- Filmmaker Michael Moore insists that corporations are evil and claims he doesn’t invest in the stock market due to moral principle. But Moore’s IRS forms, viewed by Schweizer, show that over the past five years he has owned shares in such corporate giants as Halliburton, Merck, Pfizer, Sunoco, Tenet Healthcare, Ford, General Electric and McDonald’s.
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Staunch union supporter Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) has received the Cesar Chavez Award from the United Farmworkers Union. But the $25 million Northern California vineyard she and her husband own is a non-union shop.
The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Pelosi has received more money from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union than any other member of Congress in recent election cycles.
But the Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive hotel in Rutherford, Calif. It has more than 250 employees. But none of them are in a union, according to Schweizer, author of “The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty” and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other periodicals.
The Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti, which has 900 employees. The chain is – that’s right, a non-union shop.
Assisting suicides is bad law, policy
Discovery Institute Wesley J. Smith
Sacramento is considering creating an Oregon-style system to end lives
Advocates of assisted suicide label hastened death a “compassionate choice.” But such gooey euphemisms seek to hide the harsh truth: Assisted suicide isn’t about caring: It is about the intentional ending of human life – an act barred by the Hippocratic Oath for more than 2000 years.
We are told that assisted suicide would be restricted to cases of unbearable suffering. Yet, legislation in California to legalize assisted suicide – AB651 by Assemblywoman Patty Berg, D-Eureka – contains no such requirement. Nor does the law in Oregon, where doctors who assist suicides report that most patients do not seek death because of pain, but because they can no longer engage in enjoyable activities, fear losing dignity or are worried about becoming burdens.
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U.S. Methodist panel orders gay minister defrocked
By Michael Conlon
Mon Oct 31,11:26 AM ET
The United Methodist Church’s top court has ordered a lesbian minister defrocked, overturning a lower panel’s ruling that had reversed the penalty, the church announced on Monday.
Elizabeth Stroud “was accorded all fair and due process rights” and an appeals committee that reversed her removal from the ministry in April erred in saying church officials had failed to define what a “practicing homosexual” was in terms of church law, the ruling said.
The decision by the nine-member Judicial Council is final. A church spokeswoman said Stroud could ask the panel to reconsider, but the quest would be heard by the same panel, and only two members dissented.
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Abp. Demetrios condemns hostile demonstrations against our Ecumenical Patriarch
NEW YORK – Archbishop Demetrios of America has expressed his deepest sorrow and his strong and unequivocal condemnation for the most recent hostile demonstrations and threats against the holy center of world Orthodoxy, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, in Istanbul, Turkey.
This latest assault took place last Thursday, October 28, when groups of Turkish nationalists and other extreme elements demonstrated in Phanar against the Ecumenical Patriarchate chanting slogans such as “one night we’ll come to the Phanar,” “go away Patriarch,” “Patriarch don’t test our patience,” “take the Patriarchate and go to Greece,” and the like. Before police intervened, the angry demonstrators reached the entrance to the Patriarchal compound, and placed a black wreath in front of the gate.
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Back from Wilma’s wrath — sort of
Wilma unleashed its fury Monday night cutting a swath through southern Florida leaving a considerable amount of damage in its wake. Naples got hit hard, particularly downtown as well as points south. The forecasts were relatively accurate and most people were prepared before it arrived. The winds blew all night long and well into the next day. They started abating around noon. Then the temperature dropped (a gift given that all the power was out; after Charlie we sweltered for days), and the sky cleared. No rains.
I sustained little damage on my house, mostly because it was built after Andrew hit Florida causing a massive revamp in building codes. Trees are uprooted all over the place but by today all roads are clear except in the hardest hit areas. Stop lights were ripped from their posts but everyone is a bit more civilized in the hardship and traffic moved smoothly overall. Some of the major intersections still have police officers but other areas are already fixed. Power is being restored except in the hardest hit areas (mine came back this morning), but phone service except for cell phones is still down in many areas. (I’m writing this at a coffee and sandwich place with free wi-fi.)
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Euthanasia in the Big Easy
Townhall.com Charles Colson
It turns out that many of the most horrific stories we heard about New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina weren’t true. But there’s one nightmarish story that may turn out to be an exception—a story that should cause anyone who plans on growing old to lose some sleep.
