Calvinist Romance



Of course, after that it gets totally depraved.

Any work of literature is better if it includes....zombies!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Speaking of Fascism

Obama fires the president of General Motors, appoints a "Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers" and promises that the United States will stand behind GM's warranties.

Speaking historically, what is the difference between this and what Mussolini advocated as "fascism"?

The Road to Serfdom

Father Thomas Berg and Michael Augros at NRO document the return of American Know-nothingism - and the incipient fascism - of recent legislative attacks on the Catholic church.

Keith Olbermann - America's Moron

Check out this article and ask yourself whether Ron Burgundy was based on Olbermann.

Great Moments in Diplomacy, a Continuing Series - Who painted Our Lady of Gaudelupe?

Yet, another gaffe by Secretary of State Clinton that would have been front page news and late night television fodder if it had involved the Bush administration.

Mollie Hemingway at Get Religion points out this story about Hillary Clinton's trip to Mexico:

I thought I’d wait to write this post until I saw mainstream media coverage of one particular aspect of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. And then, thousands of stories about the visit to Mexico later, I realized that the press wasn’t going to be covering it.

Which, assuming this story is true, says a lot about the media. Here’s how Catholic News Agency reported the most recent diplomatic gaffe:

During her recent visit to Mexico, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an unexpected stop at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and left a bouquet of white flowers “on behalf of the American people,” after asking who painted the famous image.

You can read more about Guadalupe here, but Roman Catholics believe that the beautiful image was miraculously imprinted on the cloak of a 16th-century peasant.
It is Mexico’s most popular and important religious image and the basilica that houses it is the second-most popular Catholic shrine in the world.

Here are the details of the exchange:

Msgr. Monroy took Mrs. Clinton to the famous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which had been previously lowered from its usual altar for the occasion.

After observing it for a while, Mrs. Clinton asked “who painted it?” to which Msgr. Monroy responded “God!”

Now, it’s one thing to not know what the Catholic Church teaches about Guadalupe. But it’s another for the State Department not to have briefed Clinton prior to her visit. Of course, those are political considerations.

Here’s what I’m wondering: Why was this story not deemed newsworthy? I’m sure some people would say that it’s just bias — that if, say, a Bush Administration official had said it, we’d be hearing all about it. I’m not sure. I suspect that it’s more likely we’re seeing the media’s ignorance of Mexico’s religious heritage and her most important religious picture.

The reader who sent this story in thought the faux pas was certainly worthy of at least a line or two in coverage of the visit. I agree.

This being Catholic News Agency, it’s also worth noting how the story ended:

This evening Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is set to receive the highest award given by Planned Parenthood Federation of America — the Margaret Sanger Award, named for the organization’s founder, a noted eugenicist. The award will be presented at a gala event in Houston, Texas.

You can read more mainstream media coverage of that award here. It doesn’t look like Sanger’s controversial views were deemed worthy of mention.

Paradise Lost

A class reading Milton.

Socially Autistic Atheists

Here is Bill Maher trying to justify Obama's "Special Olympics" snipe while exposing the mindset behind the familiar "they'd be better off aborted before birth" trope.



According to Maher, how dare Sarah Palin claim that the disabled are "the most special and unique people"! Doesn't she understand that the disabled aren't special or unique because.....well, we'd better not go there.

[Via The Raving Theist.]

The Gaffe that wasn't

According to this Telegraph opinion column, Obama was joking rather than gaffing when he thanked himself.

No word on whether he was being "insensitive" when he told the St. Patrick's day guests not to get blindingly drunk.

Also, apparently the White House has taken to moving the teleprompter back as camouflage.

The Glories of Rhetoric

*Sigh*

In America, the height of political rhetoric is to conscript an advertising slogan into a talking point.

But in England, there is still some flair.




[Via NRO]

"Sheesh, the guy is Jimmy Carter."

Vanity Fair writer Michael Wolff compares Obama to Jimmy Carter... with respect to his ability to communicate (and hectoring narcissism):

You can see the fundamental mistake he’s making. Having been so successfully elected, he’s acting like people actually want to hear what he thinks. He’s the great earnest bore at the dinner party. Instead of singing for his supper, he’s just talking—and going on at length. The real job of making people part of the story you’re telling, of having them hang on your every word, of getting the tone and detail right, the hard job of holding a conversation, he ain’t doing.

And:

Well, shit, of course. The true secret of the power of language is in quickness. Barack Obama can’t keep up. He evidently needs too much preparation. And then there’s the organization. He’s undoubtedly got too many people debating what he should say. That’s the other secret of language: You’ve got to just go for it. Can’t think too much about it. It’s like hitting the ball. And then there’s knowing who you want to be—which is different than knowing who you are. You’re on the stage. You’re acting. You’ve got to make yourself believable, cleverly make yourself up as you go along.

This guy is leaden and this show is in trouble.

In other newsthe New York Time op-ed page goes after Obama en masse.

Everybody's getting in on the action.

The Telegraph lists - and provides videotape on - Obama and Biden's Top 10 Gaffes.

Liberals are funny when they forget that they are out in public

They feel that they are the high priests of tolerance and so they claim an exemption from the PC rules that they insist everyone else follows. So, a mere days after playing on the "drunken Irishmen" trope - which went totally under the radar - Obama makes a self-deprecating comment about his bowling skill being in the "special Olympics" level and he refers to his dog as not being a "waterhead" dripping or tripping around the house, "waterhead" being apparently a colloquial term for someone with mental retardation.

In some ways the "Special Olympic" comment is the kind of endearing, self-deprecating humor that we can make to our friends, but we have to have a sense of audience. There are things we can say privately but not publicly out of that sense of audience. Obama with his friends is just Barrack; when he is on Leno, he is The President.

Further, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The left has been playing the offended victim card for years to shut down any conservative who said anything that might possibly be construed as "insensitive." It managed to derail George Allen's senatorial campaing on the discovery that "macaca" - whatever that meant - was - or sounded like - a racial slur. So, if stringing up a few liberals by their rules takes the insensitive victimization gambit down a few decibles, then it's a thing worth doing.

Finally, is this really so innocent? I think back on the awful spectacle of the left treating Trig Palin as an "it" and the oft used justification of abortion as a way of getting rid of "defective humans." Why are we supposed to think that people who know what "waterhead" means - something I've never heard before - don't really have a special little category on their special list of people who don't really count as people.

Jim Treacher has run up a list of other "Obama witticisms", including:

"I stopped by Hollywood earlier. Or as I call it, Little Israel. I dropped a penny on the sidewalk and lost 3 Secret Service guys."

"You think being the first black president is easy? Every time I leave the White House, Secret Service checks my pockets for silverware."

"Yeah, John McCain and I get along. Although he always freezes me out when I try to give him a high five! [audience groans] What, too soon?"

"Sarah Palin and I don't talk much, 'cause I don't speak Tardese. 'Doy! Durr! Look at my dumb baby!' [audience member boos] Oh, lighten up."

"Ya know, I thought about picking a female VP too. But I've already got somebody to clean my house and fetch me beers! Am I right, fellas?"

"Any Irish folks in the audience? Don't raise your hand, you might spill your drink. 'When Oirish oys are smilin'...'" [staggers, pretends to vomit]

By the way, how is that last one substantially different than what Obama actually said on St. Patrick's day:

Mr Obama joked about the free-flowing bar and warned his guests not to wear lampshades on their heads in front of the cameras.

Because I'm certain he warns all of his guests at all of his parties not to drink themselves into oblivion.

Could you imagine the media reaction if Cheney had provided this kind of ammunition?

So, there was Biden, threatening local government about misapplying the manna from heaven provided through the "Porkulus Bill", and then when everything gets serious, he unloads pure comedy gold:

JOSEPH BIDEN, Vice President of the United States: Because of the rules, the president and I can’t stop you from doing some things, but I’ll show up in your city and say, “This was a stupid idea.”

