Commentary

One of my shelves in one of my office bookcases collapsed because of two broken dowels in the front ends of the shelf. The collapsed shelf contained various post-Vatican II volumes. As fortune would have it, the shelf below it contained one singular, tall and substantial hardback volume that broke the fall of the shelf above it, supporting it and preventing it from spilling all of its books on the floor -- a worn volume published in 1935 in Spain entitled, as irony would have it: Missale Romanum.

This election's great divide: the culture of death

There is no ambiguity, no wiggle-room, no room for further 'nuance' on this one issue in this election. Arieh Ordronneau is right:

"Life is the most important issue this election season, nothing (not taxes, not economy, not the debate over the justness of the Iraq War, etc.) can outweigh the value of an innocent human soul."

And here's proof: "Just Tell Us The Truth..." (YouTube).

[Hat tip to Arieh Ordronneau]

"Redistribution of Wealth 101"

"A Jesuit friend forwarded to me a 'best of anti-Obama stuff' e-mail. (Yes, a Jesuit who is not voting for Obama and is, in fact, forwarding Obama jokes. Never stop believing in miracles.)

Yesterday on my way to lunch at Doe's, I passed one of the homeless guys in that area, with a sign that read "Vote Obama, I need the money."

Once in Doe's, my waiter had on a "Obama 08" tee shirt.

When the bill came, I decided not to tip the waiter and explained to him while he had given me exceptional service, that his tee shirt made me feel he obviously believes in Senator Obama's plan to redistribute the wealth. I told him I was going to redistribute his tip to someone that I deemed more in need -- the homeless guy outside. He stood there in disbelief and angrily stormed away.

I went outside, gave the homeless guy $3 and told him to thank the waiter inside, as I had decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy looked at me in disbelief but seemed grateful.

As I got in my car, I realized this rather unscientific redistribution experiment had left the homeless guy quite happy for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn.

Well, I guess this redistribution of wealth is going to take a while to catch on, with those doing the work.

"I think I'll let my oldest kids pick their favorite charities at Christmas, and I'll redistribute their gifts accordingly."

[Hat tip: "Some Have Hats" (October 28, 2008)]

"Eleventh Hour Election Alert"

"This is Bishop Rene H. Gracida, reminding all Catholics that they must vote in this election with an informed conscience. A Catholic cannot be said to have voted in this election with a good conscience if they have voted for a pro-abortion candidate. Barack Hussein Obama is a pro-abortion candidate."

Bishop Rene H. Gracida, Emeritus of the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Texas, made this statement recently on radio -- a statement exposited in a half hour video just produced by Fr. John Corapi (whom Bishop Graciada ordained initially as a Deacon).

Here is the video, "Eleventh Hour Election Alert" (YouTube).

Laws to be struck down by an elected President Obama

• the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal funding for abortions;
• the federal law banning partial birth abortions, which was finally upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in April 2007;
• the "Mexico City Policy," which has barred the use of federal taxpayers' money to pay for abortions in other countries;
• laws in 44 states that preserve a parental role when children under 18 seek abortions;
• laws in 40 states that restrict late-term abortions;
• laws in 46 states that protect the right of conscience for individual health care providers;
• laws in 27 states that protect the right of conscience for institutions;
• laws in 38 states that ban partial birth abortions;
• laws in 33 states that require counseling before having an abortion;
• and laws in 16 states that provide for ultrasounds before an abortion.

While the goal of overturning Roe may seem unrealistically distant, the resistance against the culture of death since 1973 has not been without its victories. The foregoing list constitutes a modest list of those victories.

As Carl A. Anderson, head of the Knights of Colombus, recently stated, however:

All of these restrictions on abortion - all of the progress we've made over the past 35 years in trying to limit and reduce abortions in the United States - would be invalidated with the stroke of a pen if the next Congress passes, and the next president signs, the so-called "Freedom of Choice Act" (FOCA).

Before you cast your vote on Tuesday, please take the time and effort necessary to learn whether candidates for whom you might vote favor or oppose FOCA.

The House sponsors of FOCA are listed here.

The Senate sponsors of FOCA are listed here.

Obviously, if a candidate in your area is not listed among the sponsors, you may have to ask his or her campaign for their position on FOCA.

We have gathered much additional information about the Freedom of Choice Act, including links to material from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and on life issues generally on a special Knights of Columbus web page:

Remember, all that we've done together since Roe to save the lives of the unborn is at stake. Please pass on this message to your pro-life friends.

Obama supports Kenyan radical Odinga at foreign political ralley at US taxpayer expense?

"The video that could cost Obama the election" (Canada Free Press, October 24, 2008):

The link to this video was sent to me by a Catholic priest. I checked it out with Snopes.com, and found nothing that directly contradicts the data and claims set forth in this video, including the appearance of Obama at the political ralley of Raila Odinga, Kenya's notorious revolutionary President, who came to power amidst flagrant voting irregularities and a post-election crisis resulting in the deaths of 1,500 people and displacement of 600,000 more (Wikipedia). In fact, Snopes.com, although denying the Odinga's claim that Obama's father is his maternal uncle, admits "the Obama campaign acknowledged that Senator Obama spoke to Raila Odinga by telephone 'for about five minutes' in January 2009" and that "he also made a public appearance with Odinga during a trip to Kenya in 2006," although it denied that he made any financial contribution to Odinga's campaign.

The first part of the video is somewhat confusing, unless you are acquinted with recent Kenyan political developments. Watch the video through to the end, however, where the point becomes damningly clear. Have you seen a word about this in the US mainstream media? I haven't. Is it true? Do you think anyone cares?

[Hat tip to D.J.]

Vol. I of Ratzinger's collected works is all about liturgy

Sandro Magister, "In the 'Opera Omnia' of Ratzinger the Theologian, the Overture Is All about the Liturgy" (www.chiesa, October 29, 2008):

And Benedict XVI explains why, in the preface to the volume that he wanted to have published first. He recalls that this is how Vatican Council II began, too. By giving God first place. And about the direction to face in prayer, he writes...

Tantalizing, isn't it? Magister reports:

Last week, when the first volume of the "Opera Omnia" of Joseph Ratzinger was presented at the Vatican, one question naturally arose: why is it that the first volume printed, of the sixteen planned, is focused on the liturgy?

To answer this question, it is enough to read the preface that Benedict XVI wrote for the opening of the volume. There, the pope writes that the selection of the theme to begin with was entirely his own. And he explains why. In passages that are highly interesting, and sometimes surprising.

Indeed. In his Preface, the former Cardinal Ratzinger himself writes:

Unfortunately, almost all of the reviews of this have been directed at a single chapter: "The altar and the direction of liturgical prayer." Readers of these reviews must have received the impression that the entire work dealt only with the orientation of the celebration, and that its contents could be reduced to the desire to reintroduce the celebration of the Mass "with [the priest's] back turned to the people." In consideration of this misrepresentation, I thought for a moment about eliminating the chapter (just nine pages out of two hundred) in order to bring the discussion back to the real issue that interested me, and continues to interest me, in the book. It would have been much easier to do this because in the meantime, two excellent works had been published in which the question of the orientation of prayer in the Church during the first millennium is clarified in a persuasive manner. I think first of all of the important, brief book by Uwe Michael Lang "Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer" (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2004), and in a special way of the tremendous contribution by Stefan Heid, "Atteggiamento ed orientamento della preghiera nella prima epoca cristiana [Attitude and orientation of prayer in the early Christian era]" (in "Rivista d’Archeologia Cristiana" 72, 2006), in which the sources and bibliography on this question have been extensively illustrated and updated.

The result is entirely clear: the idea that the priest and people should look at each other in prayer emerged only in modern Christianity, and is completely foreign to ancient Christianity. Priest and people certainly do not pray to each other, but to the same Lord. So in prayer, they look in the same direction: either toward the East as the cosmic symbol of the Lord who is to come, or, where this is not possible, toward an image of Christ in the apse, toward a cross, or simply toward the sky, as the Lord did in his priestly prayer the evening before his Passion (John 17:1). Fortunately, the proposal that I made at the end of the chapter in question in my book is making headway: not to proceed with new transformations, but simply to place the cross at the center of the altar, so that both priest and faithful can look at it, in order to allow themselves to be drawn toward the Lord to whom all are praying together.

Of course, as far as Ratzinger is concerned, this is really only a sidenote to the main focus of his liturgical work, yet a very important note, and one which, even if it functions as a presupposition, is fundamental to his thought, and, in his view, to liturgy itself.

Political notes from a lawyer

1. Zbigniew Brzezinski is an Obama foreign policy adviser: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5783.html

This is the same man who wrote in Between Two Ages ‘Marxism represents a further vital, and creative stage in the maturing of man’s universal vision. Marxism is simultaneously a victory of the external, active man over the inner, passive man, and a victory of reason over belief...’

2. Obama says he wants a Civilian National Security Force: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt2yGzHfy7s

... as has every socialist and/or totalitarian in recent memory... SA anyone, Cambodian guards, Mao, Stalin ...

3. This will give you some insight into the real power behind Obama, George Soros: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/how_allies_of_george_soros_hel.html

4. Insight into Obama's tax "cuts" from the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122385651698727257.html

5. Obama's membership in the New Party, a political party established by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA): http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2008/10/021724.php

6. On Black Nationalism, click on the RealPlayer & go to 4:20 or so to hear Obama's own words: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_101008/content/01125107.guest.html

Here are some more quotes on Black Nationalism from his own book: http://husaria.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/barack-and-michelle-obamas-black-nationalism-in-their-own-words/

7. Of course, this is his "mentor" and his pastor for 20 years:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAYe7MT5BxM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=617eK2XIaLk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNTGRL0OJWQ&feature=related

Of course, Obama didn't know this about his "mentor", which means he is either a liar or stupid (after 20 years).

8. Obama saying that sex ed should be taught in Kindergarten: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pO1dIKgfPw&feature=related

[Hat tip to A.D., Esq.]

Most-Viewed Election Video on YouTube

"Most-Viewed Election Video on YouTube: Iraq Veteran Supporting McCain" (BBC News, October 30, 2008).

A Dose of Reality on ObamaCare

While the health care debate has largely focused on whom the candidates' plans will fund, more Americans need to understand exactly what they would fund. In a recent exchange with Senator Obama's spokesman, the group RH Reality Check posted the campaign's answers to a health care questionnaire on its website. The discussion begins with Obama's assertion, 'Reproductive health care is an essential service -- just like mental health care... And private insurers that want to participate [in the Obama plan] will have to treat reproductive health care in the same way.' According to these excerpts, Obama's plan would treat abortion as a basic health care mandate for both taxpayers and private health insurers to subsidize.

REALITY CHECK: Does Senator Obama support adolescents' access to confidential family planning and reproductive health services, without having to seek permission from their parents?

OBAMA CAMPAIGN: Yes. As the father of two daughters... Obama wants to be sure that there is access to a trained health care provider that can provide needed services or help them make good decisions.

REALITY CHECK: Does Sen. Obama... think adolescents should be able to access emergency contraception over the counter?

OBAMA CAMPAIGN: ...[H]e does believe that teenagers should be able to access EC over the counter. As noted above, he supports the right of adolescents to seek confidential family planning services.

REALITY CHECK: Does Sen. Obama support the Hyde Amendment [which bans federal funding of abortion]?

OBAMA CAMPAIGN: Obama does not support the Hyde Amendment.

REALITY CHECK: Does Sen. Obama support the continued federal funding for crisis pregnancy centers [which do not promote abortions]?

OBAMA CAMPAIGN: No.

Andrea Lynch, "Sen. Barack Obama's RH Issues Questionnaire"

[Hat tip to Prof. E.E.]

Obama's strange contributors

Take this:

"A survey of the Obama donor base returns 8,794 donations from individuals who gave their state as “NA.” They included donors from Bangalore, India; London; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Lagos, Nigeria; and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia."

Or this:

"Typical is Victor A. of Lagos, Nigeria, who gave $500 to the campaign in May. In the FEC database, his address is listed as Ikoyi, NA. But a closer look at the actual itemized receipts filed by the campaign shows that he declared his address as 9e Awori Street Dolphin Estate, Lagos, Nigeria.

"Another 2,372 donors gave their state of residence as 'ZZ,' with cities including Moscow, Barcelona, Beirut, London, Lausanne, Singapore, Hagatna, Gunma-Ken, Buelach, Shanghai, Geneva, Prague, Aichi-Gun, Kiev, Hong Kong, and others.

"Take the case of Jo Jacquet, who gave $23,065 to Obama in 23 separate contributions last month....

"'Jo Jacquet' made all of her contributions on two days, alternating between $5 and $2,300 charges to a credit card.

"On all of the donations, she gave her employer as 'DFDFGDFG,' and her profession as 'DFGDFGDFGHFGH.'"

Bizarre. And none of this happend to catch the eye, supposedly, of the Obama campaign finance team? See Kenneth R. Timmerman, "Ex-CIA Expert: Obama Took Millions in Illegal Foreign Donations" (Newsmax.com, October 29, 2008).

Tables turned on a very uncomfortable Biden

Team Obama, which has been enjoying no-brainer questions from an overly-supportive press, got to taste what it's like to be Palin on Thursday, when WFTV-Channel 9's Barbara West conducted a satellite interview with Sen. Joe Biden. Hal Boedeker, of the Orlando Sentinel, said that a friend told him it's "some of the best entertainment he's seen recently."

Here's the interview: One on one with Biden (Video).

According to Boedeker's summary:

West wondered about Sen. Barack Obama's comment, to Joe the Plumber, about spreading the wealth. She quoted Karl Marx and asked how Obama isn't being a Marxist with the "spreading the wealth" comment.

"Are you joking?" said Biden, who is Obama's running mate. "No," West said.

West later asked Biden about his comments that Obama could be tested early on as president. She wondered if the Delaware senator was saying America's days as the world's leading power were over.

"I don't know who's writing your questions," Biden shot back.

Biden so disliked West's line of questioning that the Obama campaign canceled a WFTV interview with Jill Biden, the candidate's wife.

"This cancellation is non-negotiable, and further opportunities for your station to interview with this campaign are unlikely, at best for the duration of the remaining days until the election," wrote Laura K. McGinnis, Central Florida communications director for the Obama campaign.

[Hat tip to Drudge Report]

1999 NY Times article leaves key Dems caught red-handed

Steven A. Holmes, "Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending" (New York Times, September 30, 1999). All the usual suspects are there, including President Clinton, pushing expanded subprime lending, complete with an eerie warning from Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute that "... the government will have to step up and bail them out ...." Read it an weep. It deserves derisive laughter, but it hurts too much to laugh. Look who's going to have to pay.

[Hat tip to C. Binder-Scapone]

More from Laura

Laura Ingram (October 23, 2008):

AUDACITY WATCH: Forget measuring the Oval Office drapes, Sen. Obama is way beyond that. After meeting with his team of "national-security advisers," Obama yesterday gave a press conference where he played make-believe president. With a phalanx of Washington foreign-policy insiders behind him, Obama discussed plans for the post-election transition period. In Chicago, construction on a massive stage at Grant Park is underway for an Obama election night victory speech. This would be the first election-night speech from a candidate since Bubba's in '96. Speaker Pelosi, for her part, said it's "100 percent [certain] Obama is going to win," while Senator Schumer says Obama's electoral tally will top 300. Even God is doing his part. Obama told a northern Virginia crowd yesterday that he felt a "righteous wind at our backs." (When can we expect the left's attacks on Obama for harboring the same messianic complex they accuse President Bush of having?)

