NO BIAS HERE, JUST MOVE ALONG

See if you detect any bias in these quotes from MSNBC’s coverage of the President’s speech last night:

“President Bush urged Congress to enact contentious Social Security and energy legislation and confirm his controversial court nominees Thursday night, prodding lawmakers to act on an ambitious second-term agenda.”

“Contentious” and “controversial”, and that’s just from the first sentence!

“I’m not surprised that some are balking at doing hard work,” Bush said of the Republican-controlled Congress.”

I somewhat doubt it’s the REPUBLICANS he’s talking about here.

“That would mean lower payments for future retirees of middle and upper incomes than they are currently promised — a fact Bush himself did not mention in his 60-minute session with reporters in the East Room of the White House.”

Ah-ha! You can sense the smugness here. What the moron at MSNBC doesn’t understand is that people of my generation and younger have never believed that “promise” anyway, we believe there will be NO social security under the current system when we retire - none, nada, zilch, zippo.

CRAZINESS ALERT!!! As I was writing this post, jumping back and forth to the MSNBC page for quotes, the story disappeared from the MSNBC site!!! So, no link for you! But, at least we got some of the best quotes.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT COULDN'T GET WORSE...

Here’s a story so disturbing that I’m going to let it speak for itself with little comment:

“A mother who gave birth to a twin girl following an incomplete termination is suing the hospital where she had the procedure for £250,000 to help with the cost of raising the child…

Miss Dow, 20, said that after the termination she was advised it had been successful. She was then given a contraceptive injection, which she was told could lead to weight gain and an erratic menstrual cycle. She put the continuing symptoms of pregnancy down to this injection.

But when she later went to her GP she was told she was still pregnant. One of the foetuses had survived and was only seven weeks from term. Jayde was born by caesarean section on August 30 2001.

Jayde suffered no ill-effects from the termination procedure, but Miss Dow is now pursuing an action at Perth sheriff court against Tayside university hospitals NHS trust for the "financial burden" of her daughter's upbringing....

"I have got a child now that I wasn't planning to have and I believe the hospital should take some responsibility for that. They should have known, or at least warned me, that I might still be pregnant when I left," she said.”

As disgusting, terrible and outrageous ("financial burden"!) as all of that, here’s the money quote from the middle of the story:

“"I still don't know if, or what, I am going to tell Jayde when the time comes," she added. "Maybe when she is nine or 10 I will sit her down and explain it to her. I just hope that she understands what happened and why I did it. Of course it will be much harder to explain to her that she had a twin."

Yeah, Miss Dow will have to explain to Jayde why her sister was torn from the womb and thrown away. May God have mercy on her soul.

JUSTICE DENIED

The New York Times lead editorial today is fraught with irony and misrepresentations. It’s all about the two female judicial nominations by President Bush destined for a Democratic filibuster, Justices Owen and Brown.

The Times starts off by saying how conciliatory the Democrats in the Senate have been to President Bush regarding his judicial nominees:

“Senate Democrats have confirmed almost all of President Bush's judicial nominations, more than 200 of them. But they have balked at a few of the least qualified, most ideologically driven nominees.”

Firstly, I think at least SOME Republicans have been in on the confirmation of the 200 nominees, but I digress. Why the Times had to say “Senate Democrats” is because they are studiously ignoring the fact that it’s the Democrats who have used arcane rules to block an up or down vote. The Times gives the impression that the “ideologically driven nominees” have been voted down.

The first of the “disqualifications” the Times come up with for Justice Owen are high-larious:

“Justice Owen was elected to the Texas Supreme Court with Karl Rove as a campaign consultant, and with donations from Enron and other large corporations. On the court, she has a record of reflexively ruling in favor of corporations, including Enron.”

Not Karl Rove!!!! Enron, too??!! Heavens to Betsy!

Amongst the deranged left, Karl Rove is the new Hitler and Enron the Nazis – any association with them (and Halliburton, of course) makes you unclean. I would love to hear about this “reflexive” ruling in favor of Enron – my guess is that it affects a lot of corporations, not just Enron. Plenty of Judges have made rulings that affect corporations and most of them would affect a gigantic corporation like Enron, much like they affect WalMart and Microsoft, too.

