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Resting in Your Spirit

Posted in Catholic, Christian, Faith, In a nutshell, Thomas Sowell with tags , , , , , on October 18, 2011 by Joanna

I am witness.
I am martyr.
You are silence in action,
No moving parts,
Yet accomplishing Your intent,
While I keep watch.
You rest upon Your Altar.
I rest in You.

You are Son.
You are Witness.
You are Martyr.
You are Living Testament,
Covenanting with Man,
Promising me.

Draw me.
Give me Your vision of holiness.
Cause me to desire.
Infuse wisdom
As answer to my pleading desire.

O, Happy Cause.
O, Moving Spirit.
Be one with the essence of me,
That fallen nature might drink
Of Your Eternal Spring.

By Joann Nelander
Copyright 2011
All rights reserved.

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Kagan Competence Questioned

Posted in Opinions, Politics with tags , , , , on May 12, 2010 by Joanna

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey writes:

“Without any judicial experience, Kagan has to rely on her performance at the Court as Solicitor General over a short period of fifteen months — and at best, it’s mixed.”

Lack of preparation will out. Morrissey’s case for Kagan’s competence or incompetence to be on the Supreme Court is made based on her own bad:

ORAL ARGUMENT OF ELENA KAGAN

ON BEHALF OF THE APPELLEE GENERAL KAGAN: Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the Court:

I have three very quick points to make about the government position. The first is that this issue has a long history. For over 100 years Congress has made a judgment that corporations must be subject to special rules when they participate in elections and this Court has never questioned that judgment.

Number two -

JUSTICE SCALIA: Wait, wait, wait, wait. We never questioned it, but we never approved it, either.  And we gave some really weird interpretations to the Taft-Hartley Act in order to avoid confronting the question.

GENERAL KAGAN: I will repeat what I said, Justice Scalia: For 100 years this Court, faced with many opportunities to do so, left standing the legislation that is at issue in this case — first the contribution limits, then the expenditure limits that came in by way of Taft-Hartley — and then of course in Austin specifically approved those limits.

JUSTICE SCALIA: I don’t understand what you are saying. I mean, we are not a self — self-starting institution here. We only disapprove of something when somebody asks us to. And if there was no occasion for us to approve or disapprove, it proves nothing whatever that we didn’t disapprove it.

GENERAL KAGAN: Well, you are not a self-starting institution. But many litigants brought many cases to you in 1907 and onwards and in each case this Court turns down, declined the opportunity, to invalidate or otherwise interfere with this legislation.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But that judgment was validated by Buckley’s contribution-expenditure line. And you’re correct if you look at contributions, but this is an expenditure case. And I think that it doesn’t clarify the situation to say that for100 years — to suggest that for 100 years we would have allowed expenditure limitations, which in order to work at all have to have a speaker-based distinction, exemption from media, content-based distinction, time-based distinction. We’ve never allowed that.

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Secular Sex Abuse and Abusers

Posted in Opinions with tags , , , , , on April 30, 2010 by Joanna

The Anchoress | A First Things Blog:

“So, the secular institutional world may soon find itself forced onto the same learning curve that has impacted and the Catholic Church over the past few years; that world too may find itself finally forced to confront the filth that too often stays hidden. The confrontation -painful as it may be- will ultimately be for the good.”

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Denigrate, Cast-out, and De-legitimize – A Way With Words

Posted in American, Charles Krauthammer, Obama with tags , , , , on April 24, 2010 by Joanna

Charles Krauthammer on Obama’s tactics:

The way, and he has done this before — he tries to denigrate, cast- out, and de-legitimize any argument against his. And here he is talking about that it’s not legitimate even to suggest that the bill he is supporting might encourage a bailout. It’s certainly possible there had been strong, very good economists and others who have argue because of the provisions in the ball, and one in particular, where a treasury has the right to designate any entity, private entity a systemic risk and then to immediately, even without Congress approving and appropriating money to guarantee all the bad loans, that is an invitation to a bailout.

