I'm Catholic, Staunchly Anti-Racist, and Support David Duke (William Donohue , 10/07/08, Inside Catholic)
The following is a tongue-in-cheek reply to Nick Cafardi's article, "I'm Catholic, Staunchly Anti-Abortion, and Support Obama."
I believe racism is an unspeakable evil, yet I support David Duke, who is pro-racism. I do not support him because he is pro-racism, but in spite of it. Is that a proper choice for a committed Catholic?
As someone who has worked with minorities all his life, I answer with a resounding yes. Despite what some say, the list of what the Catholic Church calls "intrinsically evil acts" does not begin and end with racism. In fact, there are many intrinsically evil acts, and a committed Catholic must consider all of them in deciding how to vote.
Last November, the U.S. bishops released "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship," a 30-page document that provides several examples of intrinsically evil acts: abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, torture, racism, and targeting noncombatants in acts of war.
Duke's support for racist rights has led some to the conclusion that no Catholic can vote for him. That's a mistake. While I have never swayed in my conviction that racism is an unspeakable evil, I believe that we have lost the racism battle -- permanently. A vote for Duke's opponent does not guarantee the end of racism in America. Not even close.
Wal-Mart Launches Toy Price War (MIGUEL BUSTILLO and ANN ZIMMERMAN, 10/08/08, Wall Street Journal)
Retail price wars are starting early this year, and the latest weapon is the $10 toy -- a signal that retailers are bracing for a rough-and-tumble Christmas shopping season.Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., which accounts for more than a fourth of U.S. toy sales, last week sent a clear message that it didn't plan to be undersold when it announced 10 well-known toys, including some Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels car sets, for $10.
KB Toys Inc., the nation's largest mall-based toy seller by stores, told Wal-Mart to bring it on.
The world needs the US to get over its cultural civil war - and fast (Timothy Garton Ash, 10/09/08, The Guardian)
As if there were not enough real enemies to fight, the United States has been at war with itself in recent years. They call it the culture war. It has generated more hot air than most real wars in history. John McCain has now turned to its red army tactics to rescue himself from impending defeat - and Sarah Palin is his Katyusha.
Opec members seek emergency meeting (Carola Hoyos, October 8 2008, Financial Times)
Almost half the members of the Opec oil cartel are considering an emergency meeting in Vienna next month as oil prices dropped to their lowest level in nearly a year.Almost half the members of cartel have in the past few days called on the group to act to halt the slide before their next official meeting scheduled to take place in Algeria in late December.
Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Iraq, Venezuela and Ecuador, whose economies tend to be most dependent on high oil prices and whose ministers are among the most hawkish of the 13-member group, have all lobbied for the cartel to drop output.
Palin represents ‘fatal cancer’ to GOP, conservative says (Rebecca Sinderbrand, 10/08/08, CNN)
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, who has expressed doubts about Sarah Palin’s readiness to serve as vice president, said this week the Alaska governor “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.”Brooks praised Palin’s debate performance and called her a natural political talent, but told a New York audience Monday that “experience matters”: “Do I think she’s ready to be president or vice president? No, she’s not even close to that,” he said.
“…Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas,” he also said, in remarks first reported by the Huffington Post. “But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas, but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices."
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Black Congressmen Declare Racism In Palin’s Rhetoric (Jason Horowitz, October 7, 2008, NY Observer)
[Representative Yvette] Clarke also found a racial subtext in Ms. Palin’s repeated appeals to “Joe Six-Pack” and “hockey moms.”“Who exactly is Joe Six-Pack and who are these hockey moms? That’s what I’d like to know,” she said. “Is that supposed to be terminology that is of common ground to all Americans? I don’t find that. It leaves a lot of people out.”
Peering Into the Abyss (Maria Hsia Chang, October 2008, New Oxford Review)
At the time of his death, Ledger had only recently completed his work for The Dark Knight, which was in post-production. Reportedly, the Joker role had taken a decided toll on the actor's health. For weeks, he was unable to sleep, averaging only two hours a night. He told a New York Times reporter in November 2007 that even after taking two sleeping pills, "I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going."What is less known are Ledger's film roles both before and after The Dark Knight. Before he assumed the Joker persona, Ledger was already emotionally drained from playing a heroin addict in the Australian film Candy. To make matters worse, after the Batman movie, Ledger immediately went to work on another dark-themed film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, without taking a break. The latter is a retelling of the Dr. Faust story, wherein the leader of a traveling theater troupe makes a compact with the Devil and takes audience members through a magical mirror into a fantastic universe of limitless imagination. Ledger's part was that of Tony, a "mysterious outsider" who joins the troupe.