Justice Brown gets some particularly vicious attacks:

“Justice Brown, currently a member of the California Supreme Court, is an extreme right-wing ideologue. She is an outspoken supporter of a radical movement to take constitutional law back to before 1937, when the federal government had little power to prevent discrimination, protect workers from unsafe conditions or prohibit child labor. She has attacked the New Deal, which created Social Security, as "the triumph of our socialist revolution."

I’ll let the “extreme right-wing ideologue” bit pass, but how come we don’t get details of this “radical movement” the Times speaks of? Without the details, I have a hard time taking this charge seriously. And come on – are you telling me the New Deal wasn’t a bit of socialism? Get over yourself.

The final paragraph is a dozy:

“The Republicans are trying to make the fight about process, about whether the Democrats have a right to filibuster judicial nominees. It is a dishonest discussion: Senator Frist does not like to admit that he participated in a filibuster of an appeals court nomination made by President Clinton. But even more important, the discussion of process is crowding out the debate we should be hearing over whether the nominees being fought over would make good federal judges. Justice Owen and Justice Brown have extensive records that point to the inescapable conclusion that they would not.”

Uh, this fight is about process – the process that denies a vote to 100 members of the Senate. For the Times to call on REPUBLICANS for the “debate we should be hearing over whether the nominees being fought over would make good federal judges” is particularly egregious. It’s the Republicans who want the debate and a vote, it’s your precious Democrats who are denying you that.

I hate the Times. They lie like a rug.

A NEW PAPA

Ok, so what can I say? I can say, “Oh yeah!, Oh baby!, Kick it down!, Kick it down!” Cardinal Ratzinger has been elected Pope Benedict XVI – in just two days!!! The Church has chosen one of it’s chosen to lead it. It has chosen a true son of Pope John Paul II to carry on his legacy – and I’m a bit happy over it.

I wish I could say the same of the MSM (Main Street Media)

This is from Reuters (“Alleged Terrorists”)

“Arch-Conservative German Ratzinger Elected Pope”

“Leaders Hail New Pope, Liberal Catholics Dismayed”

No way in the world this could be a Good thing.

This comes from the Associated Press:

Some Jews in Israel Wary About New Pope

From the New York Times:

In St. Peter's Square, Optimism and Concern

This is just a few hours after the news, wait until tomorrow. A man I respect, Andrew Sullivan, who is gay (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that”), is particularly dismayed:

“THE FUNDAMENTALIST TRIUMPH: And so the Catholic church accelerates its turn toward authoritarianism, hostility to modernity, assertion of papal supremacy and quashing of internal debate and dissent. We are back to the nineteenth century. Maybe this is a necessary moment. Maybe pressing this movement to its logical conclusion will clarify things. But those of us who are struggling against what our Church is becoming, and the repressive priorities it is embracing, can only contemplate a form of despair. The Grand Inquisitor, who has essentially run the Church for the last few years, is now the public face. John Paul II will soon be seen as a liberal. The hard right has now cemented its complete control of the Catholic church. And so ... to prayer. What else do we now have?”

The Church – authoritarian? No!! Surely you jest! The Church has always been wide open to interpretation! Moron. Equal is the email you posted from a reader:

"As one who is on a similar wavelength with you regarding the direction our Church should take and the reforms that are needed to prevent its extinction in the West, I find myself far less pessimistic than you on the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as the new Pontiff. Perhaps it's simply because I was looking at the election as a realist. To put a twist on the infamous Rumsfeld quote, you elect a pope with the Conclave you have, not the Conclave you'd like to have. In regards to this election, the Conclave that Western Catholics like me and thee had was an older, more conservative group appointed almost entirely by JPII to reflect his conservative views on doctrine and his populist-conservative views on political and social world issues. The result was about what I expected: an older, doctrinaire Cardinal from John Paul's inner circle ascending to the papacy."