But Obama's cockiness comes at its own peril. Americans don't take well to being discounted, and that's exactly what an overconfident Democratic Party is doing.

PUNISHING PALIN: You know she must be doing something right. Since Sen. McCain asked her to be his VP -- thus surprising every confident "expert" prediction in Washington -- Gov. Palin has received every criticism the media talking heads' little brains can muster. Dan Henninger's piece today (which takes sly digs at the elitism of his WSJ colleague, Peggy Noonan) offers a sampling of the invective: "Republican blow-up doll," "idiot," "Christian Stepford wife," "Jesus freak," "Caribou Barbie," "a dope," "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party," "liar," "a national disgrace," and "her pretense that she is a woman." And let's not forget the latest "scandal" -- some new clothes!

Pennsylvania is case-in-point. Despite assuring voters Palin is a lying idiot anti-woman baby-moose killer, GOP enthusiasm is soaring. And this comes from no less a source than Democratic Governor Ed Rendell, who fired off two warnings to the Obama camp that the state was in danger of slipping away. According to the far-left Daily Kos website, Obama internal Keystone State polling shows just a two-point differential. Seems the less Palin cares about media attacks against her, the better she does, and the angrier the media becomes. Process, repeat.

OBAMA'S MINISTRY OF TRUTH: Should Obama win in November, thanks and credit will be in order to his 1984-inspired alteration of the historical record. In only the last few months, we've seen the following: When it was revealed in the "Fight the Smears" section of his website that he was lying about his involvement with ACORN (minimizing an actually long-established partnership), his site quietly scrubbed the falsehoods; when a blogger noticed that Michael Klonsky, an unashamed communist education "reformer" happened to be blogging on Obama's site, any hint of his existence was expunged; after Rev. Wright became a household name for his desire to send America to Hell, Obama's site suddenly stopped boasting of his involvement in the campaign; when a video of young California kids appeared singing Obama's glories in a style reminiscent of North Korea, that too was wiped from the e-book of history.

With such a cavalier approach to information control, what exactly we know about Obama -- really and truly -- is harder to discern every day.

RIDDLE OF THE DAY: What do the following names have in common: Bernadine Dohrn, Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, Michael Klonsky, Rashid Khalidi and Franklin Marshall Davis?

Give up?

Barack Obama!

[Hat tip to C. Binder-Scapone]

MEF flourishing in Diocese of Raleigh, NC

Sid Cundiff reports

1. Effective Friday, October 17, 2008, Bishop Burbidge has appointed Father Paul Parkerson, pastor of Sacred Heart Church, Dunn, NC, to the position of Bishop's Delegate for the celebration of the Sacred Liturgy in the Extraordinary Form for the Diocese of Raleigh. The words "Sacred Liturgy" were used, so Father Parkerson has the honor of oversight of all the Sacraments celebrated in the older form and not just the Mass.

2. The Mass in Dunn on Sunday, Oct 25, at 12 noon, will be a Missa Cantata in the Extraordinary Form for the Feast of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Sovereign King.

3. On Saturday, Nov. 1, at 10am, also in Dunn, NC, there will be a Mass in the Extraordinary Form for the Feast of All Saints.

4. On Sunday, Nov. 2, there will be a Missa Cantata at Sacred Heart Cathedral - at 4:30 p.m., with Father Parkerson as the celebrant. Note, though, that in the Traditional calendar, All Soul's Day does not occur on a Sunday when Nov. 2 falls on said day, and is thusly, transferred to Monday. So - the Mass at the Cathedral on Nov. 2 will be that of the resumed 4th Sunday after Epiphany.

5. Dr. Patricia Warren has assembled a Raleigh Diocesan Schola Cantorum which will be available to provide proper Gregorian music for Masses in either form, provided that the Bishop Burbidge grants his final approval of the proposal made to him. They will be known as the Schola Vox Clara.

There will be a MEF every Sunday at 6pm in Rocky Mount, NC. The address:

Our Lady of Perpetual Help
328 Hammond Street,
ROCKY MOUNT 27804
Sundays 6 pm
Saturdays 8 am
Phone (252) 972-0452
http://www.olphrm.com
(Fr Tim Meares)

[Hat tip to S.C.]

Why I can't vote for Obama..... by Huntley Brown

Why I Can't Vote For Obama

By Huntley Brown

[See: Snopes.com, October 15, 2008]

Dear Friends,

A few months ago I was asked for my perspective on Obama, I sent out an email with a few points. With the election just around the corner I decided to complete my perspective. Those of you on my e-list have seen some of this before but it's worth repeating...

First I must say whoever wins the election will have my prayer support. Obama needs to be commended for his accomplishments but I need to explain why I will not be voting for him.

Many of my friends process their identity through their blackness. I process my identity through Christ. Being a Christian (a Christ follower) means He leads I follow. I can't dictate the terms He does because He is the leader.

I can't vote black because I am black; I have to vote Christian because that's who I am. Christian first, black second. Neither should anyone from the other ethnic groups vote because of ethnicity. 200 years from now I won't be asked if I was black or white. I will be asked if I knew Jesus and accepted Him as Lord and Savior.

In an election there are many issues to consider but when a society gets abortion, same-sex marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, human cloning to name a few, wrong economic concerns will soon not matter.

We need to follow Martin Luther King's words, don't judge someone by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I don't know Obama so all I can go off is his voting record. His voting record earned him the title of the most liberal senator in the US Senate in 2007.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Obama: Most Liberal Senator in 2007 (01/31/2008) To beat Ted Kennedy and Hilary Clinton as the most liberal senator, takes some doing. Obama accomplished this feat in 2 short years. I wonder what would happen to America if he had four years to work with.

There is a reason Planned Parenthood gives him a 100 % rating.There is a reason the homosexual community supports him.There is a reason Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Castro, Hamas etc. love him. There is a reason he said he would nominate liberal judges to the Supreme Court. There is a reason he voted against the infanticide bill.There is a reason he voted No on the constitutional ban of same-sex marriage. There is a reason he voted No on banning partial birth abortion. There is a reason he voted No on confirming Justices Roberts and Alito. These two judges are conservatives and they have since overturned partial birth abortion. The same practice Obama wanted to continue.

Let's take a look at the practice he wanted to continue -- The 5 Step Partial Birth Abortion procedures:

A. Guided by ultrasound, the abortionist grabs the baby's leg with forceps. (Remember this is a live baby).

B. The baby's leg is pulled out into the birth canal.

C. The abortionist delivers the baby's entire body, except for the head.

D. The abortionist jams scissors into the baby's skull. The scissors are then opened to enlarge the hole.

E. The scissors are removed and a suction catheter is insserted. The child's brains are sucked out, causing the skull to collapse. The dead baby is then removed.

God help him. There is a reason Obama opposed the parental notification law.

Think about this: You can't give a kid an aspirin without parental notification but that same kid can have an abortion without parental notification. This is insane.

There is a reason he went to Jeremiah Wright's church for 20 years.

Obama tells us he has good judgment but he sat under Jeremiah Wright teaching for 20 years. Now he is condemning Wright's sermons. I wonder why now?

Obama said Jeremiah Wright led him to the Lord and discipled him. A disciple is one in training. Jesus told us in Matthew 28:19 - 20 'Go and make disciples of all nations.' This means reproduce yourself. Teach people to think like you, walk like you; talk like you believe what you believe etc. The question I have is what did Jeremiah Wright teach him?

Would you support a White President who went to a church which has tenets that said they have a ...

1. Commitment to the White Community

2. Commitment to the White Family

3. Adherence to the White Work Ethic

4. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the White Community.

5. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting White Institutions

6. Pledge allegiance to all White leadership who espouse and embrace the White Value System

7. Personal commitment to embracement of the White Value System.

Would you support a President who went to a church like that?

Just change the word from white to black and you have the tenets of Obama's former church. If President Bush was a member of a church like this, he would be called a racist. Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton would have been marching outside.

This kind of church is a racist church. Obama did not wake up after 20 years and just discovered he went to a racist church. The church can't be about race. Jesus did not come for any particular race. He came for the whole world.

A church can't have a value system based on race. The churches value system has to be based on biblical mandate. It does not matter if it's a white church or a black church it's still wrong. Anyone from either race that attends a church like this would never get my vote.

Obama's former Pastor Jeremiah Wright is a disciple of liberal theologian James Cone, author of the 1970 book A Black Theology of Liberation. Cone once wrote: 'Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him.

Cone is the man Obama's mentor looks up to. Does Obama believe this?
So what does all this mean for the nation?

In the past when the Lord brought someone with the beliefs of Obama to lead a nation it meant one thing - judgment.

Read 1 Samuel 8 when Israel asked for a king. First God says in 1 Samuel 1:9 'Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will do.'

Then God says

1 Samuel 1:18 "When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day." 19 But the people refused to listen to Samuel. "No!" they said. "We want a king over us. 20 Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles." 21 When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the LORD. 22 The LORD answered, "Listen to them and give them a king."

Here is what we know for sure. God is not schizophrenic. He would not tell one person to vote for Obama and one to vote for McCain. As the scripture says, a city divided against itself cannot stand, so obviously many people are not hearing from God.

Maybe I am the one not hearing but I know God does not change and Obama contradicts many things I read in scripture, so I doubt it.

For all my friends who are voting for Obama can you really look God in the face and say; Father based on your word, I am voting for Obama even though I know he will continue the genocidal practice of partial birth abortion. He might have to nominate three or four Supreme Court justices, and I am sure he will be nominating liberal judges who will be making laws that are against you. I also know he will continue to push for homosexual rights, even though you destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for this. I know I can look the other way because of the economy.

I could not see Jesus agreeing with many of Obama's positions. Finally I have two questions for all my liberal friends.

Since we know someone's value system has to be placed on the nation,

1. Whose value system should be placed on the nation?

2. Who should determine that this is the right value system for the nation?

Blessings,
Huntley Brown

[Huntley Brown is a concert pianist whose versatile repertoire includes classical, jazz, gospel, reggae. Hat tip to J.S.]

What's wrong with 'gay marriage'?

Michael Novak, "Defining Marriage Down" (The Catholic Thing, October 21, 2008):

A question posed by Bill O’Reilly has been nagging at me for a couple of weeks: “What is wrong with gay marriage?” None of his on-air guests had given him reasons...."

Read the rest of Novak's fine analysis (linked above).

[Hat tip to E.E.]

Roman synod: who's misinterpreting whom here?

Here -- in Collin Hansen's "Rome's Battle for the Bible" (Christianity Today, October 20, 2008) -- you have Evangelicals interpreting National Catholic Distorter's John Allen, who in turn is interpreting Dei Verbum as it is interpreted in the Instrumentum Laboris of the Synod! "Synod of Bishops revisits inerrancy compromise reached at Vatican II," says the sub-title of the article.

"The dogma of inerrancy was limited to the area of saving truths," said Gregg Allison, associate professor of Christian theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Matters related to history and science fell outside the purview of inerrancy. "This significantly reduced biblical problems raised by Roman Catholic scholars, but it also went against the church's historical view of Scripture's truthfulness."

Well, this is certainly how the Dei Verbum clause has often been read, but the case against such a reading has also been made by Catholics more in line with Catholic Tradition. One such criticism has shown that much depends on where one places the comma in the vernacular translation of the Latin, which has no comma in the contested clause. Too bad Dei Verbum, a product of compromise between liberal and conservative factions in the Council, wasn't clearer about the matter, instead of effectively deferring it to be dealt with yet another day.

Data shows Obama at odds with 80% of Americans on this issue

"Survey: Significant Abortion Restrictions Favored by Those Self-described 'Pro-Choice'" (CNA, October 17, 2008):

Washington DC, Oct 17, 2008 (CNA).- A new poll sponsored by the Knights of Columbus shows only limited support for permissive abortion laws among all Americans and among Catholics specifically. Even those who label themselves as pro-choice often favor more restrictions on abortion than are currently allowed under Roe v. Wade, the poll finds.

The poll asked survey respondents to state which of six statements came closest to describing their opinion of abortion and to describe themselves as either “pro-life” or “pro-choice.”

About 50 percent of survey respondents described themselves as “pro-choice,” while 44 percent considered themselves to be “pro-life.”

A plurality of about 32 percent of respondents said that abortion should only be allowed in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. Close to 24 percent held that abortion should be legal only in the first three months of pregnancy, while 15 percent said abortion should be allowed only to save the life of the mother and 13 percent agreed that abortion should never be permitted under any circumstance.

Eight percent said that abortion should be allowed only during the first six months of pregnancy, while only another eight percent said that abortion should be available to a woman any time during her entire pregnancy.

Only 15 percent of self-described “pro-choice” respondents favored unrestricted abortion throughout a pregnancy. About 43 percent of pro-choice respondents said abortion should be restricted to the first trimester and 23 percent would restrict abortion only to cases of rape, incest, or where the mother’s life was in danger.

Among Catholics specifically, 48 percent overall described themselves as pro-life, with 59 percent of practicing Catholics and 29 percent of non-practicing Catholics doing so. Close to 47 percent of Catholics described themselves as pro-choice, with 36 percent of practicing Catholics and 65 percent of non-practicing Catholics claiming the label.

Nearly 90 percent of Catholics wanted to restrict abortion to no more than the first trimester of pregnancy, while 72 percent either would limit legalized abortion to cases of rape or incest and to save the life of the mother, would permit it only to save the life of the mother, or do not believe abortion should ever be permitted.

About 35 percent of Catholics said abortion should be allowed only in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. This included 37 percent of practicing Catholics and 30 percent of non-practicing Catholics.

The next largest Catholic cohort, 26 percent, said abortion should be allowed in the first three months of a pregnancy, with 20 percent of practicing Catholics and 36 percent of non-practicing Catholics supporting this position.

Seventeen percent of Catholics said abortion should never be permitted, a position supported by 21 percent of practicing Catholics and 11 percent of non-practicing Catholics.

Six percent of Catholics supported unrestricted abortion throughout pregnancy, including five percent of practicing Catholics and eight percent of non-practicing ones. Another five percent of all Catholics favored legalized abortion only during the first six months of pregnancy, with three percent of practicing Catholics and nine percent of non-practicing Catholics taking such a stand.

The survey, whose results were reported in the document “Moral Issues and Catholic Values,” was conducted for the Knights of Columbus by the Marist College Institute of Public Opinion between September 24 and October 3, 2008. Surveying 1,733 Americans among whom 813 were Catholics, it claims a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percent for all Americans and 3.5 percent for Catholics specifically.

Full details of the poll results can be found at www.kofc.org.

[Hat tip to C.G.-Z.]

When may 'pro-lifers' vote for 'pro-choice' candidates?

