate who will win for the Republicans. Dillard was Edgar’s Chief of Staff. He also worked as a legislative aide for Thompson.
“if you want to win,” Dillard said, “you need a suburbanite who has strong ties to downstate.” Dillard’s runningmate for lieutenant…
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Rauner vs. public unions, for school reform
Much more is available from Bruce Rauner than what he said in River Forest last Thursday, among which is a long Chicago Magazine interview from last June, in which he tells what he’s heard on a listening tour:
There’s a business owner who has operations around the Midwest, and he said… “workers comp costs five times as much in Illinois as it does in Indiana and we’ve been quietly shifting our jobs out of Illinois… and hiring in Indiana and reducing our job base in Illinois….” . . . .
. . . . I met with a young man who works in the [Illinois] Department of Transportation…. He told me a few years ago when Blagojevich through executive order forced in card-check unionizing, some of the union members came to him, basically threatened him, and said you have to sign this card or else…. He felt pressured… and…
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Let no man call it p-ism
Find the p-word in this paragraph that WashPost chose to delete:
For all his news conference gyrations about not deliberately deceiving people with his “if you like it” promise, the law Obama so triumphantly gave us allows you to keep your plan only if he likes it. That’s the very definition of paternalism. [hint
here]
Yes, Virginia, there are words that liberal publications cannot stomach.
(Only WashPost? Well look here for a dozen newspapers who found K-hammer’s word palatable, including Chi Trib.)
Chris Christie as lovable loser
Like Tom Dewey, loved by mediums in primary, mocked and scorned in general, twice defeated:
When Christie makes the rounds of the Sunday talk shows and looks the NBC audience in the eye on Meet the Press and when asked if he was a moderate or a conservative replies: “I don’t get into these labels — that’s the Washington, D.C. game and what all those men and women down there play… The people of America aren’t interested in that game” — Christie is foolishly playing a game. And in fact he’s terrible at it.
Contrast Christie’s game playing — the reluctance to choose one side or the other — with the stark contrast of Ronald Reagan in a 1981 speech in which Reagan proudly referred to himself and his audience as “those of us who call ourselves conservatives,” “we conservatives,” and “fellow conservatives.”
Amusingly, neither Christie nor his advisers seem…
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Blithe Spirit 