Jun 21
Jim BowmanChicago Newspapers, Politics
Koman Coulibaly, the ref that called it wrong in the U.S.-Slovenia World Cup match, has fallen in love with a wonderful guy:
“I am now sitting in my hotel room in Pretoria, South Africa, thinking about adversity. And how Nelson Mandela and I have faced so many similar struggles,” he writes on his blog.
How so?
1) We are both African. [So are lots of refs who don't blow championship calls.] Both Nelson Mandela and I suffered under the imperialist yoke of countries like Great Britain and America. And colonialism.
Ah. That imperialist yoke. And colonialism. Surefire recipe ingredients for bad calls and subsequent refusal to explain them.
2) We are talented soccer experts. I heard Mandela considered playing left mid for Bafana Bafana before becoming an activist.
Highly irrelevant, one might say. Mandela, for instance.
3) We are both kept from achieving our full potential because of racism. Mandela had apartheid. I face the racist Americans and FIFA. Do you think there would be so much doubt about my call if I was from Melbourne, not Mali? I don’t.
I do, somehow. One hoped against hope that he would not talk that way. Question: If U.S. were not imperialist, colonialist, and racist, would he have made his call?
4) We have both been imprisoned under horrible hardships. Like Mandela, I am a prisoner. Though there are no physical bars or concrete separating me from freedom, I have had to stay indoors since the US vs Slovenia game for fear of my safety. I guess apartheid whites and some American soccer fans also have things in common.
He guesses? Why so tentative? Will he elaborate on his fear? We think not. He does not elaborate. Suffering from imperialism, and racism, he just calls them as he thinks them. Why can’t we understand that?
Later: Reader D sees “a possible job opening in the White House as our Soccer Czar. He’s got the one necessary ingredient — a desire to cut the USA down to size.”
Jun 16
Jim BowmanPolitics
“I used to say I enjoyed taking his money, but now I think he’s taking mine.”
State
Senator Bill Brady talking, about Obama the high-taxer, whom he used to play poker with in Springfield when O. too was a state senator.
“I think I could beat the president running for governor in Illinois today,” he told Politico, with reference to the bad economy but especially to this summer of discontent when Dems’ dirty laundry will be hung out to dry.
Obama would want to keep his distance from his home state: “How close does he want to be to his buddy Tony [Rezko] when he’s on the witness stand?”
Downstater Brady, who squeaked by in the primary for Republican candidate, has to concentrate on Chicagoland, where “They think they know me. They think they like me,” he said, based on his polling.
His Dem opponent, appointed Gov. Pat Quinn, will portray him as a right-winger, he said, but voters “are realizing that this state has been ruined by Chicago influences that have been in control the last eight years.”
Jun 16
Jim BowmanChicago Newspapers, Politics
The Big O. is “yet another president elevating personal quirks into a management style,” says the personal-quirk-oriented Maureen Dowd, picking on him for not coming up with her version of a good manager.
She bemoaned predecessors GW Bush, Clinton, LBJ, and Nixon’s acting out in and from the White House — no Carter, note — but expected of this “psychologically healthy” Obama (this from a book she read).
He was “dazzling” as a politician but is “obdurately self-destructive about politics.”
He is guilty of
failing to understand that Americans are upset that a series of greedy corporations have screwed over the little guy without enough fierce and immediate pushback from the president.
So this leftist commentator wants a tough guy in the White House. I do too, but toughness is for beating back the many-tentacled bureaucracy that a president inherits. Forget about it: he’s one of them. He loves power.
But as I have said before, God writes straight (sometimes) with crooked lines, and the Dowd critique is quotable even allowing for her crookedness. In his speech last night:
He appointed a “son of the gulf” spill czar and a new guard dog at M.M.S. and tried to restore a sense of confident leadership — “The one approach I will not accept is inaction” — and compassion, reporting on the shrimpers and fishermen and their “wrenching anxiety that their way of life may be lost.” He acted as if he was the boss of BP on the issue of compensation. And he called on us to pray.
A new last refuge for scoundrels here: prayer.
The rest is to the point, that he’s over his head in spilt oil, crying over it when he should . . . What?
Waive the union-protective Jones Act, say people who also want action, among other things. God, after all, helps those who help themselves, said B. Franklin (not God) in his 1736 version of Poor Richard’s Almanack, but Jewish wise men, Sts. Augustin and Ignatius Loyola and others have told us to pray as if all depended on God, act as if it all depended on us.
Assuming you really want that oil mopped up and do not approach it as an opportunity to rail at big business.
Jun 14
Jim BowmanBlithely, Politics
What next from the boy wonder?
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said he had a one-on-one meeting with Obama, in which President Obama told him that he was still a Muslim, the son of a Muslim father, the stepson of Muslim stepfather, that his half brothers in Kenya are Muslims, and that he was sympathetic towards the Muslim agenda.
“Ich bin ein Berliner” was one thing. We got the point. Kennedy was never confused with a German. He could show solidarity with freedom-loving people. But our man O, the simple tool of America Lasters?
He has something up his sleeve all the time.
(HT: News Alert)
Jun 02
Jim BowmanPolitics
Robert Benne and Gerald McDermott in Christianity Today, Feb. ‘04 picked apart arguments for gay marriage, including that it does no harm to society, calling it “a superficial kind of individualism that does not recognize the power of emerging social trends that often start with only a few individuals bucking conventional patterns of behavior.”