This is a question that has dogged many in this election. Here's a very good answer: Gerard V. Bradley's "When is it Acceptable for a ''Pro-Life'' Voter to Vote for a ''Pro-Choice'' Candidate?" (Witherspoon Institute, October 21, 2008). Bradley argues that the Golden Rule should serve as a guide to those weighing a vote for "pro-choice" politicians:

Recent debates have centered on the question of when an otherwise "pro-life" voter is morally justified in voting for a "pro-choice" candidate. The question amounts to asking when is it fair--that is, just--to vote for a "pro-choice" candidate. The answer depends on applying the Golden Rule.

Let me explain. The "pro-life" position consists, basically, of these two propositions. First, that people begin at conception, so that to kill anyone from conception onwards is to kill a human person. Second, that it is wrong--morally wrong--to intentionally kill any innocent person. Neither proposition is about religious faith. No one needs religious faith to see and to say that both of these propositions are true. You can figure out when people begin, for example, by reflecting philosophically on scientific facts about human reproduction and development. And you can figure out that killing is wrong by reflecting upon the basic principles of justice-the natural law-which, at least according to Saint Paul, is inscribed upon your heart. Or you can consult almost any secular or religious moral code, or almost any society's civil law-including our own.

It won't do to say that one is "pro-life" because one views abortion with profound misgivings, or because one regrets that so many abortions occur and that the law should work to make it more rare, or because abortion is, in some sense, wrong and evil. Abortion is all these things. But abortion is much more than all these things. In an abortion someone who has the same right not to be killed that everyone else has, is killed. So abortion isn't just an unfortunate event, but it is morally wrong because it deprives a human person of his right to life-and thus we need to enact laws that protect the right to life for all people. This is the "pro-life" position I have in mind in asking under what circumstances is the "pro-life" voter morally justified in voting for a "pro-choice" candidate.

What about the "pro-choice" position? Is it really the case that someone who is "personally" "pro-life" could coherently be politically "pro-choice"? Is it really the same thing as being "pro-abortion"? Well, it is true that a "pro-choice" candidate for public office may never advise any particular women to have an abortion. The "pro-choice" candidate may even find abortion extremely distasteful and, perhaps, abhorrent. But the surgical procedure we call abortion is not the only subject matter of the "pro-choice" position. "Pro-choice" is also, and it is necessarily, a position about what public policies and laws we should have about abortion--specifically, whether abortion should be something women are free to choose, or not. "Pro-choice" is one answer to that policy inquiry. It is the answer that the legal protections which protect most of us from being killed should not protect all of us from being killed. Some people--the unborn--are to be exposed to deadly violence without legal aid or redress. And, so, just as ante-bellum Americans who refused to own slaves were nonetheless correctly called "pro-slavery"--because they affirmed the legal right of others to do so--Americans who today affirm the legal right of a women to have an abortion could correctly be called "pro-abortion," even if they judge abortion an option unworthy of their own choice.

This is the "pro-choice" position I have in mind in seeking to answer the question previously posed. This "pro-choice" position amounts to a grave injustice, one which "pro-choice" candidates necessarily embrace, support, and choose; it is precisely what being "pro-choice," at a minimum, actually means. Anyone who votes for a "pro-choice" candidate becomes morally responsible for this grave injustice. The "pro-life" voter who votes for a "pro-choice" candidate materially--that is, in fact and as a matter of foreseeable effect--cooperates in sustaining this country's radically defective legal structure about abortion. Take the case of presidential elections. Voting for a "pro-choice" candidate helps him to win the presidency, and helping him to win the presidency is, perforce, to help him make his declared "pro-choice" policies a reality (or, to the extent such policies are in place, to help him to block efforts to repeal them). The "pro-life" voter who votes for a "pro-choice" candidate knowingly declines to do what he or she can do to legally protect the unborn from being killed-namely, to vote for a "pro-life" candidate (if one is running).

The Golden Rule

Then under what circumstances is it morally permissible to vote for a "pro-choice" candidate, particularly one who promises not just to uphold the abortion license, but even to expand our unjust structure by introducing government funding of abortion and by removing some brakes upon abortion, such as parental notice laws?

To answer this question we have to consider the matter from the perspective of those who suffer the foreseeable harm resulting from the perpetration of "pro-choice" policies--the unborn who are killed. Then we have to apply the great moral principle we call the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Golden Rule makes us walk in the others' shoes, makes us count the stranger and his or her well-being just as one welcomes the benefits and avoid the harms of what one does when the beneficiary or victim is oneself or someone near and dear. The Golden Rule pushes back particularly hard against our tendency to discount the harms we visit upon those we do not know--those who cannot object, those who cannot offer effective resistance. The Golden Rule steers us to the morally right choice despite the fact that, though we may believe everyone is equal, we do not treat them that way. The Golden Rule leads us to be fair to everyone whose lives and fortunes are foreseeably affected by our actions-as justice requires.

This question about the fairness of lethal side-effects is in the news almost every day now. Not because of abortion, but because of U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost every day there is news of an American air attack or ground operation which results in a substantial number of non-combatants' deaths, or there is news about a post-mortem analysis of an earlier deadly attack. (Some days there are both.) The basic scenario and the recurring moral question are always along these lines: suppose that there is a wedding feast in Northwest Pakistan. Among the 100 guests are two high level Al-Qaeda operatives. The military reality is that any attack intended to kill those two puts everyone present at grave risk of being killed. Would it be morally right to launch the airstrike, thus endangering 98 innocents to get two who are not?

I do not know for sure whether, all things considered, the strike should be ordered. I do know, however, that any right answer to the question must go through the Golden Rule, precisely so that we do not unfairly off-load fatal effects upon people who are not like us. Precisely to avoid that form of unjust partiality towards ourselves and those like us, we must ask: would we order the airstrike if the feast were in Zurich? Or in Dublin? Or if the feast were taking place in South Bend, Indiana (or your home town)? If the answer to any of these questions is "no" then it is pretty clear that, if we nonetheless order the strike in Pakistan, we would not be acting in accordance with the truth that every innocent has an equal right not be killed. We would not be acting in accord with the Golden Rule.

We need to apply the Golden Rule in a very similar way to the question: when is it morally right to vote for a "pro-choice" candidate. I propose to do so by testing the three best arguments that "pro-life" voters voting for "pro-choice" candidates have made to justify their decision.

Argument 1: "Attack the Root Cause of Abortion"

This argument proposes to leave the unjust legal structure about abortion in place until some distant future time when, it is hoped, abortions will be so rare that prohibiting them will make sense. This argument proposes to now seek a reduction in the number of abortions performed annually, from the present 1.2 million to some lower number. The argument proposes to accomplish the reduction by attacking what are said to be abortion's "root causes," mainly, a widespread lack of proper health care and income supports. These proposals include better pre-natal maternal care, better pediatric care, and more income supplements for the poor. The moral question is whether this proposal is fair to the unborn? And that entails applying the Golden Rule.

To do that we must take a different example of the same basic proposal, an example which substitutes a different set of people called upon to pay the price of doing nothing to legally restrict a certain class of deadly assaults. Take the example of domestic violence. Suppose that approximately 1.2 million American women are killed each year by domestic violence. Suppose further that a Presidential candidate said the following: "Friends, I think we must stop wasting resources prosecuting domestic violence. Let us get the law out of the picture. Maybe someday we could arrest men who kill women at home. But that day is not today, for anyone can see that arrests and convictions have not slowed the rate of domestic violence very much at all. Besides, we are talking about private family matters where people make hard choices. Let us instead join together and attack the root causes of domestic violence, causes which have to do with ignorance and poverty. I propose therefore to give angry men jobs and money to attend anger management classes. And I think we should start teaching all of America' children early on that every man and woman deserves to be treated well."

Anyone who refuses to vote for this candidate but who would vote for a "pro-choice" candidate is, at least presumptively, guilty of failure to apply the Golden Rule.

Argument 2: "He's Better on Other Issues"

Some people who describe themselves as "pro-life" support "pro-choice" candidates without placing any faith in the reduce-the incidence-of-abortion idea. These people instead maintain that the "pro-choice" politician's positions on other issues, such as the environment, taxes, education, are so far superior to those of a "pro-life" alternative, that voting for the "pro-choice" politician--notwithstanding the harm his abortion policies would do--is the right thing. These people often say that the virtues of his other positions supply a "proportionate" reason for voting for a "pro-choice" candidate.

The question which these people must ask themselves is this: Would they vote for a "pro-choice" candidate on the strength of his preference for more government-provided health care than his rival proposes in his comparable plan, if doing so exposed their children to mortal danger? Suppose the candidate's commitment to a policy of "choice" referred, not to so many tiny and invisible people, but instead to hundreds of thousands of immigrants, or to the same number of prisoners or mentally handicapped or physically infirm people. Would they still support that candidate, even if his policies on energy, taxes, and employment were superior to his rival's?

A vote for a candidate who favors "pro-choice" policies on abortion by someone who does not answer the preceding questions "yes" does not, I think, satisfy the Golden Rule.

Argument 3: "Women's Equality"

"For two decades of economic and social developments people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their control of their reproductive lives."

This cluster of assertions by three members of the Supreme Court in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision tracks quite closely a very widespread conviction cited in support of "pro-choice" candidates. The central claim is that laws guaranteeing "choice" about abortion are instrumentally indispensable to women's equality. Now, I do not think for a moment that the claim is true. But for this analysis I shall grant the claim, and then apply the Golden Rule to test the justice of the position articulated.

There is no need to imagine cognate claims, to which we must hypothetically apply the Golden Rule. History and current affairs supply countless examples of societies where some of its members have obtained equality for themselves by exploiting others of its members. Sometimes the numerator (those who gain) is larger than the denominator (those who suffer). Sometimes it is the other way around. In either event the basic moral question is the same. And there is little mystery about what just about everyone would say in response.

So, was it just for Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth century to obtain the satisfactions of life in Central America--where the price was paid in blood by immiserated Amerindians? Was it fair for English men and women three centuries later to enjoy the fruits of pastoral life--brought to them on the backs of dead Irishmen? A century-and-a-half ago the Supreme Court "facilitated"-indeed, helped to preserve-the equality of all white people. But does anyone today defend Dred Scott as a moral beacon?

If the answer to these questions is "no," then one who takes the Golden Rule to be a principle of justice cannot vote for a "pro-choice" candidate on the strength of what the Casey Court proclaimed. And if the voter tempted to vote "pro-choice" refuses to apply the Golden Rule--as I have done here--than he is refusing to seek and to do justice.

Gerard V. Bradley is Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Law School and a Senior Fellow of the Witherspoon Institute, where he is the Director of the Center on Religion and the Constitution. Professor Bradley sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

[Hat tip to Prof. E.E.]

Double standards & the affirmative action candidate

"Sickening Irony" (Wide Awakes, October 19, 2008) writes:

If Barack Obama applied for a job with the FBI or the Secret Service, he would be disqualified because of his past association with William Ayers, a known terrorist. And yet, he is heading for the highest office in the land.

If Obama is elected President he would not pass the security screening to be his own body guard!

And the greatest irony is that a majority of the people in this country don’t even seem to care.

Think any Obama supporters lose sleep over this? Of course not. The Obama vote is an affirmative action vote. The national syndicated networks have made it very clear that standards to which a conservative Republican evangelical like Palin and her running-mate, McCain, are held, simply do not apply to Obama. They regard him as their pet affirmative action candidate.

By contrast, look at what conservative black leaders are saying about the election in "How should black Christians choose the next president?" (Freedoms Journal Magazine, YouTube, via Wide Awake, October 19, 2008).

Goodbye to Postum

Taashi Rowe/ANN, "Goodbye to Postum" (Adventist News Network, January 17, 2008):

"Kraft Foods, the makers of coffee alternative Postum, recently announced they will no longer make the once popular beverage.

"The drink had a small but loyal following among some Seventh-day Adventists who believe that caffeine negatively affects health and some members of the Church of Latter day Saints who don't drink hot caffeinated beverages. Kraft Foods spokeswoman Laurie Guzzinati said the company stopped making Postum last fall because the demand for it was so low that manufacturing it no longer made sense.

"Postum was created in 1895 by C.W. Post who stumbled upon the recipe while he was a patient at Adventist-owned Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, United States.

"Contrary to rumors, Post was not an Adventist, said James Nix, director of the estate for Ellen White, an Adventist Church co-founder."

"... Postum, which normally sold for US$3.50 per jar, can still be found on the online auction site Ebay where one seller is offering three jars for US$70."

Sorry to see it go. Yeah, yeah ... I know. If you're a coffee drinker, the stuff tastes like dirty dish water. But if you stop drinking coffee and become acclimated to it, it can be quite good. Despite the association with the fanatically anti-Catholic Seventh Day Adventists, I liked this stuff, which became a staple coffee alternative for me when I discovered that caffeine is a migraine trigger for me. What I wanted was a savory (non-sweet) roasted grain beveridge that didn't contain caffeine and was reasonably low in calories and carbs. Postum served well. I'll give Pero a try, but I'm skeptical. Any suggestions? [Yes, I do know something about the malted grain beveridge called 'beer'.]

Barack rehearses inaugural speech, as Michelle picks White House decor

As Team Obama sets the stage for an election night victory party, where they plan to lavish the balance of their enormous campaign funds, "The One" is already planning what to order from the White House kitchen for his first presidential dinner, and what to include in his first state of the union homily:

• "Confident Obama takes presidential tone in talk of post-election plans" (US Elections 08, October 11, 2008): "Democrat risks sounding cocky as poll lead grows." [You're not serous!] "Obama's comments mark a significant change in the campaign, switching from rhetoric to a more presidential tone." [Oh, really? Like, from "Change We Need - like a hole in the head" to "Hey, George Clooney, help!!! You've taught me how to ACT presidential, but what's a president supposed to DO?!"]
  
  
• "Obama Tells Virginia Supporters of 'Righteous Wind At Our Backs'" (Political Punch, October 22, 2008). [The man is manic.]

Meanwhile, peace-loving anti-gun Obama supporters have taken the moral high ground against the NRA and other rifle-totin' McCain supporters and his trigger-happin running-mate, Palin:

• "Republican HQ Manager's Home Shot Up Over McCain Signs" (Local6.com, October 23, 2008).
  
  
• "20-year old female McCain volunteer attacked and mutilated, letter scratched into her face"
  (WTAE.TV, October 23, 2008).

Meanwhile, the press, which McCain has said we all know "is really an independent, civic-minded and non-partisan group ... like ACORN," has been the subject of a nonpartisan study:

• "Surprise: Coverage of McCain Much More Negative Than That of Obama" (Washingtonpost.com).

Democrat columnist slams media dishonesty

Remember the author of Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card? He's a Mormon, like Mitt Romney, but we won't hold that against him. He's also a Democrat, like Obama, but we won't hold that against him either. Above all, he's a thoughtful and independent-minded, clear-headed thinker. This is reflected in his fiction. But it's also evident in his newspaper columns. I first heard him speak at Lenoir-Rhyne University several years ago. Already then, he was laying into the northeastern elitest media establishment with such blistering criticisms that a coterie of indignant liberals walked out in protest. Card parts company with the political lemmings in his party who look to the media mind-molders to tell them how to think. And right when Zogby has found Obama’s lead widening among Catholics due to the rise in number of Catholic lemmings who think Obama will help their 401Ks, Orson Scott Card comes out with this no-holds-barred attack on the media that has been spinning that fantasy (Meridian, October 23, 2008):

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

By Orson Scott Card
Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.

