The Hound Of Ulster

Ramirez is off the TABLE.

The Chicago Cubs on Sunday announced that the club has agreed to a five-year deal with Aramis Ramirez that will keep the third baseman with the Cubs through the 2011 season. The contact also includes a mutual option for the 2012 season.

Perfectly fine with me. It would have been nearly impossible not to overpay for him. Now we can start paying attention to the outfield and the starting pitching, without having to worry about whether or not Ned is going to use up all his payroll on a decent - but far from star - third baseman.

I’m more disappointed about Wood. Would have liked to give him a shot, if he had been willing to take an incentive-heavy contract.

HERE is an article that deals with the Morlino “Fallout.”

The decision was not a difficult one for Frank McMahon, although he said it was one he thought he would never have to make.

As a prerecorded message from Bishop Robert Morlino began playing during Saturday’s Mass at Our Lady Queen of Peace in Madison, McMahon, 70, a lifelong Catholic, quietly but purposefully strode to an exit.

“I could have stayed in there and pretended I was soaking it up, but why be a hypocrite?” said McMahon, as he waited out the 14-minute message from Morlino by gazing at a quilt hanging in the church vestibule.

On the whole, it seems like a mostly fair piece. And it also seems to suggest that things were not too lively.

For some Catholics, Morlino had gone too far by inserting politics directly into the sanctuary and by slapping a gag order on priests. But others cheered. Finally, they said, a tough- love church leader willing to state the obvious and herd a sometimes wayward flock back into line.

Interesting that the article seems to deal almost exclusively with the marriage portion of the talk, and avoids the other issues pretty completely. Not sure if that’s because they didn’t bother people, or because the paper wasn’t interested in that angle. (HT: CAFETERIA)

This ARTICLE paints a somewhat different picture, though. And seems at least a bit more intentionally slanted.

Jim and Colleen Murphy, members of St. Mary’s Catholic Church for 11 years, said that Morlino’s warning was “primal, threatening and a little bit dictatorial.”

The couple said they both will vote on Tuesday.

“I wanted to hear what he had to say and it unfortunately reinforced that my church might be out of touch,” Murphy said.

Morlino said that anyone who causes “confusion” on the issues should have “a millstone tied around his neck and be tossed in to the sea whenever they cause another to sin.”

Murphy said that the numerous references to millstones “sounded rather capital to me.”

…

Jim said the church’s stance on gay marriage may have strayed from some of its teachings.

“They’re not very empathetic to all of God’s children,” Jim said. “There are still so many questions in and around the amendment. I don’t think people realize that it affects straight and gay people.”

Both Jim and Colleen said that they are tired of politicians using “guns, God and gay people as wedge issues to energize conservative voter turnout.”

“I think his (Morlino) Jesus and my Jesus are not the same guy,” Colleen said. “I feel uncomfortable with the church telling me how to vote. I’m getting bombarded enough on TV and I come here to be spiritually fulfilled, not given a political message.”

So much ignorance. Sometimes, I wonder if the American political spirit can every fully blend with our Catholic faith. And then I think of people like Morlino, and realize that it can. We just can’t ever expect it to be unopposed.

And this really did tick me off:

Prior to the recording, Father Jim Murphy read from Mark 12:28-34, where it states that the most important Biblical commandments are to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul… The second is this: Love thy neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”

Ironically, the specific reading was scheduled by the Catholic church, it was not chosen by Father Murphy.

Sheesh. I have enough trouble dealing with the folks that are supposed to be part of my church. Can I get away from the MSM bias for just a sec? Thank you.

Oh, and I could only find results for the marriage referendum. Wisconsin banned same-sex marriage, 59%-41%. The text of the referendum itself contains an interesting clause: “a legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized in this state.”

Also of note, Wisconsin has 72 counties. The referendum passed in 70 of those counties. Only La Crosse and Dane failed to approve it. La Crosse missed by 16 votes. Dane missed by 72,000.

Strange.

When I saw the trailer for Alfonso Cuarón’s newest FILM, I was very interested. It looked like a fascinating topic, and one that could be very timely. Unfortunately, it also looked like Cuarón was going to force it into uninteresting territory by making it a political film instead of a morality tale.

Sometime I hate being RIGHT.

Where does this bleak scenario take us? Into withering political satire on neo-con politics. Cuarón, obviously a reader of the Guardian, hasn’t been consulting Mark Steyn’s doom-laden columns in the London Telegraph about effete Europeans who have forgotten that demography is destiny. Childlessness is clearly too trivial a theme to serve as anything more than an pretext for nail-biting action and brilliant cinematography. The film’s real topic is the Iraq War, the Palestinian conflict and European attitudes towards refugees.

…

 

The novel is quite different. P.D. James does believe that childlessness is a substantial topic. There is a deep moral seriousness about her novel, which is imbued with a pessimistic, but convinced, Christianity. She certainly has a deeper sense of what life is about. For instance, Theo points out to the mother — in this case, an English dissident — that the government is at least “ensuring that the race dies with some dignity”. She responds, “Dignity? How can there be dignity if we care so little for the dignity of others?”

Cuarón’s future is grim and violent, but James’s is almost unbearably sad as she imagines how we would get on with life…She has obviously pondered the meaning of sexuality for the contraceptive mindset. “Even those men and women who would normally have no wish to breed apparently need the assurance that they could have a child if they wished,” Theo observes in his diary. “Sex totally divorced from procreation has become almost meaninglessly acrobatic.”

Cuarón is preoccupied with political oppression in a childless future, but James is shrewder. When there are no children, no one is going to give a damn about democracy. What point is there in justice if there is no future? All people want is “freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from boredom” — no one cares what happens to criminals, refugees and the demented elderly. As Theo is told by one of the Warden’s council:

Whatever man has done for good or ill has been done in the knowledge that he has been formed by history, that his lifespan is brief, uncertain, insubstantial, but that there will be a future, for the nation, for the race, for the tribe. That hope has finally gone except in the minds of fools and fanatics. Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

In other words, demography is destiny. The human race is in no danger of extinction, thank God, but these sobering words ought to be sent to politicians everywhere.

Another great idea ruined by excessive political proselytizing. But look on the bright side: at least my sci-fi film idea I’m working on still has promise. (OK, so maybe that’s only a bright side for me. But it could have been THIS, too. That deserves some “bright side” consideration, don’t you think?)