Category Archives: Conservative

Our Lady of Guadalupe – Defection of Latin Heart

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How the world has changed. The Hispanic community used to care about Life issues.  I’m lost as to what “empathy” actually means in today’s Obama-speak. The GOP wants to please Hispanics and Hispanics want to please Obama and swallow his policies and now SotoMayor because she’s a Hispanic.  What price integrity?

Hot Air covers the politics of it:

GOP officials say they realize the party needs to improve its standing among Hispanic voters in order to have any hope of winning a national election, and they admit that trashing the first Latina nominee to the court could cement stereotypes or further alienate minorities…

I’m trying to come to grips with the duplicity in the Latino community in regard to their recent voting history; their love affair with Obama to be concise.  How does the head come to be divided from the heart, or at least from who used to own their hearts.  People of Spanish decent in this nation have strongly held and loudly proclaimed devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe.  How this same people can live with that heart-set, while abiding a mind-set of choice and abortion flies in the face of integrity.  What has been the price of their defection?  Have they been won away from Our Lady of Guadalupe whose mantle they still claim as their own?

Counting on Our Lady’s for favor, love and protection under the mantle of her Son, while secretly voting with the Enemy whose head she will crush defies both logic and presumes a certain gullibility on God’s and Our Lady’s part. Here’s the crux of the matter.  Our Lady of Guadalupe is the pregnant Mother of God.  Have Latinos abandoned her for politico advantage, monetary benefit, educational expediency, life style convenience, a “good” life apart from the heart of this very pregnant Virgin.  For under her heart is the womb and nesting place of Jesus.

They have abandoned the heart of their Mother?  What else is one to think, when, while still blessing their homes and churches with her image, they none-the-less carry Obama’s torch and wave the banner of Choice.  Should her name be invoked as “Our Lady of Choice” or “Our Lady of Abortion,” for either of these, ‘choice’ or ‘abortion’ rank, by the hispanic vote, higher than the Infant she carried to term and into Life?  Poorly formed, ignored or silenced consciences, do not speak well for the once Christian people. In name only, may replace ‘In God We Trust’  as the banner over this proud inheritance.

As God’s eyes watched over the Babe in Our Lady of Guadalupe’s womb, they now watch over choices we make in life and in death.  God’s eyes watch over the womb of our Nation, which is 1/3 empty.   Should Our Lady of Guadalupe, now the patroness of the Americas and Life, not look to the Latino as her particular people, having chosen them to announce her under that title?  She has carried them.  Will they no longer claim her by their actions, affiliations and votes. The choice they now make and live, they will carry into life, death and the hereafter, as all life’s choices tend toward eternity.

Michelle Malkin cares about jurisprudence is anyone listening?

Guantanamo-“Close it-to Close it Not”

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H/T Hot Air

Weak on the merits, but how can you not love an ad that preempts lefty cries of “fearmongering” with footage from the most ludicrously fearmongering political ad the Democrats ever ran?

Where Notre Dame Went Wrong

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Thank HotAir for this: American Thinker, Paul Shoichta’s “How Notre Dame Drifted Away from the Catholic Church”

Today, to the disgust and apparent surprise of many Catholic bishops and laity, the University of Notre Dame, once the pride of Catholic intellectual life in America, will behave in a very un-Catholic way by honoring, as commencement speaker and honorary degree recipient, POTUS Barack Obama, one of America’s most extreme advocates of abortion.

This surprise is hard to understand. The old Latin proverb nemo repente turpissimus can be translated as “nobody becomes very evil overnight.” Even Judas served a lengthy apprenticeship as an embezzler before moving on to greater betrayals. In a similar manner, I contend that the invitation to Obama was merely a milestone of a drift away from the Catholic Church that Notre Dame started decades ago.


Read How It Happened here

Shoichta concludes:

The Last Straw?

So, with a majority of Catholics and Notre Dame students having voted for Obama, inviting the POTUS to the 2009 commencement seemed like a safe and harmless move. It might even result in some lavish federal grants by the sort of mutual back-scratching (known as the “Chicago Way”) that Obama has been trained in. A few pro-lifers or conservatives would protest but they would be ignored by the media and soon forgotten.

Then the protests flooded in. 68 of the 273 American bishops protested and/or boycotted the event. The announced Laetare Medalist, law professor and former ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, refused the award in protest [7]. Newspapers gave feature coverage of the protests and even cartoonists satirized the irony of the event. Alumni pledged to rescind over $8,000,000 in donations. A coalition of eleven student groups, called ND Response, organized a program of on-campus protests to coincide with the commencement.  Even the public tide has turned, a majority now disapproving of Notre Dame’s action. Notre Dame President Jenkins and his advisors must be wondering what hit them.

And we might wonder too. Considering the notorious indifference of most lay Catholics about abortion and the equally notorious pusillanimity of U.S. bishops, what has caused this sudden surge of resentment? It isn’t because of the Catholic laity as a whole; according to a recent poll, a majority of American Catholics don’t know, don’t care, or don’t disapprove of the Obama invitation.

One possibility, unfortunately a likely one, is that this is just a flash in the pan. The commencement and the protests will be over, the bishops will take no further action, the incident will be forgotten, pro-abortion politicians will have been reassured that they have noting to fear from the Catholic vote, and Notre Dame will go on as before.

