The Cardinal turns the other cheek

We're supposed to “take a deep breath, relax a second, and think carefully about” Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s invitation to President Obama to speak at the upcoming Al Smith Dinner. It shows Christians can treat adversaries with respect and honor says Edward Mechmann.   And no national leader in my memory has treated Christians more poorly than this president. From his support for abortion for any reason, including gender and disabilities, to announcing embryonic stem cell support at a Catholic university, to his phony war on women, to his flip flopping on marriage, to his sitting in the pew for 20 years of a pastor who preached hate whitey--he doesn't like us much.

http://www.womenofgrace.com/blog/?p=15789

Spiritual but not religious

It’s not trendy or politically correct to say this, but I am religious, not spiritual.  I am a Christian; Jesus Christ is the head of the church, not me, not my inner thoughts, energy source, feelings, body contortions, and no other guru who is a flash in the pan with a webpage.  I’ve always been a bit puzzled by those who claim more personal wisdom than a 5th century Pope or a 16th century reformer, or even their own local church government, given how far removed they are from the founders’ work.   Even Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament to provide a structure for the church Jesus established 2,000 years ago, didn’t rely on his own personal experience.  He had many years of being taught and grounded in the Scriptures of the Jews, and after his experience of meeting the living Christ after his resurrection, he spent a lot of time in training with the disciples who worked with Jesus during his ministry on earth and who already had a “church structure”  of meeting together for prayer, sharing bread, evangelizing and service. When the Holy Spirit revealed something to him to pass along, he had some depth and learning to test it.  The New Testament is full of lists to define various appointments, gifts, personality characteristics of leaders and roles in the church—Romans 12:-6-8, 1 Corinthians 12:28, Ephesians 4:11, Acts 6, 1 Timothy 5:17, Titus 1:7-9, Acts 20:28, 1 Peter 5:2, 1 Peter 5:1-5, etc.  In fact, other than the topic of hell, there are few topics as well covered as how to structure the church, so religion must be important to Jesus.

How much of this $900,000 for “Improving the Health of People with Disabilities” will get to the people with disabilities?

“The Ohio State University Nisonger Center and Ohio Department of Health were recently awarded a $900,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to promote health, prevent chronic disease, and increase the quality of life among people with disabilities.”  These are extremely vague goals; I assume there are specific diseases that disabled people have that are different than the general population (measles, mumps, polio, tetanus, shingles, chicken pox, etc.) and specific quality of life markers in the contract. Essentially, this is a monitoring and surveillance program—i.e., there’s nothing new—no new services, no research, no . . . nothing. The goal of the CDC is to “reduce disparities” and not to help the disabled.*

There are so many fingers in this pie, it is difficult to imagine that anyone except the direct researchers, bean counters, and university and government staff will benefit.  First of all, when a federal government grant comes to the university, close to 50-60% is taken off the top to cover university overhead—this is everything from parking lots, utilities. janitors, food service, debt, and social events for deans and faculty.  But keep In mind, that the amount started out bigger than $900,000 because each agency whose hands/offices it passed through also took their cut for overhead.

The employees of the following agencies and organizations must be paid before a disabled person receives a dime’s worth of service, and even then it is monitoring services that they already have had from earlier programs. I used to be an employee of Ohio State University and The State of Ohio Department of Aging.  It’s a very nice living for many well-educated people.

Federal

National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities

Centers for Disease Control (CDC)

State

Ohio Department of Health Division of Family and Community Health Services

Ohio Emergency Management Agency (EMA)

Ohio Department of Health’s Division of Prevention

Ohio Department of Aging

Ohio Disability and Health Program (ODHP)

Ohio Office of Health Preparedness

State Universities

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center

Nisonger Center Health Promotion / Healthcare Parity

The Ohio Colleges of Medicine Government Resource Center

University of Cincinnati UCEDD at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Associations/non-profits

Association of University Centers on Disabilities (AUCD)

Ohio Association of Community Health Centers

*Through public health efforts, such as surveillance, research, and health promotion, CDC aims to reduce health disparities and the incidence and severity of secondary conditions, including additional physical or mental health conditions that occur as a result of having a primary disabling condition. CDC http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/pdf/AboutDHProgram508.pdf

Stop his plan before he kills the country

Obama's plan is working. Unemployment is up; the deficit is ballooning; housing starts for middle America have stalled again; construction on government buildings in DC is way up; small business is not expanding, but the wars in the Middle East are; marriage and babies are being demonized; there's more free birth control for women and fewer work requirements for welfare. What is not to love in this man's accomplishments who has a Fluke introduce him?

Late Nite Catechism

Last night at the Hoover Auditorium we were treated to a very funny show called, Late Nite Catechism featuring Mary Zentmyer as Sister, a classroom teacher in traditional nun habit, and teaching pre-Vatican II style with old fashion discipline. I thought it was very funny, plus informative, and decided Catholics are a lot funnier than Lutherans or Methodists.  Yes, not everything is doctrinally correct, but I think she got the flavor.  And I was surprised when about half the audience raised their hands when she asked how many had gone to Catholic School.

 

Romney Hood--how funny is it? Not very.

