What's worse: being branded a socialist or being tagged a racist?

Considering a large portion of the world seems to think that the first epithet is actually a positive one, I would have to go with racist as the greater of two evils. Which, I think, is exactly the gameplan the President and his motley crue are running recently: bench Van Jones; sub in a "teary" Nancy Pelosi; have the peanut farmer toss the race card as a Hail Mary pass; and hope no one notices that you're ramming health care through while cozying up to Russia. Unbelievable. And since Americans are left with only two choices, being called a socialist or a violent racist, the administration is counting on you weighing the social stigma and hopping on board with a socialist agenda. For the President and his administration, everything is an either/or proposition: you can't object to Obama's policies without being a racist, and you can't raise your voice in opposition without being violent. Funny, though, that the San Francisco violence and bigotry that the emotionally wounded Pelosi is referring to in the YouTube video were the murders of Mayor Moscone and the openly gay Harvey Milk at the hand of a fellow Democrat. And Mary Katharine Ham of the Weekly Standard has recently noted that, off the 10 documented acts of violence at townhall meetings and protests, 7 of these were Obama supporters attacking opponents of healthcare - including one story where a Democrat crossed a busy street to incite a scuffle with an old man that culminated in the former biting off the finger of the latter, and then, during the turmoil of recovering the appendage and getting the old man to an emergency room, the biter returns to his side of the road to continue his support of the President! Does that sound like someone you want in your camp?

I'd cry if those people were on my team, too, Pelosi. Except I think I'd be able to make it look a little more authentic.

"this is the reality, people"

And if we stood back to take in the view of the whole, what would we see? In the first place, we see the bill brought forth under the most radical pro-abortion president the country has ever seen: a man who opposed the move even to protect a child who survived an abortion; who promised his supporters than any program of medical care would cover “reproductive” rights; and whose administration pushes that notion of “reproductive rights” at every conference under the United Nations, and in every place where there is discretion under our laws. This president has declared his intention to remove the protections of “conscience” put in place for doctors and nurses in dealing with abortion, and to repeal the Hyde Amendment that barred the use of federal funds to support most abortions.

Every level of the administration is filled with people who regard abortion as a medical procedure legitimate, desirable, urgently necessary. And so when the bill mandates “professional services of physicians and other health professionals”; when it seeks a new Health Advisory Panel to recommend other medical procedures to be covered; and when the recommendations are made to a Secretary of Health and Human Services who is famously pro-abortion – with all of these ingredients in place, what is one reasonably to expect? The presumption must be that abortion would be amply covered at many points unless there is an explicit move to forbid the coverage of abortion in the bill. And yet, when amendments of that kind were offered, they were routinely voted down in committee along party lines by the Democrats.

What is unique about Barack Obama was revealed during the controversy over his opposition, in Illinois, to protecting the children who survived abortions. When this news broke out in the presidential campaign, his response, audacious and clever, was to accuse his critics of lying for bringing the news. They would be tarred as liars for telling, about him, such a monstrous truth. And what worked in the campaign is now taken up as his standard operating procedure. What hasn’t been fully grasped about Obama is that he lies even when there is no need to lie; he lies in the way that concert pianists need to practice every day. For apart from the utility of it, he needs to practice, as any true artist needs to practice, for the sake of cultivating his art at its highest level.

Hadley Arkes at his finest.

don't disrespect the king!

There are consequences.

modern martyr

(CNN) -- Authorities have charged an Owosso, Michigan, man with two counts of first-degree premeditated murder in the Friday shooting deaths of an anti-abortion activist and another man, a prosecutor's office said.

Activist Jim Pouillon was shot and killed Friday while protesting outside Owosso High School.

Authorities say the suspect, Harlan James Drake, was offended by anti-abortion material that the activist had displayed across from the school all week.

Drake, 33, is accused of shooting anti-abortion activist Jim Pouillon, 63, and Michael Fuoss, 61, who were killed in separate locations Friday morning, the prosecutor's office in Shiawassee County said.

