Tag: Blithe Spirit

Perspective, please

This fellow has a high opinion of his line of work:

Dr. LeRoy Carhart, one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions, called on the federal government to treat as hate crimes all activities by “anti-choice domestic terrorists.” [He] compared the slain Dr. George Tiller to Martin Luther King and said planting crosses was equivalent to actions by the Ku Klux Klan.

Hold on there, Doc.  Another way of looking at this is to imagine you as a drug pusher in a tough neighborhood.  You get killed, we might say in the line of duty, we put law enforcement at work, finding the killers if we can and prosecuting them, along the way excoriating them as immoral and evil people.  But we don’t glorify you.

Cut that bonus!

The Obama administration is dropping its plan to cap salaries at firms receiving government bailout money, leaving them subject to congressionally imposed limits on bonuses.

The move is likely to end months of confusion on Wall Street about separate pay directives from the White House and Congress.

But a bonus is an incentive, you know, like contributions from a labor union or Hollywood mogul.  Congress people should be the last not to understand this.

A stitch in time?

* Disappointment rife among Euro leftists:

“The most striking feature of the [recent] election results . . . is the fact that the center-left parties across Europe, the Social Democrats and Socialists, have not been able to give a plausible answer, political answer, to the economic crisis,” said Thomas Klau of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Have they tried David Axelrod?  He’s good with political answers, and in a pinch could send someone over.

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Making one parish out of three in Waukegan

A new Catholic parish in Waukegan has its new pastor, a Loyola U.-Chicago philosophy teacher and veteran of the Peru mission.  He is Rev. Daniel Hartnett, S.J., who is to lead “a new Catholic presence in Waukegan,” according to the Chicago archdiocese’s director of research and planning, Jean Welter.

Welter explained to the News-Sun: “There were so many original ethnic parishes up there, and it’s still diverse . . .  We still have the older ethnic groups and Latinos.”

A Waukegan priest, Rev. Gary Graf, and representatives of three parishes worked out a quasi-merger plan.  The resulting quasi-single parish has been handed over to Father Hartnett.

It seems to be where a shortage of priests meets a shortage of anglos, which together meet a reasonable solution.  It’s announced as a new-pastor story —

A philosophy professor who spent 23 years ministering to the poor in a squatter settlement in Peru has been named pastor of a newly formed Roman Catholic parish in Waukegan.

— but seems equally if not primarily a neat bit of ecclesiastical problem-solving.  Not till the sixth paragraph, however, do we have details:

Each church will continue to operate, but will be referred to as the Holy Family site, IC [Immaculate Conception] site and Queen of Peace site. “Thank God,” Graf said. “We need every building we have.”

Come to think more on it, it’s one priest for three parishes — not quite a sow’s ear, but calling nonetheless for silk-purse treatment?

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Mixed Bag

Life of an image: Our headline of the week is “Icon given a fighting chance,” in 6/2/09 Chi Trib business section for lead-off hard-copy story.

Yes, and Obama couldn’t have said it better. In fact, he did, on 6/1, calling his plan “viable, achievable,” one “that will give this iconic American company a chance to rise again.”

As did NYTimes same day.

Huh. Polly want a cracker?

Death’s sting: We are in remission, cancerly speaking, from the day we are born, playwright Simon Gray wrote, brooding over friends Alan Bates and Harold Pinter, in The Last Cigarette.

Or: At birth we are sentenced to death. The medieval monk kept a skull on his desk as a reminder. “Memento mori,” the ancient Romans said.

But “I’m never going to die,” says the self-absorbed adolescent.

“I’m so happy,” Gerard Manley Hopkins told his mother on his Jesuit death bed.

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust . . . .

Remember, man, dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return. (Old-time religion admonition for Ash Wednesday, sometimes discarded in favor of “Have a nice day” or its liturgical equivalent.)

White cells down, says one day’s blood test. False alarm, the doc says after re-test. “Were you sick recently?” he asks, seeking explanation.  He’s a lifelong learner.

Never say die: In his last year, Simon Gray had his daily after-dinner smoke, “that lifelong enemy who even towards the very end never lets him down.”

He recalls playwright Harold Pinter’s “rages” as he faced death. Yes. Dylan Thomas advised, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” which was edited out of my 1971 book on prayer by my careful Catholic editor, who had it right but might have asked me first.