For the good ol' boys ...

Reinforcing the caricature and those comfortable Yankee prejudices:

Bubba: "Let's go bite some Yankees."

Spot, the dog: "I'll bring the beer."

Redneck Anthem - The BBQ Song (More Boortz)

[Hat tip to J.S.]

The human pig cometh

Last November we posted a report, "From the bioethical front ..." (Musings, November 8, 2008), detailing not only a eugenic proposal to kill disabled human babies, but a plan to create human-cow embryos, a scenario more recently comented on by an article in the Weekly Standard, "The Pig-Man Cometh."

Now the British House of Commons has actually done the nasty deed: "Commons approves embryology Bill" (The Press Association, October 22, 2008):

Controversial new legislation allowing scientists to conduct experiments using hybrid human-animal embryos has been approved by the House of Commons despite a small rebellion by Labour backbenchers.

The staunchly Catholic former minister Ruth Kelly [See "A woman with balls ..."], who quit the Government earlier this month, was one of 16 Labour MPs who voted against the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

... Conservative MP Nadine Dorries warned that loopholes in the legislation would allow scientists to attempt to create a "humanzee" - a hybrid between a human and a chimpanzee.

Recalling Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's 1920s efforts to create "the ultimate soldier" by cross-breeding men and apes, she warned: "Of all the experimental possibilities debated in the course of this Bill, surely none is quite so utterly repulsive as the possibility of seeking to inseminate animals with human sperm."

San Francisco weighs decriminalizing prostitution

Oh, goodie! Now the most liberal city in America can make prostitution respectable, as in Amsterdam, where husbands drop off bright-eyed wives in the red light district, kissing them a goodbye and wishing them a good day at work. In the AP article linked above, Evelyn Nieves reported Tuesday (October 21, 2008):

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — In this live-and-let-live town, where medical marijuana clubs do business next to grocery stores and an annual fair celebrates sadomasochism, prostitutes could soon walk the streets without fear of arrest.

San Francisco would become the first major U.S. city to decriminalize prostitution if voters next month approve Proposition K — a measure that forbids local authorities from investigating, arresting or prosecuting anyone for selling sex.

If only all those folks in the 'red' states of the American hinterland could learn to be as respectful of marginal people as these self-congratulatory citizens of this bastion of civility who have the decency also of promoting the queering of Frisco marriage laws (Proposition 8), as well as the candidacy of that most urbane embodiment of Enlightened liberal tolerance, "The One," whose long-awaited reign of blessed hope will bring well-earned respectability also to victims of intemperance still groaning under repressive state and federal limitations on baby-killing, restrictions that suggest something less than full-and-equal respectability for Moloch worship and child-sacrifice as a means of back up contraception. Maranatha, Obama! Hail City of shining light, Babylon by the Bay!

Spectacular photos of planet earth!

Kinda puts things in perspective ... Check it out and click through the slide show. It's called: "Blue Beauty."

[Hat tip to C. Binder-Scapone]

"Never before ..."

Laura Ingram (October 20, 2008):

Congratulations, Team Obama, we've still got two-plus weeks until Election Day and you're already destroying jobs. After last week's now-notorious encounter with Joe the Plumber, Obama's media foot soldiers were dispatched with a simple mission: destroy Joe. On Sunday's Fox and Friends, Joe announced their success; his business has been shut down.

Thanks to the intrepid reporting of journalists who've obviously lost all sense of perspective, it turns out Joe has been fixing Ohioans' plumbing without a government-issued license. Talk about irony. Joe came under fire for humiliating Obama by noting his tax plans interfere with Joe's American Dream. He wanted to buy his plumbing company and expand it, but higher taxes on small businesses threaten to turn that dream into a nightmare. The left, in other words, used Big Government to silence Joe Citizen for speaking ill of Big Government.

In turn, Americans have offered financial support to Joe - offers he's politely declined.

Americans have taken to Joe for his willingness to go where the media refuses - that is, for actually speaking truth to power. Nothing's more infuriating than reporters allowing themselves to be used by politicians, yet that's exactly what's being done on a daily basis at CBS, NBC, CNN, etc. Joe got the opportunity to tell Obama directly that his tax plans - which penalize hard work while claiming to further America's best interests - were an insult to his intelligence.

Meanwhile, conservative websites are left to do the real reporting on Obama. NewsMax's Ken Timmerman reports that as much as $63 million of Obama's $150 million September haul may originate from illegal foreign donations. (Conveniently, the campaign refuses to release the names of more than 80% of its 2.5 million contributors.) Obama's tax returns also indicate that in 2000 and 2002, he violated Illinois state law by accepting speaking fees while serving as a state senator.

The press is supposed to hold politicians accountable on behalf of the people. Yet while Obama collects millions in dubious donations and ACORN registers phantom voters in battleground states by the thousands, today's media is doing the Democrats' heavy lifting with its slash-and-smear campaign against people like Joe.

Never before in our history has the media establishment been so derelict in its responsibilities, so one-sided in its coverage, that today it is nothing more than a cheerleader for the Obama campaign. Never with so much at stake for America's security and our way of life, has the media worked with such single-minded zealousness to elect a dilettante with so little experience and such faulty judgment.

Is the type of bullying and intimidation that Joe's endured what Americans can expect from an Obama administration in response to serious criticism? Will the media closest to the people - talk radio and the blogosphere - be the next targets?

May God help us.

[Hat tip to C. Binder-Scapone]

Pope to Synod: beware of dangers in biblical interpretation

Sandro Magister: "Interpretations are proposed that deny the real presence of God in history" (www.chiesa, October 14, 2008): "The complete transcript of the popes address to the synod of bishops on 'The Word of God in the life and mission of the Church,' on the morning of Tuesday, October 14, 2008" -- an important address, if not a warning shot across the bow of Catholic biblical scholarship too taken by the hermeneutical traditions of Protestant Liberalism.

Why, I hardly knew Bill Ayers ... (Hilarious)

"Just Some Guy from the Neighborhood?" (Weekly Standard Blog, 10/2008).

Weigel on responsibilities of Catholic politicians

George Weigel, "'Sectarian' issues? Not quite" (Catholic Education Resource Center, via USA Today, October 13, 2008). Summarizes Weigel: "In the hope of answering the questions and clarifying the confusions, I offer the following "small catechism" on the responsibilities of the Catholic politician."

[Hat tip to Doug & Karen Miller]

Wanna know why Sen. Obama only voted "present" so often?

"Uncle Jay Explains the News - July 2, 2007" (YouTube) [Hilarious!!!]

[Hat tip to C.B.]

Character assassination of Joe the Plumber

Here, in part, is the account given by "The War on Joe the Plumber" (American Catholic, October 20, 2008) of what has happened to Joe Wurzelbacher since he asked a question of Senator Obama on October 11, 2008 that proved potentially damaging to his campaign:

1. He has had his divorce records disclosed to the public by the press.

2. Left-wing blogs have published his home address and that of his ex-wife.

3. Snuff films fantasizing about the violent death of Joe the Plumber have been posted by Obama supporters on YouTube.

4. The City of Toledo has notified him that he cannot work without a license, which will certainly come as news to the legions of plumbers without licenses who work for plumbers who are licensed.

5. The fact that he has a personal property tax lien against him in the vast sum of $1,182.98, and a judgment lien in the amount of $1,261, has been revealed by the press.

6. Documents relating to his work history have been published in the press.

7. His party affiliations and voting history have been disclosed by the press.

8. The press has charted where he has lived over the years.

9. The tax history of the business which employs him has been published by the press.

10. Left wing blogs have falsely claimed that Wurzelbacher is a relative of Charles Keating of the Keating Five scandal.

11. The press has reported that his driver’s license was suspended in May of 2000 when he lived in Arizona for non-payment of civil traffic fines.

The list could go on for considerable length but suffice it to say that Mr. Wurzelbacher has received more searching media analysis in three days than Senator Obama has received from most of the mainstream press since he announced his candidacy for President.

[Hat tip to American Catholic via C.B.]

A woman with balls, and a man without any

• "Senior British MP, Ruth Kelly, is prepared to vote against her party on Embryo Bill, citing her Catholic Faith."
  
  
• Biden on abortion: "I'm not a Pope John Paul guy": sees need to "balance faith with social responsibility" of killing babies.

Impailin' Palin? Impailed by Palin?

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been taking a beating from the drive by media, not to mention late night television. I had to admire her sporting attitude on SNL last night. Most of the trendy-lefty mockeries I've seen or heard are sheer circumstantial ad hominems, many of them articulated in faux jocularities too vile to bear repeating. What, even Peggie Noonan, whose writing I usually admire, came out with an article sounding like she's taken some of the toxic venom of the professional left-wing opinion shapers, in "Palin's Failin'" (The Huffington Post, October 19, 2008).

It was a refreshing bit of fresh air, then, to have a reader call my attention to what one magazine has been saying about Gov. Palin overseas -- in England of all places. In searching for the article via Google, I first turned up this very upbeat bio just after her nomination by Sen. McCain: "Why John McCain's beauty queen running mate has a grizzly bear on her office wall" (London Daily Mail, August 31, 2008). This article contains a lot about her family and childhood background that is particularly winsome, especially from an interview with her mother.

The more interesting from a political point-of-view, however, is "A pistol-packin' Looby Loo: the Left's worst nightmare" (London Daily Mail, September 4, 2008). The article may be dated in some respects, but not in others -- especially amidst the mounting barrage of slanderous attacks on Gov. Palin. In fact, it may be more timely now than when it was written:

At the very least, McCain has got a wonderful sense of mischief - a quality sadly lacking in most politicians. The way the Left, both here and in America , are contorting themselves is a joy to behold. Sarah Palin is every Guardianista's worst nightmare.

It's reminiscent of how they used to patronize Mrs. Thatcher 30 years ago. What did this small-town girl know about anything? How could any woman expect to run a country and raise a family? What does she know about foreign affairs? Of course, they weren't saying that a woman couldn't be Prime Minister, you understand. Just not this woman. Shirley Williams would have been fine, but this ghastly, lower middle- class Snobby Roberts woman from Grantham, of all places - AAARGH!

It's been hilarious watching the sisterhood tie themselves in knots over Sarah Palin.
They've been in full Glenda Slagg mode - dontcha just hate her, dontcha just love her?

... What they are doing is what they usually do when confronted with something which offends their world view - character assassination. Every 'liberal' newspaper and TV network has sent hatchet men north to Alaska to dig for the dirt beneath the tundra.
What they discovered is that 80 per cent of Alaskans think she's doing a great job.

A supermarket tabloid is claiming she had an affair, which she denies. Apart from that, the worst the scandal-hounds have come up with is that Palin, as governor, put pressure on a police chief to fire her former brother-in-law. Given that said brother-in-law had beaten up her sister and threatened to kill her father, I'd say that far from abusing her office, she showed considerable restraint....

... When Palin talks about shattering the glass ceiling, the sisters are supposed to cheer - except most of them suspect her idea of shattering a glass ceiling would be with a both barrels blast from a 12-bore.

She epitomizes the 'God and guns' mentality at which Barak Obama and his supporters sneer. They use 'small town' as a pejorative term. That's not how Middle America sees it.

John Mellenkamp wrote his hit song Small Town as an ironic take on Hicksville, USA . He even performed it at an Obama rally earlier this year.

Back at you: Democrats say Sarah lacks the experience for the top job - but neither do Obama or Biden.

But that hasn't stopped Middle Americans adopting it as an anthem. Mellenkamp must be just as horrified as Springsteen was when Ronald Reagan purloined his anti-war Born In The USA as a campaign song.

It's not that the Americans don't do irony, as European 'sophisticates' always maintain. It's just that sometimes, my dear, they don't give a damn. A good song is a good song - and to hell with the message.

Most Americans were born and raised in a small town. Her values are their values. John Mellenkamp wrote his hit song Small Town as an ironic take on Hicksville, USA . He even performed it at an Obama rally earlier this year.

Back at you: Democrats say Sarah lacks the experience for the top job - but neither do Obama or Biden. But that hasn't stopped Middle Americans adopting it as an anthem. Mellenkamp must be just as horrified as Springsteen was when Ronald Reagan purloined his anti-war Born In The USA as a campaign song.

It's not that the Americans don't do irony, as European 'sophisticates' always maintain. It's just that sometimes, my dear, they don't give a damn. A good song is a good song - and to hell with the message. Most Americans were born and raised in a small town. Her values are their values.

The mantra from the Obama camp is that she lacks the experience to be VP. In truth, she has more executive experience than either Obama or his Neil Kinnock-impersonator sidekick mate Joe Biden, neither of whom has ever run anything.

But, wail the skeptics, what about foreign affairs? Admittedly, Palin has never slagged off her country at a mass rally in Berlin. But Alaska's next door to Russia. She's got more experience of dealing with Russians than anyone outside of corporate hospitality at Stamford Bridge.

Who is Putin more likely to be wary of - Barak 'we must negotiate with dictators' Obama, or Looby Loo packing heat?

To paraphrase the Duke of Wellington, I don't know what she does to the enemy, but she scares the life out of me.

... With all the hoop-la, it's easy to forget that she's running for Vice-President, not President. Not yet.

Sarah Palin: The next Margaret Thatcher? Time will tell...

That's what really frightens her condescending opponents. Not that we've a leg to stand on in Britain. We've got Harriet Harman a chewed fingernail away from the top job - and she's never shot a moose in her life.

Remember, they all laughed at Margaret Thatcher.

But ho, ho, ho, who had the last laugh?

[Hat tip to C.G.-Z.]

Of related interest

If you haven't really appreciated just how winsomely funny McCain can be, you owe it to yourself to check out his speech (along with Obama's who gets in some good lines of his own) at the recent Al Smith Dinner in NYC. "John McCain Rocks the House at the Alfred House Dinner" (YouTube). At least read the transcript: "McCain, Obama Bring Down House At Al Smith Dinner." You could almost remember the Gipper at times. Sen. Obama got in some good lines, too, especially the one about having once hung around with a crowd of worthless punks -- members of the U.S. Senate. He did seem to me like he looked a bit out of place, however, like a dressed-up school boy invited to address the Rotary Club after winning a spelling bee. But then, he was surrounded pretty much by the NYC geriatric set of aging Democrats -- and a septuagenarian Republican opponent.

Prayer and politics

A reader sends the following (which I've secured authorization to publish) about: (1) a decision about prayer in church, and (2) a thought about our political future. Judging it to be of general interest to our readers, I offer it for your consideration.

Prayer:

The decision is that I have returned to the proper way of folding hands during the Mass: palm on palm, thumbs crossed. This is the way I learned it in grade school. Half the faithful, even then, had sloughed off to a fingers intertwined and dangling at roughly groin level stance -- especially the men. But a couple weeks ago I watched the redoubtable Peter Leonard, stalwart altar boy at my Sunday mass at St Luke's Mission of Mercy (horribly NO in most respects, mercifully traditionalist in others), with his palms glued together, fingertips brushing his chin, and I wondered, what the hell excuse can I have not to do as much? So I have been imitating my 11 year old mentor ever since. It has not rubbed off on my 12 year old and eight year old wards as yet (resolute groin-protectors, both), but, aside from the fact that it is simply the right thing to do, I see two potential benefits:

(1) It is not a completely comfortable position to maintain while standing. A certain amount of attention and perseverance is required to maintain it. It is thus a tiny little occasion for redemptive suffering, and also helps keep the mind from wandering to things like Mrs Bielman's behind and the upcoming Bills game.

