Gawker delivers the headline of the day with Barack Obama's Eerie, Frozen Grimace Will Haunt Your Dreams.
Iowahawk is fracking cracking me up on the aforementioned push to out-Riefenstahl Leni herself.
Unlike traditional art schools, the Federal Art Instruction Institute doesn't waste your time on boring Post-Modernist theory, messy bodily fluids, or painful self mutilation. With our easy-to-learn program you will quickly learn how to channel your natural artistic ability and suburban self-loathing at state enemies who, when you think about it, are a lot like your parents.
Can you draw triangles? The Federal Art Instruction Institute will show you the easy way to turn them into Ku Klux Klan hoods. Turn them upside down and they become scary vampire fangs! Even a simple black rectangle can become a Hitler mustache with our easy to learn methods.
Our award winning studio instructors includes some of the top young professional kowtowers, bumnuzzlers and bootlicks working in the government art field today -- people like Buffy Wicks, Yosi Sergant and Michael Skolnik. They will keep you up to date on all the hot new policy trends and enemy lists, and what your patrons at the NEA need you to do about it. Using tried and true traditional art techniques from Cuba, Germany and central Asia, they will teach you how to pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it -- for big cash prizes!
The hat tip goes to our friend Carol McKinley for pointing out this excellent piece by John Zmirak. It reminds me of another one of his articles which I linked to regarding "misguided compassion". Those Zmirak skewers here are no less misguided than the Earl of Longford; here's his initial characterization:
When asked, "What's your favorite thing about being a Catholic?" some well-instructed souls will cite the Eucharist, while others will speak of their devotion to Our Lady.... Reading what many Catholics have to say on economics and politics lately, it seems to me that if these folks answered honestly, they'd have to say: "Being Catholic gives me a high-minded rhetoric of noble-sounding values, a sense of moral superiority, and unrestricted license to speak and write as a crank."
I've had my disagreements in the past with the learned Thomas E. Woods Jr., but as someone who has taken the trouble to read seriously in the discipline of economics (I wrote a book on the subject in the light of Catholic social teaching), I share with him a violent frustration at Catholics who grandstand about "distributive justice" and offer Rube Goldberg schemes for re-engineering our country's economy, without knowing or caring how wealth is produced in the first place. Our country's relatively recent, hard-won, and fragile prosperity they treat as if it had descended in pennies from heaven, and the only question now is how to divide up the windfall fairly. All property and all labor, they take for granted, is owned in common. It may suit the State to allow you to hold a "title" to your house, or keep some portion of your wages. But fundamentally you belong to the U.S. Congress, just as a Russian serf and every stick of furniture in his house was the property of the tsar. Left-leaning bishops who wish to make this point note that Creation was given to man in common; they leave out the fact that our labor is our own, and that taxes enforced by the threat of imprisonment can mount up to a kind of slavery. (Medieval serfs paid only 10 percent of their wealth to their feudal lords; you and I pay up to 50 percent when federal, state, local, Social Security, and sales taxes are added up -- which means that half our time is spent working with a bayonet at our backs.)
What's missing from these people's happy, totalitarian picture is something fundamental to the West, a fruit of Christian culture that it took Vatican II (yes, you read me correctly) for the Church to fully recognize: the fact of human dignity. In the early Church, up through the first writings of St. Augustine, the Church asked only for liberty of worship, confident that the gospel would sway people on its own. In his later years, frustrated by the intransigence of the Donatist heretics, Augustine changed his mind and asked the now-Christian emperors to "compel them to come in." Building on Augustine's later work, many popes and countless Christian kings used the coercive power of the State to persecute heretics -- arguing that the free will of these individuals was outweighed by the danger to the souls they might lead to hell. Besides, they said in a phrase that became a little bit infamous, "Error has no rights." Since no one has a right to do what's wrong, how can those with false beliefs have a right to hold and practice an inaccurate religion? Do they have the right to lie about the gospel?
At Vatican II, the Council Fathers were more concerned about the very real persecution of Christians throughout the Communist bloc than the duty of (now-deposed) Catholic monarchs to uphold orthodoxy. They reframed the question as follows: Error may have no rights, but the person holding the error does. In Dignitatis Humanae, the Council teaches that the dignity of the human person forbids religious coercion by the State. Pope John Paul II was not, I think, misguided when he apologized for the actions of his predecessors that violated this precept.
Nor does human dignity stop at the church door. Throughout the Catechism, the Church insists on the rights of the human person to liberty of thought, association, and action—within the limits of justice and the countervailing rights of one's fellow men. Only when our actions violate justice—not charity, but justice—is it right to use the violent, coercive power of the State to curb and restrict them. Indeed, it is only justice that can be enforced by the State. Mandatory charity is as moot as mandatory faith or hope.
James C. Capretta asks the question Who's Really Paying for Obamacare? Then he gives a hint: "it's not the rich." Here's the conclusion:
The president and his allies in Congress are trying to convince Americans that they have found a painless way to achieve “universal coverage” that will involve no sacrifice from anyone. But the truth is that the Democratic plans all depend on coercion and hidden and regressive taxes. Low- and moderate-wage workers are the ones who will pay the bulk of the costs. Indeed, last week, the Lewin Group found that the House bill would increase costs for households with at least one uninsured member by $1,400 per year, on average. The same is almost certainly true of the Baucus plan. “Taxing the uninsured” is not likely to be a winning slogan for Obamacare. But it’s an accurate description.
The Fairbanks Daily Cage-Liner published a story about Palin's speech at a Hong Kong investors conference on Wednesday. The caption that appeared with the photo for the story read, "A broad in Asia."
The Cage-Liner's managing editor Rod Boyce published an apology later in the afternoon for the paper's "terrible mistake."
In a plea to Notre Dame to drop the charges against those protesting the honoring of pro-abortion President Obama at a Catholic University, Jeff Miller elucidates the primary incongruity about the arrests.
What gets me about the arrest of the pro-lifers is a couple of things. One Fr. Jenkins decided he could give his own interpretation on what the Bishops said regarding honoring pro-abortion politicians. He has not followed the provisions in Church documents such as Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Yet when it comes to a Notre Dame law in regards to protests - that is hard and fast dogma with no mercy or change possible. Dialog is so much talked about, but making allowances for pro-lifers to peacefully protest is another story. The way that these protesters were treated is sad beyond belief. Handcuffing a elderly priest for the crime of protesting what 80 some bishops said should never have allowed is a sad indictment. Really what should have happened is that the protests should have been given permission in the first place.
I was watching Lou Reed perform Vicious in Paris in 1974 yesterday and my first thought was "Man, this makes the Village People seem straight. Of course unlike Reed, Victor Willis can actually sing."
My next thought was this: what if Andy Warhol had discovered Art Paul Schlosser rather than the Velvet Underground?
Andy: "You gotta get vicious."
Lou: "What do you mean vicious?"
Andy: "Vicious, like I hit you with a flower."