Gay marriage is defended as not harming marriage in the short run. The authors recall the ’60s, “when illegitimacy and cohabitation were relatively rare” and “we were asked, whom do these individuals hurt?”
Now we know the negative social effects these two living arrangements have spawned: lower marriage rates, more instability in the marriages that are enacted, more fatherless children, increased rates of domestic violence and poverty, and a vast expansion of welfare state expenses.
That said, the authors cite three reasons why “the institutionalization of gay marriage” would be bad for marriage, children, and society.
The first is that it would change “the definition of marriage.” Such a “scrambling” would be “shock to our fundamental understanding of human social relations and institutions.”
Gays are less faithful, for one thing. ”There is more likely to be a greater understanding of the need for extramarital outlets between two men than between a man and a woman,” wrote gay marriage proponent Andrew Sullivan in his 1996 book, Virtually Normal, approvingly. “Something of the gay relationship’s necessary honesty, flexibility, and equality could undoubtedly help strengthen and inform many heterosexual bonds,” he added.
Or, as Metropolitan (gay) Church founder Troy Perry told The Dallas Morning News, “Monogamy is not a word the gay community uses.” For them fidelity calls for “a loving, caring, honest relationship,” in which honesty matters most. “Some would say that committed couples could have multiple sexual partners as long as there’s no deception.”
Even (legally) “married” gays in Netherland have an average of eight partners per year outside their relationship, according to a study made shortly before this article appeared. “Gay marriage will change marriage more than it will change gays,” commented the authors.
“Further,” they add, gay marriage will provide a wedge for societal acceptance of marriage among more than two partners, or such is the goal of some proponents.
Law Professor Martha Ertman of the University of Utah, for example, wants to render the distinction between traditional marriage and “polyamory” (group marriage) “morally neutral.” She argues that greater openness to gay partnerships will help us establish this moral neutrality.
And
University of Michigan law professor David Chambers wrote in a widely cited 1996 Michigan Law Review piece that he expects gay marriage will lead government to be “more receptive to [marital] units of three or more.”
More to come, including sharp rejoinders from opponents to the authors’ position.
May 31
Jim BowmanPolitics Congr. Mike Quigley, Obamacare, Senior citizens
Astute Reader attended a Seniors Club luncheon at a northwest side parish where Democrat Congressman Mike Quigley was the unannounced speaker, talking up Obamacare. She missed his introduction, but what she heard was “revolting.”
* 55,000 thousand nuns supported it. Nothing about the bishops.
* Insurance and drug companies supported the Republicans and lied to scare “you.”
* There will be no such thing as $500 billion in cuts to Medicare.
* Look how terrific social security is, and Medicare, and the Republicans opposed it for years, even Ronald Reagan.
“Most disgusting of all, he said change is “difficult,” condescending crapola that Michelle Obama also likes to peddle.
The progressives are softening us up for some re-education programs. It’s their idea of “the Future.”
Q. ended saying he is soon off to Cuba to learn how to make things here as good as possible for “us.” (Ah. Learning from the experts.)
But seniors are a tough sell. The luncheon organizers took a survey at check-in and advised Q. that seventy-plus percent opposed the health bill. His answer? It’s too late, it passed, get used to it.
(Shut up and do what you’re told.)
May 19
Jim BowmanPolitics
One good reason, please, for preferring to see the glass half full in Pennsylvania:
Mark Critz
is a “Rush Limbaugh Democrat” who campaigned against almost everything Obama and Murtha support.
No SEIU line for him?
. . . [H]e was more conservative than the McCain campaign of 2008 and was more apt to criticize Obama than is, say, Lindsay Graham.
Hmmm. To get elected he did that?
This was hardly a race that can be celebrated by the Democrat leadership today. Critz is the type of Democrat that Nancy Pelosi was hoping to lose in November.
Good. An anti-Pelosi congressman? Replacing one of her faves? My glass runneth not over, but it’s half full!
May 18
Jim BowmanPolitics
Tom Roeser resurrects this from Teddy Roosevelt:
“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else—for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed or birthplace or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American and nothing but an American.
“…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American but something else also isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag…We have room for one language here and that is the English language. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
That’s rough riding over open-border enthusiasm.
May 17
Jim BowmanPolitics
He don’t like to talk?
[A]fter [Obama] signed the bill [promoting press freedom around the world], and as the press “wranglers” began aggressively herding us out of the room, I asked if he still has confidence in BP [whom he excoriated on Friday, taking no questions]. He ignored the question so I tried this: “In the interest of press freedom, would you take a couple questions on BP?”
That did elicit a smile, and he told me I was free to ask questions. Someone else shouted, “Will you answer them?”
He said he’s not holding a press conference today as we were escorted out the door.
Look, he’s a very superior fella, in every way. Can you get that straight?
May 17
Jim BowmanPolitics
What do you know? The younger you are, the more pro-life!
Americans in the 18 to 29 age bracket are now more likely than their elders to believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, according to the data released last week, and generally oppose abortion in greater numbers than Baby Boomers.
That’s Gallup Poll numbers.
Something’s working.
And try this on for size:
Republican candidates now hold a five-point lead over Democrats in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot, a further narrowing of the gap between the two parties to the smallest margin this year.
That’s from Rasmussen.
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