The Robin Hood (Romney Hood) ploy that the Dems have been using since the mid-90s? Robin Hood took from the rich government thieves and gave the money back to the people from which it had been stolen. In the story, Robin Hood is the good guy, so why are the O forces so confused again? Well, Obama grew up outside the country--he is clueless about our culture. But what's his advisors excuse?

A new one today was the funding stream for Romney to start Bain Capital. Have the Democrats complained about the bootleg money that built the Kennedy fortunes or the Mafia ties o JFK and RFK? It's Chicago politics, all right.

You can't make these things up!

Sandra Fluke who chose her high price Catholic university law school for its lack of contraception coverage so she could lead a protest, is going to introduce Obama at the Democrat convention. Together they can destroy future generations of Democrats and African Americans! Apparently, this is supposed to help the women voters decide--free contraception, not jobs, not career advancements, not expansion of the wars, not the 5 trillion deficit, not bail outs and buy offs, but a $9/mo contraceptive she could just as easily buy at WalMart.

http://blogs.denverpost.com/thespot/2012/08/06/sandra-fluke-introduce-obama-denver/77882/

The reading list wars

Whatever became of the "reading list wars?" Well, Obama pretty much lost that race/battle in 2009, back when the lapdog media were still presenting GW Bush as a dumb, ignorant, gaffe-prone ignoramous. Then when they stared checking things, Obama came out to be the light weight who didn't know history, political science, finance, business or religion, and wouldn't learn from history. He mostly read stuff written by other Democrats or himself. Also, over time, the media learned Obama couldn't even keep track of the words put in front of him by his writers on the teleprompter, and mispronouned or misspoke often. So the comparisons just weren't fun anymore, plus, it was all Bush's fault anyway, so why did it matter?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/books/19read.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove (who recently boasted that he beat the president by reading 110 books to Mr. Bush’s 95 in 2006), or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

What exactly worked?

Increased deficit?
Loss of religious freedom?
Increased health care costs?
Expanded war zones?
More people on food stamps?
Loss of prestige globally?
More radical Muslim governments in power?
Highest unemployment since WWII?
Businesses sitting on their capital rather than investing it?

And somehow only 10% of the people who supported him in 2008 are defecting?

This needs to be in an Obama/Romney campaign ad, with sad faced, weeping retirees

When the Obama administration was "saving" the auto industry in 2009 the UAW got the spoils and investors and creditors got the shaft. It's no surprise that this trickled down to the auto suppliers as well. Who got shafted there? At Delphi, 20,000 non-union retirees. (Kitchen Cabinet)

Delphi, a General Motors company, is one of the world’s largest automotive parts manufacturers. Twenty thousand of its workers lost nearly their entire pensions when the government bailed out GM. At the same time, Delphi employees who were members of the United Auto Workers union saw their pensions topped off and made whole.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/07/emails-geithner-treasury-drove-cutoff-of-non-union-delphi-workers-pensions/#ixzz22sNCF2xX

Why lie about taxes? Because class envy works for the President.

I just can't figure out the lies about taxes that the left reports. I've looked at these tables (Brookings) from every angle, and there's just no way but what the top 1% is being unfairly taxed more than any other group. And if you like quintiles (fifths), then the top quintile pays 24.5% and the bottom .8. To the left, that's not fair because after taxes, the rich are still rich, not impoverished, and the poor are still poor even with all those government transfers for food, housing and health. Before the recession that Obama has relentlessly encouraged, the top quintile paid even more, but they've lost a lot of ground.

 http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?Docid=3277

What we call “Cafeteria Catholics”

Protestants.

Priests should be free to marry.  Women should be able to be priests. Gays should  marry in the church.  Abortion and contracepting is OK.  Nah, I don’t go to Mass every Sunday.  Confession?  Well, gosh,  why not be a Methodist or Presbyterian?

“The Christian who believes he has a right to his private opinion, that he already knows what the Church will only come to grasp later, must ask himself in sober self-criticism before God  and his conscience, whether he has the necessary depth and breadth of theological expertise to  allow his private theory and practice to depart from the present doctrine of the ecclesiastical authorities.  The case is in principle admissible.  But conceit and presumption will have to answer for their willfulness before the judgement seat of God.” K. Rahner, “Magesterium” quoted in Francis A. Sullivan, Magisterium, 1983, p. 171.

Random sightings at Lakeside

I saw on Fox News this morning at the coffee shop that the man who killed worshipers at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin was white, a veteran and had tattoos and it has been called domestic terrorism rather than a hate crime.  Obviously, the left media will claim a victory—saying it’s the Tea Party’s fault.  They never blame testosterone, the mentally ill or the military in these shootings. Or they won’t while Obama is Commander and Chief. Not even the Ft. Hood massacre was called “domestic terrorism” even though the perp was an American (and, shhh, a Muslim).

There are two groups of very handsome, agile teens here this week.  The boys appear to be track, the girls, either cheerleaders or drill team.  The coaches of course are riding bikes while the kids run.

