Virginia Governor – and Clinton toady – Terry McAuliffe is under FBI investigation for corruption. Appears to have at least some connection to the Clinton’s grifting con charity organization. If Hillary does manage to win, expect an endless series of corruption investigations…all to be spiked by whichever Clinton crony is installed as Attorney General.
Clinton has some policies to tackle the mythical “pay gap” – seems that implementation would likely make the problem worse (ie, create a problem where there wasn’t one before).
VA boss says we should think of VA wait times as we do waiting in line for a Disney ride. I don’t know of anyone who died waiting to get on Pirates of the Caribbean.
A Socialist apparatchik won election to the Presidency of Austria – 72% of working class voters went for the non-Socialist. Socialism was, is and always will be a mere conceit of upper class people who presume to speak for the poor and the workers when they know nothing of the lives of such people. The difference between now and 100 years ago is that working class people have caught on to the Socialist scam.
Shocking News! DOJ lawyers lied about Obama’s immigration policies. Actually shocking news! A judge called them out on it.
Charles C.W. Cooke asks our Progs: do you still like that old “pen and phone” thing now that there’s an outside chance The Donald will be the next President?
Upset with the Pope? Then here’s your tonic from Cardinal Robert Sarah:
Speaking in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, Cardinal Robert Sarah enjoined Catholics to resist “ideological colonization” and the removal of God from society, in order to help the Church resist threats to the family and religious freedom around the world…
…Protecting the family is also linked to the preservation of religious freedom, Cardinal Sarah said as he urged the Americans to protect their history of religious freedom. While many Christians across the world are suffering from violence due to persecution from governments or groups like Islamic State, “ violence against Christians is not just physical, it is also political, ideological and cultural,” the cardinal said…
Of course, the good Cardinal was appointed to his post by Francis. Do keep in mind when you read stories about the Pope that he and pretty much everyone in charge of the Church these days was appointed by Pope St. John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI.
Blogs For Victory 
“Do keep in mind when you read stories about the Pope that he and pretty much everyone in charge of the Church these days was appointed by Pope St. John Paul II or Pope Benedict XVI.”
So ?? The wimpification of the Church and its lurch to the Left started in the 60s—has there been a Pope since then who has tried to reverse these trends? Being a nice man who says nice things is not the same as being a strong leader who can turn the tide, which is what the Church has been needing. When Benedict was elected, there was a sigh of relief that the Church finally had a conservative Pope. Meh. I didn’t see any changes, at least not reversals of the spiral into Leftism. Have any clergy been disciplined for forays into hate-mongering and racism (Father Pfleger) or advocating abortion (many nuns in many protests)? There was some lip service to rooting out homosexual predators but it was pretty feeble, with no strong statement against homosexual predation. No, the Church went along with the Leftist narrative of general “pedophilia” because that did not tread on Liberal PC toes.
Today’s Church would never have the backbone to excommunicate a radical group, as it once did with the Penitentes. No matter how often you point out that many of these things are in the past, they have only faded away to some extent or been swept under a rug or just dropped off the radar, but I am not aware of a strong stance from the Church following the example of Christ when he forcibly drove the moneylenders out of the temple. If the Church chided Nancy Pelosi for advocating, advancing and trying to fund abortions, there is no indication of that, as she met with the Pope and never changed a thing about her activities, continuing to receive Communion. What good is a Pope who won’t tell someone like this she has to make a choice between her politics and her religion when her politics are antithetical to the teachings of that religion but gives her the status of an audience ?
As for bragging on “bringing more people to the Church” what does that mean when the Church is now so similar to pretty much any Protestant religion? Making the Catholic Church less Catholic so more people will feel more “comfortable” joining because it really isn’t much of a leap anyway from any other religion doesn’t seem to carry many bragging rights, to my way of thinking. The whole “Let’s dilute Catholicism so it is more like other religions” movement has made some “Catholic” services into odd hybrids, which makes conversion more of a symbolic gesture than a real commitment to a specific doctrine.
The Church Militant will return – but probably with the next Pope. But think about what has been accomplished: outside of the basic theological matters which have been firmly adhered to, there will be no female priests; there will be no retreat on abortion or birth control; there will be no accommodation with the re-definition of marriage; there will be no accommodation with the “death with dignity” horror. This is pretty good, considering that an absolute majority of all people are in favor of all these things. And there stands the Church – un-moved by modern ideas on the matter. Naturally, as a Catholic, I believe this is because the Church is the Church founded by God while he was personally present on Earth – others may dispute this notion as they wish…but I’ll merely point out that there has been zero change in the basics of Catholicism since 33 AD. Given the amount of folly and knavery we’ve seen even among those who claim to be part of the Church, it is not unreasonable to believe that the only thing which keeps it going is God’s grace.