You think I’m kidding? This is the only part the president was right about: Don’t mess with Joe, because I mean it. I’m serious, guys. I’m serious. I’m absolutely serious.

"...the only part the president was right about...."

Great week for the "Not Ready for Prime-Time Administration."

I'd say it's time to lock Biden up in an undisclosed location, but Obama is gaffing just as bad.

Be afraid, America. Be very afraid.

Michelle Malkin has the audio.

Regulation and Financial Apocalypse

Mark Perry has some interesting slides about the cause and future of the economic collapse. The supporting information comes from this slide show by Morgan Stanley.

I found interesting this slide from a 1998 "State of the Nation's Housing Report" which identified regulatory pressures as causing lenders to revise their practices.



That was - to repeat - 1998.

This slide indicates a connection between rising house ownership rates and decline in savings:

Peggy Noonan

From the WSJ:

These are the two great issues, the economic crisis and our safety. In the face of them, what strikes one is the weightlessness of the Obama administration, the jumping from issue to issue and venue to venue from day to day. Isaiah Berlin famously suggested a leader is a fox or a hedgehog. The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In political leadership the hedgehog has certain significant advantages, focus and clarity of vision among them. Most presidents are one or the other. So far Mr. Obama seems neither.

The Ruling Class

Why should our representatives have to suffer the same taxes that we do?

From the Wall Street Journal:

On the same day the House whooped through a 90% surtax on some bonuses, Bloomberg News reported that Democratic Rep. Pete Stark, a House eminento from California, may have been improperly claiming residency in Maryland to get a tax break. As you might guess, Maryland's tax bite isn't as deep as wonderful California's. This follows on news reports last week that Democratic New York Congressman Eliot Engel has been told by Maryland authorities he too may not claim his suburban Maryland home as his primary residence for tax purposes. The AP noted, "Engel isn't the only politician who's been found to be improperly receiving the credit. Another Congressman, some U.S. Senators and several Maryland legislators have also been tripped up by the requirements."

Oh my. If New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank are going to try to make public the names of bonus recipients to help mobs demonstrate in front of individuals' homes, perhaps Maryland's tax authorities could do the same for out-of-state politicians who've turned the state into their personal Liechtenstein. No doubt millions of average Joes living in such tax hells as New York and California would love to work on the taxpayers' dime in Washington and live in a low-tax jurisdiction nearby.

No representation without taxation.

Great Stuff



[Via Mark Shea]

Look who is benefitting from bourgeoisie justice and the special advantages given to white wealthy women.

Sara Jane Olson released to serve parole in Minnesota:

Culminating a case that has evoked history and strong emotions, former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson was released from state prison Tuesday and cleared to serve supervised parole in Minnesota after completing a seven-year sentence for bank robbery and attempting to kill Los Angeles police officers.

Who is Sara Jane Olson?

Olson was one of five SLA members -- including Emily Montague-Harris, William Taylor Harris, Michael Alexander Bortin and James William Kilgore -- who pleaded guilty in Sacramento County to second-degree murder in the death of Myrna Opsahl during the April 21, 1975, robbery of Crocker National Bank in suburban Carmichael.

Then known as Kathleen Soliah, Olson was inside the bank and armed at the time Opsahl, a 42-year-old mother of four, was fatally shot. The case took on added notoriety because kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst said she was the getaway driver and described in a book how the robbery and killing took place. Hearst was not charged in that case, but served a two-year federal prison sentence for a San Francisco bank robbery.

Olson cold-bloodedly murdered the mother of small children - who the SLA viewed as an expendable "bourgeois pig" - but was allowed a very lenient plea bargain.

At the sentencing, the Opsahl family showed commendable sympathy for the fact that Olson had remade her life, but - ironically - she was able to remake her life because she came from the white privilege that she allegedly murdered to end.

Ultimately, this is another Boomer story - spoiled children who scamper back to the security of their elite position when forced to face the consequences of their actions.

The "Not Ready for Prime-time Administration"

Treasury Secretary Geithner and Congress were not "blind-sided" by the AIG bonuses.

Obama's Problems with Communications

From Politico.

If someone is accusing you of something you are not doing, then you can bet they're doing it.

As Vox Day points out, we now know why the left wing has been ventilating about the "vast right wing conspiracy.

From Politico:

For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.

As Vox Day points out:

So, it seems journalism has its own little group of would-be Bilderbergers. What a surprise! One thing I've noticed is that you can usually tell what a left-winger is doing in secret by paying attention to what he accuses the right of doing. And this quote tells you all you need to know about the factual reliability of the liberal media:

"Defending the off-the-record rule, Klein said that “candor is essential and can only be guaranteed by keeping these conversations private.”"

In other words, if a left-leaning blogger, political reporter, magazine writer, policy wonk or academic is communicating openly in public, candor is inessential and cannot be guaranteed. In short, you should assume they're probably lying.

Isn't remarkable how long this has gone without being covered by our "watchdog media"?

Cynicism Rules

Down below, I wondered what the pay-off was for inserting the language permitting AIG to pay bonuses.

Now it turns out that the person responsible for that language was Chris Dodd, who was notoriously in the pocket of the mortgage lenders.

So, I guess we are getting an idea about what the quid pro quo was.

Don't worry, though, the people responsible for creating this mess are still running the country.

Terrific.

Before it goes down the memory hole

NRO points out:

But Frank, Hodes, and 244 other congressmen — all Democrats — voted last month for a stimulus package that explicitly allows TARP funds to be used for such bonuses. To be precise, President Obama’s $789 billion stimulus package contained the following provision, which deals specifically with executive compensation at AIG and other companies that receive TARP money:

The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009, as such valid employment contracts are determined by the Secretary or the designee of the Secretary.

Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.) read this statutory language to the subcommittee twice during the hearing’s early-afternoon session, just in case anyone was unaware. The executive compensation loophole was not merely a holdover from President Bush’s original bailout plan. It was laid out in clear statutory language that was enacted and signed by Democrats over vigorous Republican opposition. The provision was inserted in conference committee by Senate Banking Committee chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.), one of the biggest beneficiaries of political contributions from AIG employees.

It makes you wonder - if you're prone to such a jaundiced view - exactly what was the pay-off and to whom for that particular provision of the Bailout Bill.

Get to know your President better

5 Myths about President Obama:

I’ve concluded that much of the conventional wisdom about Obama is wrong. Here are five of the biggest misconceptions:

1. Obama is bold. Actually, he is overly cautious. It’s no coincidence the first bills he signed into law were the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and an expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, two populist favorites. Signing these bills was not an act of courage any more than attacking lobbyists or selecting Joe Biden as a running mate. In fact, Obama’s entire agenda is cautious (sometimes to a fault, in the case of his housing and banking bailouts). Are the numbers in his proposed budget eye-popping? Yes. But eye-popping budgets are well within the Democratic mainstream now.

2. Obama is a great communicator. Cut away the soaring rhetoric in his speeches, and the resulting policy statements are often vague, lawyerly and confusing. He is not plain-spoken: He parses his language so much that a casual listener will miss important caveats. That’s in part why he uses teleprompters for routine policy statements: He chooses his words carefully, relying heavily on ill-defined terms like “deficit reduction” (which means tax increases, rather than actual “savings”) and “combat troops” (as opposed to “all troops in harm’s way”).

3. Obamaland is a team of rivals. Obama earned the label “No-Drama Obama” for a reason. His closest advisers — those who actually shape his thinking, strategy and policies — are loyal and, by all accounts, like-minded. Obviously, they regularly disagree with each other, as any group of smart individuals does. But reading the (many) profiles of Obama aides written since the election, it’s striking that there are no anecdotes of serious disputes inside Obamaland. Obama does try to bring political foes into the fold when it’s convenient, but his team is primarily made up of political friends.

