RCIA 10/21/2008

As some of you may or may not know, I am currently sponsoring my friend during his RCIA. Today the topic of the session was the procession/order of mass. When the priest got through his whole spiel, I figured it would be a good time for me to ask a nagging question I had about this particular church. This church has their tabernacle located in a side room at the back of the church. As most Catholics know, the tabernacle is customarily placed in the front of the church, primarily behind the center of the altar.

So I asked him why the tabernacle in his church was not on the alter. The following is pretty much exactly what he said. He launched into his explanation that prior to the middle ages there was no such thing as a tabernacle. Instead the church would receive their hosts/communion prior to mass and then use it all during the mass. Apparently during the Enlightenment (or something) less people were able to receive communion because they were in states of sin. But they figured that if they couldnt receive the Eucharist they wanted to at least see its presence. So they placed the host in the center of the altar and this is where Eucharistic adoration originates (and the concept of a tabernacle which is where the host was kept).

Well, Vatican II came around and the counsel evidently wanted to go back to the way things were originally. [Which makes no sense to me because Vatican II seems to be a time when we broke from many of our traditions.] So they wanted to do away with the tabernacle. But that was considered controversial because people had grown accustomed to Eucharistic adoration, so the idea was to compromise....remove the tabernacle from the altar and have a separate chapel devoted to Eucharistic adoration. [Which is what this church has opted to do.]

The priest then said it's still a topic for discussion. Recently his parish was host to a local archbishop. The archbishop asked the priest where was the tabernacle and the priest pointed to the back. The archbishop then shook his head and said that the tabernacle should be in the center of the altar. The priest then said it would cost alot of money to make that renovation, which is what is primarily holding them back from doing so.

He then went on to talk about restructuring of churches, which seems to be common in many churches nowadays. He said many churches are going in favor of moving the altar directly in the center of the church since the sacrifice and Word are central themes. They are also in favor of making larger baptismal fonts which you should be able to hear the water flowing in. He thought his church, if they remodeled, would move in that direction and that the tabernacle would go on the altar then. I asked if this model would be similar to the renovation of the Cathedral in Milwaukee. He said yeah but that a better example would be the new Cathedral in Los Angeles. (Don't know what that looks like.)

Milwaukee Pre-Renovation










Milwaukee Post-Renovation

My Take on the Economic Problem

This week's events have caused mass panic concerning the economy. Lehman Brothers going under, AIG needing the government to bail them out, and Bank of America's purchase of Merrill Lynch have made this week quite tumultous. How can our economic situation have gotten so far out of hand? Where was the congressional regulatoin? How can the current president be forced to shoulder most of the blame? Was he secretly a CEO of one of the said companies? Frankly I don't know anything about economics, but I believe there are several factors that are responsible for our weakened economy...

• The election. I read in several places that over 1 BILLION dollars will be spent on this election. Are you kidding me? One billion dollars. That certainly seems like a large amount to spend campaigning, especially when you consider that we're going to be doing it all over again four years from now. The 1 billion dollars that has been going into the election is one billion dollars that ISN'T going into the economy. One billion dollars. We're not going to see any return on this. Why is it neccessary to spend so much money ever four years. It's no wonder our economy is in the shitter.
• Offshore drilling. It would bring tons of new jobs and money into our economy. You better believe we sell the oil to Europe at competing prices with the middle east. First, anyone else find it interesting that the senate waited until a crisis before finally approving an offshore drilling plan? Our congress is like a freaking ant, it just plods along passively until someone puts an obstacle in its way, then it changes direction. They need to be more proactive. Now about the offshore drilling plan. What a sham that is. (Perhaps this is why they waited for crisis, so that they hope it gets lost in the news, which it pretty much has.) The plan is going to produce no oil at all from the intercontinental shelf. It stipulates that drilling can only take place 50 miles off the coast. Interestingly, there are an estimated 18 billion barrels of oil located between 10-50 miles offshore. Second, a state must agree to have oil drilled off its shore. However since there are no financial incentives or royalties for the state to agree to this, no one will be drilling oil. Florida is also supposed to be off limits until 2022. Basically, while offshore drilling should really stimulate the economy, it will have no effect other than to continue our dependence on foreign oil, since this basically prevents us from drilling. Anyone willing to bet some of the current senate majority are in bed with the oil companies? If I'm president Bush I veto this bill and tell congress to come up with something that will actually work.
• Dependency on foreign entities to purchase our debt. In our current financial state no one would be willing to purchase our debt. This will have very bad effects on our economy.
• Irresponsible spending by Americans. Spending money on things outside their means (I am also slightly guilty of this). There are many Americans who pile up credit on purpose, never pay it off, then file bankruptcy. This practice should be illegal and prosecuted. It is a dishonest act and results in people who spend their money responsibly being punished. We buy too many things on a whim in this country. And so much of what we buy are things that we don't actually need.
• In the 1990's Clinton passed the Community Reclamation Act, which resulted in lowering lending standards so that more people could buy houses. This perhaps is the birth of the whole crisis. Clinton was the quintessential "live it up now because it's going to get worse later" president.