Now the president could argue otherwise, but to say that to raise the issue is illegitimate is simply appalling. What he is doing here is he is making a lot of provisions that will be changing a very complex financial system. At least have the intellectual honesty to admit you can’t predict all the outcomes. The president has a tick in which he presents himself as having this sort of academic, reasonable discourse, but it really has inside of it a sharp edge of partisanship. He won the presidency. That gives him a big house, a lot of power, and a fabulous airplane but does it not make him the arbiter of American political discourse.

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Nuclear Dreaming

Posted in American, Charles Krauthammer, News with tags , , , , , , , , on April 17, 2010 by Joanna

Charles Krauthammer summarizes the dangers lost on a naive President Obama in “Obama’s Nuclear Posturing, Part Deux”.

Danger:

  • Iran “is frantically enriching uranium to make a bomb, and which our own State Department identifies as the greatest exporter of terrorism in the world.”
  • ” Syria has just been discovered transferring lethal Scud missiles to Hezbollah, the Middle East’s most powerful non-state terrorist force. This is the same Syria that was secretly building a North Korean-designed nuclear reactor until the Israeli air force destroyed the facility three years ago.”
  • Pakistan “is adding to the world’s stockpile of fissile material every day.”
  • Pakistan’s “own secret service, the ISI, is of dubious loyalty, some of its elements being sympathetic to the Taliban and thus, by extension, to al-Qaeda.”
  • A “softening of the U.S. nuclear deterrent posture (sparing non-proliferation compliant states from U.S. nuclear retaliation if they launch a biochemical attack against us)
  • “Iran is about a year away from acquiring the fissile material to make a nuclear bomb. Then, only a very few years until weaponization.”

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The Obama Touch – Disrespecting Foreign Allies

Posted in American, Charles Krauthammer, Obama, Politics with tags , , , , , , , , , on April 2, 2010 by Joanna

Charles Krauthammer telling it like it is:

RealClearPolitics – Disrespecting Foreign Allies.

What is it like to be a foreign ally of Barack Obama’s America?

If you’re a Brit, your head is spinning. It’s not just the personal slights to Prime Minister Gordon Brown — the ridiculous 25-DVD gift, the five refusals before Brown was granted a one-on-one with The One.

Nor is it just the symbolism of Obama returning the Churchill bust that was in the Oval Office. Query: If it absolutely had to be out of Obama’s sight, could it not have been housed somewhere else on U.S. soil rather than ostentatiously repatriated?

Perhaps it was the State Department official who last year denied there even was a special relationship between the U.S. and Britain, a relationship cultivated by every U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt.  Read more »

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Judge Speaks on Murphy Case – Shame on NY Times

Posted in Catholic, Christian, Church, Culture, News, Opinions, Political with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 30, 2010 by Joanna

Thank you Anchoress: Murphy Case – NY Times Never Talked to Judge

Thank You Fr. THOMAS BRUNDAGE, JL

Setting the record straight in the case of abusive Milwaukee priest Father Lawrence Murphy

Then-presiding judge for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee gives first-person account of church trial

By Fr. THOMAS BRUNDAGE, JLC

For CatholicAnchor.org

To provide context to this article, I was the Judicial Vicar for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee from 1995-2003. During those years, I presided over four canonical criminal cases, one of which involved Father Lawrence Murphy. Two of the four men died during the process. God alone will judge these men.

To put some parameters on the following remarks, I am writing this article with the express knowledge and consent of Archbishop Roger Schwietz, OMI, the Archbishop of Anchorage, where I currently serve. Archbishop Schwietz is also the publisher of the Catholic Anchor newspaper.

