Le soir

Always loved this tune.

Public Service Announcement (without guitars)

We had a fire in our house, in our kids' room. It happened a few weekends ago. No one got hurt, the damage was mostly from smoke, and I really don't want to talk about it in any more detail. But here's what you need to know--the culprit:

...and here's the scoop on the exact model. Basically each time these SMC oscillating fans oscillate they get a step closer to shorting out the cord which comes up through the stand. So if you have one of these, you may want to replace it with something newer.

Hokey Pokey President

Pretty accurate.

HT Erick Erickson

Jonah on the GOP primary

Here's a rambling yet fun Goldberg article on the GOP primary. Have to admit I hadn't heard Pataki's remarks about hate crimes.

Oh, and Pataki is also the author of what I have long considered the single dumbest prepared statement in modern political history.

“It is conceivable,” Pataki said in 2000 when he signed a hate-crimes bill into law, “that if this law had been in effect 100 years ago, the greatest hate crime of all, the Holocaust, could have been avoided.”

You could write several Ph. D. dissertations on why that is idiotic. Though I do like the image of Hitler having his hands tied by a hate-crimes law, because, you know, there were no laws against genocidal murder when he came into power. “Meine Herren,” Hitler would have to tell his comrades in the Eagle’s Nest, “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.”

Sort of puts me in mind of the blame-the-Pope-for-AIDS crowd, only with the added silliness factor of mindless holocaust invocation.

"Many things are on my mind, words in the way"

Ironic and Coincidental

What do you think I got for Father's Day? Ironically my wife got me the Sh*t My Dad Says book, which is funny because as I mentioned earlier the subject of the book is so anti-Father's Day. It came out last year, but who cares. You're always behind when you have five kids.

Also received awesome homemade cards. Homemade cards on Father's Day mean I didn't have to pay for store bought F-day cards with stale aphorisms, the definition of loser. Instead I got penguins and Pokemons on my cards with secret codes which had to be explained to me. Definition of awesome.

Plus we went to Panera and ate out on the patio which is like the top thing to me right now after that ridiculous winter.

Awesome Father's Day Story

This is the real shit. "I love you; your room stinks."

How much time do you have?

If you have 15 minutes or so, I highly recommend reading George Weigel's piece "The End of the Bernardin Era" from the Feb 2011 issue of First Things. I just finished it, and it was informative and enjoyable as all Weigel's articles are. Here's a typical paragraph:

John Paul II embodied a heroic model of the priesthood, and a heroic exercise of the office of bishop, that had a profound effect, over two-and-a-half decades, on the Catholic priesthood and episcopate in the United States. The men who elected Timothy Dolan as USCCB president in November 2010 were men deeply influenced by the John Paul II model, as they were men intellectually formed by the Polish pope’s dynamic magisterium on questions ranging from the Catholic sexual ethic to Catholic social doctrine. They understood, in a way that those who embodied the Bernardin Era did not quite seem to grasp, that it was important for the Catholic Church to be able to give a comprehensive, coherent, and compelling account of its faith, hope, and love in the Cathechism of the Catholic Church, just as they understood that the reaffirmation of classic Catholic moral theology in Veritatis Splendor was an important weapon in the war against what John Paul II’s successor called the “dictatorship of relativism.”

If you don't have much time, here's a quick email I just received from ol' Bill Donohue at the Catholic League which I believe to be related. The subject is "Sister Fiedler gets it right".

Sister Fiedler Gets It Right

Sister Maureen Fiedler, one of the most outspoken veteran dissenters in the Catholic Church, commented honestly yesterday on the meeting of the American Catholic Culture last weekend in Detroit. She admitted that those in attendance were part of the "graying" crowd, and bemoaned that it was also "a very 'white' crowd."

Thus did she validate our news release on the meeting that we issued prior to the conference. We mentioned how it would be filled with octogenarians. We didn't mention that only old white people would be drawn to event, but next time we'll be sure to mention how lacking in diversity the dissidents really are. Thank you, Sr. Maureen, for getting it right.

These aging white hippies are the folks whom people like Cardinal Bernardin were interested in appeasing with a lot of the triangulation in which he engaged during the seventies and eighties. Now that these angry fogies are dropping off his old policies are of a necessity going by the wayside and making way for straight-ahead Catholicism. At least we hope.