Captain Yips Secret Journal

250 Above the Fold

The same World's Greatest Newspaper that gleefully, almost hysterically endorsed Barry Goldwater in 1964, has now endorsed Barry O for president in a mash note of an editorial.  No big surprise here:  the Trib has been salivating at the idea of an Obama presidency since, O, about the day after his election to the Senate, and it played a role in the destruction of Obama's only credible Republican challenger. The Trib very nearly lost me as a subscriber then - not because I thought Jack Ryan should get a pass on anything, but because the Trib's indulgence in cheap shot politics was disgusting.  As it turned out, media action back then allowed Obama to coast into the Senate without any inspection of his beliefs and principles at all.  A full  campaign versus Ryan -the anti abortion, fiscal conservative that Ryan is - would have at least provided some light on whatever it is that Obama actually believes.  He was spared that, as he's been spared it so far. 

This election reminds me more and more of the 1945 election in Great Britain.  'Course, the US isn't an elective dictatorship.  It may be that the greatest potential damage from an Obama victory would be to pro-life efforts.  A President Obama would probably get at least one and maybe two nominations to the Supreme Court, putting an indefinite halt to the slow reshaping of the Court.

The title of this post?  Since the Trib's redesign a couple of weeks ago, that's the approximate number of words found above the fold on page one.  That number includes Chicago, Tribune, the date, and the new slogan, "The Midwest's Largest Reporting Staff."  We now get an advertisement on page one.  Maybe not for much longer, for me.

ACT Update

 A while back, I mentioned difficulties with the ACT folks about the Offspring Unit's need for additional time on the test - more like time x 1.25 than time-and-a-half, but that's neither here nor there.  After getting several reams of documentation, the ACT folks caved.  It seems that they've revised how such needs are documented, and who within ACT makes the decision, and we were caught in the gears.  I still advise getting the documentation together early, picking the test date well in advance, and working through local schools if possible.  It seems that the ACT grants accommodation only for a particular test date, not for a block of time as does the College Board (the SAT folks).  Very confusing.

Cruelty

There's a cruelty to the theology that dominates the Episcopal Organization.  Not only can you not change, but you also cannot be forgiven.  The case in point, of course, is the EO's latest tearfest over slavery, 145 years after the Emancipation Proclamations.  There's no forgiveness, and no transformation.  The EO wallows in the mire, bemoaning its sins and unaware of forgiveness.  Pathetic.

Such tearfests are also deeply ignorant.  Please forgive some minor family history, but it is relevant.  My great-great grandfather, a second generation American who was a shopkeeper in Philadelphia, organized and partially paid for a rifle company at the outset of the Civil War.  Like a lot of these volunteer groups, they drilled for a while, elected their own officers, did some marching around with the Union Army, and then were sent home before they could do the Union any serious harm.  G-G-Grandad was 40, with a wife and a bunch of small kids at home.  He didn't need to do this.  He went on to serve for years as vestryman and warden of a parish in Philadelphia, and his daughter, my great grandmother, is the source of my family's Anglicanism.  She married into a fiercely abolitionist family who moved from upstate New York to Illinois partly to get at the rich farmland, and partly to guarantee that Illinois would come into the Union a free state.  Downstate cousins who farmed along the Illinois river seem to have kept an Underground Railway station:  other cousins died at Gettysburg and Andersonville.  There's nothing really special about this history:  it's typical, not unusual.  They did what they could for the sake of freedom.  The EO's relentless focus on a sliver of its history amounts to deception.  It cultivates a desire to look back, to remain fixed in sin, rather than not looking back, and moving ahead in God's love.