I will limit my comments, because of judicial oaths I have taken as a canon lawyer and as an ecclesiastical judge. However, since my name and comments in the matter of the Father Murphy case have been liberally and often inaccurately quoted in the New York Times and in more than 100 other newspapers and on-line periodicals, I feel a freedom to tell part of the story of Father Murphy’s trial from ground zero. Read more »

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Barak Obama – The Man Inside the Image

Posted in American, Opinions with tags , , , , , , on March 27, 2010 by Joanna

H/T Anchoress for directing us to this thought provoking article by Spengler writing about Obama with a view to his late mother,Ann Dunham, and his “rancorous wife, Michelle.”  David P. Goldman exams “Who Is Barack Obama?”

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point.

Be afraid – be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word “hope”, they instead hear, “handout”. A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as “something for nothing”. Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.

“Evil will oft evil mars”, J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist. The elder Obama became a senior official of the government of Kenya after earning a PhD at Harvard. He was an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured his career.

The senior Obama died in a 1982 car crash. Kenyan government officials in those days normally spent their nights drinking themselves stupid at the Pan-Afrique Hotel. Two or three of them would be found with their Mercedes wrapped around a palm tree every morning. During the 1970s I came to know a number of them, mostly British-educated hollow men dying inside of their own hypocrisy and corruption.

Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama’s father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals – and nothing can be more terrible for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.

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Value Added Tax Around the Corner

Posted in American, Charles Krauthammer, Conservative, Government, In a nutshell with tags , , , , , , , , , on March 27, 2010 by Joanna

Charles Krauthammer prognosticates, “The VAT Cometh”:

American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care. Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation.

Obamacare was sold on the premise that, as Nancy Pelosi put it, “health care reform is entitlement reform. Our budget cannot take this upward spiral of cost.” But the bill enacted on Tuesday accelerates the spiral: It radically expands Medicaid (adding 15 million new recipients/dependents) and shamelessly raids Medicare by spending on a new entitlement the $500 billion in cuts and the yield from the Medicare tax hikes.

With the VAT, Obama’s triumph will be complete. He will have succeeded in reversing Reaganism. Liberals have long complained that Reagan’s strategy was to starve the (governmental) beast in order to shrink it: First, cut taxes — then ultimately you have to reduce government spending.Obama’s strategy is exactly the opposite: Expand the beast, and then feed it. Spend first — which then forces taxation. Now that, with the institution of universal health care, we are becoming the full entitlement state, the beast will have to be fed.

And the VAT is the only trough in creation large enough.

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The Biden Incident – Charles Krauthammer

Posted in American, Charles Krauthammer, Opinions, Politics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 22, 2010 by Joanna

RealClearPolitics – The Biden Incident.

Noting Israel history of peace overtures in the Middle-east Charles Krauthammer asks:

Why did President Barack Obama choose to turn a gaffe into a crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations?

And a gaffe it was: the announcement by a bureaucrat in the Interior Ministry of a housing expansion in a Jewish neighborhood in north Jerusalem. The timing could not have been worse: Vice President Joe Biden was visiting, Jerusalem is a touchy subject, and you don’t bring up touchy subjects that might embarrass an honored guest.

But it was no more than a gaffe. It was certainly not a policy change, let alone a betrayal. The neighborhood is in Jerusalem, and the 2009 Netanyahu-Obama agreement was for a 10-month freeze on West Bank settlements excluding Jerusalem……………………..


Clinton’s spokesman then publicly announced that Israel was now required to show in word and in deed its seriousness about peace.

Israel? Israelis have been looking for peace — literally dying for peace — since 1947, when they accepted the U.N. partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. (The Arabs refused and declared war. They lost.)……………………

So why this astonishing one-sidedness? Because Obama likes appeasing enemies while beating up on allies — therefore Israel shouldn’t take it personally (according to Robert Kagan)? Because Obama wants to bring down the current Israeli coalition government (according to Jeffrey Goldberg)?

Or is it because Obama fancies himself the historic redeemer whose irresistible charisma will heal the breach between Christianity and Islam or, if you will, between the post-imperial West and the Muslim world — and has little patience for this pesky Jewish state that brazenly insists on its right to exist, and even more brazenly on permitting Jews to live in its own ancient, historical and now present capital?