This is “Peace” week, or “multi-faith” week at Lakeside, so I won’t be going to the programs.  The speakers are usually on a journey, seeking, striving, dialoguing, and it is just so boring.  There is a walking tour of south Lakeside that looks good.

This will make it easier

To remember the Great Lakes, think HOMES

Huron

Ontario

Michigan

Erie

Superior

 

Thanks Gayle!  (from my cousin’s weekly newsletter)

Happy Birthday, Mr. President

You are the only president in my memory (the first president I remember was Harry Truman) who worsened race relations, promoted class warfare, supported death to the unborn, and denigrated the spirit and drive that built our great country.  May the archives ever reflect your accomplishments so future presidents will learn from your mistakes.

Christians are disappearing from Islamic countries

Megamosques are in the news, but ordinary mosques should raise some questions too. In the past few decades, thousands of mosques have been built in post Christian Europe--France, Germany, England--and in Christian America and Australia. But I wonder how often a Christian church is being built in a Moslem country? I think we'd hear about it. I did hear on the radio the last Christian church was closed in Afghanistan (our ally?). With the Arab Spring, with support from our own President who praised it, Christians have been sent into hiding, have lost jobs, or have had to immigrate. At one time when Jesus first commanded his disciples to "GO" there were Christian cultures in Turkey, Syria, Egypt--in fact, that part of the world was Christian a thousand years before Scandinavia.

We have a President who was raised a Muslim, who converted to Christianity in a church (UCC, Rev. Wright, Chicago) where hatred for whites, Western Civilization and the United States was preached. He says he didn't notice--but maybe he just didn't attend that often. In any case, President Obama says we are not a Christian nation. Being a nation that doesn't demand its citizens attend a Baptist or Presbyterian or Catholic church must be what he means--it's what allows Muslims, Bahai, Jews, and Wiccans to pursue their spiritual needs.

In the past, our Presidents have had a "bully pulpit" for human and religious rights. With his "multicultural" past and his attempts to reduce our own religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment, any words of warning to despots and monarchs can be laughed away. "Human rights" and "religious freedom" in Muslim countries are terms defined by Sharia Law, not ours. The July 30 report by Secretary of State Clinton must be viewed with the August 1 HHS Mandate currently being fought by Catholics and many other Christian groups in mind.

We’ve been down this road before—with FDR

Perhaps you believe Rush and Beck are just alarmists about the Muslims in the White House even if maybe backing the Arab Spring wasn’t such a good idea.  Ok, so maybe thousands are being slaughtered by the guys BO supported.   After all, the progressives (Democrats, Socialists, media) all say there is no problem or we shouldn’t expect their version of democracy to look like ours. But remember, that's what Communist sympathizers in the press and government said about Stalin and the USSR too in the 1930s, when FDR reigned and Ukrainians were dying at 25,000 a day from starvation.

As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty's denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.

What is so awful about Duranty is that Times top brass suspected that Duranty was writing Stalinist propaganda, but did nothing. In her exposé "Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times's man in Moscow," S.J. Taylor makes it clear that Carr Van Anda, the managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, an assistant managing editor, and Edwin L. James, the later managing editor, were troubled with Duranty's Moscow reporting but did nothing about it. Birchall recommended that Duranty be replaced but, says Taylor, "the recommendation fell by the wayside."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/791vwuaz.asp

And still there are Democrats who trust him to lead

Contraception as a health issue for women

In 1955 the famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey said, “. . . we have found the highest frequency of induced abortion in the group, which in general, most frequently used contraceptives.”  Alan Guttmacher, for whom the research wing of Planned Parenthood of America is named said, “. . . there is no scientific evidence that increased availability of contraceptive services will clearly result in a decreased abortion rate.”  Keep in mind, this was before the pill, before legal abortion.  And nothing has changed.  Statistics kept today at PP show that half of the women using abortion services have been using contraception. And we’re having one million abortions a year, and for blacks it’s over 40% of the pregnancies are ending in abortion.  It explains how Planned Parenthood guarantees repeat customers, since even teen girls after their 2nd or 3rd abortion are given contraception after their procedure to destroy the baby.

Citation:  Abortion in the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1958),  pp 157, 182.

So by requiring that all employers, including religious institutions that are against both contraception and abortion, provide for contraceptives in their insurance plans in the HHS Mandate of Obamacare, our misguided president is not preventing unwanted pregnancies,but encouraging them, and then calling the result “health services for women.”  It’s a 2-fer—hurts women and hurts blacks.

Was he homophobic and hateful in 2008?

In 2008 Barack Obama ran on a “traditional values” and “one man one woman marriage” plank in his leftist platform.  For people who didn’t read his books or weren’t stampeding because of his Marxist friends and views, this was a good ploy.  But he dropped it last year, and came out.  Now, those of us who didn’t flip flop on marriage are being called intolerant by gay activists (Shep Smith on Fox News) and bigots and hateful (have you seen the YouTube of the sweet CFO  who harassed a poor clerk at Chick-fil-A when he drove through for free water?).  So what happened between 2008 and 2012?  Well, Obama’s leftist base was getting cranky and threatening not to support him.  So the marriage views, held by reasonable people for thousands of years, had to go.