RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Parochial President
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Obama’s Catholic school comments are less substantial than his critics think.

Barack Obama is turning into a one-man gaffe machine. “Obama repeatedly called British finance minister George Osborne ‘Jeffrey’ at the G8 summit.” Agence France-Presse includes this lovely deadpan observation: “The chancellor, 42, bears little resemblance to Jeffrey Osborne, a 65-year-old African-American hit singer-songwriter known for his 1982 classic ‘On the Wings of Love.’ ”

Sky News called Jeffrey Osborne for comment, and he said: “I was really delighted actually. I was really not aware that [Obama] was that much of a fan that he would call the chancellor Jeffrey Osborne. Tell the chancellor when I come over I will have to hook up with him and we will do a duet of ‘On The Wings Of Love.’ ”

Yeah, well, it’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt. Earlier in the week, Obama made what the Scottish Catholic Observer construed as “an alarming call for an end to Catholic education in Northern Ireland”:

Obama . . . repeated the oft disproved claim that Catholic education increases division in front of an audience of 2000 young people, including many Catholics, at Belfast’s Waterfront hall when he arrived in the country this morning.

“If towns remain divided–if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden–that too encourages division and discourages cooperation,” the US president said.

The president’s words rankled on the other side of the Atlantic too. CNSNews.com tied them in with the ObamaCare assault on religious liberty, which America’s Catholic bishops, rightly in our view, call “an ‘unjust and illegal mandate’ that violates the constitutionally guaranteed right to free exercise of religion” (the quote is from CNSNews).

On this point, however, it seems to us that the president’s critics are overreaching. Considered in context, his comments seem to us the product of ignorance and parochialism rather than hostility toward Catholicism (or Protestantism, which he mentioned in a parallel fashion).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324688404578541822549510286.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Have financial markets become a giant crack house? Investors have certainly been acting like a bunch of junkies lately. Any hint that their main dealer—otherwise known as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke—might start cutting down his generous supply of cash sets them off in a frenzy. Mr. Bernanke’s latest comments on Wednesday, signaling a […]

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To say that there are items that present in the news each day that make me roll my eyes would be to under-state the fact in a dramatic way. But every now and again — and it is beginning to happen with more frequency, much to the detriment of the forces lending themselves to common sense — there presents a story so outrageous, so infuriatingly hypocritical, so blatant in arrogance, that it conjures the forces of anger from within one’s soul. The coverage of Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis’ words to the City Club of Chicago is such a story.

Ever since the 1850s, when a founding faction of the Progressive Movement – an elitist faction consisting of anti-religious bigots – began to call for the government institutionalization of education in the United States, the American education system has “progressively” marched down the road of, not only ideological monopoly, but of political allegiance. Coincidentally, the level of achieved education in the United States has suffered a continuous and steady decline ever since…you guessed it, the 1850s.

The Heartland Institute’s president, Joe Bast, recently spoke about the state of American education at the Eighth Annual Wisconsin Conservative Conference. During his talk he touched on the topic of, “How the Left Destroyed Schooling in America,” of which he noted:

“Once they had succeeding in kicking the Catholics out of K-12 education they campaigned to ban public funding for all religious schools. They placed Blaine amendments on the constitutions of 37 states, including Wisconsin.

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Berlin hadn’t seen bombing like this since the allies turned the city into a wasteland in the spring of 1945, when American B-17s and B-24s, British Lancasters and Russian heavy artillery took turns making the rubble bounce. This week the bomb was the bomber himself, and when the day was done, the legend of the irresistible eloquence of Barack Obama lay in shreds and tatters.

The allies required 363 raids between 1942 and 1945 to level the city, while President Obama leveled himself with only one. The allies required 200,000 tons of high explosives for the deed, finally including the famous blockbuster, while Mr. Obama made “mission accomplished” with a load of attitudes, platitudes and a ton of what one London newspaper called “pure mush.” It was mush ground from stale corn.

He delivered his remarks in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, almost exactly a half-century after John F. Kennedy thrilled the Germans and reassured Europe with his “ich bin ein Berliner” speech, declaring that he, too, was a Berliner resisting aggressive Soviet communism. Mr. Obama, fresh out of inspiring bloviation, gave the Berliners only a laundry list of fears to terrorize themselves with – the West’s inventory of nuclear weapons, global warming, Guantanamo, poverty across the world and the heartbreak of teenage acne.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3780/spain-muslims-kings While Spanish Muslims are busy trying to Islamize Spain, Spanish politicians are busy removing all references to Christianity from public discourse…The requirement which will be enshrined in Spain’s legal code law, represents an unprecedented encroachment of Islamic Sharia law within Spanish jurisprudence. Spanish police have arrested a Muslim immigrant in Mallorca after he claimed […]