Drudge has a link to a NYT story on an Apostolic Visitation investigating women’s religious orders in the US. I think we can see the problem here:
While some nuns say they are grateful that the Vatican is finally paying attention to their dwindling communities, many fear that the real motivation is to reel in American nuns who have reinterpreted their calling for the modern world.
We just got back from a family road trip out to Colorado–no internet, no cell phones, wonderful. I spent a few years there as a kid, and I’m always struck by the vast space in the West. Coming from the South, it’s rather unsettling.
In Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman, when Will Barrett goes West to New Mexico, he finds it ‘the locus of pure possibility.’ As Americans, we see that as an unqualified good, but it is far from it. The soul bleeds out in all directions in the West.
It is the land of progressive desperation. The farmers and ranchers manage to dig their heels in enough to stay grounded, but most everyone else is afloat. High Country Christianity is for the most part disembodied, as is High Country Conservatism generally. There are no relics in the Air Force Academy Chapel. But God bless them if they can stand the altitude.
For my part, it’s back to the ever-so-incarnate South. Sip some bourbon under the live oaks with 95% humidity and you’re back in the flesh. That haze in the air is History.
Absolutely hysterical “misheard lyrics” video set to Pearl Jam’s Yellow Ledbetter.
Heh. Potato Wave.
H/t: Scott Keith.
Wow. There finally may be some hope and change in Washington. Hang around until the 2:48 mark and watch Helen Thomas do her best Brutus impression on Robert Gibbs.
A friend of mine (and future Priest) just emailed me this story:
Suspended Fresno priest turned gay activist Father Geoffrey Farrow has called for Catholic priests to retaliate against the Knights of Columbus for their support of Proposition 8.
Farrow was removed as pastor from the St. Paul Newman Center at Cal State Fresno in October 2008 for his outspoken defiance of church teaching over Proposition 8 and the issue of homosexuality.
In a post on his personal blog dated June 4, 2009 “Boycott the Knights of Columbus,” Farrow wrote:
“Many priests have E-mailed me and expressed their rage and anger over the hypocrisy of the Catholic hierarchy in supporting anti-marriage equality legislation…One of the organizations, which the bishops have effectively employed to do their dirty work, has been the Knights of Columbus.”
Farrow then asked “So, what can priests do to fight the anti-gay agenda of the bishops and the K of C?” His first suggestion:
“Borrow the full amount against your Knights of Columbus life insurance policy immediately. Take the check and invest the funds with an LGBT friendly fund. Do not pay back the loan.”
The blog post is here. Shockingly comment moderation is on. Can’t imagine why that would be. It is amusing to read the comments from the sycophants who have absolutely no clue as to what the Knights of Columbus do.
This petty call for vengeance is shameful and disgusting to be sure, but I also imagine that the Supreme Council is not exactly sweating too much. Still, it’s always a tragedy when someone who has taken a vow before God spits in the Lord’s face.
(Cross-posted at CrankyCon)
In the wake of the scandals and persistent self-absorbtion of Mark Sanford and John Edwards, Mark Steyn asks this pertinent question:
Is politics some kind of affirmative-action program for sociopaths?
Good question, Mark. The answer is yes.
The way I look at politics is this: Think of Frank Capra’s classic film ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.’ Recall the climax where Senator Smith (ably played by Jimmy Stewart) collapses during his filibuster. Now, imagine that Senator Paine, instead of confessing his complicity with the Taylor machine in a fit of guilt, goes on to say “I believe Senator Smith has yielded the floor. I would now like to move for a vote on the proposed public works bill.” The bill passes.
Senator Smith leaves Washington, disgraced. The Boy Rangers disband. Clarissa Saunders, her cynicism affirmed, rises in her profession and eventually becomes the co-anchor of CBS News. Senator Paine, drunk on power and cheap liquor, later gets involved in a car accident with a young campaign staffer as his passenger, and leaves the scene of the crime; nevertheless, he continues to be reelected. The end.
Too cynical?
Thank you, Senator Hatch, for looking out for us, and advancing our interests in the most important of issues.
The Senate plans to hold a hearing next week looking into antitrust issues surrounding the Bowl Championship Series.
Indeed, it is about time that the federal government get involved in College Football. For years the Notre Dame football team has had God on its side; it seems only fair that all the other football teams reap the benefit of an equally strong force (so the politicians seem to think): the United States Government. The playing field shall now be level, so to speak. (more…)
Two of my dear friends, Kevin Newsom and Marc Ayers (of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings), are teaching a fascinating CLE seminar that I thought would be of interest to some SA readers (particularly since the seminar has been approved for ethics credit!). Here’s the description:
On June 8, 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its long-awaited decision in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co.–the so-called “West Virginia recusal case.” By a narrow 5-4 margin, the Court held that the Due Process Clause required a state judge to recuse himself from a case involving an individual who had made expenditures in support of the judge’s election campaign. The contours of this new constitutional recusal rule remain very vague, and the Court’s decision is likely to launch a new wave of disqualification motions in both state and federal courts. Clients and their counsel need to be prepared.