Andrew, what if you and your readers are wrong? What if, in your short time on this planet you have got it all wrong? Perhaps you and your friends need to heed the words of G.K. Chesterton, a Catholic apologist who never understood the doctrine of priestly celibacy:

"The Greeks felt virginity when they carved Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world. Above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence — the great modern worship of children. For any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex. With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority, I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather that I am defective, while the church is universal. It takes all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is one flower in my father’s garden, of which I have not been told the sweet or terrible name. But I may be told it any day." (Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p 153-4)”

In an nutshell, what G.K. is saying is that, even though the doctrine of celibacy makes no sense to him, he has been wrong an awful lot during his life and the Church has almost always been right, so he’s going to accept this doctrine on faith, because who is he to say the Church is wrong?

USE YOUR NOODLE, JUST NOT IN MISSOURI

With the news just so depressing this week, I loved running into this:

Noodlers Anonymous try to legalize poleless fishin'

Yes, poleless fishin' (that's fishing with your hands) is called "Noodling" and it's illegal. At least in Missouri, that is and a bunch of noodlers want that changed. Yep, abortions are legal but fishin' with your God given hands is not.

You can't make this up.

"POOR ME"

We are turning into such a country of helpless wimps, and no more so than in bellwether of American wimpiness – California.

Skimming the LA Times this morning, I came across this headline and I knew it was Mel’s Diner Gold:

Near the Rails, on the Edge
Southland residents near train tracks live with noise, dirt and danger -- and wonder why homes are allowed to be built so close.

That’s right – a whole story on why people need to be protected from their own decisions. In it we get such money quotes as these:

“Just like how there are changes in train traffic, there should be changes in laws" to protect people who live near railroads, Marquez said.”

"In a perfect world, we can say, 'We'll industrial-zone every track," said Jim Ledford, the mayor of Palmdale, where dozens of new homes will be constructed alongside tracks this year. "But landowners have certain rights as well."

Oh, those pesky property rights! Along those lines, here’s the top dollar, big money quote:

"They shouldn't put any houses near railroad tracks. It should be against the law…. The setback minimum should be at least a block," said Jack Edwards, 45, whose Palmdale house sits about 100 feet from railroad tracks on a double-size lot near a grade crossing. "I've been here eight years. In eight years, I haven't slept a night through once!" Like many homeowners near tracks, Edwards said it would be too costly to move.”

Now, Jack is 45 years old and if he moved into his track shanty 8 years ago, that means he was 37 years old then. Are you telling me a 37 year old man is so stupid and helpless that it wouldn’t dawn on him being 100 feet from a main line track wouldn’t be a bit loud? I tell you, I don’t feel too sorry for him, certainly not nearly as sorry he feels for himself.

Buffoon.

"I SUPPOSE WE NEED TO..."

You can tell The Boston Globe didn't want to write anything about the Pope, but knew they had to say something. Their editorial is confusing, incoherent and short. Half of it is about the Pope and Vatican II, in fact, three paragraphs of the eight total start with mentioning Vatican II,

"In keeping with the modernizing spirit of Vatican II..."

"Also in keeping with Vatican II..."

"While hewing to the decisions of Vatican II..."

The editorial reads like a junior high English assignment, not like a lead editorial in a major newspaper. Yet, even as they muddle through a short editorial devoid of a lot of facts, they still manage to get things wrong:

"Although John Paul named women to advisory committees, they never gained significant power. His attitude toward them remained rooted in the past. His approach to sexuality changed little from his days as a bishop, when he rejected birth control within marriage except for periodic abstinence."

Perhaps if the editors had a modicum of knowledge about the Church, they would see that Pope Paul VI reinforced idea that contraception went against the will of the Lord in his BEAUTIFUL Humanae Vitae, it wasn't a random decision by Pope John Paul II. Of course, that might require at least some of them to be practicing Catholics, way too much to ask for from the editors of a liberal paper in Boston, Massachusetts.

PAPA

The Pope has died. My Pope has died. Raised an Episcopal, as a child I never thought too much about the Catholic Church. The first Pope I remember was John Paul I and he was only Pope for a very short period of time - 33 days, so John Paul II is the only Pope I have known. When I converted to the Church, I was able to say that he was a huge reason why, a beacon to me in my search for the truth.

And now he's gone.

I'll miss you, Papa