An Oscar nominee for his portrayal of a homosexual cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, Ledger was known for his total absorption into his film roles. He told a reporter that "the only way that I can act" is to climb inside the skin of the person he was playing. To prepare for his part in Candy, Ledger had spent time with a real-life junkie in the dark, troubled milieu of Sydney's red light district. For The Dark Knight, he spent a month alone in a hotel room to work on his character and voice, perfecting an unhinged cackle that sends shivers up the audience's spine. But by immersing himself in the role of the Joker, Ledger might well have gazed too deeply into the abyss.
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." This famous but cryptic quote by Friedrich Nietzsche is understood to be a warning against too close a contact with evil. As one interpretation has it, if a person gazes too long at evil, it will become a part of him. Did Ledger fall prey to this mysterious phenomenon?
Nietzsche's adage is not our only warning about evil. Aldous Huxley opined that "No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected…. The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous." Similarly, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck cautioned that "an exclusive focus on the problem of evil is actually extremely dangerous to the soul of the investigator…. The dangers exist…for anyone who becomes preoccupied with the subject of evil. There is always the risk of contamination, one way or another. The more closely we rub shoulders with or against evil, the more likely it is that we may become evil ourselves."
Like Heath Ledger, the brilliant historian and journalist Iris Chang, who wrote The Rape of Nanking (1997), seemed to have been another moth that flew too close to the flame.
As Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, watched from a nearby stool, McCain promised to buy failing mortgages directly from homeowners and mortgage providers and replace them with government-backed fixed-rate mortgages. "Is it expensive?" McCain asked. "Yes. But we all know, my friends, until we stabilize home values in America, we're never going to start turning around and creating jobs and fixing the economy." [...] Bill Burton, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, said the idea was not a new one and noted that the Illinois senator had raised it. On Oct. 1, in a news release, Obama said he intended to "encourage Treasury to study the option of buying individual mortgages like we did successfully in the 1930s." McCain has based his presidential bid in part on frequent calls for cuts in government spending and regulation. His housing bailout proposal was a surprise in a debate that could prove a crucial pivot as the race enters its final month.Could Maverick have framed this any more ineptly? Most people watching would barely even have noticed it was new. How about starting by making a nod to Senator Obama, "who's proposed looking at this," making the proposal and ending by saying you want t introduce it to the Senate as the McCain/Obama bill on Wednesday? "No, wait, pardon me. The Obama/McCain bill..."
Whatever happened to the new age of European unity we were supposed to be entering, according to our leaders? Or, come to that, where is the all-powerful ‘Brussels Empire’ we have often been warned about by the shriller critics of Euro-bureaucracy? The financial crisis sweeping the continent has revealed that the European Union has no clothes. At the first sign of serious trouble, it has become every government for itself. Or to paraphrase an old British working-class saying, a case of ‘Blow you Jacques, I’m not all right’. First the Irish government broke Euro-ranks and unilaterally declared that it would guarantee all deposits in Irish banks, thus risking conflict with financial institutions elsewhere in the EU. That might have been dismissed as the desperate action of a small European economy trying to avoid becoming the next Iceland. But when the government of Germany, the biggest economy at the heart of the Euro-zone, effectively did the same thing it was clear that big shifts are afoot. Just the day before, German chancellor Angela Merkel had led an emergency summit call for European solidarity. Within 24 hours, in the face of mounting problems, Germany had torn up that paper agreement and gone its own way, to the horror of ‘close allies’ such as Britain. Amid the outbreak of confusion and consternation that followed, British chancellor of the exchequer Alistair Darling sought to reassure us that the German government had issued only a ‘political declaration’ of intent rather than a ‘legally binding’ guarantee for bank depositors. They had indeed, Mr Darling; it was a political declaration of the German state’s intent and determination to defend its national financial interests, regardless of what worthy EU summit statements might say. The governments of Denmark, Greece and Spain have followed suit in guaranteeing savers’ deposits, and more are expected to do so.Suppose someone told you that the Brits were surprised the Germans had stabbed them in the back?