As for disciplining – Pfleger was suspended and since then has kept a low profile, because if he did keep on as he was going, he was going to be defrocked. Now, maybe he’ll rise up again one day into his past errors, and then he’ll be done as a priest. We’ll have to see. As for the Nuns who have played fast and loose with their vows, the recent investigation of female religious orders in the United States ended with a rebuke of the orders, and a concession by the orders that they have to get in line with Catholic dogma. Meanwhile, traditionalist female religious orders are growing at a rate about 5 times faster than the older orders which got themselves mixed up with anti-Catholic ideas starting in the 60’s…and that is if one really believes the old orders are growing. Plenty of data indicates they are rapidly shrinking…and that would explain why, at the end of the day, the Church didn’t do much about the old orders because you don’t worry do much about that which is fading away. You just wait a bit and get what you want when what you want is growing by leaps and bounds and what you dislike is falling to pieces.
To be sure, the efforts of various Progressives in the Post-Vatican II era to destroy the Church was intense and had a lot of successes…but it has been turned back, and over the next 100 years the Church will be entirely revitalized and able to really get going on the task of reconverting the West to religion…and, oddly enough, it’ll probably be the host of Catholic priests and nuns coming out of Africa and Asia who lead the re-conversion.
Mark, thanks for the update on Pfleger and the rogue nuns. We never hear about any of that if we aren’t tapped into Church news.
A priest at a church I attend is from Africa and he is a wonderful priest. His passion and energy are inspiring.
One item that has pissed me off to no end is the alleged pay gap between women and men. Ever since my second job, at age 14, I have “negotiated” my pay for the position. Never have I once again wondered in and just accepted what was offered and in particular if the demands of the position outweighed what was advertised. The offer was a starting point.
If people are too stupid to understand the market then they shall reap what they are advertised. I do not even settle on “sale” prices in stores. For example, I look at items as “How much will you discount it to take it off your inventory?” rather than “Oh. Good deal.”
If these are professional women which includes everyone from fast food to the ivory towers – lack of negotiation skills is to blame and not some inherit pay diversity. Now, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is (according to well vetted sources) paying almost 40% less to women than men. Let’s start there and ask her why.
From a Wikipedia entry:
The European Commission defines the gender pay gap as the average difference between men’s and women’s aggregate hourly earnings. The wage gap is due to a variety of causes, such as differences in education choices, differences in preferred job and industry, differences in the types of positions held by men and women, differences in the type of jobs men typically go into as opposed to women (especially highly paid high risk jobs), differences in amount of work experience, difference in length of the work week, and breaks in employment. These factors resolve 60% to 75% of the pay gap, depending on the source. Various explanations for the remaining 25% to 40% have been suggested, including women’s lower willingness and ability to negotiate salaries or else due to discrimination. According to the European Commission direct discrimination only explains a small part of gender wage differences.
In the United States, the average female’s unadjusted annual salary has been cited as 78% of that of the average male.[6] However, multiple studies from OECD, AAUW, and the US Department of Labor have found that pay rates between males and females varied by 5-6.6% or, females earning 94 cents to every dollar earned by their male counterparts, when wages were adjusted to different individual choices made by male and female workers in college major, occupation, working hours, and maternal leave. The remaining 6% of the gap has been speculated to originate from deficiency in salary negotiating skills and sexual discrimination.”
It sums up most of what I was going to say. When I looked up wage disparity, the articles complaining about this “pay gap” lumped all professions and job categories together, which I think gives a very slanted view.
A woman with a high school education is a lot more limited than a man with the same educational background, if she has traditional views on what kind of work she wants to do. She, for example, is more likely to work in child care or lower levels of health care, while a young man is more likely to get a CDL and drive a truck, or learn to weld, or just do general roughneck work on an oil rig. In most cases the pay disparity is based on the work, not on the gender of the worker. Women truck drivers get paid the same as men, but women are not usually interested in jobs that require a lot of physical strength, so don’t become welders or work in the oil patch.
A lot of high paying jobs just don’t appeal to women. I once had a car salesman tell me that he made all his kids go to college, and if he had it to do over again he would send them to trade school—the top mechanic in his dealership made close to $150,000 a year and got job offers every week from rival dealerships. Our top heavy equipment operators make about $150,000 a year but in good weather they put in 15 hour days, they work in grueling heat or miserable cold, and it is hard work and can be dangerous. They also put in a lot of years to acquire the skills to get them to that level.
Now that more women are going into tech jobs, I think this “gender gap” will shrink, but we do have to deal with the fact that so many girls are attracted to the soft majors like psychology, and then there are all the people in colleges now majoring in those ridiculous “studies” courses, where they rack up huge student loan debt learning questionable history about how mean (blank) has historically been to (blank) and therefore angst and resentment and rage and a deep sense of victimhood are called for—none of which translates into job skills.
Negotiation is fine, but you have to have a position to negotiate from. You have to have a skill set the employer needs enough to be willing to negotiate with you to get you to take the job. i think the data show that in most jobs, women and men get paid very close to the same amount, within each job category—doctor, truck driver, teacher, etc. I think the difference is based on which job categories are occupied by which genders.
Okay, here I have to agree with you; however, it was more a matter of getting the LSM to report on facts rather than perception which I guess will never happen. For once I would like them to report, with their usual diligence against Republicans, that the Clinton foundation pays it’s female executives 38% less than men but somehow she is the champion for women. Just as an example.