4. Obama is smooth. Despite being deliberate, Obama is surprisingly gaffe-prone. Reporters on my e-mail lists last year know he consistently mispronounced, misnamed or altogether forgot where he was. (In one typical gaffe in Sioux Falls, S.D., he started his speech with an enthusiastic “Thank you, Sioux City!”) His geographic gaffes are not just at routine rallies but at major events, including the Democratic National Convention and his first address to Congress. Any politician occasionally misspeaks, but the frequency of Obama’s flubs is notable.

5. Obama has a good relationship with the media. Working with the hundreds of reporters who covered the Obama campaign last year, I was struck by how many of them would quietly complain about Obama’s borderline disdain for the press. Sometimes it is readily visible — like when he scolded a reporter for asking a question during a presidential visit to the White House briefing room. Other times it’s more passive, like long gaps between press conferences, or it’s reflected in his staff’s attitude.

Playing on Ethnic Stereotypes

Oh, since it's a St. Patrick's day party, it's ok to play on the stereotype of the Irish being unrestrained drunks?

From the Sky News article on Obama's teleprompter blunder:

Mr Obama joked about the free-flowing bar and warned his guests not to wear lampshades on their heads in front of the cameras.

I imagine that on Cinco De Mayo, he will be warning everyone to stay away from the beans and on on Hmong New Years, we'll hear about using dog meat as a main ingredient in the casserole.

And everyone will be appropriately offended by this lack of sensitivity.

Stereotypes - good natured humor from me, evidence of inherent racist tendencies from thee.

Update:

On the other hand, this is so over the top funny that even a melanin-deficient, red-headed descendent of Eire has to laugh:

I’m madder than a leprechaun with a crooked shillelagh about St. Patrick’s Day!

St. Patrick’s Day is the stupidest holiday of the year, because the Irish are the craziest people on earth, next to the Paleostynians and those nutcase A-rabs. The Irish are basically just Mexicans who speak English.

Why are we having a big parade for a bunch of weirdos who pray to the Pope, believe in fairies and blow each other up?

I know my history, and this great country of ours was founded by Pilgrims and Puritans and other Protestants, not weirdo Catholics like the Irish. If it had been, the Statue of Liberty would be the Virgin Mary!

All the Irish do is get drunk and sing sad songs about dropping dead. Once a year, we let them march down the street, all boozed up on their disgusting warm brown beer. Then they stuff themselves with potatoes and cabbage and stink up the place!

Potato-eating, beer-puking Pope-lovers, that’s what they are!

What have the Irish ever done for America? They stuck us with those damn Kennedys, that’s what. Between their Old Man the crooked bootlegger, down to fat Teddy boy, that family is an embarrassment, not to mention a danger to public safety! Ralph Nader fellow should’ve left General Motors alone and gone after the Kennedys. Their cars should have warning labels instead of bumper stickers.

When St. Patrick’s Day rolls around, don’t get tricked by all the booze and the songs, my fellow Americans. It’s all part of an evil Jesuit plot to help the Vatican take over America! So stay away from all those crazy parades or you’ll end up praying to the wrong Jesus!

That, Mr. President, is how it has to be done.

The Milli-Vanilli President

Big Hollywood shares this:

I’ve been searching for the video of Obama accidentally reading Irish PM Brian Cowen’s speech yesterday. He even thanks himself at the end! Apparently his teleprompter went loopy.

If this were GWB, the video would be everywhere, yet I can’t find a clip on the Internet of a public press conference that took place yesterday. It will come out, but this is amazing.

Thank Sky News for doing its job:

Mr Cowen stopped, turned to the president and said: “That’s your speech.”

A laughing Mr Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.

Mr Obama is an accomplished orator but is becoming known in America as the “teleprompt president” over his reliance on the machine when he gives a speech.

Be afraid everyone, be very afraid.

I am.

Seriously, though, mistakes happen, but after 8 years of the media, Jon Stewart, the Left, academia, etc. seizing upon every gaffe of George W. Bush to assert that Bush was stupid and incompetent, the official silence over Obama gaffes from the usual sources is deafening. Also, if this isn't the main topic for a week's worth of late night comedians and Comedy Central, then it's time to retire the tired claim that conservatives shouldn't be offended when their figures get skewered because "it's all in fun."

Final Jeopardy Questions

Saint Artemius and Saint Nicetas the Goth.

Answer: who are two Arians included in the Catholic list of saints.

And this is the - either really cool or really gross - uncorrupted hand of St. Nicetas the Goth.



That's pretty amazing, given the fact that St. Nicetas the Goth was killed in 372 after being tossed into a fire. He was a Goth warrior - back when being a Goth warrior really meant something, and he wrote several dissertations on faith, the creed, the Trinity, and liturgical singing, and is believed by some scholars to be the author of Te Deum", which is particularly impressive since the Gothic alphabet was just fresh off the presses.

I really like the sound of Saint Nicetas the Goth's name.

He's also the saint that the Orthodox pray to for the preservation of children from birth defects.

The Roman martyrology also includes St. Elesbaan, who was a Monophysite. This is interesting:

Procopius, John of Ephesus, and other contemporary historians recount his invasion of Yemen around 520, against the Jewish Himyarite king Yusuf Asar Yathar (also known as Dhu Nuwas), who was persecuting the Christians in his kingdom. After much fighting, Kaleb's soldiers eventually routed Yusuf's forces and killed the king, allowing Kaleb to appoint Sumuafa' Ashawa', a native Christian (named Esimphaios by Procopius), as his viceroy of Himyar. As a result of his protection of the Christians, he is known as St. Elesbaan after the sixteenth-century Cardinal Cesare Baronio added him to martyrology despite being a Monophysite heretics.[2][3][4]

Along with St. Elasbaan are Aretas and the Martyrs of Najra, who apparently were Monophysites but are Catholic saints.

This Catholic Online site says about Aretas and the Martyrs of Najra:

Also called the martyrs of Najran, a large group of Christian martyrs, possibly as many as 340, who suffered at Nagran, in south­western Arabia. Abdullah ibn Kaab, also called Aretas, was the leader of the martyrs and the chief of the Beni Harith. He and his companions were slain by Dhu Nowas, or Dunaan, a Jew who commanded heathen Jews and Arabs. A woman and her small children were among the victims. The martyrdom is recorded in the Koran.

That last part is interesting in light of Philip Jenkins' recent book, The Lost History of Christianity, which argues that much of Islamic practice is based on Syriac Christian practices.

So, the answer to the question "Is the Pope Catholic" is "Yes, but not all the saints are."

Quality in Fresno News Reporting

Notice how often Fresno newspapers and television stations get things wrong in this post about "9 Things the Media Messed Up About the Obama Stem Cell Story".

The Fresno media may get the facts wrong, but, at least, they are dependably in the tank for liberal rightthink.

And they wonder why no one is buying their products.

Because Conservatives can Read

While liberal newspapers have been tanking, conservative papers have seen their readership grow.

This is from the White House Press Secretary?


White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs opines:

Question: "One quick followup: Former Vice President Cheney was on State of the Union yesterday. He had a lot -- a lot of criticism of this White House.

"To boil it down, on national security, he said the president's policies were making the country less safe. And on the economy, he was charging that the president is taking advantage of the financial crisis to vastly expand the government in all kinds of ways -- health, education, energy.

"How do you respond to those kind of allegations from the former vice president?"

Gibbs: "Well, I guess Rush Limbaugh was busy ... so they trotted out the next most popular member of the Republican cabal.

I do not recall any Republican White House Press Secretary speaking about a "Democrat cabal." I can well imagine the uproar if that kind of language had ever been used by a Republican.

There was at least this follow-up question:

Question: "It was a really hard-hitting, kind of sarcastic, response you had. This is a former vice president of the United States. Is that the attitude? Is that the sanctioned tone for the former vice president of the United States from this White House?"

Gibbs: "Sometimes I ask forgiveness, rather than for permission ... but no, I hope my sarcasm didn't mask the seriousness of the answer ...

Of course, if it was a Republican administration, there would be calls for his firing.