(2) It provides a clearly Catholic gesture of solidarity, the kind contemporary hey-look-at-me performance Catholics are so fond of. It thus obviates the need for faux-Catholic orans posturing, handholding, and other heterodox diddling.

Politics:

The thought is that 2009 is going to be a hellish year no matter who the new president is. Many of us will be out of work. Old folks will be wondering where their money went. Mission doors will be straining to close behind the last butt inside.

Pro-lifers have made their beds with republicans, with results that can, charitably, be termed "mixed." The usual corruptions of power infest the republican party no less than the democrat, and prolifers have not been up front in facing that fact. The result now -- evident IMO since 2006 -- is that the grand pro-life scheme for packing the Supreme Court is about to unravel. I would guess that within a year of Obama's inauguration, Justice Stevens will put himself out to pasture, followed, very possibly, by the ailing Justice Ginsberg -- and it will be as if Roberts and Alito never existed.

The lives of American Catholics are about to start sucking real bad, and the leadership of The Man Without Qualities, flanked by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and a pleased-as-punch mainstream media, will likely make it worse. But that's what's going to happen -- and you can blame an awful lot of it on:

(1) the almost unbelievable corruption, venality and hypocrisy of the republican party, a party of corporate lap dogs, statutory rapists, and public restroom romeos

(2) the fecklessness of pro-life leaders in general, American Catholic bishops in particular

Yeh, yeh, I know, what about the democrats? Excellent point, which I myself have made on many occasions. But we've been blaming them for years, usually with great success, and are we better off as a result?

[Hat tip to the author]

Howard Stern show quizzes Obama supporters in Harlem on candidate policies

This is just sad. Some people speculate that some Obama supporters support him strictly because he's black, and not because of his policies. So Howard Stern sent a team into Harlem to ask Obama supporters why they support him. Only, they took McCain's policies and pretended they were Obama's, asking questions like: "Do you support Obama because he's pro-life or because he thinks our troops should stay in Iraq and finish this war?" or "If Obama wins do you have any problem with Sarah Palin being Vice President?" Here's what they found: "Howard Stern show quizzes Obama supporters in Harlem on candidate policies" (Breibart.TV).

To be fair, such ignorance can surely be found among partisans of either party and any ethnicity. On the other hand, you can't fool all of the people all of the time:

It's about time!

"The Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) suspended funding a nationwide community organizing group (ACORN) after it was disclosed June 2 that nearly $1 million had been embezzled." Dennis Sadowski, "CCHD ends funding to ACORN over financial irregularities" (Catholic News Service, October 16, 2008).

Was it a decade ago that Catholic World Report had a major exposé of the CCHD and the USCCB announced a tightening up of funding regulations for many of CCHD's pet socialist projects? Social Gospel redivuvus.

Obama not a natural born US citizen? Get real!

Have any of you heard this claim? Does anyone here know anything about it? I have checked Snopes.com, which addresses and refutes related rumors, but nothing in Snopes directly answers the specific allegations made in the video discussed below, even though Snopes mentions the Philadelphia lawyer involved.

My good friend, Edgar, a fellow-philosopher concerned with veritas, directed me to a website called "The Wide Awakes" that had the same material about Gov. Palin posted as I received recently in an independent email. I previously knew nothing about this website. It's obviously politically right-wing, and while I haven't had the time to explore it, I did watch one video it posted -- a video produced by Molotov Mitchell, representing Illuminati Pictures, which produced an earlier video I saw opposing Obama's pro-abortion position. (That anti-abortion video was one called to my attention by my good friend in North Carolina, Dr. Doug Miller, so this follow-up video on Sen. Obama aroused my curiosity.)

This subsequent video, entitled "The Obama October Surprise" (YouTube) featues a Philadelphia attorney, Philip J. Berg, former Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania, a life-long Democrat and former candidate for Governor of PA, standing in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and talking about a federal law suit he is bringing against Sen. Barack Obama for failure to produce adequate records confirming that he is a natural born U.S. citizen, a Constitutional requirement for becoming President of the United States. In fact, Berg argues that even if Obama were a natural-born U.S. citizen, which he contests, he could only be at best a naturalized U.S. citizen after his purported adoption by his Indonesian step-father. In short, Berg insinuates a major cover-up. This is the first I've heard this allegation, but then I haven't spend much time digging into the personal details of Sen. Obama's past, primarily from lack of interest. One assumes that details such as these are ordinarily seen to well in advance of this stage of a political campaign.

I'm inclined to dismiss such allegations out-of-hand, especially during the heated tensions of an election year. I simply doubt their truth. There would seem to be too many improbabilities to make the case. On the other hand, even if it were true, I doubt whether it would be permitted to see the light of day at this stage. Imagine: if this were true, and if it surfaced as a national issue at this stage of the game, just days before the election, there would be rioting in the streets. There would be blood. They would call out the National Guard.

Ferrara on voting this November (while holding his nose)

Catholic lawyer, author and columnist, Christopher A. Ferrara, is not happy with the Republican Party. Yet he believes that it is a Catholic's duty in this year's election to vote Republican. He minces no words about this. His two-part analysis and argument can be found here:

1. "Why I am Voting Republican this Year (While Holding My Nose)" (Remnant, September 1, 2008)
   
   
2. "Why I am Voting Republican this Year – Part II (And I am still holding my nose)" (September 3, 2008)

In Part II, Ferrara "front loads" the relevant facts:

First, the Republican Party Platform for 2008 does not condone abortion in any case, not even in cases of rape, incest or “life of the mother,” but declares that “we assert the inherent dignity and sanctity of all human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution, and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion and will not fund organizations which advocate it. We support the appointment of judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity and dignity of innocent human life.”

Second, candidate McCain, clearly in response to pressure from the pro-life constituency, has abandoned any attempt to insert “exceptions” into the Republican plank on abortion.

Third, under pressure from the pro-life constituency, McCain selected as his running mate an unreservedly pro-life mother of five who just gave birth to a fifth child with Down syndrome, rejecting the option of abortion.

Fourth, under pressure from the pro-life constituency, McCain has promised to appoint Supreme Court justices like Alito and Roberts, who at least can be expected to provide votes for the overruling of Roe v. Wade on the ground that the issue of abortion is for the states to decide.

Fifth, the Democratic Party platform declares precisely the opposite of the Republican Platform: “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.”

Sixth, Barack Obama not only supports unrestricted abortion on demand, including “partial birth” abortions, but has even opposed efforts in the State of Illinois to prohibit the passive euthanasia of babies who survive botched abortions.

Seventh, Obama has promised an aggressive federal campaign to promote “abortion rights,” including Supreme Court appointments.

In case some critics still don’t see the big picture, let me connect all the dots: Thanks to sustained pressure from the pro-life movement, including threats to boycott this election, the Republican Party has adopted an official position that is pro-life without exceptions, whereas the official position of the Democratic Party is pro-abortion without exceptions. And it does not matter that McCain might personally be soft on abortion. He now understands quite well that he cannot afford politically to buck the 2008 Platform, and that a “pro-choice” Republican Party will fail at the polls.

... At the risk of being tedious, let me restate the argument this way: Obama is a pro-abortion fanatic, and his party’s platform is fanatically pro-abortion. His election would be a grave evil we have it in our power to prevent by voting against him. Since we would not in any respect be endorsing abortion by voting Republican, given the Party’s platform, there is no rational basis for the claim that voting for McCain-Palin would constitute even material, much less direct, cooperation in abortion. Ergo, our vote for the Republican Party in this particular election would appear to be morally imperative, in view of the alternative of Obama-Biden.

... Vote as you please, or vote not at all. But then do not complain about a single thing Barack Obama and his minions will do to you, your family, and our nation if he is elected. Be silent in the face of injustice and moral calamity, because you will have gotten exactly what you asked for.

Ferrara is not only a conservative Catholic, but a very sharp lawyer. Whatever your political orientation, his thoughtful and articulate analysis is well-worth considering.

[Hat tip to C.G.-Z.]

Tridentine Community News

Tridentine Mass Subtleties

In previous columns, we have made mention of a number of finer points in the Extraordinary Form of Holy Mass. Today, we will recap these and mention some additional ones:

Making the Responses

In a Sung Mass (Missa Cantata, Solemn High, or Pontifical), the faithful are encouraged -- not just permitted -- to join the altar servers in making all of the sung responses, such as "Et cum spiritu tuo," plus the recited "Domine, non sum dignus" before Holy Communion and those surrounding the Last Gospel. The priest says the Pater Noster alone; the faithful only say the concluding line. At a Low Mass, the faithful may make the recited responses except those during the Prayers at the Foot of the altar at the beginning of Mass.

The 1958 Vatican instruction De Musica Sacra permits the faithful to make additional responses, such as the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar and singing the Pater Noster along with the priest, although these practices are very rarely witnessed. At our Masses, we do not employ these practices because we wish to follow the more standard customs outlined in the preceding paragraph.

No Response After Sung Readings

Unlike in the Novus Ordo, the servers and faithful do not respond with "Deo gratias" after a sung Epistle or "Laus Tibi, Christe" after a sung Gospel in a Sung Mass. The responses are only given after recited readings both in otherwise Sung Masses and in Low Masses. We are not aware of the reason for this practice, yet it is clear that this is the intent. However, "Deo gratias" is always said at the end of the (always recited) Last Gospel in both Low and Sung Masses.

No Cross or Response at the Vernacular Readings

As signified by the celebrant removing his maniple before reading the Epistle and gospel in English, the vernacular readings and homily are actually not part of the Mass. Therefore, it is not necessary to make the triple sign of the Cross before the English reading of the Holy Gospel, nor to respond with "Thanks be to God" after the Epistle or "Praise to You, Lord Jesus Christ" after the Holy Gospel. Those are liturgical actions, and we are outside the liturgy at this point. The Crosses, and the responses as outlined above, are only required during the initial Latin readings. Nevertheless, these are understandable habits as well as pious practices, thus they are not prohibited.

For some reason, it is common to hear the faithful pronounce the Prayer Before Communion as "Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tecum meum, sic tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea." The word to us is actually "sed" Latin for "but," as "sic means "therefore" or "thus." In English: "Lord I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof, but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed."

Method of Receiving Holy Communion

In the Tridentine Mass, it is customary for the communicant to receive Holy Communion on the tongue, kneeling at the Communion Rail. If the communicant cannot kneel, he or she may receive standing at the rail. If the communicant cannot approach the rail, the priest or deacon will bring Communion to the communicant in the pew.

Strictly speaking, current Canon Law does permit the reception of the Sacred Host in the hand in the Extraordinary as well as Ordinary Forms of the Holy Mass. This is not the historical custom, however, and is therefore discouraged, much as hymns from the Glory & Praise hymnal are discouraged at a Tridentine Mass. Practices have their places.

"Amen" is not said by the communicant before receiving the Sacred Host, as the priest says "Amen" on behalf of the communicant as part of his own prayer.

Prayers After Low Mass

Pope Leo XIII ordered the addition of the Prayers After Low Mass seen in virtually every Tridentine Hand Missal. The 1962 edition of the roman Missal no longer requires these to be said, but common custom is to recite them, as we do at St. Josaphat's Monday 7:00PM Low Mass. Being outside the Mass per se, their use is not a matter of rubrics, as for example, using the suppressed Confiteor before Holy Communion would be.

Bishop Boyea Mass in Flint Cancelled

Due to a scheduling conflict, Bishop Boyea will not be able to celebrate Mass next Sunday, September 28, at Flint's All Saints Church. At press time, the Flint Latin Mass Committee was trying to find another special celebrant for this, their annual Anniversary Mass and Dinner. Bishop Boyea hopes to reschedule for a future date.

[Acknowledgement: This issue of Tridentine Community News first appeared in the September 21, 2008, issue of the St. Josaphat Sunday church bulletin. It is reproduced here by kind permission of the author, A.B.]

Clearing the air: what really lies ahead?

While smooth and self-assured, Sen. Obama's words are what count; and all-too-often, they bluff and baffle with subterfuge. Here, again, is Robbie George with another clear-the-air operation; this time with Yuval Levin, "Obama and Infanticide" (The Witherspoon Institute, October 16, 2008): "Obama's latest excuse for opposing the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act is that the law was 'unnecessary' because babies surviving abortions were already protected. It won't fly."

The Wall Street Journal recently had an artice, "A Liberal Supermajority" (WSJ, October 17, 2008), prognosticating the sort of future we likely have in store with Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress, a filibuster-proof Senate, a Democratic administration eager to rubber-stamp socially 'progressive' tax-and-spend legislation, and bright torches in the firmament like Nancy Pelosi 'representin' ... "Get ready for 'change' we haven't seen since 1965, or 1933," says WSJ.

The WSJ predictably addresses the inevitability of coercively leveraged Medicare for all, a paralized business climate, the recrudescence of regnant unionism, economy-killing taxation in support of an inconvenient Al Gore Green Revolution, voting rights for felons, federal regulation of talk radio in the name of free speech, and a potpourri of other special interests. What the WSJ article does not mention, also predictably, is the issues that the Church considers basic in the culture wars -- namely Moloch worship (the Culture of Death), and the infrastructure of 'pelvic' issues supporting it (recreational sex, contraception, same-sex marriage, divorce and re-marriage, abortion, stem-cell research and infanticide). For the latter, check out the Robbie George--Yuval Levin article at the beginning of this post.

Better homilies? Biblical literacy? Huzzah!

Sandro Magister, "The Synod Wants Better Homilies. With the Pope as the Model" (www.chiesa, October 17, 2008): "The synod fathers are proposing a "manual" to elevate the quality of preaching. But the living example is Benedict XVI. Here is the unscripted meditation with which he opened the working sessions, while stock markets were collapsing around the world."

I'm glad he mentioned the need for a "living example." From my experience no manual would do the trick. What Catholic priests and seminarians need is good exemplars, and they are few and far between, although this is one of the crying needs of our day.

In related news, see Magister's post, "The Art of Reading the Scriptures. A Lesson for Today's Illiterates" (www.chiesa, October 16, 2008): "It is the liturgy that must again shape the reading and understanding of the Bible. Just as in medieval monasticism, creator of modern civilization. Timothy Verdon explains why, at a synod that has reached the halfway point."

While this is true (that liturgy must shape reading and understanding the Bible), it is no substitute for sitting down and reading through the books of the Bible first-hand. While the lectionary and liturgy provides the necessary framework, these alone will not provide an integrated synoptic grasp of the books of the Bible and how they fit together within themselves and into the whole of Scripture and Tradition. One must read the Bible. In fact, one must make a habit of reading the Bible, and not just as found in the Breviary or Divine Office.

I wish all Catholic seminaries required a first-hand mastery of Scripture and a substantial course in Biblical theological hermeneutics. This would prevent some of the superficiality and slipshod errors that one finds in discussions about the Catholic Faith at the parish level. It's not enough for priests and seminarians to get down the public speaking technique. One has to know what the Word of God in order to proclaim it. As St. Jerome says: "Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ."