Bradley Arant Boult Cummings partner Kevin Newsom filed an amicus curiae brief in Caperton and has followed the case and related recusal issues closely. Vanderbilt University law professor Brian Fitzpatrick is an expert on the various methods of judicial selection and how those methods might affect the recusal calculus. Bradley Arant Boult Cummings partner Marc Ayers, who assisted on the Caperton amicus brief, will moderate.
The seminar will be held on July 8, 2009, from 12:00 p.m. until 1:30 p.m., at the offices of BABC. The seminar will be live in the Birmingham and Nashville offices; the Huntsville, Jackson, Montgomery, and Washington D.C. offices will be connected via video conference. This seminar has “been approved for 1.0 hour of Ethics CLE credit by the state bars in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee; credit is currently being sought for the District of Columbia.”
Space is limited, so if you are interested in attending, please reserve your spot early by sending an RSVP to rsvp@babc.com.
With Pope Benedict XVI set to receive President Obama in a couple of weeks, surely progressive Catholics have too much self respect to try to make some sort of bizarre political hay out of the visit.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Last week witnessed Michael Sean Winters doing what Michael Sean Winters does best: writing logically strained, caricature-laden articles declaring that conservative Catholics have been put to shame by the Pope.
Eh, that’s mere little league stuff compared to this: The Catholic Democrats have announced their latest propaganda effort, titled the “Pope Greets Hope” Campaign. One can only stand in awe of the rhetorical brilliance of that one.
So, what are the Catholic Democrats saying in their letter to the Pope? I’m sure they have a long list of meaningful, orthodox requests.
We support your mutual efforts to:
- Build true understanding among nations;
- Eliminate nuclear weapons;
- Promote economic justice and reduce the poverty that diminishes the dignity and potential of people across the globe;
- Work toward the common ground of promoting the sanctity of all life;
- Encourage the world’s great religions to greater dialogue and understanding, thus promoting peace and tolerance;
- Support programs and policies that preserve God’s creation.
Well, at least they threw in something about the sanctity of all life, so they got that going for them.
We shouldn’t belittle the Catholic Democrats, after all this is similar to the initiative Catholic Republicans spearheaded during their “The Rottweiler meets the Decider” campaign last year. You remember that, right? There’s a link somewhere I’m sure. Just Google it.
I do wonder who the Catholic Dems think should be kissing whose hands.
Southern Appeal readers in the greater Chicagoland area may be interested in an upcoming conference on Global Bioethics sponsored by the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. It will be held July 16-18, 2009 on the campus of Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. Among the featured speakers are yours truly, O. Carter Snead (Notre Dame Law School), and David P. Gushee (Mercer University). You can find out more about the conference here.
(Originally posted on First Thoughts, a First Things blog)
This weekend the House of Representatives passed Waxman-Markley, a bill designed to stop global warming by imposing a cap and trade system on carbon emissions. Included in the bill is a provision, inserted in the middle of the night before passage, mandating tariffs on goods from countries that do not adequately limit their own carbon emissions. Such tariffs could be waived only with explicit congressional approval.
President Obama has said that he opposes the provision, and some bloggers have been comparing the move to Smoot-Hawley. Yet as Eric Posner notes, the carbon tariff idea is not only not necessarily protectionist, it is necessary to keep Waxman-Markley from being counter-productive. (more…)
The Supreme Court has just ruled, in a 5-4 decision, for the firefighters in Ricci, et al. v. DeStefano, et al.
Follow live updates via SCOTUSblog.
Update: Here’s a link to the opinion.
Any thoughts on the subject?
Rep. Artur Davis is running for Governor of Alabama. You hear rumblings in Montgomery and elsewhere that some Democratic Party leaders are concerned about Davis being on top of the ticket, both because of his race and because of his liberal stances on a number of issues. His vote today which helped move the Cap and Trade Bill forward won’t help their heartburn and will be something that Davis will later have to explain.
UPDATE: I think that Bobby Bright may get some heartburn from the bill’s passage as well despite voting against the bill. Last election, the Republican nominee tried to link Bright with Pelosi and it didn’t work. When the Speaker rams a bill through which raises taxes and costs jobs in Alabama and no one even has a copy of the bill voters may pay a little more attention to Bright’s vote for Pelosi as Speaker of the House and I suspect that Bright may have to explain his vote a few times while he is on the stump.