Beyond liberal hypocrisy, Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO makes this substantive point:

I'm confident in saying neither Rush Limbaugh nor Dick Cheney mind association with the other. But that doesn't change the inappropriateness of Robert Gibbs's reaction — "cabal"? — yesterday to a question about Cheney's weekend CNN interview. At some point, this administration — when it takes a break from talking about bipartisanship — ought to consider that Barack Obama is Rush Limbaugh's and Dick Cheney's —every American's — president, too.

If we say "Obama is my president", then it works the other way around also. I think Bush instinctively understood this, but Obama doesn't.

They said that if I voted for McCain, taxes on employer provided health care would be taxed....

...and they were right!

Obama administration plans to tax employer provided health care benefits despite attacking McCain for proposing to tax employer provided health care benefits.

Sometimes it's the SSPX and sometimes it's Foxnews

Pope Benedict XVI observes:

Sometimes one has the impression that our society needs at least one group for which there need not be any tolerance; which one can unperturbedly set upon with hatred. And who dared to touch them - in this case the Pope - lost himself the right to tolerance and was allowed without fear and restraint to be treated with hatred, too.

First Principles

From Just Thomism:

-I read a rational account of why an (obvious) evil is evil, and thought "when you get to the point of having to having to reason about this, you’re doomed." You can know who has power by seeing [who is] allowed to get angry in public, and who doesn’t have to establish the first principles he’s arguing from.

It's nice to hear this kind of thing from the foreign press.

According to this Telegraph article, Sir Gus O'Donnel, England's most senior civil servant, is having trouble finding out who to talk to in the Obama administration because "there is nobody there":

But yesterday, Sir Gus O'Donnell, Britain's most senior civil servant, exposed transatlantic tension when he protested that Downing Street was finding it "unbelievably difficult" to plan for next month's G20 summit in London because of problems tracking down senior figures in the US administration. "There is nobody there. You cannot believe how difficult it is," the Cabinet Secretary told a civil service conference in Gateshead.

And:

"You get to a certain point, and you can't go any further," Sir Gus said. "A whole new bunch of people come in who probably haven't been in government before." Fifty days after President Obama was sworn in, every senior post in the US Treasury Department remains vacant, with the exception of Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary, who should have 17 deputies. The vacuum has prompted complaints that it is struggling to deal with the most severe downturn since the 1930s.

There was some "what he meant to say" from PM Gordon Brown's office, to the effect that this was a description of the fact that America doesn't have a permanent civil service like England.

Except that we do, and the problem is that the leadership hasn't been installed yet.

Bankruptcy Law Reform Needed

According to the Empirical Legal Studies Blog, the data shows that it may be time rethink the Bankruptcy law reform:

With the Dow below the 6,800 mark (as of 3:30 PM EST) for the first time since 1997, now is perhaps an appropriate time to turn our attention to bankruptcy scholarship. To this end, a recent paper by Bob Lawless (IL) et al. warrants attention as it is among the first wave of empirical assessments of the recently reformed bankruptcy code. In Did Bankruptcy Reform Fail? An Empirical Study of Consumer Debtors, the authors report that:

"Contrary to the advocates' claim that high-income filers would be driven from the system and, by implication, that those remaining would have more modest incomes, the data show no change in the income levels of bankruptcy filers after the amendments. These findings thus cast doubt on the suggestion that those purged from the bankruptcy courts - approximately 800,000 in 2007 alone based on trend extrapolation - were high-income deadbeats; they instead appear to have been ordinary American families in serious financial distress. The data also show that debtors filing for bankruptcy in 2007 have even greater debt loads than their counterparts from 2001, a development that seems to track a national trend of increasing consumer debt. The findings thus align with at least two predictions of some legal scholars. The first is that the bankruptcy reform bill was not aimed at high-income abusers but was instead a general assault on all debtors, regardless of their financial circumstances. The second is that debtors are waiting longer - and incurring more debt - before ultimately seeking bankruptcy relief, consistent with the so-called "sweat box" theory of credit card lending."

"Global Warming is a Fraud"

The debate is over, according to Al Gore, but it never really got started. Reason Online reports:

March 9, New York—The participants at the final lunch of the International Climate Change Conference in New York were in a celebratory and pugnacious mood. On the one hand, these skeptics feel beleaguered—who would not?—from their antagonists constantly comparing them to Holocaust "deniers" and calling for them to be tried for "high crimes against humanity and nature." On the other hand, they are cheered by recent polls indicating public skepticism of the claims of imminent catastrophe made by climate "alarmists." In a January Pew Research Center poll, global warming came in dead last on a list of issues of concern to Americans.
At the luncheon, retired NASA climatologist John Theon rose to lament the fact that he hadn't fired James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an ardent advocate of the idea that man-made global warming is a catastrophe in the making. The audience burst into applause when Theon called Hansen an "embarrassment." In 1988, Hansen launched global warming as a public policy issue in his testimony before a congressional committee. Theon admitted that he actually couldn't have fired Hansen, who had powerful political protectors, most notably then-Senator and later Vice President Al Gore. So had Theon tried to do it, it's much more likely that he himself would have been out on the street rather than Hansen.

Theon told the audience that while he remained silent on the issue of global warming when he retired from NASA, he now felt he needed to speak out. "This whole thing is a fraud," said Theon. "We need to educate the public about what we're going to get into unless we stop this nonsense." The nonsense being the deleterious effect that carbon rationing would have on economic growth and jobs.

No Comment Required

"Clown nose on, clown nose off"

For the origin of "clown nose off, clown nose on" read this excellent post by Jim Treacher.

Jon Stewart makes solid points against Jim Cramer and, probably, does a better interview than anyone on television.

Unfortunately, Stewart never turns the light on himself and his own bias because, gosh, he's a comedian.

Mark Hemingway at NRO points out:

If you want to have Cramer on your show and bully him for sticking his neck out and being spectacularly wrong in hindsight, fine. Perhaps he deserves it, and certainly it’s not hard to see Cramer as emblematic of Wall Street arrogance. The problem is that Stewart’s critique of Jim Cramer, or of the financial press in general, is not new or particularly relevant — banks have been collapsing for a year. It only became an issue when Stewart wanted to delegitimize Santelli and Cramer’s comments on the Obama administration.

Stewart wants to use bad stock picks to question the motives of financial observers who are now saying the Obama administration has botched its handling of the crisis. But, ironically, Stewart is the one now risking his own neck with a shaky prediction. Anyone want to bet on whether or not a year from now Stewart’s pro-Obama boosterism will look foolish?

and:

Stewart’s been having it both ways for far too long — his moral authority was such that when he appeared on CNN’s Crossfire in 2004 and declared that the show was “hurting America,” it was soon canceled. Liberal journalists such as The Nation’s media critic Eric Alterman have declared, “Literally no one upheld the honor better of what remains of the media than did this ‘fake news’ comedian. He is our leader.” Last August, during an appearance at the Democratic convention, he gave a pointed lecture to the “established” media bemoaning that they’d abdicated their role to the “slow-witted beast.” And his interview roster is the envy of broadcast journalists the world over.

Yet, when Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz questioned him on his role, the exchange was pretty much the perfect distillation of Stewart’s arrogant and hypocritical defense:

KURTZ: So you don’t, you’re not confusing yourself with a quote “real journalist”?

STEWART: No. You guys are . . .

KURTZ: You’re just making fun . . .

STEWART: You guys are confusing yourselves with real journalists.

That’s right, don’t confuse the comedian Stewart with being a journalist — because he’s better than that. Jim Cramer, on the other hand, is a tool of the corporate media and Wall Street. Of course, anyone who has tuned into his show and seen Cramer strutting around a soundstage that looks like the helm of the Starship Enterprise as envisioned by the Teletubbies’ set designer and pushing buttons that make wacky sound effects could tell you that Cramer is to stock-picking what The Daily Show is to TV news: something not to be taken too seriously.

Clown nose off, clown nose on.