For the record

Question: What is America's first line of missile interceptor defense that protects the entire United States ?

Answer: 49th Missile Defense Battalion of Alaska National Guard.

Question: What is the ONLY National Guard unit on permanent active duty?

Answer: 49th Missile Defense Battalion of Alaska National Guard

Question: Who is the Commander in Chief of the 49th Missile Defense Battalion of Alaska National Guard?

Answer: Governor Sarah Palin, of Alaska

Question: What U.S. governor is routinely briefed on highly classified military issues, homeland security, and counter terrorism?

Answer: Governor Sarah Palin, Alaska

Question: What U.S. governor has a higher classified security rating than either candidate of the Democrat Party?

Answer: Governor Sarah Palin, Alaska

According to the Washington Post, she first met with McCain in February, but nobody ever found out. This is a woman used to keeping secrets. She can be entrusted with our national security, because she already is.

[Foreign policy experience this may not be, but it's certainly responsibility: "Sarah Palin as Alaska National Guard commander" (Los Angeles Times, September 6, 2008).]

Few Japanese realize their Prime Minister is Catholic

"Japanese have first Catholic prime minister, and few know it" (Chicago Sun times, September 25, 2008).

Great exposé of Hollywood political bias

Andrew Klavan, "5 Myths About Those Tinseltown Liberals" (Washington Post, October 12, 2008).

[Hat tip to J.M.]

Princeton's black sheep turns his steel trap logic on Obama

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is a member of the President's Council on Bioethics and previously served on the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse. He is brilliant. What many of his Princeton colleagues hate about Robbie George, however, is that he has a history of enlisting his intellectual powers in the service of all the 'wrong' causes. Like turning the pro-choice argument on its head (see, for example, his hilariously revealing logical demonstration of pro-choice logic applied to the bombing of abortion clinics: "In Short, I am 'Moderately Pro-Choice'"). But the worst nightmare for his monolithically Democratic colleagues is his latest article in which he turns his razor sharp logic against Obama's and Obama supporters' pro-choice rationalizations: "Obama's Abortion Extremism" (The Witherspoon Institute, October 14, 2008). Here it is:

Sen. Barack Obama's views on life issues ranging from abortion to embryonic stem cell research mark him as not merely a pro-choice politician, but rather as the most extreme pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket.

Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.
Yet there are Catholics and Evangelicals-even self-identified pro-life Catholics and Evangelicals - who aggressively promote Obama's candidacy and even declare him the preferred candidate from the pro-life point of view.

What is going on here?

I have examined the arguments advanced by Obama's self-identified pro-life supporters, and they are spectacularly weak. It is nearly unfathomable to me that those advancing them can honestly believe what they are saying. But before proving my claims about Obama's abortion extremism, let me explain why I have described Obama as ''pro-abortion'' rather than ''pro-choice.''

According to the standard argument for the distinction between these labels, nobody is pro-abortion. Everybody would prefer a world without abortions. After all, what woman would deliberately get pregnant just to have an abortion? But given the world as it is, sometimes women find themselves with unplanned pregnancies at times in their lives when having a baby would present significant problems for them. So even if abortion is not medically required, it should be permitted, made as widely available as possible and, when necessary, paid for with taxpayers' money.

The defect in this argument can easily be brought into focus if we shift to the moral question that vexed an earlier generation of Americans: slavery. Many people at the time of the American founding would have preferred a world without slavery but nonetheless opposed abolition. Such people - Thomas Jefferson was one - reasoned that, given the world as it was, with slavery woven into the fabric of society just as it had often been throughout history, the economic consequences of abolition for society as a whole and for owners of plantations and other businesses that relied on slave labor would be dire. Many people who argued in this way were not monsters but honest and sincere, albeit profoundly mistaken. Some (though not Jefferson) showed their personal opposition to slavery by declining to own slaves themselves or freeing slaves whom they had purchased or inherited. They certainly didn't think anyone should be forced to own slaves. Still, they maintained that slavery should remain a legally permitted option and be given constitutional protection.

Would we describe such people, not as pro-slavery, but as ''pro-choice''? Of course we would not. It wouldn't matter to us that they were ''personally opposed'' to slavery, or that they wished that slavery were ''unnecessary,'' or that they wouldn't dream of forcing anyone to own slaves. We would hoot at the faux sophistication of a placard that said ''Against slavery? Don't own one.'' We would observe that the fundamental divide is between people who believe that law and public power should permit slavery, and those who think that owning slaves is an unjust choice that should be prohibited.

Just for the sake of argument, though, let us assume that there could be a morally meaningful distinction between being ''pro-abortion'' and being ''pro-choice.'' Who would qualify for the latter description? Barack Obama certainly would not. For, unlike his running mate Joe Biden, Obama does not think that abortion is a purely private choice that public authority should refrain from getting involved in. Now, Senator Biden is hardly pro-life. He believes that the killing of the unborn should be legally permitted and relatively unencumbered. But unlike Obama, at least Biden has sometimes opposed using taxpayer dollars to fund abortion, thereby leaving Americans free to choose not to implicate themselves in it. If we stretch things to create a meaningful category called ''pro-choice,'' then Biden might be a plausible candidate for the label; at least on occasions when he respects your choice or mine not to facilitate deliberate feticide.

The same cannot be said for Barack Obama. For starters, he supports legislation that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which protects pro-life citizens from having to pay for abortions that are not necessary to save the life of the mother and are not the result of rape or incest. The abortion industry laments that this longstanding federal law, according to the pro-abortion group NARAL, ''forces about half the women who would otherwise have abortions to carry unintended pregnancies to term and bear children against their wishes instead.'' In other words, a whole lot of people who are alive today would have been exterminated in utero were it not for the Hyde Amendment. Obama has promised to reverse the situation so that abortions that the industry complains are not happening (because the federal government is not subsidizing them) would happen. That is why people who profit from abortion love Obama even more than they do his running mate.

But this barely scratches the surface of Obama's extremism. He has promised that ''the first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act'' (known as FOCA). This proposed legislation would create a federally guaranteed ''fundamental right'' to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, including, as Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia has noted in a statement condemning the proposed Act, ''a right to abort a fully developed child in the final weeks for undefined 'health' reasons.'' In essence, FOCA would abolish virtually every existing state and federal limitation on abortion, including parental consent and notification laws for minors, state and federal funding restrictions on abortion, and conscience protections for pro-life citizens working in the health-care industry-protections against being forced to participate in the practice of abortion or else lose their jobs. The pro-abortion National Organization for Women has proclaimed with approval that FOCA would ''sweep away hundreds of anti-abortion laws [and] policies.''

It gets worse. Obama, unlike even many ''pro-choice'' legislators, opposed the ban on partial-birth abortions when he served in the Illinois legislature and condemned the Supreme Court decision that upheld legislation banning this heinous practice. He has referred to a baby conceived inadvertently by a young woman as a ''punishment'' that she should not endure. He has stated that women's equality requires access to abortion on demand. Appallingly, he wishes to strip federal funding from pro-life crisis pregnancy centers that provide alternatives to abortion for pregnant women in need. There is certainly nothing ''pro-choice'' about that.

But it gets even worse. Senator Obama, despite the urging of pro-life members of his own party, has not endorsed or offered support for the Pregnant Women Support Act, the signature bill of Democrats for Life, meant to reduce abortions by providing assistance for women facing crisis pregnancies. In fact, Obama has opposed key provisions of the Act, including providing coverage of unborn children in the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), and informed consent for women about the effects of abortion and the gestational age of their child. This legislation would not make a single abortion illegal. It simply seeks to make it easier for pregnant women to make the choice not to abort their babies. Here is a concrete test of whether Obama is ''pro-choice'' rather than pro-abortion. He flunked. Even Senator Edward Kennedy voted to include coverage of unborn children in S-CHIP. But Barack Obama stood resolutely with the most stalwart abortion advocates in opposing it.

It gets worse yet. In an act of breathtaking injustice which the Obama campaign lied about until critics produced documentary proof of what he had done, as an Illinois state senator Obama opposed legislation to protect children who are born alive, either as a result of an abortionist's unsuccessful effort to kill them in the womb, or by the deliberate delivery of the baby prior to viability. This legislation would not have banned any abortions. Indeed, it included a specific provision ensuring that it did not affect abortion laws. (This is one of the points Obama and his campaign lied about until they were caught.) The federal version of the bill passed unanimously in the United States Senate, winning the support of such ardent advocates of legal abortion as John Kerry and Barbara Boxer. But Barack Obama opposed it and worked to defeat it. For him, a child marked for abortion gets no protection-even ordinary medical or comfort care-even if she is born alive and entirely separated from her mother. So Obama has favored protecting what is literally a form of infanticide.

You may be thinking, it can't get worse than that. But it does.

For several years, Americans have been debating the use for biomedical research of embryos produced by in vitro fertilization (originally for reproductive purposes) but now left in a frozen condition in cryopreservation units. President Bush has restricted the use of federal funds for stem-cell research of the type that makes use of these embryos and destroys them in the process. I support the President's restriction, but some legislators with excellent pro-life records, including John McCain, argue that the use of federal money should be permitted where the embryos are going to be discarded or die anyway as the result of the parents' decision. Senator Obama, too, wants to lift the restriction.

But Obama would not stop there. He has co-sponsored a bill-strongly opposed by McCain-that would authorize the large-scale industrial production of human embryos for use in biomedical research in which they would be killed. In fact, the bill Obama co-sponsored would effectively require the killing of human beings in the embryonic stage that were produced by cloning. It would make it a federal crime for a woman to save an embryo by agreeing to have the tiny developing human being implanted in her womb so that he or she could be brought to term. This ''clone and kill'' bill would, if enacted, bring something to America that has heretofore existed only in China-the equivalent of legally mandated abortion. In an audacious act of deceit, Obama and his co-sponsors misleadingly call this an anti-cloning bill. But it is nothing of the kind. What it bans is not cloning, but allowing the embryonic children produced by cloning to survive.

Can it get still worse? Yes.

Decent people of every persuasion hold out the increasingly realistic hope of resolving the moral issue surrounding embryonic stem-cell research by developing methods to produce the exact equivalent of embryonic stem cells without using (or producing) embryos. But when a bill was introduced in the United States Senate to put a modest amount of federal money into research to develop these methods, Barack Obama was one of the few senators who opposed it. From any rational vantage point, this is unconscionable. Why would someone not wish to find a method of producing the pluripotent cells scientists want that all Americans could enthusiastically endorse? Why create and kill human embryos when there are alternatives that do not require the taking of nascent human lives? It is as if Obama is opposed to stem-cell research unless it involves killing human embryos.

This ultimate manifestation of Obama's extremism brings us back to the puzzle of his pro-life Catholic and Evangelical apologists.

They typically do not deny the facts I have reported. They could not; each one is a matter of public record. But despite Obama's injustices against the most vulnerable human beings, and despite the extraordinary support he receives from the industry that profits from killing the unborn (which should be a good indicator of where he stands), some Obama supporters insist that he is the better candidate from the pro-life point of view.

They say that his economic and social policies would so diminish the demand for abortion that the overall number would actually go down-despite the federal subsidizing of abortion and the elimination of hundreds of pro-life laws. The way to save lots of unborn babies, they say, is to vote for the pro-abortion-oops! ''pro-choice''-candidate. They tell us not to worry that Obama opposes the Hyde Amendment, the Mexico City Policy (against funding abortion abroad), parental consent and notification laws, conscience protections, and the funding of alternatives to embryo-destructive research. They ask us to look past his support for Roe v. Wade, the Freedom of Choice Act, partial-birth abortion, and human cloning and embryo-killing. An Obama presidency, they insist, means less killing of the unborn.

This is delusional.

We know that the federal and state pro-life laws and policies that Obama has promised to sweep away (and that John McCain would protect) save thousands of lives every year. Studies conducted by Professor Michael New and other social scientists have removed any doubt. Often enough, the abortion lobby itself confirms the truth of what these scholars have determined. Tom McClusky has observed that Planned Parenthood's own statistics show that in each of the seven states that have FOCA-type legislation on the books, ''abortion rates have increased while the national rate has decreased.'' In Maryland, where a bill similar to the one favored by Obama was enacted in 1991, he notes that ''abortion rates have increased by 8 percent while the overall national abortion rate decreased by 9 percent.'' No one is really surprised. After all, the message clearly conveyed by policies such as those Obama favors is that abortion is a legitimate solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancies - so clearly legitimate that taxpayers should be forced to pay for it.

But for a moment let's suppose, against all the evidence, that Obama's proposals would reduce the number of abortions, even while subsidizing the killing with taxpayer dollars. Even so, many more unborn human beings would likely be killed under Obama than under McCain. A Congress controlled by strong Democratic majorities under Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi would enact the bill authorizing the mass industrial production of human embryos by cloning for research in which they are killed. As president, Obama would sign it. The number of tiny humans created and killed under this legislation (assuming that an efficient human cloning technique is soon perfected) could dwarf the number of lives saved as a result of the reduced demand for abortion-even if we take a delusionally optimistic view of what that number would be.

Barack Obama and John McCain differ on many important issues about which reasonable people of goodwill, including pro-life Americans of every faith, disagree: how best to fight international terrorism, how to restore economic growth and prosperity, how to distribute the tax burden and reduce poverty, etc.

But on abortion and the industrial creation of embryos for destructive research, there is a profound difference of moral principle, not just prudence. These questions reveal the character and judgment of each man. Barack Obama is deeply committed to the belief that members of an entire class of human beings have no rights that others must respect. Across the spectrum of pro-life concerns for the unborn, he would deny these small and vulnerable members of the human family the basic protection of the laws. Over the next four to eight years, as many as five or even six U.S. Supreme Court justices could retire. Obama enthusiastically supports Roe v. Wade and would appoint judges who would protect that morally and constitutionally disastrous decision and even expand its scope. Indeed, in an interview in Glamour magazine, he made it clear that he would apply a litmus test for Supreme Court nominations: jurists who do not support Roe will not be considered for appointment by Obama. John McCain, by contrast, opposes Roe and would appoint judges likely to overturn it. This would not make abortion illegal, but it would return the issue to the forums of democratic deliberation, where pro-life Americans could engage in a fair debate to persuade fellow citizens that killing the unborn is no way to address the problems of pregnant women in need.

What kind of America do we want our beloved nation to be? Barack Obama's America is one in which being human just isn't enough to warrant care and protection. It is an America where the unborn may legitimately be killed without legal restriction, even by the grisly practice of partial-birth abortion. It is an America where a baby who survives abortion is not even entitled to comfort care as she dies on a stainless steel table or in a soiled linen bin. It is a nation in which some members of the human family are regarded as inferior and others superior in fundamental dignity and rights. In Obama's America, public policy would make a mockery of the great constitutional principle of the equal protection of the law. In perhaps the most telling comment made by any candidate in either party in this election year, Senator Obama, when asked by Rick Warren when a baby gets human rights, replied: ''that question is above my pay grade.'' It was a profoundly disingenuous answer: For even at a state senator's pay grade, Obama presumed to answer that question with blind certainty. His unspoken answer then, as now, is chilling: human beings have no rights until infancy - and if they are unwanted survivors of attempted abortions, not even then.