Who knows? Perhaps we should ask those Obama acolytes who assured the 63 percent of Americans who support Israel – at least 97 percent of those supporters, mind you, are non-Jews — about candidate Obama’s abiding commitment to Israel.



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Kill This Bill!

Posted in American, Economy, Opinions with tags , , , , , , , , on March 18, 2010 by Joanna

The People are speaking out about their distrust of the health care bill but is Congress listening.

What about the President? The man is a more concerned with himself than he is with the People and their will.  It’s still all about him. It’s still all about his presidency.  His present last ditch effort amounts to ‘Please save me!’

“There are serious implications of losing on President Obama’s ability to be effective for the rest of his three years in office,” Waxman told POLITICO. “That’s a message [undecided members] need to hear. If they don’t think that affects them if they are reelected, they are burying their heads in the sand.”

But many Democrats simply aren’t buying it after months of what they view as Obama’s disengagement from the health care battle.

“We’ve always known he’s a fourth-quarter player, and it’s great to see him on the field,” said an aide to a senior House Democrat. “So why did he sit on the sidelines for the last eight months?”

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), a firm “no” vote, has politely rebuffed feelers from Obama’s staff and rejects the idea that he can’t survive a defeat on health care.

Bob cusack:

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) said Thursday that all House Republicans are planning to go to the Rules Committee in an effort to amend the healthcare reform bill.

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Democrats Self-executing – How Lovely!

Posted in American, Economy, Government, News, Opinions with tags , , , , , , , , on March 15, 2010 by Joanna

Democrats aren’t suicidal. They’re self-executing | Washington Examiner.

Death by Algae-nan

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Krauthammer – In Praise of the Rotation of Power

Posted in American, Charles Krauthammer, Government, In a nutshell with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on March 14, 2010 by Joanna

RealClearPolitics – In Praise of the Rotation of Power.

Charles Krauthammer praises rotation of power:

“Barack Obama is now commander in chief. The lack of opposition (to our presence in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan) is not a matter of hypocrisy. It is a natural result of the rotation of power. When a party is in opposition, it opposes. That’s its job. But when it comes to power, it must govern. Easy rhetoric is over, the press of reality becomes irresistible. By necessity, it adopts some of the policies it had once denounced. And a new national consensus is born.”

Krauthammer further explains:

“The rotation of power is the finest political instrument ever invented for the consolidation of what were once radical and deeply divisive policies. The classic example is the New Deal. Republicans railed against it for 20 years. Then Dwight Eisenhower came to power, wisely left it intact, and no serious leader since has called for its repeal.

Similarly, Bill Clinton consolidated Reaganism, just as Tony Blair consolidated Thatcherism. In both cases, center-left moderates brought their party to accept the major premises of the highly successful conservative reforms that preceded them.

A similar consolidation has happened with many of the Bush anti-terror policies. In opposition, the Democrats decried warrantless wiretaps, rendition, and detention without trial. But now that they are charged with protecting us from the bad guys, they’ve come to view these as indispensable national security measures.”


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Praise Bart Stupak Now!

Posted in American, Conservative, Culture of Death, Opinions, Politics with tags , , , , , , , , , , on March 13, 2010 by Joanna

Democrats Against Abortion » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog.

Joseph Bottum directs us to Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List,who” has an op-ed in the Washington Post called “If Republicans Keep Ignoring Abortion, They’ll Lose in the Midterm Elections.”

Dannenfelser writes:

Republicans oppose President Obama’s health-care reform effort for many reasons: It will cost too much, it’s “socialist,” it’s big government at its worst. But they are letting Stupak and his fellow antiabortion Democrats lead on that issue. And the more the GOP ignores abortion and focuses on economic populism—taking up the “tea party” cause—the more the party risks leaving crucial votes behind in November.