It's scary how easily the President lies

Forgive me while I temporarily lapse into semi-thoughtful emotionally charged political commentary: A lie is an intentional distortion of the truth. The truth is correspondence with reality. Therefore a lie is anything that intentionally distorts the correspondence between one's knowledge of reality and the intentional meaning of one's words. Either

(a) President Obama does not know the content of his party's health care bill
or
(b) President Obama does know the content of his health care bill
or
(c) President Obama knows some of the content of his party's health care bill

If (a) President Obama is not a liar - just delusional. If (b) or (c), this President lies more easily than perhaps even President Clinton, and lies even more insidiously. He is intentionally trying to distort the truth, and he does it so easily and so "persuasively". And what really gets me is how obvious it all is. Listening to some of the content of the President's speech, I cannot help but wonder how anyone does NOT know he is lying. He so clearly avoids speaking plainly about anything. Almost everything he says is a half-truth.

The Democrats, good Machiavellians that they are, know that a lie in service of the greater good is a justifiable, and therefore a good lie. Christians, with the true knowledge that God is perfectly just, can rest comfortably knowing that no lies, no matter how they may serve the putative goodness of some cause, go unpunished. And so we continue to pray for the immanetization of the Eschaton when true justice will be served.

(For a look at the lies in the President's speech, see this website.)

life at high speed

Time flies

Same tired stuff

I originally posted this over a year ago, but I just stumbled upon it again and it's worth rereading Father Schall's article. It's funny how some things never change: whether it's Obama trying to smooth things over while sweeping things under the rug; Father Schall being devastatingly spot on with his critiques of politics; or Plato telling it like it is while everyone chooses not to listen...

In an age when the trendiest political slogans are "Together we can" and "Change you can believe in," it's nice to hear someone bringing the Utopian masses back to their senses. Fr. James Schall, in a pithy contribution to the Ignatius Press website, writes about a question that has dominated the Western mindset for millenia: How can we make life better? And not in the future, but right now? Illustrated by Deval Patrick and Barack Obama's vapid campaign slogans, the "forward-looking" Progressive quest for improvement is humorously ironic, in that it is the same quest that Plato remembers having experienced as a young man. At the age of 40 in 334 B.C., the philosopher is reminded of his youthful enthusiasm by an encounter with a boy who has yet to be jaded by politics. Plato is empathetic with the youth's optimism and belief that his city of Syracuse "ought to be free and live under the best of laws," but experience (not the least of which includes his relationship with Socrates and hemlock) leads Plato to understand "how difficult it is to manage a city's affairs rightly." One's own daily experience with the fallible nature of man provides easy corroboration for Plato's claim. How is it that some people can find so much wrong with the world and still insist that it would take so little to make it all right? If only we had universal health care, if only this law were in place or that law were repealed or free market economies were magically changed to some Utopian ideal. Ahh, wouldn't things be wonderful then? Obama says that's change we can believe in. Patrick says that if we all work together, we can achieve this ambiguous and elusive state of happiness.

But what exactly is it that these politicians are campaigning on? If Plato, in 334 B.C., knew that the perfectly just city was to be forever beyond the earthly grip of man, what are Progressive politicians promising the masses? Fr. Schall notes that "Some philosophers even say that this very desire to have the perfect city is the cause of all political evils that do happen in the world." In my opinion, the careers of politicians of this stripe can have one of two endings: First, they may prove neutered and insipid like Patrick's, having failed to deliver on any of the grandiose promises made on the campaign trail. Second, and infinitely more dangerous, they may follow the path outlined by the philosophers of which Schall speaks in the last quotation, sacrificing many for the good of the whole.

too strong?

Have you read Father Thomas J. Euteneuer's column this week? Whoa.

We must, as a matter of precept, pray for the salvation of heretical Catholics like Senator Edward Kennedy, but we do not have to praise him let alone extol him with the full honors of a public Catholic funeral and all the adulation that attends such an event. There was very little about Ted Kennedy's life that deserves admiration from a spiritual or moral point of view. He was probably the worst example of a Catholic statesman that one can think of. When all is said and done, he has distorted the concept of what it means to be a Catholic in public life more than anyone else in leadership today.