In the end, the efforts of Obama's apologists to depict their man as the true pro-life candidate that Catholics and Evangelicals may and even should vote for, doesn't even amount to a nice try. Voting for the most extreme pro-abortion political candidate in American history is not the way to save unborn babies.

[Hat tip to E.E.]

John Lamont on what was wrong with Vatican II

Part I. Why the Second Vatican Council Was a Good Thing & Is More Important Than Ever

Longtime readers will remember the article by John Lamont published in New Oxford Review, which we reproduced online by permission of the editor: "Why the Second Vatican Council Was a Good Thing & Is More Important Than Ever" (Musings, August 31, 2005). That article was prompted by a question raised by NOR in response to a Crisis magazine article by George Sim Johnston, whose article was subtitled: "Why Vatican II Was Necessary." Dale Vree, the Editor of NOR, had written: "We'd dearly like to know why it was. We can think of a few things that Vatican II did that were good and necessary -- but only a few -- and we doubt if an ecumenical council was necessary to accomplish them." Lamont said that this was an excellent question that needs an answer, and his article was written to take up the challenge posed by it.

Lamont's article is one of the best I've seen and too long to be summarized here; but after making the case that the disasters that followed the Council were not caused by its documents, he gets down to the business of laying out why the Council was a good thing. Briefly, he argues that there were two kinds of problems the Council was required to address -- external and internal problems. External problems involved such things as Church-state relations, which required the sort of natural law argument for religious liberty made by Dignitatis Humanae; the evolving relations with Protestants and other non-Catholic Christians, which elicited the kind of ecclesiological statements one finds in Unitatis Redintegrato; and relations with the Jews, which demanded the Church's forthright rejection of antisemitism found in Nostra Aetate.

The internal problems addressed by the Council are far subtler, deeper, and more difficult to discern. It is here, however, that Lamont is particularly illuminating. Following Louis Bouyer, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Servais Pinckaers, he sees these problems as ultimately stemming from the influence of nominalism on Catholic thought in the late Middle Ages, "an influence that gave rise to Protestantism, and that in the emergency of contriving a Catholic response to Protestantism was not properly eradicated." What sorts of problems does Lamont identify?

Among other things, there was a tendency to identify religion with obedience to orders and commandments, and to separate it from happiness and truth. One manifestation of this tendency was was anti-intellectualism and hostility towards reason: "If faith is a matter of obeying orders, then asking questions about Catholic belief is insubordinate." Another was the spiritual weakness stemming from a morality of obligation that regarded the development of a life of prayer, virtue, and pursuit of holiness as the province of the religious, rather than the laity. Yet another was a defective attitude toward the world resulting from this weakness: if religion is seen as a matter of obeying orders and the secular world is largely ignoring the orders, the orders themselves are seen as flawed, in need of being changed, or at least rephrased, to make them acceptable.

The Council addressed this weakness in four ways: it (1) presented Christ as the ultimate fulfillment of human nature, along Thomist lines, with the Church offering the means needed to attain this fulfillment; (2) asserted that everyone, not just religious, is called by God to be perfect; (3) insisted on the necessity of Catholics being familiar with the Scriptures; and (4) promoted, in Sancrosanctum Concilium, the revival of the liturgy that had been developing since the 19th century, and had been endorsed by Pius XII's encyclical Mediator Dei.

Yet, as Lamont states, "These attempts to address this fundamental weakness, however, were received by a Church that was still enthralled by them," which is what explains the disasters that followed the Council and the triumph of the very weaknesses the Council tried to remedy. "Its attempts at overcoming the nominalist mindset were interpreted as rejecting the previous requirement of obedience," freeing "all the bitterness and resentment that had been produced by such obedience ... untrammeled by any intellectual discipline or loyalty to truth. The idea of coming to terms with the world, which was given support by some utterances of John XXIII and Paul VI, was embraced as the main theme of the Council, despite the lack of any basis for it in the conciliar documents." The triumph of this weakness, according to Lamont, "means that the Council's teaching is even more important now than at the time it was convoked," an importance compounded by the fact that the basic Church teaching it sets forth, largely taken for granted at the time, is now widely rejected. "There does not seem to be a better way of promoting these teachings than by getting the clergy and laity to realize that they are taught by the Council that progressives claim as their own," concludes Lamont.

Part II. What was Wrong with Vatican II

Last year, John Lamont published another article, this time entitled "What was Wrong with Vatican II" (New Blackfriars, Vol. 88, 2007) [fee levied for online access]. He begins by rehearsing the broad outlines of the turmoil and catastrophe that followed the Council, admitted by no less an authority than Pope Paul VI in an often-quoted sermon on June 29, 1972, in which he remarked that "from some crack the smoke of Satan had entered the temple of God."¹ He notes that Pope Benedict XVI, in his address to the Roman Curia on December 22, 2005, distinguished two different ways of interpreting the Council -- a "hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture," and a "hermeneutics of reform." While applauding this analysis as quite correct, Lamont observes that it leaves certain questions unanswered. "The bishops at the Council were the same people who presided over the mess that followed," he writes. "For the most part, they either wholeheartedly accepted the "hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture," or else went along with measures that followed from it." While they may have done so for the most part in the sincere belief that they were implementing the Council, says Lamont, this raises a pressing question: "what was it about the Council that could have promoted its disastrous misinterpretation, and the calamities that resulted from it?"

While ecumenical councils cannot go wrong through teaching anything false, says Lamont, this does not mean that they cannot be "one-sided or ill-judged or even harmful in some respects"; and he gives as an example Canon 26 of the Third Lateran Council.² Nevertheless, at pains to make clear that he does not think the Council was simply a disaster, Lamont reiterates the claim of his earlier article that the Council was on the whole a good thing and introduced a number of important and needed reforms (see above). But this only makes more urgent the task of sorting out the Council's flaws from its achievements:

This task is especially pressing, in my view, because traditionalists have not gone about it in the right way. I do not think that the Council can be held responsible for the liturgical abuses that followed it; in this I am supported by the view of Fr. Louis Bouyer, an important figure in the liturgical movement, who remarked of the post-conciliar liturgical changes that "perhaps in no other area is there a greater distance (and even formal opposition) between what the Council worked out and what we have."³ Nor do I think that the Council contradicted previous Church teachings on religious freedom, as the Lefebvrists maintain -- the declaration Dignitatis Humanae, on religious freedom, was the most debated and revised document of the entire Council, precisely in order to avoid such a contradiction.

Here is where Lamont approaches his thesis, first by the partial insight found in a common criticism of Gaudium et Spes:

A better criticism of the Council focuses on its constitution Gaudium et Spes, and accuses the document of an unrealistically optimistic view of modern culture. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not get to the heart of the problems with the Council. The circumstances; they go deeper. They are found in two areas; in the Council's teaching on mission, and in the view of the human condition that underlies its approach to mission. By mission I mean the task of converting unbelievers to Catholicism.

A. The Council's teaching on mission

Lamont continues:

The trouble with the Council's approach to mission is that although it stresses that Catholics must seek to convert unbelievers, it gives no adequate reason for doing this. It does give Christ's command to evangelize as a reason, but it gives no proper explanation of why that command is given, or of the good that the commandment is supposed to promote. This, of course, means that the command is unlikely to be followed; and it has in fact been largely disregarded since the Council.

This omission, as Lamont points out, represents a departure from Catholic tradition, which is replete with references to evangelization as an activity that should be undertaken in order to save the souls of unbelievers. Lamont offers ample historical documentation, which I will not detail here. He carefully analyzes the historical statements on invincible ignorance, noting the non sequitur of leaping from the claim that unbelief is not a sin when it is beyond the control of unbelievers to the conclusion that unbelievers will therefore necessarily be saved, despite lacking faith or baptism and still being subject to original sin. Earlier discussions of the subject articulated a more balanced position. Pius IX's statement in Quanto Conficiamur Moerore that unbelief need not be a sin and that unbelievers can be saved despite their unbelief, was never intended or taken as more than a modal statement, an hypothetical possibility; it makes no claim about what actually happens. All of the positions taken by the Church historically entail that, although it is possible that unbelievers can be saved, we should nevertheless endeavor to convert them in order to save their souls. Lamont comments:

However, the Council did not state this balanced position. It made no reference at all to unbelief rendering salvation doubtful. Instead, in its decree on missions, Ad Gentes, it offers the following rationale for missionary activity:

"Christ himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and baptism (cf. Mk. 16:16; Jn. 3:5), and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter as through a door. Hence those cannot be saved whom, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded by God as something necessary, still refuse to enter it, or remain in it (Lumen Gentium, 14)." So, although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel to that faith without which it is impossible to please him (Heb. 11:6), the Church, nevertheless, still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize."⁴

As a rationale for missionary activity this is absurd, since it does not give a reason for trying to convert unbelievers generally, but only a reason for trying to convert those (presumably rare) souls who are already convinced of the truth of the Catholic faith, but obstinately refuse to follow its command to join the Church. It is in fact a rationale for avoiding missionary activity, since if people are not made aware that God founded the Church as something necessary for salvation, they cannot be lost through refusing to be baptized.

This neglect to mention the traditional rationale for mission could not fail to be noted by Catholics, and it led to predictable consequences. One was to lull Catholics into assuming that unbelief was not a serious obstacle to salvation, which eroded their interest in mission and evangelization. "This loss of interest was noted," says Lamont, "by John Paul II in his encyclical Redemptoris Missio, although that encyclical failed to properly address its cause." Another consequence was to lead Catholics to assume that the distinctive tenets of Catholicism and of Christianity were optional picture preferences. For if people who do not accept the distinctive tenets of Catholicism and Christianity can reasonably hope to be saved, then these distinctive tenets may obviously be thought to be unnecessary and discarded at will. Yet a third consequence for those Catholics who still continued to take salvation and evangelization seriously was to leave them vulnerable to the attraction of religious groups like Pentecostalists and other Evangelical Protestant sects who overtly stress the importance of mission and concern for the salvation of human souls. From this, says Lamont, stems the numerous defections of Catholics to Pentecostalists and other Protestant groups.

Lamont's discussion is detailed, and he considers various possible objections and offers replies; but these elude the scope of the present discussion.

B. The Council's teaching on the human condition

The second problem, the one underlying the Council's unsatisfactory teaching on mission, centers precisely on the reason for evangelization. Lamont writes:

The reason we cannot be confident of the salvation of unbelievers is that they are human, and are born into slavery to evil, suffering from the cancer of original sin. Damnation is the default setting for humanity -- that is why Christ had to die to redeem us -- so we can have no reason for expecting anyone to be saved unless they have undergone a real conversion. (This applies to Christians as well as unbelievers -- a Christian whose life is not noticeably different from those of the unbelievers around him has no reason to expect salvation.) To deny this is to deny the doctrine of original sin, and to ignore the evidence of human evil that is recorded in all of history. The Council did not of course actually make this denial; but, by remaining silent about salvation as a motive for missionary activity, it gave the impression that original sin and the evil that results from it are not realities. This failure to adequately acknowledge the reality of evil is the second problem with the Council.

Although the chief expression of this deficit is in the Council's teaching on mission, says Lamont, it can be found also in other places. For example, in Lumen Gentium, one of the most authoritative documents of Vatican II, one finds an unfolding of the inner nature and universal mission of the Church. Yet it's description of the Fall, says Lamont, passes over that event in the phrase: "when they had fallen in Adam, [God] did not abandon them."⁵ Missing is any explanation of the Fall, its effects, why Christ's death was needed to save us from it, or how Christ's death achieves this, even though these doctrines are indispensable for understanding the nature and mission of the Church. The problem, says Lamont, "goes deeper than being unrealistically positive about modern society; it is being unrealistically positive about the human condition itself.

This overlooking of the reality of sin and evil, according to Lamont, was the feature of the Council most responsible for the way the "Church of Vatican II" was fashioned by the bishops and curial officials after the Council. Lamont offers several examples:

(1) One example of an official implementation of this approach cited by Lamont is "the bowdlerization of the Divine Office, the public prayer of the Church." The Office, he notes, "is centered around the psalms, as is traditional, but every passage from the psalms -- and a few whole psalms -- that condemns evildoers, and threatens their punishment, has been removed." He mentions as an example Psalm 62(63), one of the most frequently recited Psalms in the Breviary, which stops at the line "My soul clings to You; Your right hand upholds me." The ending of the Psalm, with its negative message of condemnation upon the evil, however, has been removed. "This really shocking and blasphemous censorship of the Scriptures," writes Lamont, "illustrates how the 'spirit of Vatican II,' of which the refusal to acknowledge evil was a central part, was preferred to God's revelation."

(2) Another official measure Lamont considers is the new code of canon law promulgated after the Council. He cites canonists R. Michael Dunnigan and Charles Wilson as pointing out the greatly reduced role of penal sanctions in the new code, with penalties for specific crimes being reduced from 101 in the old code to 35 in the new, as well as concerns raised by Bishop V. de Paolis, formerly professor of canon law at the Gregorian University and secretary of the Apostolic Signature (the supreme court of appeal in the Church) at the time of Lamont's article.

(3) A third example mentioned is the abolition of the post of the devil's advocate in canonization cases

(4) A fourth is the "grave inadequacy of the new rite of exorcism," a rite, Lamont points out, "that has been described by the chief exorcist of Rome, Fr. Gabriele Amorth, as a farce."⁶

(5) On the level of one language group, as opposed to the whole Church, he notes the problem of the standard English versions of the liturgy originally produced by ICEL (the International Commission on English Liturgy) in the 1970s, "versions which the new secretary of ICEL, Fr. Bruce Harbert, has described as tending towards the Pelagian heresy."⁷

(6) As an example of policies not officially promulgated but generally agreed upon, Lamont cites the observation by Dunnigan and Wilson that even the reduced penal sanctions of the new code "have been tacitly abandoned, and that penal sanctions are no longer applied." The most scandalous instance, of course, is the sexual abuse by priests. While canon law requires the punishment of this offense (see canon 1395, sec. 2 of the 1983 code), the canonical requirement was ignored by bishops who simply refused to apply it. "This refusal was a reflection of the post-conciliar practice of appointing 'pastoral' bishops," writes Lamont. "A 'pastoral' bishop was understood to be one who would not confront rejection of the Church's doctinal and moral teachings, but instead treat such rejection as an acceptable option for Catholics -- and would require everyone over whom he had power to do the same."

(7) Turning to trends and policies outside the hierarchy, Lamont finds ready examples of the refusal to acknowledge evil in the wide acceptance of proportionalism and fundamental option theories by moral theologians. While both of these positions have been condemned by Rome, each is designed to permit or excuse actions formally condemned as mortally sinful, if not to completely remove any actual possibility of mortal sin. Another example of the influence of this mitigation of evil among self-styled 'progressive' Catholics is the general enthusiasm for some form or other of mitigated universalism as set forth by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which claims that we can at least dare to hope that no human being is damned. Yet another example is found by Lamont, also linked to von Balthasar, in the popularity of the connection between theology and aesthetics, which tends to minimize if not altogether neglect the problem of sin. "God is beautiful, and sin is ugly," writes Lamont, "but there is more to its evil than ugliness; ugliness in itself is not sin. Ugliness is unpleasant, but it does not as such attract the wrath of God and bring damnation."