Bottum responds:

That’s right—and yet, it isn’t. There are genuine reasons for pro-lifers to resist any move toward a nationalized health-care system. The iniquitous distribution of American healthcare is a scandal, but even the incomplete moves of the current plan create a system that no future bureaucracy or Congress will be able to resist using for purposes of social engineering. And, given the condition of social-elite opinion today, that will always mean increased government-sponsored abortion and euthanasia.

Bottum further says:

All of American politics has been corrupted by this murderous procedure, and, at present, the party platforms are clear enough. But pro-life forces should not want an America in which the great pro-life message is shoved off into one party. We shouldn’t want an America that squanders its religious exceptionalism by having a political party of believers and a political party of non-believers—a European-style division between the Christian Democrats and the Socialists. This is everyone’s issue, we must believe, and when Democrats such as Bart Stupak arrive, they ought to be celebrated.

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Democrats’ push for health care “bitter, destructive and endless.”

Posted in Economy, In a nutshell, Opinions, Politics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on March 13, 2010 by Joanna

Althouse: Senator Scott Brown calls the Democrats’ push for health care “bitter, destructive and endless.”.

H/T Althouse:

Well… you know, sometimes they get bitter, and they cling to health care…

Senator Scott Brown:

“An entire year has gone to waste,” Brown said in the weekly GOP radio and Internet address. “Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and many more jobs are in danger. Even now, the president still hasn’t gotten the message.

“Somehow, the greater the public opposition to the health care bill, the more determined they seem to force it on us anyway.”

We need to drop this whole scheme of federally controlled health care, start over, and work together on real reforms at the state level that will contain costs and won’t leave America trillions of dollars deeper in debt,”

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” ‘Time for A Talk’ is Over’

Posted in Opinions, Politics with tags , , , , on March 11, 2010 by Joanna

Michelle Malkin:

Endless talk tour - Update: More signs of No-mentum

“Calling all Tea Party activists: Make sure to make your voices heard in Cleveland, Ohio, on Monday when President Obama comes to town.”

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Why the Health Care Bill is a Failure

Posted in American, Charles Krauthammer, Obama, Opinions, Politics with tags , , , , , , on March 5, 2010 by Joanna

RealClearPolitics – Why the Health Care Bill is a Failure.

Charles Krauthammer:

“Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments) they are in favor.Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?

Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.

However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed — say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?”

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Obama “Is Now at the Level of Prime Minister”

Posted in American, Charles Krauthammer, Conservative, Government, In a nutshell, Obama, Opinions, Politics with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 28, 2010 by Joanna

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“Half of All Black Children Are Aborted”

Posted in American, Anti-abortion, Culture, Defending Life, News, Obama, Opinions, Politics, United States, Video with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 28, 2010 by Joanna

Rep. Trent Franks has called President Obama the “Abortion President.” He clarifies the call, but doesn’t back away from it.  Congressman Frank tells why:

“I don’t know what it takes to get people to see the obvious. The fact that humanity is very gifted and hiding from something that obviously true. I mean: in this country, we had slavery for God knows how long, and, now,  we look back on it and we say, ‘How blind were they? What was the matter with them?’ I mean: four million slaves! This is incredible, and we’re right!  We’re right!  We should look back on that and question.  It is a crushing  mark on America’s soul!  And yet today, today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted! Far more black children, far more of the African American community is being devasted by the policies of today, than were being devastated by the policies of slavery.. and I think, ‘What does it take to get us to wake up?’ “

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When You Can’t Blame Bush – Blame America & the Constitution

Posted in Charles Krauthammer, Opinions, Politics, United States with tags , , , , , , , on February 21, 2010 by Joanna

Charles Krauthammer makes it plain:

“In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president’s own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.”

“Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.”

“Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: “America the Ungovernable.” So declared Newsweek. “Is America Ungovernable?” coyly asked The New Republic. Guess the answer.”

Krauthammer sides with the American people and the Constitution:

“The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public opinion polls, then in elections — Virginia, New Jersey and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.“

“That’s not a structural defect. That’s a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself — despite the special interests — through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.”

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