2016: Obama’s America, not for the liberal faint of heart

Dedicated libs should not be allowed to see “2016: Obama’s America,” now showing in Chi area; it would be a health risk for them, because of its blasphemous nature as they would see it, regarding their hero Obama. Others? See it, soon.

Dinesh d’Souza has put together a film that offers a fresh framework for viewing Obama — anticolonialism. A key interview is with a Kenyan writer and activist who tells d’Souza about Barack Sr.’s anticolonial feelings and convictions. Israel is “a Trojan horse” for The West in the Middle East, for instance. And Barack Jr.? He and his late father, of “Dreams” fame, are as one in their thinking. Barack Jr. is an anticolonialist in his father’s mold.

Which after an hour or so of building his framework, d’Souza illustrates, telling us what to expect in 2016 if Obama is re-elected: sharply diminished role for the U.S. in the world scene because of unilateral nuclear disarmament and because of its crippling debt, which has ballooned already and will reach five times its current level by then.

It’s an effective campaign film here. The Yorktown AMC theater audience sat quiet as mice throughout — allowing for some candy-wrapper crinkling by a young person to my right. The crowd at this 11:50 showing pretty much filled the tiered “stadium seating.” Yesterday, Sunday.  Above link gives all Chi-area showings, including AMC Showplace Galewood, just off Central north of North Ave. a few minutes drive from Oak Park.

So stay away, committed Obama-supporters; it will be too painful. But flock to it, ye Obama-objectors and -suspectors and -neutralists in the matter. Eyeful and earful awaits ye.

Oak Park hate crime not out of poverty

Image via CrunchBase All about addresses.

The black-on-white hate crime with which an Oak Park man is charged was committed in the village’s NW quadrant, its most affluent, and the offender has a NW quadrant address, Fox-Chicago reports, using a fuller, updated Sun-Times Media account that gives this info:

Alton L. Hayes III, of 1233 N. Woodbine Ave., was allegedly one of two people who attacked a man walking on the 600 block of North Kenilworth Avenue at 12:45 a.m. Tuesday.

The address is for a single family home, 2195 square feet, with 2 1/2 baths, price estimated by Zillow at $487,000. Nice digs.

The Trayvon case made him do it

Mugging of white man in our fair village:

 Alton L. Hayes III, of Oak Park, and a 15-year-old Chicagoan both black walked up behind the 19-year-old victim and pinned his arms to his side early Tuesday, police said.

Alton:

He said, Empty your pockets, white boy,” robbed him, threw him down and punched him out, he and his friend.

He was mad about the Trayvon business and took it out on the white man, he told police. It didn’t pay.

Hayes was charged with attempted robbery, aggravated battery and a hate crime, all felonies, Oak Park police Detective Cmdr. Ladon Reynolds said.

He was still in jail Friday.

Schism healed: Pius X Catholics on way back to church

Very hot news in Catholic circles: the Society of St. Pius X, broken away from the Vatican since the 2^nd  Vatican Council, is “on the verge” of reconciliation with the church.

It’s remotely comparable to the resolution and dissolution of The Great Schism of the 14^th  century, the three-pope period when disarray was the order of the day. 

Benedict XVI is making it happen.  Standing objections by the SPX people to Vatican 2′s “rupture” or disruptive aspects will remain. 

Trust me, folks, it’s like The Episcopal Church U.S.A. making room for Evangelical Christians.  Somewhat like?  Am working on that.

In Oak Park it means that the Pius X Latin mass church at Ridgeland and Washington, kitty-corner from Julian Middle School, is no longer out of bounds for venturesome Catholics. 

More to come.  more more more

Kill church, start over

At Oak Park Newspapers.

Who’s in charge church-wise? Anyone?

In a letter to the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest, The Mass belongs to the Church, not the priest, I take exception to the publisher’s taking vigorous exception to a bishop’s enforcing liturgical rules.

[Bishop Edward] Braxton [of Belleville IL] had no choice. Once apprised of the situation, he nixed the practice. What was he supposed to do, poll the congregation?  . . . .