Beating back scandal is important, I suppose.

soteriology in one word

Grace

There's hope

India Arie:

You don't have to pay to smile
It doesn't cost a thing to laugh
You better thank God for that

Beautiful

The Catechism on immanetizing the Eschaton

Via Christopher Blosser:

#676 - The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.

for the funky

Check out Marc Ronson's CD version - it's awesome.

basics

Modern liberalism (i.e. progressivism) is in practical consequence the attempt to enforce, using the machine of government, communal charity.

This effort has the unintended effect of increasing social isolation by making the commitment we have to one another something abstract, and therefore something easily ignored. Our responsibility for each other is passed on to our politicians, who take care of our responsibilities to the greater community for us - so that we can be "left alone".

I am opposed to this form of progressivism because I do not believe that the redistribution of wealth via the mechanism of democratically elected representatives is an effective way to ensure the basic demands of justice. Further I think this putatively well-intentioned desire to force the work of charity destroys the fabric and cohesion of our authentic communities by misappropriating the charitable motive (thanks Roger Scruton).

Is this an ideological point of view? I don't think so, but I would be interested in the thoughts of someone who thinks otherwise.

the presuppositions of happiness and the importance of the spirit and practice of liberty

A strong belief in free will is an essential component of happiness. We are free to choose good or evil; true happiness consists in choosing what is good. It follows that belief in determinism cannot produce true happiness. It is important that we work, as Catholics and other people of good will, to remind people of the true way to happiness, and to steer people away from thinking that they are helpless with respect to their state of soul.

Modern society and culture does its best to convince us we are nothing but automatons whose actions and condition in life are more or less nothing but the sum of the forces of nature and circumstance. This is a demoralizing, degrading, and depressing force that is mass produced by our society that is without (eschatological) hope.

To counter this culture of demoralization, we must cultivate an ethic of liberty, rightly understood. Liberty is a free gift given to all human persons that enables us to choose happiness despite the circumstances we find ourselves in. This capacity is something real, something concrete we find in our nature. I think our culture, by and large, has lost knowledge of this capacity for greatness - or perhaps we have given it up intentionally, having found its practical difficulties too much to bear. But our willful ignorance does not change the truth. We will only be happy when we choose the good, and this is only possible when we believe such a choice is possible in the first place.

what's foreign policy for?

Those who advocate “national greatness” American foreign policy (thinkers who came to be identified as neo-cons after 911) share quite a bit in common with their multilateral critics who argue that the United States should use global institutions to remake the world along the lines of their vision of a just society (we are the world). Both parties misunderstand human nature in that they fail to understand how different peoples are from one another. Both parties misunderstand the use and abuse of statecraft in that they believe that institutions rather than men will shape the course of history. But most importantly, both groups misunderstand the purpose of American foreign policy, namely that it is a means to the end of preserving the Republic. A Republic . . if you can keep it. . .a republic.

David Corbin at Republican101

great quote

"In order for human experience to bear fruit in our spiritual lives, it must lift us upward to God, not collapse downward in a celebration of ourselves." - David G. Bonagura, Jr.

Facts are Stubborn Things

In case you guys aren't regular readers of the White House blog (shame on you), or consistent viewers of the Glenn Beck Show (what else is there to watch?), here are some fun links to check out:

1. Meet Linda Douglass! As the communications director for the White House's Health Reform Office, she alerts the average, misinformed American that everything they have been told by their friends about universal health care is wrong. Don't read the DrudgeReport (she displays a headline that is FALSE); read whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/ for the real facts. Would the government lie to you? Of course not. But your friends would. In casual conversation, or in insidious chain emails. If you receive one, or your friend tells you something that is in direct contrast with what the Führer... uh President... has said, do the American thing and immediately write to flag@whitehouse.gov . As Linda says, they are doing their best to squelch any "rumors," but if you hear something "fishy"...do the American thing and report the treason to the White House. They'll handle it from there.

2. Glenn Beck respectfully mocks Linda Douglass! The clip really speaks for itself. Enjoy.

You know what, just to be safe, maybe I better email this whole post to flag@whitehouse.gov . I'd hate to spread rumors..even if those rumors do contain a few stubborn facts.

After all, treasonous exile to Siberia works wonders for one's literary career.

Faith and Feeling

Here is a useful bit of information I find very helpful to many people thinking about religion:

Faith is not some state of feeling we get ourselves into. It is much simpler than that. It is simply believing in God and therefore believing everything he has revealed - no matter how we feel. "God said it, so I believe it, and that settles it."