More Obama Problems in Staffing

H. Rodgin Cohen withdraws from nomination for the Treasury Department's "number 2" position.

No explanation was provided for Cohen's withdrawal and the press is not interested in finding out:

The party line, according to ABC’s This Week host and former Clinton administration adviser George Stephanopoulos, is that “an issue arose in the final stages of the vetting process.” David Cho at the Washington Post reports that “two sources familiar with the matter” confirmed this, but that they “declined to identify the reason.”

Perhaps the press is not really interested in finding out that reason, or reasons. Or worse, they’ve got a pretty good idea, and they’d rather not dig; because if they don’t dig, they won’t have to tell us. Stephanopoulos appears to be giving away that he knows more than he’s willing to reveal when he writes that “Cohen has been a counsel to just about every major player on Wall Street, which perhaps complicated his nomination.”

Instapundit observes:

HMM: So Why DID H. Rodgin Cohen Withdraw as Treasury’s No. 2? Press Is Curiously Not Curious. On the other hand, a colleague of mine who knows this stuff says that he is to banking law what the Dalai Lama is to religion. But this media observation seems on-target: “I suspect that investigation and speculation would have run rampant if a Republican president had pulled the nomination of someone like Cohen; witness the feeding frenzy that followed Bush Homeland Security nominee Bernie Kerik for several days in 2004 even after his nomination was pulled. Instead, we’re supposed to just let this Cohen thing go and move on.”

Indeed.

Great Moments in Science Educamation

Bill Clinton thinks its ethically acceptable to use human embryos for scientific research because they "are never going to be fertilized."

I kid you not.

See the video for yourself. Clinton repeats that point repeatedly, when he is not biting his lip and looking thoughtful.



Ed Morrisey points out that the sycophantic interviewer - a physician and Clinton's first choice for Surgeon General - never corrects Clinton.

Hate Speech

Maureen Mullarkey describes how she has been subjected to tactics that liberals normally condemns as "McCarthyite" but now apparently its "all good":

Until now, donating to a cause did not open private citizens to a battery of invective and jackboot tactics. While celebrities sport their moral vanity with white ribbons, thousands of ordinary Americans who donated to Prop 8 are being targeted in a vile campaign of intimidation for having supported a measure that, in essence, ratified the crucial relation between marriage and childbearing. Some in California have lost their jobs over it; others worry about an unhinged stranger showing up at the door.

Who was it who predicted that if fascism ever came to the United States, it would come in the guise of liberal egalitarianism?

Here's a list of "homemakers" that one group wants everyone to boycott.

Stimulate science, not ideology

There is something very disturbing in the haste in which the Obama administration is trying to take down as many barriers to the protection of human life as quickly as possible. It's as if having more abortions and more human embryos created and destroyed for science were a blood rite that will bring prosperity back by propitiating the Prince of this World.

According to the Investor's Business Daily, the embryonic stem cell research angle is a sucker's bet:

During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama said: "I believe that the restrictions that President Bush has placed on funding of human embryonic stem cell research have handcuffed our scientists and hindered our ability to compete with other nations."

With all due respect, that is nonsense. With Obama lifting the restrictions on Monday, we will now be federally funding research that has yet to produce a single therapy or a single treatment of an actual human being, at least one that works. It has generated a lot of hope but very little change. It is he who is putting ideology over science.

What has handcuffed our scientists is the difficulty of controlling embryonic stem cells and what they develop into. They're called pluripotent because they can develop into any type of human tissue, sometimes all at once.

Embryonic stem cells have a tendency to develop into one of the most primitive and terrifying forms of cancer, a tumor called a teratoma. Adult stem cells don't have that problem.

Recently the family of an Israeli boy suffering from a lethal genetic brain disease sought a solution in the form of injections of fetal stem cells. These injections apparently triggered tumors in the boy's brain and spinal cord.

It's in the area of adult stem cell research that new discoveries are being made every day. Fact is, there are now hundreds of conditions and diseases actually being treated using adult stem cells drawn from umbilical cord blood and other nonembryonic sources.

The typical reaction to Obama's move was represented in a Los Angeles Times sub-headline in its Saturday piece describing Obama's decision. It read, "Lifting Bush's limits on research will reopen a door for science." But no door had been closed.

Bush's executive order banned federal funding only of new stem cell lines. Neither federal funding of existing lines nor private funding was banned. In fact, Bush was the first president to spend any money on ESCR at all. Clinton spent zero.

The Times notes, as we have, that in 2006 researchers led by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Japan's Kyoto University were first able to "reprogram" human skin cells to behave like embryonic stem cells. But it claims the potential of these induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS) "is still unclear."

No, it's not. They can do everything stem cells from destroyed embryos can do, except without the moral baggage or the destroyed embryos.

This type of stem cell, according to the National Institutes of Health, offers the prospect of having a renewable source of replacement cells and tissues to treat diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, spinal cord injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, to name a few.

Last week, Canadian and Scottish researchers, led by Andras Nagy of the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto, announced in the journal Nature a new and safer way to create IPS cells. The original method used genetically engineered viruses to coax the skin cells into a state biologically identical to embryonic stem cells.

The new method uses strands of genetic material, or DNA, which can safely be removed once it does its job. The technique builds on Yamanaka's advance when he electrified scientists by reprogramming ordinary skin cells into stem cells capable of growing heart, brain and other tissues.

Venture capitalists think IPS cells are promising and are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Last year, Kleiner Perkins, the veteran Silicon Valley venture capital firm that helped found the biotechnology industry, announced it was backing a new Bay Area company, iZumi Bio Inc., which will work on further developing the technology for creating and using IPS cells developed from adult stem cells.

If embryonic stem cells are so promising, why aren't venture capitalists lining up and why does ESCR need federal funding? Indeed, let's stimulate science, not ideology.

In the areas of global warming and stem cell research, the secular left has shown itself to be in the grip of magical thinking.

Men and women - occupying but not really sharing the same planet.

I stumbled across this post - OK, with that title, I was drawn to it like metal filings to a magnet - and I found Brooke's patient but exasperated tone in dealing with Dan to be endearing. Then, I read Dan's post and I started laughing, because, you know, based on the commercial, his conclusion was not entirely unreasonable.

Obama "owns" the recession

According to Reason magazine.

The Never-ending Double Standard

On September 11, 2001, James Carville said he wanted the President to fail.

Coming Attractions

According to NRO:

ATLANTA — An undercover state investigator told a right-to-die network that he wanted to kill himself. In response, he later testified, officials of the network planned to have him asphyxiate himself with a helium-filled face mask while holding down his arms.

After an investigation, four officials of the group, known as the Final Exit Network, were arrested last month on charges of racketeering and assisted suicide.

The arrests raised questions about whether the group, which has helped some 200 people commit suicide since 2004, merely watched people take the leap into death, or pushed them over the edge.

And:

“They went through a dry run just to let the agent know what would happen,” Mr. Bankhead said. “Mr. Goodwin got on top of the agent and held down both of his hands,” which investigators say would have prevented him from removing the mask if he had changed his mind during a real suicide.

"Changed his mind during a real suicide"?????

Isn't causing someone to die when they want to live something we call "murder"?

The Case for Marriage is from the child's perspective

Too much of our discussion of marriage has a narcissistic viewpoint of the adults involved, but there is a perspective that can not speak for itself and, so, requires state invervention.

According to Jennifer Robach Morse:

What is the social function of marriage? We can answer this by taking the perspective of the child as a rights-bearing person and asking what it is owed. Unlike adults, the child does not need autonomy or independence. The child is entitled to a relationship with and care from both of the people who brought him into being. Therefore, the child has a legitimate interest in the stability of his parents’ union. No child, however, can defend these entitlements himself. Nor is it adequate to make restitution after these rights have been violated. The child’s rights to care and relationship must be supported pro-actively, before harm is done, if those rights are to be protected at all.