Rather cool assessment: Monsignor Darcy in This Side of Paradise (1920) is “intensely ritualistic, startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate and rather liked his neighbor.” Italics added to this from p. 16 of the Dover edition, 1996.

Abortive: Talked to a man of the cloth the other day about abortion, he referred several times to people of whom he did not approve who opposed it. I recalled years ago being told to abandon my racial-justice thinking because Communists shared it. The argument sells or it doesn’t, regardless who embraces it.

He and others in a group also held in contempt the abortion-as-murder argument advanced by pro-lifers, to which my response would be, are you sure it’s not murder? If we’re not sure and do it anyway, what does that say about our respect for life?

Not much.

Self-something: Heritage Foundation’s “Morning Bell” has this well-chosen phrase for Obama’s repeated confessions of American guilt: It’s “a ritual exercise in self-loathing.”

The sort of thing he got used to hearing from his spiritual guide Jeremiah Wright, who required self-separation from the totality which is us.

Union-made: If you’re looking for a boycott protest, consider this, also from “Morning Bell”:

According to Rasmussen Reports, Only 26% of Americans believe nationalizing General Motors was a good idea and 17% say that Americans should protest the bailout by boycotting GM and refusing to buy its cars.

Well. Our own vehicle is a Geo Prizm, built for the 1994 season with a Toyota motor, which our man on Madison Street praises to the skies, at the same time manifesting utter disdain for whatever comes out of Detroit’s UAW shops. He fixes them all the time and should know.

So what? Obama won,didn’t he?  Wall St. Journal Political Diary on the (expensive) GM-takeover caper:

Usually this kind of funding for big projects has to go through the powerful appropriations committees in the House and Senate, but now the power of the purse has been commandeered by the executive branch. It isn’t executing the laws, it’s making the laws.

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Oak Park’s Congressman: Socialists liked him

Interesting Oak Park and Danny Davis reference here from the March-April 1996 “New Ground,” published by the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), revving up for the coming primry:

The Seventh Congressional District runs from the lakefront straight west to the Cook County border. If you’d like to get involved, contact the Davis for Congress headquarters: (312) 626-1996. Folks out in Oak Park can also call Larry Shapiro at (708) 445-0072.

Contributions can be sent to Davis for Congress, 5730 W. Division, Chicago, IL 60651. Note that Federal law requires political committees (i.e. Davis for Congress) to report the name, mailing address, occupation and name of employer for each individual whose contributions aggregate in excess of $200 in a calendar year.

Davis won in April and November, has been Illinois 7th’s man in Congress since that time.  Before he had put a foot in Congress, he had socialists’ support.  “New Ground” tells why:

Danny Davis is certainly not foreign to Chicago DSA. From the very beginning, he has always been willing to help: appearing as a speaker with Michael Harrington, serving as a Master of Ceremonies without peer at the annual Debs – Thomas – Harrington Dinner.

If there’s been dissatisfaction with him on socialists’ part since then, it has not surfaced.  At least in 2002, if not before and since, he belonged in Congress to the Progressive Caucus, with these leading-edge worthies:

Neil Abercrombie — Hawaii
Tammy Baldwin — Wisconsin
Xavier Becerra — California
David Bonior — Michigan
Corrine Brown — Florida
Sherron Brown — Ohio
Michael Capuano — Massachusetts
Julia Carson — Indiana
William “Lacy” Clay — Missouri
John Conyers — Michigan
Danny Davis — Illinois
Peter DeFazio — Oregon
Rosa DeLauro — Connecticut
Lane Evans — Illinois
Eni Faleomavaega — Am Samoa
Sam Farr — California
Chaka Fattah — Pennsylvania
Bob Filner — California
Barney Frank — Massachusetts
Luis Gutierrez — Illinois
Earl Hilliard — Alabama
Maurice Hinchey — New York
Jesse Jackson Jr. — Illinois
Sheila Jackson-Lee — Texas
Stephanie Tubbs Jones — Ohio
Marcy Kaptur — Ohio
Dennis Kucinich — Ohio
Tom Lantos — California
Barbara Lee — California
John Lewis — Georgia
Jim McDermott — Washington
James P. McGovern — Massachusetts
Cynthia McKinney — Georgia
Carrie Meek — Florida
George Miller — California
Patsy Mink — Hawaii
Jerry Nadler — New York
Eleanor Holmes Norton — D.C.
John Olver — Massachusetts
Major Owens — New York
Ed Pastor — Arizona
Donald Payne — New Jersey
Nancy Pelosi — California
Bobby Rush — Illinois
Bernie Sanders — Vermont [Socialist]
Jan Schakowsky — Illinois
Jose Serrano — New York
Hilda Solis — California
Pete Stark — California
Bennie Thompson — Mississippi
John Tierney — Massachusetts
Tom Udall — New Mexico
Nydia Velazquez — New York
Maxine Waters — California
Diane Watson — California
Mel Watt — North Carolina
Henry Waxman — California
Paul Wellstone — Minnesota
Lynn Woolsey — California