[A] priest wants to remake the Mass, the center of Catholic worship? Braxton is supposed to say go ahead, suit yourself? If he has authority in any area, it’s in worship.

Unless you don’t like authority in the first place, or at least not in the church.

Up, up, and away scale-wise

Aggressively repositioning this stretch of Oak Park Ave.

Catholic mass: With you or your spirit?

Heard at George’s in Oak Park: Man boasting of how he and others get together during mass and in loud voice frustrate new Catholic liturgy by saying at the proper points not “And with your spirit,” as currently the rule, but “And with you also,” as it used to be.  So hostile are they to Vatican edicts, so nostalgic for the old ways.

Signe and Binky capture Oak Park

Signe Heart and Binky Stephenson, sisters, sell craft items in their Forest Park store, open since April of ’11. 

“We find the stuff at the cool and funky craft fair,” Signe told the Oak Leaves.  The store is Pretty Little Things, at 7324 Madison Street, a block or so west of Oak Park.

“Love is put into everything we put into our shop and you can feel that,” said Binky, an Oak Parker.  Prices range from $10 to $100, for “hand-knitted sweaters, hats, T-shirts with funky silk-screened designs, homemade candles and necklaces,” to quote the article.  “We’re trying to make a little money and that’s the hard part.”

They believe in recycling and using things that people may discard to create new things.

They are proud to note that all of their merchandise is made in America. [Signe] said she hopes it takes [a] child laborer off the assembly line in an overseas sweatshop.

Nothing “pre-made” is offered, nothing “from Wal-Mart,” said Signe.  “We pride ourselves in that.” 

She and Binky “inherited their way of doing things from their parents, who were hippies and raised them in an unconventional way,” says the article.

They are looking for customers who are looking for “something different, all natural, made with pride and not on an assembly line,” says the article. 

“We have to live with ourselves,” Signe said.

On Friday evenings shoppers receive free champagne.

Clean copy throughout, captures Oak Park.  I love it.

I would, of course, like to know where the child laborer works once the sweatshop job is gone.  And maybe a few other things.  Later.

Mandate rubs Catholics’ noses in it. Yuck.

Responded last week to especially provocative local-paper column about the HHS mandate, “Who controls birth control?”  But no letters in the paper this week.  Thin paper and all.  A pity, that.  Here’s my letter, which addresses some more than parochial concerns:

2/17/2012 3:54:03 PM

Editor:

Ken Trainor, my excellent editor for many months of Wednesday Journal columns, laid an egg in his Feb. 14 column about the HHS mandate, ignoring the governmental intrusion-coercion factor in favor of lambasting bishops.

In so doing, he soared over the top, even for this sometime critic.  The bishops were “beside themselves with outrage” over the mandate.  They “thundered,” calling the issue “a matter of religious liberty!”  It’s time for them “to grow up.”

Plus, he makes a bit much of the “people of God” argument, as if the Vatican Council meant to dismantle or otherwise negate the church’s entire governing structure.  Where’d he get that idea?

Basically, he wants a referendum about what’s sin and what isn’t, something not even the pace-setting reformer Martin Luther had in mind.

Failing that, he wants bishops to shut up about some things, which is apparently what the feds want also and have hefty fines in store if they don’t.  Refusal to participate has an estimated $10 million a year fine for an institution the size of Notre Dame, for instance.  Not even the bishops have that kind of power.

The whole thing is really a rubbing of Catholics’ noses in the weltanschaung, a German word for the whole damn contemporary dumb view of things.  Ken doesn’t mind, because he stepped in it and can’t get himself out.

Before I go, one of Ken’s arguments has me fascinated.  It’s this: “The hierarchy doesn’t like the U.S. government telling them what to do. The Catholic laity . . . has refused to allow the hierarchy to tell them what to do.  What works for the hierarchy, . . . works for the [laity].”  Which I find as mysterious as a papal encyclical.  Can’t a good editor do better than that?

– Jim Bowman