So it’s not just a heated atmosphere in the runup to the mid-term election? Rage is the new ’politics as usual’  in Washington politics?

That’s what Politico is saying.

Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment — in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war. Do you dive into the next fact-lite partisan outrage — or do you stay out and risk looking slow, stupid or irrelevant? No one is close to figuring it out.

I’ll take the risk, and believe that remaining fact-based, truth-oriented and civil is still relevant. Respect for dignity attracts.

Everyone does it, no one benefits from it, and it particularly demeans the office of the presidency. But the president is resorting to it with greater frequency these days.

Just a sampling of headlines, and for each one there were plenty of others not captured here.

President Obama Blasts GOP During Speech.

Obama Accuses GOP of “Lack of Faith in the American People”.

Obama Criticizes Republicans on economy.

Obama Slams GOP for Opposing DISCLOSE Act.

Obama chides Republicans on campaign finance.

And that’s just a sampling. Why this sudden assault on Republicans?

Here’s my guess. Barack Obama was brought up in his early formative years in the Saul Alinsky school of community organizing, putting to great effect Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. One of those rules was to pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. Obama has used this strategy unlike any president of memory. He has ‘named the enemy’ throughout his presidency and attacked Republicans, Sarah Palin in particular (though why the president would take on a former small-town mayor and state governor who ran for vice-president, and lost, is both questionable and telling), Fox News, the Cambridge Mass. police force, the Supreme Court (in an unprecedented criticism of that body during a State of the Union address), Arizona lawmakers, and now the Republicans again.

The attack is timed to the November mid-term elections. If the other party can be diminished, maybe they can be defeated, or at least their victories can be minimized.

This is unpresidential. Sympathizers and staffers of George W. Bush asked him why he wouldn’t go before the public and the press to confront his attackers, and he contended it was beneath the office of the presidency. Period. No more would be said. Let history judge, for better or for worse.

The president is supposed to be the leader and the servant of all the people of the republic. This one is engaging in the partisan political sniping he promised to end when he ran for office, he is not attending to the will of the people, and his poll results show that.

For the Americans struggling with issues either being unaddressed or unresolved – or even threatened – by government, the promises of the 2008 elections have faded and become the brunt of jokes. They are looking for leaders who will inspire and elevate and ennoble, and be accountable for the results. And consequential election are under 100 days away.

Every election cycle, candidates promise to end ‘politics as usual’. All we’ve seen is a shifting definition of ‘usual.’ We want change alright. And hope is building as the election gets closer.

And it may be short-lived.

This should be a momentous occasion.

As the nation marks the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act on Monday, a new survey finds that the law has not made meaningful progress in improving the quality of life for people with disabilities.

Many social and economic gaps still exist between the 54 million Americans with disabilities and those without, according to a survey conducted by the Kessler Foundation/National Organization on Disability. The report found that the disabled still lag in key areas such as employment, access to health care and socializing.

But the way things are going, it’s about to get worse.

This is beyond comprehension.  Plans are apparently afoot to gut NHS services and more strictly ration care.

And the recess appointment President Obama just made to run things like this in the States is in love with that system.

Wesley Smith, who knows this stuff better than most anyone, warns we’re heading for a meltdown.

We are at jarring odds with human rights and the protection of human dignity in this country.

For Eric Wright, 25, the ADA has been a factor for almost his entire life. He was born with cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to get to his job at the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, D.C., where he helps the agency comply with federal requirements for making the agency’s electronic and information technology accessible to the disabled.

Wright participated in individual education plans (IEPs) throughout grade school, and in college he used a note taker in classes and was given extra time on tests because it took him longer to type.

“There was never a point in my life where, if you saw me outside my home, that you wouldn’t know I had a disability,” Wright said. “But, thanks to the ADA, the people around me — including my family, teachers and employers — knew that I shouldn’t be excluded from a normal life.”

Pray that doesn’t change.

But this is ridiculous.

Deprived of the opportunity to speak to a City Council committee about its plan to hire a $30,000 state lobbyist, Darlene Heslop apparently could not contain herself. She sighed and rolled her eyes — and was promptly ejected from the June 14 meeting. Surely nobody expects the committee to conduct its business effectively if citizens are free to make facial expressions in public.