And:

Marriage is adult society’s institutional structure for protecting the legitimate interests of children. Marriage attaches mothers—and especially fathers—to their children, and attaches mothers and fathers to one another. As a result, marriage is every society’s preferred context for sexual activity and child-rearing. The often-heard objection that some marriages don’t have children stands the rationale for marriage on its head. It views marriage strictly from the adult’s perspective.

And:

The motivation to form a contract of a particular kind or indeed any contract at all depends largely on the “default” alternative position. For instance, a strong social safety net decreases the mother’s economic need to form a stable parenting alliance with the father. The state may decline to enforce certain kinds of agreements if it perceives things like sexual exclusivity or permanence to be oppressive relics of a backward time. Through the combination of tax policy, parental leave policy, education, housing and many other policies, the state can show implicit favoritism toward parenting as a solo activity or as a partnered activity, without ever explicitly declaring a preference for one over the other.

This is why the idea of “getting the government out of marriage” is an illusion. The state can, by changing the terms of these and many other social parameters, greatly influence the types of contracts people form. We have simply moved the problem, and the conflict, back a step. Instead of fighting over marriage, we will still have to slug it out over these background conditions. “Government neutrality” sounds good on the chalkboard, but in fact, it is not possible.

In one sense, the government has already removed itself from the marriage business by ceasing to enforce the most basic features of the current “default” marriage contract: stability and sexual fidelity. The no-fault divorce revolution makes marriage less than an ordinary contract. In most contracts, the person who breaches must make some kind of compensation to those who relied on his performance of the contract. Only in marriage does the law permit people to dissolve the contract for any reason or no reason and never even offer an account of themselves.

Couples today are on their own when it comes to maintaining a relationship stable enough to rear their children to adulthood. They may obtain some support from their faith communities and social circles, but parents must make substantial investments of human and financial capital, over a long period of time, with minimal contractual protection.

Now we can see what “getting the state out of marriage” likely means in actual practice. It means eliminating the default marriage contract, with these background conditions. We know that the state has already shown itself to be uninterested in enforcing sexual exclusivity and permanence. Social pressures to form stable unions are almost non-existent. Yet the “social safety net” for unmarried mothers and their children will not go away, and in fact would probably be strengthened if the government didn't recognize marriage as such.

The most likely outcome, therefore, is that few people would even attempt to create a lifelong contract. The “prisoners’ dilemma” problem is at work here: it is publicly beneficial for society to have a norm of long-term marital stability, but it is in each couple’s private interests to write an escape clause for themselves into their own contract.

Would getting the state out of marriage make us freer? We can get a glimpse of the answer to this by looking at the impact of no-fault divorce. Presented to the public in the name of personal liberty, no-fault divorce has led to an increase in the power of the government over individual private lives. Family courts are one of the most intrusive institutions of the modern state, regulating how mothers and fathers spend their time and money. People under the jurisdiction of family courts can have virtually all of their private lives subject to its scrutiny. This is not an increase in freedom: it is an unprecedented insertion of the state into domestic matters.

Excellent analysis.

The "Hopeychange" Presidency

According to Mark Steyn:

I have to say the first six weeks of the Age of the Hopeychange have surprised me. I expected it to be bad, but I didn't expect it to be so incompetent. Not because I had any expectations of President Obama's executive skills: As I said back in the fall re the comparisons with Governor Palin, Barack ain't run nuthin' but his mouth. This is the first real job he's had where you're supposed to show up at nine in the morning and make decisions.

According to VDH:

Obama's awkward corrective call to the NY Times that "Bush is the socialist, not me!" comes after claiming that the Brit protocol disaster was due to his weariness and the frenzy of the job. That claim comes after the White House orchestrated attack on Rush. Yet the problem for Obamians is not in the stars, but in themselves, mostly a result of that classically unfortunate combination of hubris and inexperience. The Obamians need to get a life and govern the country, rather than blaming their gaffes on Bush, Rush, life, etc. . . .

Here's the NYT article with the Obama phone interviews that blame Bush for being a socialist that started the thread.

No Reformation in Connecticut

Committee hearings on the "Henry VIII" Bill have been cancelled after public protest.

Remember, California, that you may be bankrupt, but your credit is still being used to underwrite $6 Billion in bonds to subsidize fatcat embryonic stem-cell researchers.

Remember how I said that sinking your money into a single line of research is a sucker's bet?

Remember how I said that if embryonic stem cell research was that promising, then the market would be funding it?

Remember how I used the analogy of Soviet superiority in vacuum tube technology?

But you wouldn't listen.

However, the president’s support of embryonic stem cell research comes at a time when many advances have been made with other sorts of stem cells. The Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka found in 2007 that adult cells could be reprogrammed to an embryonic state with surprising ease. This technology “may eventually eclipse the embryonic stem cell lines for therapeutic as well as diagnostics applications,” Dr. Kriegstein said. For researchers, reprogramming an adult cell can be much more convenient, and there have never been any restrictions on working with adult stem cells.

Members of Congress and advocates for fighting diseases have long spoken of human embryonic stem cell research as if it were a sure avenue to quick cures for intractable afflictions. Scientists have not publicly objected to such high-flown hopes, which have helped fuel new sources of grant money like the $3 billion initiative in California for stem cell research.

In private, however, many researchers have projected much more modest goals for embryonic stem cells. Their chief interest is to derive embryonic stem cell lines from patients with specific diseases, and by tracking the cells in the test tube to develop basic knowledge about how the disease develops.

Despite an F.D.A.-approved safety test of embryonic stem cells in spinal cord injury that the Geron Corporation began in January, many scientists believe that putting stem-cell-derived tissues into patients lies a long way off. Embryonic stem cells have their drawbacks. They cause tumors, and the adult cells derived from them may be rejected by the patient’s immune system. Furthermore, whatever disease process caused the patients’ tissue cells to die is likely to kill introduced cells as well. All these problems may be solvable, but so far none have been solved.

The good news is that UC Merced is going to research improvements in vacuum tube technologies.

Experience Matters

According to Steve Sailer:

Four months past the election, Obama’s basic problem with staffing is that he doesn’t know many people — not in the sense of having worked closely with them on a successful project so that he can tell who is effective and who is an empty suit. He’s not exactly Dwight Eisenhower, who came to office with a list in his head of the strengths and weaknesses as managers of hundreds of potential appointees. How many successful projects has Obama been part of other than his own self-advancement? The Chicago Annenberg Challenge? That didn’t do anything for test scores. Getting (some) asbestos out of a public housing project? Woo-hoo!

So, Obama has mostly been appointing four kinds of people: Chicagoans he knows, ex-Clintonites he read about in the newspapers during the 1990s, campaign aides, and random people who sound cool. He doesn’t know anything about economics or business, so his weaknesses at staffing Treasury are particularly glaring.

Interesting.

Collapsing Denominations

Michael Spencer links to this interactive graph/chart comparing the state of religion in 1990 and 2006.

The visuals display is nothing less than striking in showing the hemorhaging membership of Catholics in the Northeast. Catholic growth can be found in the South, undoubtedly fueled by the unprecedented immigration of Mexicans, which will probably be coming to an end.

For Protestants, the story is even more dismal.

Spencer writes:

Hispanics are the only thing floating in a sinking American Catholicism. Catholicism in the northeast is in rapid decline. Stunning, really.

Protestants are in a free fall. Evangelicals are moving to non-denominational megachurches and away from mainlines and traditional evangelicalism. Non-denominational, highly Charismatic flavored evangelicalism is on the way to domination, and you heard it here first, megachurch evangelicalism is a house of cards. If those in the pews of the megachurches think think grandchildren will be there as adults, I have a bridge I’d like to sell cheap.

While out and out atheists are still a sliver of the population, those calling themselves non-religious are growing rapidly. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet in that category. America remains a nation that says it is over 70% Christian, but Christianity as a percentage of the population is shrinking in every category except for Hispanics.

Baptists are coasting into decline, with growth far behind the total population. Generational horizons- the end of churches because no younger generation exists- are everywhere in the mainlines.