Following Katrina, stories began to circulate about the goings on at Memorial Hospital. These stories depicted an overwhelmed and increasingly desperate staff repeatedly discussing the unthinkable: “euthanizing patients they thought might not survive the ordeal.”
Fran Butler, a nurse manager at Memorial, told CNN that her “nurses wanted to know what was the plan.” Were they supposed to put people out of their misery? Dr. Bryant King has told authorities about similar discussions among doctors, adding that he thinks that the matter went beyond mere talk.
Breaking News: 10,000 Lay Violent Siege To Coptic Church
U.S. Copts Association
Web site: www.copts.com
Email: copts@copts.com
Alexandria, Egypt (10/21/05)—Over 10,000 Egyptian Muslim protestors and Egyptian police on Friday, October 21, 2005 surrounded the Mari Girgis (St. George) Coptic Orthodox Church in Muharram Bey street, Alexandria. The violent protestors were incited by October media reports alleging a church play ad “offended Islam.”
According to reports from U.S. Copts informants at the St. George Church, since 12:00 PM CMT over 10,000 Muslim protestors have flooded the streets outside the building, trapping inside the church three priests and 70-100 Coptic youth. The protestors, armed with Molotov cocktails and other weapons, brandished copies of the Qur’an and demanded that St. George priest Father Antonious convert to Islam.
Officials deployed approximately 1,000 soldiers from the Egyptian army and seventy armored vehicles to help subdue the mob. Soldiers released tear gas and fired live bullets to disperse the thousands chanting in the streets.
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Miers Remorse: Conservatives are right to be skeptical
Wall Street Journal John Fund Monday, October 10, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
I have changed my mind about Harriet Miers. Last Thursday, I wrote in OpinionJournal’s Political Diary that “while skepticism of Ms. Miers is justified, the time is fast approaching when such expressions should be muted until the Senate hearings begin. At that point, Ms. Miers will finally be able to speak for herself.”
But that was before I interviewed more than a dozen of her friends and colleagues along with political players in Texas. I came away convinced that questions about Ms. Miers should be raised now–and loudly–because she has spent her entire life avoiding giving a clear picture of herself. “She is unrevealing to the point that it’s an obsession,” says one of her close colleagues at her law firm.
White House aides who have worked with her for five years report she zealously advocated the president’s views, but never gave any hint of her own. Indeed, when the Dallas Morning News once asked Ms. Miers to finish the sentence, “Behind my back, people say . . .,” she responded, “. . . they can’t figure me out.”
Religion and the Court
Wall Street Journal October 11, 2005; Page A16
The world will learn a lot more about Harriet Miers in coming weeks, so we’re not going to join the pack already chasing her back to Texas. But one strategy that the White House would be wise to drop is its not-too-subtle promotion of both her religion and her personal views on abortion.
In case you haven’t heard, Ms. Miers is an evangelical Christian who is personally opposed to abortion. A main White House talking point is that she fought to reverse the American Bar Association’s position supporting abortion rights. We are supposed to believe — wink, wink — that this means Ms. Miers is a judicial conservative who would oppose the likes of Roe v. Wade. The National Right to Life Committee has already endorsed Ms. Miers. And James Dobson of Focus on the Family has endorsed her because, he says, “I know the individual who brought her to the Lord” and because “I do know things that I am not prepared to talk about here [on TV].”
We’ll concede that Mr. Dobson’s sources upstairs are better than ours. But whatever he knows, if it concerns Ms. Miers’s religion it doesn’t tell us anything about how she’ll rule on the Supreme Court. Allow us to recall the case of Anthony Kennedy.
Wesly Smith blog: Assisted Suicide: A Policy of Privilege
I have been reading stories about the oral arguments in the Supreme Court yesterday in Gonzales v. Oregon. It is often said that predictions cannot be made based on oral arguments. Bunk. In every appellate case in which I have been involved or observed, it was easy to discern at least the general state of play. And from what I have read, it looks like a closely divided court. Indeed, the swing vote may be Justice O’Conner or her replacement.
Justice Ginsberg’s response to the truth that non controlled substances could be used in assisted suicide thereby permitting Oregon’s law to continue on got me thinking about something. She responded that these other methods might not be so gentle. Whether true or untrue, that becomes a policy decision, not a judicial one.
Ginsberg is an elite member of the elite, as are most members of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. This is why, particularly with social or cultural issues, the courts so often reflect the cultural values of the upper strata. (Again, this is a general statement, not an all-inclusive one).
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