What explains this refusal to acknowledge evil on the part of the Council, according to Lamont, and the adoption of this deficiency as the main aspect of postconciliar changes? "It should be stated that the postconciliar embrace of this refusal [to acknowledge evil] was partly due to shortcomings the Council tried to remedy," writes Lamont. Ignorance of Scriptures was one such shortcoming, and understanding of morality in terms of obligation (as detailed in Lamont's earlier article) was another. Yet none of these sorts of explanations explain the refusal to acknowledge evil on the part of the Council itself. Papal leadership, which Lamont discusses briefly, does not sufficiently account for it either. Given the time frame of the Council -- less than twenty years after Europe had been convulsed by the most brutal war in human history and during a period when a third of the world was groaning under communist tyranny (which the Council refused to condemn) -- this refusal to acknowledge evil, says Lamont, was "grotesquely incongruous and bizarre." Yet Lamont wonders whether it wasn't precisely this situation that led to the problem. In other words, Lamont wonders whether it wasn't the fact that the bishops of Europe had seen Europeans go from unprecedented cultural pre-eminence to committing the worst crimes in human history, that led them to recoil from the condemnation of evil. This reaction would have been exacerbated, particularly, in instances where they had found themselves compromised by moral dilemmas in the face of Nazi or Fascist rule. Lamont even speculates that the roots of this failure may go back to the Counter-Reformation, given that the idea that we have to rely on God's righteousness rather than our own is something that sounds Protestant to Catholics, and was thus devalued in the Catholic Church.

Be that as it may, Lamont states that it was not the Council's failure to acknowledge evil that was the cause of the diasters that followed it -- with the exception of the collapse in mission and evangelization. Yet "it was an indispensable catalyst for these disasters," he says, and lent them most of their strength. "Refusal to admit the existence of evil is not just a negative step; it usually leads to actual involvement in it. This is what happened after the Council, as the sexual abuse scandals illustrate."

How can this problem be corrected? While it is inevitable, as in the case of the sex scandals, that evil cannot be ignored forever, this recognition itself is insufficient. "In order for such a correction ot have its best effects in the Church," says Lamont, "it will be necessary to admit the one-sidedness of the Second Vatican Council with respect to evil, and to remedy this one-sidedness through a better understanding of the teachings of Scripture and tradition on the power and gravity of evil in this world, and on the warfare that Christians have to carry out against it."

Notes

1. Insegnamenti di Paolo VI, X: 1972 (Vatican City: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1972), p. 707. [back]


2. "... We declare that the evidence of Christians is to be accepted against Jews in every case, since Jews employ their own witnesses against Christians, and that those who prefer Jews to Christians in this matter are to lie under anathema, since Jews ought to be subject to Christians and to be supported by them on grounds of humanity alone" (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1: Nicaea I to Lateran V, ed. Norman P. Tanner S.J. [London: Sheed & Ward, 1990], p. 224). [back]


3. Louis Bouyer, The Decomposition of Catholicism, tr. C.V. Quinn (London: Sands & Co., 1970), p. 99. [back]


4. Vatican II, Decree Ad Gentes, para. 7, in Vatican Council II: The Counciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery O.P., new ed. (New York: Costello, 1992), p. 821. [back]


5. Vatican II, Dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium, para. 2, in Flannery (1992), p. 350. [back]


6. In an interview in 30 Days, June 2001. [back]


7. In an interview in the Catholic Herald, May 2002. [back]

[John Lamont is professor at Catholic University of Sydney, 99 Albert Road, Strathfield NSW2135 Australia. Hat tip to Prof. E.E.]

Lou Dobbs: "absolutely obscene and outrageous"

"Lou Dobbs - The Obama Campaign and ACORN" (YouTube). ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a leftist-organization claiming to be nonpartisan, has received federal funding, and nobody seems to have a handle on how much, although the recent Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac settlement contained a set-aside to the tune of 500 million dollars for community organizations like ACORN. The kicker: the Obama campaign has contributed $800,000 to ACORN to register voters (non-partisan, eh?); and Sen. Obama represented the ACORN in a lawsuit against the State of Illinois to force the State to comply with voter registration laws.

Burning down the house

I heard a New York Times writer interviewed on NPR about the details related here, and the best he could spin it was to say that there was enough corruption and blame to go all around. If you parse that, it's a phenomenal admission. Check this out for yourself: "Burning down the house: what caused our economic crisis" (YouTube).

Liturgical changes in store after Obama's election

"Sing for Change: Barack Kids Serenade Dear Leader Obama" (YouTube). This was recorded on a Sunday in Venice, California: the Cult of Obama, reminiscent of children singing hymns of adoration to their Dear Leader Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, or Adolf Hitler. Creepy. As Ripley used to say: reality is stranger than fiction!

(Here's a slightly more heavy-handed version.)

Of related interest:

Laura Ingram: "With Friends Like These" -- Look whose endorsing Sen. Obama!

"Liberals"

It has always struck me as a perverse twist of fate that this perfectly good term, "liberalism," which was historically identified with those who wished to restrict the powers of government because of their assumption that human nature was fallen, should have come to be co-opted by those who discard the notion of original sin and embrace a vision of maximal governmental power. Indeed, nobody is quite so illiberal as the contemporary political "liberal."

The origins of totalitarian democracy

In book VI of The Republic, Plato offers a fascinating sketch of how, in his view, democracy may give birth to tyranny. The discussion is much too long to quote in its entirety here; but here are some choice excerpts:

"When a democratic city athirst for liberty gets worthless butlers presiding over its wine, and has drunk too deep of liberty's heady draught, then, I think, if the rulers are not very obliging and won't provide plenty of liberty, it calls them blackguards and oligarchs and chastises them."

"So they do," said he.

"Yes," I went on, "and any who obey the rulers they trample in the dust as willing slaves and not worth a jot; and rulers who are like subjects, and subjects who are like rulers, come in for the votes of thanks and the honors, public and private...."

***
"Then it is likely," said I, "that democracy is precisely the constitution out of which tyranny comes; from extreme liberty, it seems, comes a slavery most complete and most cruel."

***
" ' People' will be the name of the [largest] class; all who are handiworkers and outside politics, without much property of their own. This is the largest and most sovereign class in democracy, when it combines."

"So it is," he said, "but it does not often care to combine unless it can get a bit of the honey."

"Well, it does get a bit from time to time," I said, "depending on the ability of the presidents, in taking the property away from those who have it and distributing it among the people, to keep most of it themselves."

"Yes, it gets a share to that extent," he said.

"So those whom they plunder have to defend themselves, I suppose, by speaking before the people and taking action in what way they can."

"Of course."

"And so they are accused by the other party of plotting against the people ...."

"... So the common people will always put up for itself some special protector, whom it supports and magnifies?"

"One thing is clear then," I said, "that when a tyrant appears, he grows simply and solely from a protectorship as the root."

"That is quite clear."

"Then what is the beginning of this change from protector to tyrant? ..."

"...When the Protector of the People finds a very obedient mob ... when he hints at abolition of debts and partition of estates -- surely for such a one the necessity is ordained that he must either perish at the hands of his enemies, or become a tyrant, and be a wolf instead of a man?"

"Such must be his fate of necessity," said he.

"That is the man then," said I, "who comes to lead a party against those who possess property."

"... those who get so far always hit on the tyrant's notorious plea -- they beg the people to give them a bodyguard, in order that the people's champion may be kept safe for themselves."

***
"Well, then," I said, "at first, in the early days, he greets everyone he meets with a broad smile; says he is no tyrant, and promises all sorts of things in private and in public, frees them from their debts and parcels out the land to the people and to those about him, pretends to be gracious and friendly to all the world."

(Plato, Republic, VIII, 562c-566e)

Of related interest

J.L. Talmon, Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (W.W. Norton, 1970) -- a fascinating study based on an examination of Rousseau's Social Contract.

Investment advice: the 401-Keg

If you had purchased $1,000 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49 left.

With Freddie Mac, you would have $2.50 left of the original $1,000.

With AIG, you would have less than $15 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have $214 cash.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

It's called the 401-Keg.

The Catholic vote: 67 million Catholics in America

Catholic Vote 2008 (Grassroots Films 2008) -- a powerful video.

67 million Catholics: What a difference it could make if the Catholic vote didn't simply cancel itself out by reflecting the spectrum of views found in secular culture.

[Hat tip to E.E.]

Obama, ACORN and voter fraud

Obama's rise to the top in Chicago was fueled by a group called ACORN, which has a history of voter-fraud. They are up to the same tactics in this election. Just read the links:

• "MORE ACORN FRAUD! Kansas City Officials Find Hundreds of Bogus Registrations" (Gateway Pundit, October 8, 2008)
  
• "More Voter Registration Shenanigans: Indianapolis Has 105% Of Its Population Registered To Vote" (Say Anything, October 8, 2008)
  
• "Obama and ACORN: More Lies, More Fraud" (Say Anything, October 8, 2008)

A specific, month by month account of money paid by the Obama campaign to the ACORN front organization, Citizens Services, Inc. for those fraudulent "advance service", taken from FEC reports and totaling $832,598.29 since Feb, 2008, can be found here.

Barack Obama has a long and colorful history of denying his embarrassing, radical leftwing associations, until he can no longer maintain the façade. At which point, he jettisons whatever or whoever has caused the embarrassment and MovesOn.

As he has done throughout his career, Obama has been rewarding those who support his ambitions. The Obama campaign, flush with cash, has been funneling money to ACORN through Citizens Services, Inc. much as he did in Chicago with the Woods Foundation and the Annenberg-Chicago Challenge. While Obama served on the Board Of Directors of the Woods Fund, for example the Chicago ACORN received grants Of $45,000 (2000), $30,000 (2001), $45,000 (2001), $30,000 (2002), And $40,000 (2002) From The Woods Fund, as reported on the Donors Forum Website, ifs.donorsforum.org.

[Hat tip to C.B.]

"Flush with cash": the black genocide project

The Dow Jones may be in tank on Wall Street, but Planned Parenthood is "flush with cash," says Wall Street Journal, its revenues topping one billion dollars in 2007, including $336,000,000 in taxpayer funding.

Its Action Fund is putting $10 million into electing pro-abortion candidates, which ensures continuing government handouts, and it is doing a makeover of its 882 clinics with a "contemporary, fun, and lively look." (quoted by Richard J. Neuhaus, "The Public Square," First Things (October 2008), p. 71f.)

A Planned Parenthood official says that the changes make their work "so much more mainstream." Indeed. Planned Parenthood, whose origins can be traced to a eugenics plan, "The Negro Project," hatched in the diseased mind of Margret Sanger, perpetrates one out of every four abortions committed in the United States, which comes to roughly 1000 per day.

Does anyone fail to see the irony here in the fact that the darling of Planned Parenthood, which began with the aim of black genocide (www.blackgenocide.org), is a black candidate massively supported by African Americans? "Useful idiots" of a Culture of Death.

Sowell astonished at political shift over economic crisis

Thomas Sowell, "Do Facts Matter? Recriminations" (NRO, October 4, 2008):

Abraham Lincoln said, 'You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.'

Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now.

Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time.

The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John McCain-- which is astonishing in view of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on this crisis.

It raises the question: Do facts matter? Or is Obama's rhetoric and the media's spin enough to make facts irrelevant?

Fact Number One: It was liberal Democrats, led by Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, who for years-- including the present year-- denied that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taking big risks that could lead to a financial crisis.

It was Senator Dodd, Congressman Frank and other liberal Democrats who for years refused requests from the Bush administration to set up an agency to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was liberal Democrats, again led by Dodd and Frank, who for years pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans, which are at the heart of today's financial crisis.

Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, five years ago.

Yet, today, what are we hearing? That it was the Bush administration 'right-wing ideology' of 'de-regulation' that set the stage for the financial crisis. Do facts matter?

We also hear that it is the free market that is to blame. But the facts show that it was the government that pressured financial institutions in general to lend to subprime borrowers, with such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and, later, threats of legal action by then Attorney General Janet Reno if the feds did not like the statistics on who was getting loans and who wasn't.

Is that the free market? Or do facts not matter?

Then there is the question of being against the 'greed' of CEOs and for 'the people.' Franklin Raines made $90 million while he was head of Fannie Mae and mismanaging that institution into crisis.

Who in Congress defended Franklin Raines? Liberal Democrats, including Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus, at least one of whom referred to the 'lynching' of Raines, as if it was racist to hold him to the same standard as white CEOs.

Even after he was deposed as head of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines was consulted this year by the Obama campaign for his advice on housing!

The Washington Post criticized the McCain campaign for calling Raines an adviser to Obama, even though that fact was reported in the Washington Post itself on July 16th. The technicality and the spin here is that Raines is not officially listed as an adviser. But someone who advises is an adviser, whether or not his name appears on a letterhead.

The tie between Barack Obama and Franklin Raines is not all one-way. Obama has been the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae's financial contributions, right after Senator Christopher Dodd.

But ties between Obama and Raines? Not if you read the mainstream media.
Facts don't matter much politically if they are not reported.

The media alone are not alone in keeping the facts from the public. Republicans, for reasons unknown, don't seem to know what it is to counter-attack. They deserve to lose.

But the country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.

[Hat tip to Prof. E.E.]

McCain-onomics vs. Obamanomics made easy

From "Taxes and tax cuts in terms of beer" (Posted, September 24, 2008):

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the
bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill
the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite
happy with the arrangement until one day the owner threw
them a curved ball (or is that a curved beer!).
'Because you are all such good customers,' he
said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily
beer by $20.'

Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay
our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They
would still drink for free. But what about the other six men
- the paying customers? How could they divide the $20
windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if
they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the
fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to
drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to
reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and
he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And
so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% savings).
The seventh now paid $5 instead of $7 (28% savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first
four continued to drink for free. But once outside the
restaurant the men began to compare their savings.

'I only got a dollar out of the $20,' declared
the sixth man.. He pointed to the tenth man, 'but he
got $10!'

'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth
man. 'I only saved a dollar too. It's unfair that
he got ten times more than me!'

'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man.
'Why should he get $10 back when I got only two?
The wealthy get all the breaks!'

'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in
unison. 'We didn't get anything at all. The
system exploits the poor!'

The nine men surrounded the tenth man and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks,
so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when
it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something
important. They didn't have enough money between
all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college
professors, is how our Tax System works. The people who
pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax
reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy
and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might
start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat
friendlier.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is
possible.

New York or bust

I'll be away for the weekend visiting progeny in the Big Apple (yes of Benedict Fan Club renown). As almost always, the means of transport is four wheels. I solicit your prayers. I should be back in the Big D, Lord willing, Sunday night, and in Blogsville sometime early next week. Keep the Faith.

By the way, the in-laws in Hickory, NC, said that during the near absolute shut-down of gas stations in NC over the last weekend, things came pretty close to a crunch. The police requisitioned two gas stations that hadn't run out for purposes of municipal emergencies (fueling police cars & EMI vehicles), and shortly before that there was an incident involving a pulled gun over the purchase of fuel at a station close to running out. Grim. Thankfully, supplies have begun returning to NC.