Here is the Touchstone article on the survey.

Rules for destroying the economy

Here they are.

I particularly like these:

5. Undermine the ability of those who create jobs by increasing their taxes so there’s less money available for investment.

6. While you’re at it, offer to spread the income around by raising taxes, in the process, making it clear to those who work hard, invest in their educations, take risks, save, and delay gratification that they will see their money go to those who do not do these things.

7. Encourage class warfare. Divide the populace and destroy cooperation, thus encouraging backlash and creating paralyzing polarization.

It's not just an economy that's being destroyed, it's a way of life!

New Charges against Palin E-mail Hacker

Story here.

First Amendment Alert

The Connecticut state legislature is taking a page out of the playbook of historical enemies of the Catholic Church, including the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Communist Chinese and others. It is attempting to "democratize" the Catholic Church, and weaken the authority of Bishops, by requiring that parish matters be controlled by a board of lay people, with the bishop being reduced to a non-voting ex officio member.

In other words, the Connecticut legislature wants the Catholic Church to be more Protestant.

Yea, that will work.

Here's a link to the bill, which targets the Catholic Church by name. This has to raise substantial separation of church and state issues, but given the anything goes climate of state supreme courts, who knows what will happen.

Connecticut Senator Michael Mclachlan writes:

The Judiciary Committee of the Connecticut General Assembly, chaired by Senator Andrew McDonald and Representative Michael Lawlor, seems to have run off into a ditch this session.

First we have an over-reaching attempt to codify the Connecticut Supreme Court's Kerrigan decision legalizing gay marriage - Senate Bill 899 - and now we have a bizarre attack of First Amendment rights against the Roman Catholic Church in Connecticut - Senate Bill 1098.

I'm going to focus on Senate Bill 1098 -- "An Act Modifying Corporate Laws Relating to Certain Religious Institutions." The stated purpose of this bill is "to revise the corporate governance provisions applicable to the Roman Catholic Church and provide for the investigation of the misappropriation of funds by religious corporations." The real purpose of this bill is payback to the bishops and pastors of the Roman Catholic Church in Connecticut for opposing gay marriage.

Unfortunately, I think some well-intentioned, unhappy Catholics from Darien are being used as pawns by Senator McDonald and Representative Lawlor in a thinly-veiled attack on the Church.

This legislation seeks to eliminate bishops and pastors from all financial decisions of the Church. Currently, local parish corporations are governed by the bishop, diocesan administrator, pastor and two lay trustees as required in Canon Law. Senate Bill 1098 will change this to an elected board of directors of seven to thirteen lay members and will exclude the bishop and pastor. The pastor of the parish corporation will report to the board of directors.

This proposal turns the Catholic Church of Connecticut into a congregational church structure. The proponents claim this is necessary because of financial impropriety of two pastors from Darien and Greenwich in the past several years. McDonald and Lawlor claim the parishioners approached them for assistance making changes to the Catholic Church to hold the bishops accountable for their decisions.

Some would say this is an incredibly bold move by McDonald and Lawlor but the constitutional scholars say their proposal is a clear attack on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Connecticut Catholics are outraged by the proposal and are likely to fill the halls of the State Capitol and the Legislative Office Building on Wednesday, March 11th for the Judiciary Committee's public hearing on the bill.

I suspect this public hearing will be more like a zoo with the tone of an inquisition. Chances are the topics for discussion on Wednesday will go far beyond the bill proposed. I fear that we'll be hearing all kinds of attacks on the bishops, pastors and priests of the Catholic Church.

I pray fervently that we can dispense with this brutal attack on the Roman Catholic Church very quickly. Catholics don't deserve this attack and the proponents of this bill will hopefully hear this message loud and clear.

Connecticut State Senator Andrew McDonald - a sponsor of the bill - is acting like turning the Catholic Church in Connecticut into a congregational church is just an exercise in good government.

The NCR explains the politics behind the bill.

The Republican Party of Connecticut describes the bill as follows:

Legislation proposed by the Democratic chairmen of the Judiciary Committee represents a brazen affront to the Roman Catholic Church and speaks to their desire to have the state dictate policy and procedure to people of faith, according to Republican State Party Chairman Chris Healy Monday.
"Democrats have crossed the line between church and state," said Healy. "Mike Lawlor and Andrew McDonald are now saying that the state knows best when it comes to being church member. Every citizen of Connecticut, no matter what faith, should be frightened by this legislation."

Committee bill 1098, which will be heard at a public hearing on Wednesday, would require that each Roman Catholic church’s governing body be comprised of between seven and 13 lay people and that the Archdiocese would have a solely advisory role. These lay councils would have complete control over the operations of each church or organization.

This is amazing. Between the undemocratic restructuring of marriage and the legislative grab at restructuring the church, how far are we from a complete collapse of the social compact?

[Via NRO]

What does it mean when only a liberal Obama supporter can explain that class warfare is bad for America?

It means that gutless Republicans have become whipped by the media and could take a few lessons in "manning up" from Jim Cramer.

Cramer responds to the Obama/media complex:

President Obama's team, unlike Bush's team, demonstrates a thinness of skin that shocks me. When I somewhat obviously and empirically judged that the populist Obama administration is exacerbating the crisis with its budget and policies, as evidenced by the incredible decline in the averages since his inauguration, I was met immediately with condescension and ridicule rather than constructive debate or even just benign dismissal. I said to myself, "What the heck? Are they really that blind to the Great Wealth Destruction they are causing with their decisions to demonize the bankers, raise taxes for the wealthy, advocate draconian cap-and-trade policies and upend the health care system? Do they really believe that only the rich own stocks? What do they think we have our retirement accounts in, CDs? Where did they think that the money saved for college went, our mattresses? Do they think the great middle class banks at the First National Bank of Sealy and only the wealthiest traffic in the Standard & Poor's 500?"

and

When Obama trounces both unemployment and house-price depreciation, he will have the power to enact anything he wants. But all the initiatives he wants to rush, like tax hikes, changes in health care, tinkering with the mortgage deduction -- good grief, right now in the midst of the worst housing downturn ever -- and the tough cap-and-trade rules, will derail any chance we have of turning this economy around. Instead, they put the Second Great Depression smack on the nation's table. The markets thought he could stop it; hence the giant relief rally when he was elected. But in fewer than 50 days of his ascendancy, the markets' hopes were totally dashed and the averages are now forecasting the worst decline since the Great Depression. As someone who listens to what the averages are screaming, I think they are accurately predicting the future.

and

(Oh, and memo to Bill Maher: Stop insulting my faux great-great-uncle Vlad Lenin. I am using him to dramatize the point of a failed nationalization and confiscation of the banks at the hands of the people. It is funny how the right is certainly very civil as my old friends and new allies as of last week, Fred Barnes and Sean Hannity, don't hold my left wing social view against me when they talk about my criticism of the president! I always love anyone from Fox on the team because they are fierce in their defense with much less gratuitous slamming.)

and

But if it stays ad hominem, we will all be betrayed and the train wreck will become inevitable.

Good luck with that last. It's worked for so long that it's become the way that the Left does policy.

Well of course he's tired; this is the longest he's ever had to work at a job.

Villainous Company points out that Obama's lame "we're so overwhelmed and tired" excuse for snubbing Great Britain goes back a long way. The Telegraph reports the wonderful news that Obama didn't intentionally insult our most important ally, he negligently snubbed England because he was tired and overwhelmed:

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been "overwhelmed" by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.

British officials, meanwhile, admit that the White House and US State Department staff were utterly bemused by complaints that the Prime Minister should have been granted full-blown press conference and a formal dinner, as has been customary. They concede that Obama aides seemed unfamiliar with the expectations that surround a major visit by a British prime minister.

But Washington figures with access to Mr Obama's inner circle explained the slight by saying that those high up in the administration have had little time to deal with international matters, let alone the diplomatic niceties of the special relationship.