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She knows life in the Bronx, anyhow

Has Sotomayor any business experience?  She knows how the world works, says Obama, but like him knows not the pressures and realities of profit and loss?  I’m alluding to his test for a good S.C. justice. 

I’d prefer a keen legal mind and a propensity to call it by the book.  Why does Obama privilege (as they say in academe and its offshoots) some kinds of experience and not others? 

We know why: he’s a leftist radical who is skilled in vote-getting.  But we few — we unhappy few — would like a majority to know it, wouldn’t we?

Here’s a case in point, demonstrating her baffling lack of common sense in the business arena.

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It’s the market, stupid

Don Boudreaux of George Mason U. offers a neat capsule pro-market statement, quoting Pietra Rivoli’s 2005 book The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, as in this excerpt:

A system that ignores market signals, that provides no incentives, that subsidizes losers cannot be efficient in producing goods and services. Central planners will produce the wrong goods, use the wrong inputs, set the wrong prices, hire the wrong people, and ultimately produce shoddy products, and not enough of them, anyway.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (White House), the fixers are bound to decide they know all those things and can do it better.  They just know, that’s all. 

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Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States

Here’s a little something off the top of one’s head:

America’s 46th president, Seamas McDoherty-O’Rahilly, fresh from his commencement address and honorary doctorate at Notre Dame in May, 2013, set himself to put things right with Catholic voters. He had angered them by banning Polish surnames, leaving Sitko, Czarobski, Lujack and others languishing pseudonymously in the record books. In addition, after the election, which he had won with heavy Catholic support, he had come out as a Presbyterian.

At the commencement he announced revocation of the Polish-name ban, and a week later he paraded distant Catholic cousins at a White House reception. But what really did it for him was an unexpected shift in Catholic thinking on political-economic matters.

Officially and with considerable grassroots approval, the church began to emphasize the seventh commandment (as Catholics number them), “Thou shalt not steal,” somewhat to the detriment of its longstanding emphasis on the Catholic sixth, “Thou shalt not commit adultery” and the don’t-even-think-about-it 9th, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”

Similarly, new emphasis was placed on the Catholic tenth, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods,” rarely invoked and largely replaced with social-justice exhortations. No change was apparent in emphasis on the fifth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” as in opposition to abortion and capital punishment and in its ongoing flirtation with pacifism.

The shift to the anti-stealing seventh came gradually, as Catholic shifts always do, though far less gradually than most. It was virtual confiscation of money and property by the government from citizens and their companies, mainly by way of the money-printing spree known as the stimulus bill that got the bishops off a dime.

Then came the auto company bailouts and subsequent transfer of ownership. “It’s the Chrysler thing, stupid,” anti-Obama publicists said when they weren’t saying, “It’s the economy, stupid” and “It’s the inflation, stupid.”

Implicated in this was the car czar, an auto-industry newcomer under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for activities predating his czar appointment. Under his management, for instance, General Motors became known as UAW Motors. The Treasury department played its role. “Treasury hath given, treasury hath taken away” was the relevant campaign slogan. Major banks found themselves owned in part by the government.

It became too much for the bishops, until then vocal almost exclusively about abortion and immigration. The boldest of them counseled withholding Communion not only from abortion-enablers but also from various abrogators of property rights. Several Catholic senators switched to suburban mega churches rather than be embarrassed.

Rome finally spoke. Even when supporting a free market, Pope John Paul II had said that the market should be “appropriately controlled by the forces of society and by the State,” giving what some called a license to steal to creative officials. But the newly crowned Pope John Paul III quoted a 16th-century Jesuit named Mariana, who said, “The private goods of citizens are not at the disposal of the king.”

Times were a-changing. McDoherty-O’Rahilly climbed on this churchly bandwagon and sailed ahead toward mid-term elections with the wind at his back.

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