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Architecture and Railroads: A Tribute (Paul M. Weyrich, October 7, 2008, Orthodoxy Today)
Last Sunday my son Peter and I were guests of Amtrak, the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation and others in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Union Station in Washington, D.C. The millions who use Union Station see a magnificent edifice reflecting the day when the railroads were royalty in America. President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned Union Station in 1904. In 1908 it opened. As its glorious history was discussed at the event, I could not help but think back a few decades when Union Station was close to being torn down. It was saved thanks to Secretary of Transportation (now North Carolina Senator) Elizabeth Dole.Many expected Secretary Dole, serving in the Reagan Administration, to relegate this magnificent building to the wrecking ball. In fact, General Counsel of the Senate Steering Committee Mike Hammond arranged for her to do so if she so chose. Instead she constituted the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation as an early public-private partnership. The organization restored Union Station to its previous glory. [...]
The saving of Union Station marked a major change in the public’s attitude towards the preservation of classic American architecture. How many magnificent classic buildings were torn down in the 50s, 60s and 70s to be replaced by ugly steel and glass buildings which lacked character and soul? When one thinks of railroading one thinks of the great and grand Penn Station in New York City, which was torn down to make way for the cold, ugly Madison Square Garden. Fortunately it now appears that a new Penn Station, built from the actual interior of the Old Farley Post Office Building, may come back into being after all. The Farley Post Office was similar in design to the thoughtlessly razed Penn Station building.
I don’t always agree with Great Britain’s Prince Charles, but when it comes to architecture he is spot on. He has made it clear that he believes classical architecture is a tribute to God Almighty. I could not agree more. I hesitate to suggest to whom the ugly modern buildings are a tribute.
Emergence on Global Stage Leaves Brazilians Divided: Brazil's very recent emergence on the global stage has fueled debate in the country between those advocating adaptation to international norms and those who view Brazil's real interests as conflicting with the current world order. (Maria Regina Soares de Lima, 10/08/08, Der Spiegel))
It is clearly visible that Brazil is increasingly recognized as a major player in the international arena. It is included among the "outreach five countries" along with China, India, Mexico, and South Africa, which participate in "constructive engagement" with the G-8. Engagement also seems to be the goal of the European Union, which has established strategic partnerships with countries such as South Africa, Brazil and India. It is interesting that the increased attention given to Brazil is not necessarily linked to military capacity, but rather to Brazil's ever greater importance in the global economy.This rising importance has been triggered by two major changes in the international environment. The first is economic globalization and the spread of capitalism. Many developing countries abandoned their previous economic models and took to capitalism after the end of the Cold War. As a result, many of these peripheral countries, such as Brazil, became strongly integrated into the international economy through their participation in global chains of production. This has led to a new intermediate layer of emerging economies such as the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and the Large Peripheral Countries. Some of these developing countries evolved their own forms of state-coordinated capitalism through which governments perform not only the regulatory role of the state, but also foster policies for social inclusion, and more assertive foreign policies. A consequence of this has been the questioning of the traditional models of economic growth and development. The space available for countries such as Brazil to showcase their own paths of development in the international arena has increased.
The second major change in the international environment that had a positive impact on Brazil was the demise of authoritarian governments and the successful transitions to democracy in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Latin America's position under US influence during the Cold War had been detrimental for democracy in the region. Today, Cold War-style military interventions are no longer possible. In this new context progressive governments have not only been elected but have also been able to carry out their terms.
It was in this new international context that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's government was elected to power in 2002. As Brazil has become more integrated into the global economy, its negotiating positions have gradually become more assertive -- both in the domain of trade and in the political forums of the United Nations. In the future, Brazil might benefit further from the rising importance of energy and food production in global geopolitics. It is already a large producer of bio-fuels. If the expected discovery of oil off the Brazilian coast is confirmed, Brazil will also play a major role in the production of conventional fuels. In food production, Brazil stands out not only as a competitive agricultural and mineral commodities exporter but also as an important agricultural producer. Naturally, the potential benefits of these strengths will also depend on the policies followed by the Brazilian government.
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Fed, ECB, Central Banks Lower Rates in Coordinated Reduction (Scott Lanman, 10/08/08, Bloomberg)
The Federal Reserve, European Central Bank and four other central banks lowered interest rates in an unprecedented, emergency coordinated bid to ease the economic effects of the financial crisis.The Fed cut its benchmark rate by a half point to 1.5 percent, the central bank in a statement. The ECB and central banks of the U.K., Canada, Sweden and Switzerland are also reducing rates, the Fed said in a statement.