Starting tomorrow and until July 11, you can pre-order Windows 7 upgrades for a pretty good savings from several vendors, including Best Buy, Amazon.com and direct from Microsoft. The Home Premium upgrade will run ya around $50 during the sales; normal price will be around $120 if you wait until Oct. 22, when it is released.
I have Windows 7 Release Candidate running on a virtual machine, and it’s definitely an improvement over Vista. One neat feature is the ability to have two folders parallel to each other, rename one the same name as the other and have the folders merge.
Anyway, I thought I would give a heads up to anyone interested.
Is she a wise Latina?
You hate how the vacancy came about… but Haley will certainly be an able chairman.
You can read the opinion here.
I’ll say the same thing I said when the Edwards story broke: Leave the man’s family be.
My thoughts and prayers are with the Sanford family.
Ramesh Ponnuru has an op-ed in the New York Times today in which he criticizes conservatives for having a blind spot with respect to judicial activism involving racial issues. I disagree with many of his arguments. However, I’ll set aside, for the moment, the propriety of conservatives using the New York Times to argue with their own, and move on to a good ol’ fashioned fisking:
[W]hen it comes to the race cases before the Supreme Court, too many conservatives abandon both originalism and judicial restraint.
The Voting Rights Act decision was a case in point. Eight justices avoided weighing in on the constitutionality of the law’s requirement that certain jurisdictions, mostly in the South, get Justice Department permission before making any changes to election procedures. Instead they ruled that a utility district in Texas that wanted to be freed from the provision should have an opportunity to try.
But Justice Clarence Thomas went further, declaring the provision unconstitutional. Congress, he argued, was justified in the 1960s in responding to the denial of the voting rights guaranteed by the 15th Amendment, but things have changed and the provision is no longer needed.
Justice Thomas is, in my view, right to consider the law outdated. But is that really for him to say? Congress is the proper body to make that judgment. In 2006, it decided to renew the law for 25 years. Its determination that the law was still necessary may have been mistaken, but it is not clear that the Constitution authorizes judges to second-guess it.
Well, if one believes in judicial review, the Court will always have the authority to “second guess” laws when it believes they potentially conflict with any provision of the Constitution. Treating a subset of states according to different, more onerous standards is at least dubious under basic principles of federalism. I’m not entirely familiar with the jurisprudence or the history with respect to the federal governmnent discriminating against certain states, but I’d wager it’s a great deal more complex and more enlightening to this discussion than Ponnuru lets on. (more…)
I recently read Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘N’ Roll, which is about the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia during the Communist period (I was supposed to see it performed on a recent trip, but plans fell through). I was struck by one passage in particular, by the lead character Jan, describing an incident from his childhood, when he had just returned to Communist controlled Prague after a stint in England:
A one-legged man showed up at my school once. He waited outside the classroom. It turned out the man with one leg had come to say goodbye to our teacher. Afterwards, the teacher explained to us his friend lost his leg in the war, so as a special favor he’d been given permission to go and live near his sister somewhere in north Bohemia. ‘You see,’ our teacher said, ‘how Communism looks after its war heroes.’ So I put my hand up. God, I must have been stupid. I really thought it would be interesting for them, so I said in England anyone could live anywhere they liked, even if they had two legs. My mother was questioned and she lost her job at the shoe factory, but the point is the others kids in the class. They thought I was telling travelers’ tales. They couldn’t grasp the idea of a country where someone, anyone, could decide to move to another town and just go there. Suppose everybody wanted to live in Bohemia when their job is in Moravia! How would such a society work
How hot is it?
So hot that South Louisiana is experiencing widespread road buckling.
An absolutely brillant put-down of Andrew Sullivan by Christopher Badeaux.
Poor Sully is going to have to go to the burn unit after this.
As part of their strategy against Obama’s health care proposals, Senate Republicans recently introduced the “Preserving Access to Targeted Individualized, and Effective New Treatments and Services” (PATIENTS) Act of 2009, which would prohibit Medicare or Medicaid from using “comparative effectiveness research to deny coverage.” Here’s Paul Krugman commenting on the move:
How bad is it? Let me count the ways.
1. Politicians who rail against wasteful government spending are taking action to prevent the government from reining in … wasteful spending.
2. Politicians who warn that the burden of entitlements is killing the federal budget are stepping in to block … the single most painless route to reducing the growth of entitlements.
3. They’re doing it in the name of avoiding “rationing of health care” … but they’re specifically addressing taxpayer-funded care. If you want to go out and buy a medically useless treatment, Medicare won’t stop you.