(the Chicago Tribune editors say wryly)

“Making faces behind the mayor’s back is disruptive, in my opinion,” said committee chairman Stephen Hipskind, who told Heslop to leave.

So small town council members are going after “non-verbal outbursts.” Yes, that’s what it says.

Funny thing about public meetings: They tend to expose disparate viewpoints, especially if the discussion is about something like whether it’s a smart idea for one government body to spend taxpayer dollars to lobby another government body for more taxpayer dollars.

Which is what this town council was discussing, prompting the eye-roll.

Our advice to public servants who think citizen discourse is somehow disrespectful to the democratic process: Get over yourselves. Your job is to heed those opinions, like them or not. If a pair of arched eyebrows can bring the legislative process to a halt, then it’s time to throw out the aldermen, not the citizens.

Now imagine this whole scenario writ large. Elections are just 98 days away.

This could be a many-part series under that heading….

Let’s look at what’s at stake in this particular campaign.

Catholics United aims to raise $500,000 to support congressional candidates who backed health care reform, the liberal-leaning Catholic advocacy group announced Wednesday.

It’s planning to pour money into four races in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia to start, and it hopes to widen its efforts as November’s elections approach…

The executive director of Catholics United accused “many political operatives” of “dishonesty” in their attacks on candidates they oppose.

“These groups are engaging in scare tactics and misusing the language of faith to score cheap political points and lead voters astray,” Chris Korzen said in a statement announcing the “Set the Record Straight” campaign.

Confused? Okay, let’s really set the record straight.

These Catholics are anything but united under the teachings of the Church on supporting anything that facilitates abortion, and Obamacare does that in many and assorted ways (NRLC lists and updates them, though fact check here, especially down under ‘Seeing Through the Smoke’). The name ‘Catholics United’ alone misuses the language of faith.  Not sure what they mean by the nebulous reference to “many political operatives…engaging in scare tactics…to score cheap political points,” but it would help the debate to clarify who and what they’re blaming.

This CNN item notes, correctly, how contentious this debate has been for members of the Church, complete with the key buzz phrase at core…

The health care reform debate was deeply divisive for Catholics, with some saying it would lead to government funding of abortion and others denying it. Catholic supporters of health care reform portrayed the bill as an issue of social justice.

There it is. The false dichotomy between the social justice crowd and the pro-life crowd, as if it’s an either/or proposition for faithful Catholics.

Which, speaking of language distortion, gets back to the issue of what is meant by social justice. I interviewed Fr. Robert Sirico again the other day on this issue, and he talked about the “creeping socialism” of government takeover and control of the private sector. Catholics have traditionally carried out the church’s teaching of subsidiarity and run everything from soup kitchens and shelters to hospitals and health care networks. But the “moral impulse” behind humanitarian services and civil rights movements has been co-opted by government. And he said he doesn’t see how it applies the Gospel. “Jesus is much more of a radical than the progressives are,” he told me. “He calls on us to conform our hearts and react from our hearts.”

Which means not killing the unborn under the guise of choice or reproductive health, stresses CatholicVote.org. Especially in response to the ‘Catholics United’ congressional election campaign.

This confusion benefits some “political operatives,” but others are trying to clarify it.

Look for the clarity.

The administration had the chance to redeem the institution’s hasty decision to fire a professor for doing his job. They blew it.

When the press release went out last week that the U of I had called a meeting with Prof. Kenneth Howell and his Alliance Defense Fund attorneys, supporters were hopeful that they would reconsider their irrational and knee-jerk action against a popular professor who taught Catholic studies and the rare academic discipline of critical thinking skills.

Why else would the school go to such extent?

Because Prof. Howell has such a huge following and the cause is so noble and the grievance so gaping, they had to do something. But it turns out they chose to contrive a more ridiculous defense of their actions.

In response to a lawsuit filed on behalf of a Catholic professor who was barred from teaching after he explained Catholic teaching on homosexuality to the students in a class on Catholicism, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has defended the decision by saying that the professor was not actually “fired” – he’s just not allowed to teach any more classes.