Obama Operatives Trying to Divide Catholics from Bishops

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From: Catholic News Agency Saying that Notre Dame is acting as if it is not a member of the local Church in its response to the controversy, Catholic commentator George Weigel has charged that “political operators” in the Obama administration are trying to divide Catholics from their bishops by co-opting Catholic intellectuals and their institutions. In his May 13 column in the Denver Catholic Register, Weigel noted Boston College theology professor Fr. Kenneth Himes’ charge that there is a “political game” going on in the dispute over the University of Notre Dame’s commencement invitation to President Barack Obama. Fr. Hines had commented in a Boston Globe story about former Ambassador to the Vatican Mary Ann Glendon’s decision to decline Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal. He granted that some “well-meaning people” think Notre Dame has given away its Catholic identity. However, he also warned of a “political game” which results in demonizing those who disagree with you, questioning their integrity and character, and branding them as “moral poison.” “Some people have simply reduced Catholicism to the abortion issue, and consequently, they have simply launched a crusade to bar anything from Catholic institutions that smacks of any sort of open conversation,” he said in the Boston Globe. Responding to Fr. Himes, Weigel said if Fr. Hines was referring to the leading critics of President Obama’s Notre Dame honors, the priest was “perilously close” to committing calumny. “Yes, there are self-serving nuts in the forest, some of whom have seized the Obama/Notre Dame issue for their own purposes,” Weigel said. “But why does Father Himes waste time bashing fringe crazies? Why not engage the arguments of the serious critics?” Weigel cited as one such critic Notre Dame graduate Prof. Russell Hittinger, a professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa. Hittinger has said that Notre Dame has adopted a “purely American low-church” position of institutional autonomy by acting as if its local bishop is not worthy of attention. The Obama controversy, Hittinger said, has nothing to do with academic freedom or ecclesiastical supervision but is “ecclesiological all the way down.” “What Church is Notre Dame ‘in,’ if any?” Hittinger asked. “Notre Dame is speaking and acting as though it were not a member of the local Church, let alone Rome.” Weigel said this comment was “exactly right,” alleging that the actual “political game” is being played by “very smart political operators” in the Obama administration. He charged that these operators, noting the presidential election results, have sensed the possibility of “driving a Catholic News Agency wedge through the Catholic community in America, dividing Catholics from their bishops and thus securing the majority Catholic vote.” Weigel said they are targeting Catholic intellectuals and their institutions and journals, which he described as “the soft underbelly” of Catholic resistance to the Obama administration’s “radical agenda.” “It’s a clever move on the political chessboard, and barring extraordinary actions from the bishops, it will likely meet with considerable success,” Weigel continued. He closed by again reiterating the question: “Just what Church are Notre Dame and its supporters ‘in,’ anyway?”

Link – Around – Pelosi

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Ashes, ashes…the truth will out Pelosi!

The Torture Debate-Continued – Charles Krauthammer

“So what happened? The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken. It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions — our blindness to al-Qaeda’s plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama’s own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed “high-value information” — and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.”

The Wall St Journal Time-line-intelligence trail:

What Pelosi said she knew

  • August 2002: Justice Department authorizes waterboarding and other ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques (EITs). The CIA uses the technique.
  • September 2002: Nancy Pelosi, ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, is briefed on the techniques.
  • February 2003: A Pelosi aide attends a briefing with the new ranking member on the committee, Jane Harman. Pelosi later says that she learns after this meeting that the techniques have already been used, and that she ‘concurred’ with Harman’s letter to the CIA protesting the decision to use them.
  • December 2007: A news report quotes two officials who say Pelosi was briefed on waterboarding and raised no objections. Pelosi issues a statement confirming she was briefed on one occasion in the fall of 2002 ‘on interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the future.’
  • April 23, 2009: After the Obama administration releases four memos approving the use of waterboarding, Pelosi says that in September 2002, ‘We were not …told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation techniques were used.’
  • May 5, 2009: Intelligence officials send lawmakers a list of 40 congressional briefings on EITs, saying lawmakers ‘will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened.’ The list says Pelosi was told that some EITs had been employed, but doesn’t specify waterboarding.
  • May 8, 2009: Pelosi repeats that she was briefed on techniques that would be used in the future
  • May 14, 2009: Pelosi says she wasn’t told in September 2002 that waterboarding was being used, and says ‘the CIA was misleading Congress.’

In case you missed it and hadn’t already guessed: “Pelosi: Utterly Contemptible” – here’s Charles Krauthammer, impeccable on the subject, if reason still matters?

Nancy Pelosi Explains What She Knew About Waterboarding

In her own words, you decide!

HotAir on Ed’s Post and More : Pelosi goes nuclear on CIA over torture as Cheney’s memo request is denied:

Meanwhile, as this soap opera’s playing out, Dick Cheney’s request to declassify the two CIA memos which he claims prove that torture works has been denied. Surprise. Exit quotation: “President Obama has the legal authority to declassify the documents ‘with the wave of his hand,’ according to one expert.”

Update: I want to highlight this bit from Ed’s post because it really is the million-dollar question:

And if the CIA really had lied to her in the briefings, why didn’t Pelosi start out with that explanation? In fact, why didn’t she mention that in 2005 when both the EITs and the briefings were made public? Coming four years later, this explanation lacks any kind of credibility.

The killer quote from today’s presser is “they mislead us all the time,” a reference to the CIA’s bad intel on Iraq’s WMD. If there really is a pattern of deception going on, why would she wait until there’s a Democrat in the White House to complain when she could have pinned the whole thing on Bush by screaming about it earlier?

New Majority: Former CIA Sources Respond to Pelosi: Congress Knew Everything