4. These same politicians are, of course, opposed to efforts to expand coverage. In other words, it’s evil for government to “ration care” by only paying for things that work; it is, however, perfectly OK, indeed virtuous, to ration care by refusing to pay for any care at all.
I can’t speak to the politics of the measure (on that score the Republicans seem to know what they’re doing). But as policy the move leaves something to be desired, to put it mildly.
(HT: Scott Sumner)
The Daily Report has the list of folks who turned in questionnaires to the Judicial Nominating Committee.
Newsweek has an interesting Q&A with Robert Bork regarding Judge Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
Here are some of the questions and answers I found interesting:
Newsweek: Is there a principled definition of what judicial activism is?
Bork: Sure. A judge is an activist when he announces principles or reaches results that cannot plausibly be related to the actual Constitution.
…
Newsweek: Your own confirmation hearing in 1987 is often called a watershed for the process.
Bork: It wouldn’t have been but for the fact that I looked like the fifth vote to overrule Roe v. Wade. And in modern politics, that is a subject that raises hysteria.
Newsweek: Would you have been the fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?
Bork: Oh, of course. It’s one of the most corrupt decisions I’ve ever seen.
Newsweek: Was it your view that the law on abortion should be left totally to the democratic process?
Bork: I oppose abortion. But an amazing number of people thought that I would outlaw abortion. They didn’t understand that not only did I have no desire to do that, but I had no power to do it. If you overrule Roe v. Wade, abortion does not become illegal. State legislatures take on the subject. The abortion issue has produced divisions and bitterness in our politics that countries don’t have where abortion is decided by legislatures. And both sides go home, after a compromise, and attempt to try again next year. And as a result, it’s not nearly the explosive issue as it is here where the court has grabbed it and taken it away from the voters.
It is really a shame this man is not on the Supreme Court.
On this feast day of St. Thomas More, patron saint of politicians, it seems appropriate to mention my latest enterprise.
Southern Appeal has always been a law blog, among other things. When I came on board as a contributor, it was in spite of my lack of experience with the law. I am now endeavoring to gain a greater involvement with the law — as a legislator.
I am a candidate for the Illinois legislature. I am seeking to unseat a Republican incumbent who has voted to repeal parental notifications for minors seeking abortions, voted to increase state funding of abortion, voted to abolish conscience protections for pro-life healthcare providers, voted for state funding of embryo-destructive stem cell research, who voted to remove the requirement that abortion providers be physicians, and who voted to protect abortion providers from malpractice suits. Her largest contributor is a pro-abortion PAC, and she has repeatedly been endorsed by Planned Parenthood.
And in 2008, she ran unopposed in both the primary and the general election.
I am running against her as a regular guy with no money, no organization, and virtually no relevant experience. But at least I know what a person is.
For me to beat her may require a miracle. But as a Christian, I believe in miracles. I’m asking for your prayers, for the intercession of St. Thomas More. And if you want to help spread the word, I’d be grateful for that as well.
St. Thomas More, Patron of politicians, ora pro nobis.
Today is the feast of St. Thomas More. He was an honest lawyer, and as punishment he was beheaded. All other lawyers should take heed of this fact.
I’ve recently been watching the surprisingly good Showtime series The Tudors, which is a dramatic retelling of the reign of Henry VIII. It’s not family viewing, but the historical material is very engaging, and the treatment of Thomas More on the show is, in my opinion, top notch. The above clip, in which More refuses to take the Oath of Succession, may offer a glimpse of what I mean.
The United States Supreme Court has just released its opinion in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder. At issue was whether Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is constitutional. The Court, while acknowledging that there are “serious constitutional concerns” regarding the Act, chose instead to rule that the Utility District could “bail out of the Act” (a lengthy process whereby the political entity establishes that it doesn’t discriminate and should not longer have to seek pre-clearance from the Justice Department before it any changes to any election procedure) thereby avoiding the question of whether Section 5 is constitutional.
I have not read the decision but I am disappointed that the Court did not take this opportunity to rule on Section 5 constitutionality. While the Act has had a significant positive impact in the states to which it applies (it doesn’t apply to all of the states), I have long thought that there were constitutional and practical problems with the Act.
If you want to move a polling place because the current location was destroyed by a tornado, you have to make a lengthy submission to the Dept. of Justice to get that approved. In Alabama, there were changes made to the section of the Alabama Code which dealt with the conduct of elections. It was cleaning up wording, making grammatical changes, etc. The bill passed both the Alabama Senate and the Alabama House without a single dissenting vote. The filing to the Department of Justice weighed over 50 lbs. All of this for a bill which did not have a single dissenting vote. It is incidences like this which highlight that there are significant problems regarding the current application of the Act in 2009.
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