Further proving that in what was once known as the institutions of higher learning, intellectual exercises have given way to semantic gymnastics.

Enough cultural clout for the Boomers. They’ve wrought enough damage to succeeding generations.

So (sort of) says entertainment industry expert Barbara Nicolosi in a new analysis she was asked to write about the future of religions and their pastoral challenges, within her business, which is ultimately storytelling. The setup of the piece on her blog is Barb-like, and the Patheos column characteristically compelling. She and the young artists she applauds are daring “to buck the tired irony-cool cynicism that has shaped and stifled too much of the culture.” We’re changing the cultural guard, and it’s about time.

The Boomers’ exit from cultural influence creates a two-sided pastoral challenge for the 21st-century Church.

First is the effect on the gargantuan Boomer generation of a lifetime of listening almost exclusively to their own voices. The movies being created by and for the Boomers today are a very unentertaining mix of “Never regret! Life starts at 70!” and “Life is a cruel joke, ‘full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’” Movies like It’s Complicated showcase a bunch of grey hairs still acting badly, swallowing their shame, and ignoring their appropriate role as the wise mentors of the younger generations. The Dorian Greyish dark echo of this kind of story, are movies like There Will Be Blood and the chillingly titled No Country for Old Men, in which the characters’ lives of narcissism and greed devolve into cynicism and brutality.

Vicious stuff there.

But it presents an opportunity and a challenge.

As an institution charged with saving souls, the Church’s urgent outreach to fading Boomers must encourage them to face and take responsibility for the mistakes they have made. If they would be saved, the Boomer Generation must be guided into repentance for the way they self-righteously sacrificed all others as they fled from the simple heroism of adult human life. The rigid eradication of tradition, the gross materialism, the unbridled license, the embarrassing promiscuity — all always accompanied by shrill distortion and denial — have left our society disconnected, bloated, poorly educated, unable to trust, and simmering in resentment. I see many of my Millennial Generation students clamoring to set back the clock to a day before the Sixties, when there were grown-ups.

How’s that for a blast of clarity?

There’s more, much more. And it’s said, as everything said and done by Barb is, with the goal of reaching consciences and serving human dignity. Often, by startling.

History is devastatingly cyclical. The Boomers made the case that they should end their marriages and abort their children for the God Expediency. Their children, stripped of any attachment to a moral framework, will eye the old grey hairs, drooling and in diapers — but certainly still sneering — and consider expedient “Death with Dignity” to be a sensible and pragmatic policy. The Church must use all media to reach these new cultural power brokers, and to penetrate the commanding subconscious voices of their parents; she must teach them that the breakdown of the Boomers will require patience, heroism, and long-suffering.

And “the urgent need for forgiveness.” Because, as she so keenly points out, narcissism has too long trumped excellence.

Thanks for reminding us of Dostoevsky’s wisdom, Barb. We need beauty.

What a good time to recall the hard won victory of human dignity over degradation that the civil rights movement struggled for in the South and ultimately, nationwide, in the ’60’s.

And what a noble way for the new civil rights movement to show the coherence of the cause.

As the civil-rights movement was simmering in the early 1960s, black men and women, often accompanied by white sympathizers, boarded buses in the American South and sat wherever they wanted. These “freedom riders” challenged local and state laws and customs that kept the races separate on public transportation as well as in waiting rooms and restrooms.

This Friday, a new kind of freedom rider will take to the road…

‘Freedom Rides for the Unborn’. Led by Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, and Dr. Alveda King, director of PFL’s African-American Outreach, this undertaking is more than symbolic.

Linking the Freedom Rides for the Unborn to the concept and method of the 1961 Freedom Rides for civil rights was the result of a conversation Father Pavone and King had while attending a March for Life.

“This is the civil-rights movement” of this century, King concluded.

“I always see the pro-life effort and my own involvement as a striving for freedom,” said Father Pavone. “We’re talking about real people who are really enslaved, oppressed. And the whole ministry of the Gospel and priesthood is what Jesus said about his ministry: ‘I come to proclaim liberty to captives.’”