Feelings are influenced by external things, like fashions and fads, wind and weather, diet and digestion. But when God gives us the gift of faith, he gives it from within, from within our own free will.

The devil can influence our feelings, but he has no control over our faith.

We are not responsible for our (unfree) feelings, but we are responsible for our (free) faith.

Yet, though faith is not a feeling, it often produces feelings: of trust, peace, gratitude, and confidence, for instance. And faith can also be aided by feelings: for instance, when we feel trustful or grateful to someone, God or man, it is much easier for us to believe him than when we feel mistrustful or ungrateful.;

But even when we do not feel trustful or peaceful, we can still believe. Faith is not dependent on feelings. It is dependent on facts: divinely revealed facts.

- Peter Kreeft, Catholic Christianity

It is easy to reject something because we do not feel it to be true. Personally I can say there are many times when I do not feel something to be true; nevertheless, I know it is true because of faith, or conscience, or experience.

So what is one to do when faced with something that is supposedly divinely revealed but contradicts one's feelings, perhaps strong feelings? My suggestion is to try out what God says - take a leap, trust in God for a moment. Humbly submit yourself to God's will. See what happens.

Correct me if I'm wrong...

...but isn't the Democratic party the equality club (at least on their party banner)?

Then why does everyone just roll over and take it when the President and his motley crew claim that we need universal health care to level the playing field, but sorry, Grandma, you're past the age the government has set for "worthwhile" people? The Democrats determine whether or not unborn babies have "worth," they determine whether or not Grandma and Grandpa have "worth," they tell you whether or not your wheel-chair bound son with Cerebral Palsy has "worth," but they are the party of equality? You know what, Mr. President? If we're all equal, then why aren't you and your children and your illegal alien aunt going to be on the very same health care that you insist will solve all of America's problems? In fact, the health care plans of government officials will be privately run, won't they, Mr. President? Of course they will. Because who better than government officials to know how crappy things get when the government is involved?


Some more things to think about:

The father of the wheel-chair bound man with Cerebral Palsy talks with Megyn Kelly

The article he references
The article's main point? "Dr. Emanuel [could he be any more ironically named?] wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else."

And finally, if you thought that at least the President must have a little compassion for Grandma...
OBAMA: I don't think that we can make judgments based on people's spirit. That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that say that we are going to provide good, quality care for all people. End-of-life care is one of the most difficult sets of decisions that we're going to have to make. But understand that those decisions are already being made in one way or another. If they're not being made under Medicare and Medicaid, they're being made by private insurers. At least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what, maybe this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off not having the surgery but taking the painkiller.

But in whose mind are you "better off," Mr. President? Isn't that another subjective decision? Or not, because you can quantify a person's monetary worth but not their spiritual worth?

Everything about this administration and this president disgusts me.

this should be circulated, at least so people know

Items that are in President Obama's health care bill:

Sec. 113, Pg. 21-22 of the Health Care (HC) Bill MANDATES a government audit of the books of ALL EMPLOYERS that self-insure in order to “ensure that the law does not provide incentives for small and mid-size employers to self-insure”!

• Sec. 122, Pg. 29, Lines 4-16 - Your health care will be rationed

• Sec. 123, Pg. 30 - There will be a government committee deciding what treatments
and benefits you get.

• Sec. 142, Pg. 42 - The Health Choices Commissioner will choose your benefits for you. You have no choice!

• Sec. 152, Pg. 50-51 - HC will be provided to ALL NON-US citizens.

• Sec. 163, Pg. 58-59 beginning at line 5 - Government will have real-time access to individual’s finances & a National ID health care card will be issued!

• Sec. 163, Pg. 59, Lines 21-24 - Government will have direct access to your bank accounts for electronic funds transfer.

• Sec. 164, Pg. 65 is a payoff subsidized plan for retirees and their families in unions & community organizations (ACORN).

• Sec. 201, Pg. 72, Lines 8-14 - Government is creating an HC Exchange to bring private plans under government control

Maybe it's worth distributing this around public locations in your local towns and cities. Via the Liberty Council