Obama the choice for at least one
President Barack Obama may be a lot of things, but a good Catholic he is not.
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough made the odd assessment of the outgoing president last week on the podcast “The Axe Files” with former Obama adviser David Axelrod.
“I’ve said this publicly before,” he said, “I think this is our most Catholic of presidents. And I mean that by capital ‘C’ Catholic in what I see and what he does everyday.”
Now McDonough might be forgiven if he’d mixed up “Catholic,” a member of the Catholic faith, with “catholic,” a term often used for the church universal. But, no, he emphasized the capital C.
“It’s not to say that he does everything entirely consistent with Catholic teaching,” the White House official went on, embarrassing himself further. “That’s not the idea, but I think in fact his view of the person and our role and the view of us as adding to the common good is an undeniably Catholic set of premises, and that’s why I say that to him a lot.”
Unlike Catholics, Obama, not a Catholic by profession, values life neither at its start nor at its end. He is a strong supporter of abortion on demand, spoke out for partial birth abortion and signed off on a health care program that initially would have paid doctors for providing voluntary counseling to Medicare patients about end-of-life options.
That’s just for starters, of course. In truth, it’s unlikely U.S. Catholics will be in a hurry to name him their “Man of the Year.”
First lady’s revisionist Christmas story
For goodness sake, can “A Visit From St. Nicholas” not be read to school children without making it politically correct?
Apparently when first lady Michelle Obama reads it, it can’t.
She and radio and television host Ryan Seacrest took turns reading lines from the 1823 Clement Clarke Moore poem to children in a Washington, D.C., hospital last week before she came to the offending part, where it describes Santa Claus as having a “stump of pipe” “tight in his teeth.”
No, that just wouldn’t do.
“I think St. Nick gave up smoking,” the first lady broke off her recitation to add. “This was a long time back.”
“This was written way back in the day,” Seacrest added.
“Way back in the day,” Obama assured the children.
How she managed not to excoriate Santa for being “dressed all in fur” or to explain that Santa’s “little round belly” came from not eating the foods she demanded be served at great cost in the nation’s public schools we’ll never know.
Golden gates of hypocrisy
Residents of San Francisco, that West Coast bastion of liberalism and supposed tolerance, recently showed how quickly they could drop that tolerance in desiring to protect home and hearth. Indeed, residents of its Tenderloin District said nuns running a soup kitchen in their neighborhood were worthy of praise, but they didn’t want such an operation to be close to their pricey enclaves.
Rent had threatened to drive the nuns out of the district, but multimillionaire Tony Robbins bought them a $750,000 condo from which they could run their soup kitchen.
Lawyers for the area’s homeowners association indicated its residents were only tolerant to a point. The letter they filed with the city’s planning department said feeding the homeless was wonderful but the condo “is not the appropriate location.” The letter also claimed soup kitchen lines could hurt future development.
Nuns of the Sisters of the Fraternite of Notre Dame of France said they planned to attend a January meeting of the planning department and attempt to change some minds.
“I will ask them to be compassionate,” Sister Marie said. “I know it’s not so easy to live when you have a lot of encampment on the street, but we need to work together to help those.”
A different list
Baby boomers remember growing up in an era when the most popular surnames in the United States were Smith, Johnson and Williams. Well, guess what? They’re still the top three surnames in the country. But the list is changing as the U.S. becomes more diverse and endures largely unchecked illegal immigration.
Nearly one in four newborn Americans now are children of immigrants, whether legal or illegal.
Following Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown and Jones, the surname Garcia is now sixth on the list, as of the 2010 Census. Rodriguez is now ninth, Martinez 10th, Hernandez 11th, Lopez 12th and Gonzalez 13th.
In addition, the surnames with the largest increase in frequency of use between 2000 and 2010 were, in descending order, Zhang, Li, Ali, Liu, Khan, Vazquez, Wang, Huang, Lin, Singh, Chen, Bautista, Velazquez, Patel and Wu.
Not surprisingly, then, the top countries of origin for legal immigrants to the U.S. between 2010 and 2014 were China and the Philippines.