Archive for February, 2009

Lucky Bastards at the Washington Examiner

Posted: February 2, 2009 by datechguy in opinion/news
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Byron York is a solid reporter and one of the best examples of a person who can report facts without without letting one’s ideology mess with them. Check out his archive to see what i mean.

He anounces today that this will be his last week at the National Review as he moves to political reporting at the Washington Examiner and blogging at http://ExaminerPolitics.com

This is a huge loss for the corner. The graveyards may be full of irreplaceable men but as noted earlier real reporters who actually report are a rare commodity these days.

A sucker bet

Posted: February 2, 2009 by datechguy in catholic
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Father Z offers a sucker bet:

This is probably the week we will start to see an acceleration of expressions of real hatred of the Holy Father and the SSPX.

The nastiness is starting to seep out cracks in the foreheads of the progressivists which split open when Benedict lifted the excommunications.

These people are terrified.

I wouldn’t bet against this if you were giving 100-1. Just because it is the Catholic Church doesn’t mean we don’t have our own angry left.

Good Choice

Posted: February 2, 2009 by datechguy in catholic
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Boston has a really good Cardinal in Sean O’Malley. Damian Thompson recommends him for his comments on the St. Pius X society but he really shines on his blog over the Right to life march:

Last week, the March for Life was a great success. The numbers of people who participated — particularly the number of young people — and the enthusiasm of the people for the cause was very encouraging. However, it is disturbing to see that the secular press, for the most part, chose to ignore a gathering of this proportion.

This week someone shared an article with me written by Don Feder, whom many of you will remember as a long-time Boston Herald columnist. In the article, he expresses dismay that the March for Life did not even receive a mention in the New York Times. He makes a strong point when he says that, had the cause been one that the liberal media was in favor of, even if there were just a few people there, it would be given prominence of place.

Sadly, the pro-life cause frequently receives this sort of unfair treatment. The media often seem to prefer to ignore the fact that huge numbers of Americans are dismayed at the lack of legal protection for human life in our country and are willing to express that in a public demonstration. This is certainly indicative of what a lacuna there is in our national media when it comes to the pro-life cause.

Indirect proof?

“There is no press now”

Posted: February 2, 2009 by datechguy in arthur vs carter, opinion/news
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Victor David Hansen nails it with a column today President Hamlet:

Sometime around mid-2007, during its coverage of the Democratic primary, it ceased to be investigatory and chose to become an adulatory megaphone. A news story on the front pages of the New York Times or Washington Post, or a piece aired on NPR, or a feature in Time or Newsweek, is simply a disguised op-ed on yet another underappreciated moral or intellectual gift of Barack Obama. He has transcended the traditional doctrinaire support for liberal governance and become a sort of talisman that offers exemption to our elite from all sorts of guilt and anguish in matters ranging from race at home to multicultural sensitivity abroad.

The whole article is something Hanson bottom lines the choice for the president:

In the next year Obama can continue to run against George Bush and whine about the “mess” that “they” left him as he tries to turn the U.S. economy and government into copies of those in Spain and Greece. He can print money and label as “stimulus” a pork plan that is designed to empower Democratic constituencies at the price of leaving generations to come with decades of debt. He can use his formidable powers of rhetoric to talk of ethical progress while he allows Clintonian ethical regress. He can hope-and-change the world—and learn to his dismay that its thugs take such magnanimity for weakness to be ridiculed and indecision to be exploited. And he can end up a mediocre president who counts on historians to whitewash his presidency just as the media once ensured it.

Or President Obama can decline to be worshiped and instead stop the monstrous borrowing, unsustainable debt, and endless expansion of an increasingly incompetent government. And as solace, he can remember that his idol, Lincoln, was as hated by his contemporaries as he was worshiped by posterity—and that the latter is often predicated on the former.

The either or is the meat of the Carter/Arthur watch but I’m reminded of the Book I Claudius . Claudius goes on the how Caligula could have been Caligula the good , or Caligula the wise, but concludes of course if he was that type of person he wouldn’t have survived to rule. Same thing.

Update: Exhibit B at newsbusters and Michael Bates Blog.

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