Allies of Mr Obama say his weary appearance in the Oval Office with Mr Brown illustrates the strain he is now under, and the president's surprise at the sheer volume of business that crosses his desk.

A well-connected Washington figure, who is close to members of Mr Obama's inner circle, expressed concern that Mr Obama had failed so far to "even fake an interest in foreign policy".

A British official conceded that the furore surrounding the apparent snub to Mr Brown had come as a shock to the White House. "I think it's right to say that their focus is elsewhere, on domestic affairs. A number of our US interlocutors said they couldn't quite understand the British concerns and didn't get what that was all about."

The American source said: "Obama is overwhelmed. There is a zero sum tension between his ability to attend to the economic issues and his ability to be a proactive sculptor of the national security agenda.

Imagine that, Obama didn't understand "the sheer volume of business that crosses the President's desk"; proving that criticizing is easier than doing. But, then, why should we be surprised at the surprise of a guy who has never actually had to work at a job where he had any responsibility for showing up and working.

And this bit from the Telegraph article is really special:

The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key.

The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: "There's nothing special about Britain. You're just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn't expect special treatment." The apparent lack of attention to detail by the Obama administration is indicative of what many believe to be Mr Obama's determination to do too much too quickly.

Perhaps the official needs a nap before he wrecks the United States' relationship with its most loyal ally.

Remember when all those leftists did a "we're sorry World" video campaign after Bush was elected in 2004? Maybe we need a conservative "we're sorry Britain" campaign.

Back in May of 2007, Jim Geraghty at NRO's The Campaign Spot was writing about our affirmative action president:

Sundry Commentary on The Obama "Tired" Excuse

Two comments from my co-bloggers last night...

"You know, really soon, Obama's excuse that he was tired... is going to get tired."

"Do you get the feeling that if Obama becomes president, we're going to need somebody to handle the night shift? Picture it, somebody awakens him at 2 a.m. with some foreign crisis and by dawn we've accidently invaded Paraguay."

Meanwhile, over on Powerline, Paul Mirengoff and John Hinderaker start asking inconvenient questions for Obama, like, "Hey, even if he was tired, did he really think that a tornado killed ten thousand people? Or that an entire country's cars could get 45 miles per gallon?"

If this guy doesn't toughen up, these are going to be an amusing and destructive four years.

Can you imagine Bush or McCain whining about not getting enough rest?

Saints and Sinners

Read this American Catholic piece on Father LaFleur.

At a time when it seems that every reference to Catholic priests involves an insult, it's good to remember those who participate in our redemption.

Iceland - Europe's California

This is a great article on Iceland - where every man, woman and child is bankrupt to the tune of $330,000:

Global financial ambition turned out to have a downside. When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, last October, Iceland’s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own bizarre private foreign-currency speculations, and even more from the 85 percent collapse in the Icelandic stock market. The exact dollar amount of Iceland’s financial hole was essentially unknowable, as it depended on the value of the generally stable Icelandic krona, which had also crashed and was removed from the market by the Icelandic government. But it was a lot.

Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.” In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.) As absurdly big and important as Wall Street became in the U.S. economy, it never grew so large that the rest of the population could not, in a pinch, bail it out. Any one of the three Icelandic banks suffered losses too large for the nation to bear; taken together they were so ridiculously out of proportion that, within weeks of the collapse, a third of the population told pollsters that they were considering emigration.

When you hear someone say, "Hey, everyone's getting rich; what could possibly go wrong?," it's at that moment you should say "Remember Iceland."

Good news

Large law firms feel the pain.

More Wonderful News

According to this article, our Treasury Secretary - the supposedly indispensible man whose talents meant overlooking his record of tax evasion - was the person responsible for bungling the bail-out of the Asian credit crisis and spooking China into amassing two trillion (!!!) American dollars.

So, Geithner misdiagnosed in Asia ten years ago, the same crisis that we are facing now, and he induced the Chinese to accumulate enough American dollars to destroy the American economy at will.

But we had to have him despite his record of tax evasion.

Wonderful.

Foreclosure Rates

This is a very cool graphic about the change in foreclosure rates from 2006 to 2008.

You will notice that Fresno County is - surprise! - in the top 35 counties by foreclosure rates, and that a lion share of the nation's top 35 are clustered around Central California.

Wonerful...it's 1929 and I'm living in the panhandle of Oklahoma.

Count me in

I agree with Vox Day's sentiments:

I'm certainly not saying that serving the broad spectrum of the populace would have been enough to save any newspapers from the other challenges facing them, but you know something was fundamentally wrong with the business model when many intelligent, educated, high-income individuals, the very sort of people newspapers needed as customers if they were going to survive, are openly celebrating their demise.

I haven't subscribed to the Fresno Bee for over a decade. The only time I buy the Bee is on the occasional Friday to find out what's going on in lockal entertainment.

I am also taking an unhealthy amount of schedenfreude every time I read about a newspaper going bankrupt.

In theory, I'm exactly the kind of target audience the Bee should have been interested in serving. So what went wrong?

Well, I got tired of the bias and then being told that I was imagining things. There comes a point in time when you can succumb to Stockholm Syndrome or realizing that the media must know that it is acting in bad faith. If you go the latter route, then you begin to doubt everything that the media says, and then you begin to reciprocate the contempt for the media that the media is showing for your intelligence and common sense.

Maybe if the Bee had openly acknowledged the bias of its reporters?

Or better still if it had attempted to balance its bias?

Too late now.

Holding Paper

Before the media completely flushes the truth about the cause of the economic crisis down the "memory hole," check out this follow the links explanation of how liberalism put us where we are.

Two reasons why this is so very bad

According to NRO:

Mark (Steyn), your point below is well-taken, as always. But perhaps today is not the day we give her the benefit of the doubt. Consider this AP story from a mere two hours ago:

US gesture lost in Russian translation

GENEVA (AP) — Call it a goodwill gesture lost in translation.

With smiles all around, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gathered with aides Friday for talks on a range of issues, including the fight against terrorism, Iran's nuclear ambitions, missile defense and other topics.

With a media gaggle looking on, Clinton handed Lavrov a green box tied with a green bow. He opened it to reveal a "reset button," a reminder of Vice President Joe Biden's recent remark that the Obama administration hopes to reset U.S. relations with Moscow.

Trouble was, the Russian-language label the Americans put on the button had the wrong word. Before she realized the mistake, Clinton assured Lavrov, "We worked hard to get it right."

"You got it wrong," Lavrov responded with a smile. He said the word the Americans chose — "peregruzka" — meant "overloaded" or "overcharged" rather than "reset."

While the State Department is obviously to blame here, I just love that even inanimate objects associated with Joe Biden make gaffes.

Obviously, it makes our nation look stupid in the world.

More importantly, it was Kennedy's slamming of the Eisenhower administration to Kruschev, according to Donald Kagan, that allowed Kruschev to assess Kennedy as an empty suit - because he couldn't imagine anyone with any class taking such a shot at a prior leader - which in turn encouraged Kruscheve to test Kennedy in Cuba.

It's not like anything like that could happen now.

More Great Moments Update;

From NRO's Media Blog:

More funnies from her European tour:

Tiredness appeared to show Friday when she answered questions in front of 500 young Europeans at the European Parliament, where she was the highest-ranking U.S. visitor since the late President Ronald Reagan in 1985.

A veteran politician, Clinton compared the complex European political environment to that of the two-party U.S. system, before adding:

"I have never understood multiparty democracy.

"It is hard enough with two parties to come to any resolution, and I say this very respectfully, because I feel the same way about our own democracy, which has been around a lot longer than European democracy."

The remark provoked much headshaking in the parliament of a bloc that likes to trace back its democratic tradition thousands of years to the days of classical Greece.

One working lunch later with EU leaders, Clinton raised more eyebrows when she referred to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who stood beside her, as "High Representative Solano."

She also dubbed European Commission External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner as "Benito."

Imagine if President Bush had done this? Media madness would have ensued.