Tag: Blithe Spirit

Obama the knife

Obama’s proposed penal law regarding Catholic institutions buying birth control and morning-after pill insurance (now immaculately accommodated) has sharp teeth:

Employers who violate the HHS mandate, and who thereby fail to provide the coverage HHS deems necessary under Obamacare, incur an annual penalty of roughly $2000 per employee. More precisely, as I understand it, the base penalty is $2000 x (number of full-time employees minus 30), and the base is increased each year by the rate of growth in insurance premiums. So, for example, Belmont Abbey College (one of the two plaintiffs already challenging the HHS mandate), which has 200 full-time employees, is facing an annual base penalty of $340,000. Colorado Christian University (the other plaintiff) has 280 full-time employees and is facing an annual base penalty of $500,000.

via Ethics and Public Policy Center: The HHS Contraception Mandate vs. the Religious Freedom Restoration Act 

For a school the size of Notre Dame? $10 million a year, a Becket Fund woman told Sean Hannity last night. (at 4:10 on tape)  Whoa, million here, million there, soon you’re talking real money.

Power to the people at Lutheran School

Chi’s Lutheran School Of Theology has this fellow Bill Fletcher Jr. as keynoter for the  Human Rights Awards Dinner of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression.  He’s gung-ho for reelecting Obama and offered this strategy:

1. Forget running a candidate against Obama in 2012. That would be a sure way to alienate much of his black and Latin base. Instead, there needs to be a progressive strategy focused on Congressional races. That means identifying key races to run genuine progressive candidates against conservative Democrats and/or Republicans.

2. We need to build an electoral organization that can run such candidates. There are examples of these around the country but we need to expand, ultimately building something at the national level that rivals the vision of the National Rainbow Coalition from the late 1980s. It needs to be an organization that has a mass base and can run candidates inside and outside the Democratic Party.

3. We desperately need mass action. Wisconsin was wonderful for many reasons but one important one was the sustained presence in the capitol. A protest movement focused on power needs to be prepared to break the law, not through the actions of a few individuals, but much as happened in Wisconsin, as well as in the Civil Rights movement, with masses of people making a situation untenable. [boldface added]

But we also have to develop key strategic targets for our actions where we are clear on what we want them to do. This will largely happen at the local level at first, but it can also happen at the national level, such as through selective boycotts.

4. We have to think and act globally and locally. We must link with social movements around the world challenging U.S. foreign policy, providing such movements with whatever level of support we can. We cannot allow more Honduras coup situations, and we have to make it clear that U.S. policy in Afghanistan is a disaster.

via Trevor Loudon’s New Zeal Blog » Bill Fletcher, Jr. – Leading Socialist Calls for Mass Actions, Law Breaking, to Re-Elect Obama in 2012.

What would Martin Luther say?

Big O is fooling

Paul Ryan is not convinced by President Tricky:

“The President’s policy continues to contradict the core principles of our nation. His decision today still disrespects the Constitution by treating our rights as revocable privileges from our government, instead of inalienable gifts from our creator. The President did not compromise — he doubled down.”

via Ryan Speaks Out in Defense of Religious Liberty | U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan.

Sneed and her shots

God bless Miss Sneed for reporting Cardinal George’s broadside to the maximum leader, but these shots kill me:

† The upshot: The issue was resolved when . . . .

† The backshot: Cardinal George is now in Rome . . . .

† The buckshot: “The contraceptive mandate imposed on health plans . . . .

Deliver us, O Sneed, from this surfeit of neologisms and quirkish behavior in print.

via Cardinal George defies President Obama on birth control – Chicago Sun-Times.

Sister Rosemary in a perp walk

Is it Barbara Frietchie time in Chi?

“The contraceptive mandate imposed on health plans by the Department of Health and Human Services also violates freedom of conscience,” said a Catholic priest.

“Imagine the impact on a revered Chicago Catholic institution like Misericordia, which is a home to the mentally disabled.”


Barbara Frietchie retrieved the flag shot down by Johnny Reb as he marched through “Frederick town” and hurled her defiance at Stonewall Jackson’s Confederate soldiers:

‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,’ she said.

At 90, she’d come by her gray hairs honestly.

Context: Cardinal George defies Obama, screams Sun-Times

 . . .

 

“We cannot — and will not — comply with this unjust law,” states the cardinal, who is vehemently opposed to the new Obama administration rule requiring religious organizations to include contraceptive health insurance coverage.

“People of faith cannot be made second-class citizens because of their religious beliefs. . . . Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights.”

 

. . . but nowhere runs his letter!  Left-wing hothouse, like most mainstream newsrooms.

Later: And what’s here comes after five days of nothing, reader Pat Hickey notes below!