Ride on…

In the past two week, racially charged arguments and accusations have been heating up the air waves. Allegations are out there about the Tea Party movement, the New Black Panthers, the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, and certain members of the Obama administration. What’s going on here?

We’re supposed to be ‘post-racial’.

The election of Barack Obama, America’s first black president, was supposed to be a sign of our national maturity, a chance to transform the charged, stilted “national conversation” about race into a smarter and more authentic dialogue, led by a president who was also one of the nation’s subtlest thinkers and writers on the topic.
Instead, the conversation just got dumber.

And a lot angrier.

Fox News often stars a leather-clad New Black Panther, while MSNBC scours the tea party movement for racist elements, which one could probably find in any mass organization in America. Obama’s own, sole foray into the issue of race involved calling a police officer “stupid,” and regretting his own words.

Since that was written, however, Obama has at least secondarily figured into another flareup, the Shirley Sherrod fiasco.

The ex-official spoke following a whirlwind 48-hour period in which the Obama administration completely reversed its position toward Sherrod. The former Georgia director of rural development was compelled to resign Monday after a brief video surfaced showing her telling a story to an NAACP audience about how she once withheld support to a white farmer. Vilsack said he, not the White House, urged her to resign. The NAACP also initially condemned her…

The NAACP later rescinded its earlier statement and on Wednesday both Vilsack and the White House apologized, calling the incident a “teachable moment.”

Yes, it is. So what have we learned?

Now, that the facts have come to light, we have another one of those teachable moments that keep piling up without, apparently, teaching us anything.

The conservative wing of the media (on the internet, talk radio and Fox News) ran way too quickly with a story that seemed to support the narrative of reverse discrimination in the Obama administration — particularly coming on the heels of questions regarding the Justice Department’s handling of a caught-on-tape alleged voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panthers.

On the other hand…

Here’s one, for those who cringe at the very mention of the Tea Party movement…The leftist organization Think Progress has created a video allegedly demonstrating racism by Tea Party demonstration participants — except that at one of those shown was plucked from another video which clearly shows the clown being shunned by the other demonstrators.  It was a fact that didn’t seem to matter to the video’s creator — and clearly casts doubt over the validity of the overall piece.

Charges and counter-charges have been fast and furious.

If we were all to actually learn something from this incident (doubtful) it might be to slow down and think before reacting to the latest video that happens to support the narrative we have come to believe (and, therefore, are always looking to corroborate).

I happened onto a conversation Dr. Alveda King was having about the current flareup of racial allegations and the longterm civil rights cause, and she and Pastor Stephen Broden gave the best commentary and analysis on this I’ve heard. May calm heads, and hearts with honest intent, prevail.

In different states, over the past year, I’ve seen the same roadside sign on many highways touting to motorists that government stimulus funds were at work right there in the present construction or improvement project. But I never saw anyone present there at work on anything. And I wondered how much money that sign cost just to brag about government programs.

Finally, media noticed. This Chicago Tribune editorial focuses on Illinois. Multiply that many times over…

Republicans in Congress, notably Rep. Aaron Schock of Illinois, think there are better uses of the $787 billion than tributes to politicians who have done nothing more than appropriate money furnished by their long-suffering constituents.

He estimates the cost of such signs around the country at $20 million, though the Illinois Department of Transportation says it has spent about $665,000. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board says it has no idea what the actual cost is.

There’s accountability and transparency for you…

But uncertainty about the total expense does not make outlays that are inherently indefensible any more worthy.

The rationale behind the stimulus spending is that it will pump up the economy by putting money into paychecks, which will then be spent on other goods and services, creating more jobs. There is plenty of doubt whether the alleged effect is offset by the harm done by soaring deficits. But even if you accept the theory, this is hardly a sensible item.

That’s putting it mildly. These are road signs the government paid all that money for, to hoodwink the people.

The best use of the money is for things that would be worth doing regardless—such as repairing and upgrading roads. That way, citizens get something valuable even if the stimulating effect never shows up.

Unnecessary road signs, by contrast, have no lasting or even temporary value.

Except as evidence, seen daily by countless Americans, that our government is wasting our money.