To put this mess solely on the president is unfair. We have caused alot of our own pain. It is time to stop bitching, get our heads out of our asses, and unite to fix this problem. It is fixable. As John McCain says, the fundamentals of our economy are strong.

ODE TO TAN TOM

Now this is a story all about how

Tan Tom's life got turned upside down

So I'd like to take a minute just sittin right there

I'll tell you how he became the coach of a team not to be feared.

In Milwaukee Wisconsin hired and praised

Coachin the Warriors is where he spent most of his days

Chillin out maxin and relaxin all cool

And while coachin some kids at Al Mcguire's school.

When a couple of guys who were up to no good

Showed up wearing IU sweaters in his neighborhood

He got one little memo and as you can tell

Was lured from paradise straight into hell.

He whistled for a limo and when it came near

The liscense plate said "Indiana"

And had a Psi on the mirror

If anything he can say that this limo was grand

But he thought nah forget it, yo home to hoosierland.

He pulled into Bloomington hailed as a savior

And yelled to the limo driver "Yo homie text ya later"

Looked at the cornfields and was finally there

To coach "Its INdiana...It's Indiana" to further dispair.

Wrote this back in April the second Friday after Crean ditched MU for IU. Wrote it in about 10 minutes.

Obama's actions do not support his statements

Obama only talks good game on gender pay equity
DEROY MURDOCK

"Now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day's work," Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said Aug. 28 in his convention acceptance speech. He told the crowd in Denver: "I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons."

Obama's campaign website is even more specific. Under the heading "Fighting for Pay Equity," the women's issues page laments that, "Despite decades of progress, women still make only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. A recent study estimates it will take another 47 years for women to close the wage gap with men at Fortune 500 corporate offices. Barack Obama believes the government needs to take steps to better enforce the Equal Pay Act..."

Obama's commitment to federally mandated pay equity stretches from the Rockies to Wall Street and beyond. And yet it seems to have eluded his Senate office. Compensation figures for his legislative staff reveal that Obama pays women just 83 cents for every dollar his men make.

A watchdog group called LegiStorm posts online the salaries for Capitol Hill staffers. "We have no political affiliations and no political purpose except to make the workings of Congress as transparent as possible," its website explains. Parsing LegiStorm's official data, gleaned from the Secretary of the Senate, offers a fascinating glimpse at pay equity in the World's Greatest Deliberative Body.

The most recent statistics are for the half-year from Oct. 1, 2007 to March 31, 2008, excluding interns and focusing on full-time personnel. For someone who worked only until, say, last Feb. 29, extrapolating up to six months' service simplifies this analysis. Doubling these half-year figures illustrates how a year's worth of Senate employees' paychecks should look.

Based on these calculations, Obama's 28 male staffers divided among themselves total payroll expenditures of $1,523,120. Thus, Obama's average male employee earned $54,397.

Obama's 30 female employees split $1,354,580 among themselves, or $45,152, on average.

Why this disparity? One reason may be the under-representation of women in Obama's highest-compensated ranks. Among Obama's five best-paid advisors, only one was a woman. Among his top 20, seven were women.

Again, on average, Obama's female staffers earn just 83 cents for every dollar his male staffers make. This figure certainly exceeds the 77-cent threshold that Obama's campaign website condemns. However, 83 cents do not equal $1. In spite of this 17-cent gap between Obama's rhetoric and reality, he chose to chide GOP presidential contender John McCain on this issue.

Obama responded Aug. 31 to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's Republican vice-presidential nomination. Palin "seems like a very engaging person," Obama told voters in Toledo, Ohio. "But I've got to say, she's opposed -- like John McCain is -- to equal pay for equal work. That doesn't make much sense to me."

Obama's criticism notwithstanding, McCain's payment patterns are the stuff of feminist dreams.

McCain's 17 male staffers split $916,914, thus averaging $53,936. His 25 female employees divided $1,396,958 and averaged $55,878.

On average, according to these data, women in John McCain's office make $1.04 for every dollar a man makes. In fact, all other things being equal, a typical female staffer could earn 21 cents more per dollar paid to her male counterpart -- while adding $10,726 to her annual income -- by leaving Barack Obama's office and going to work for John McCain.

How could this be?

One explanation could be that women compose a majority of McCain's highest-paid aides. Among his top-five best-compensated staffers, three are women. Of his 20-highest-salaried employees, 13 are women. The Republican presidential nominee relies on women -- much more than men -- for advice at the highest, and thus, best-paid levels.

If anyone on McCain's Senate staff is unhappy, McCain's male staffers might complain they seem to get a slightly raw deal.

In short, these statistics suggest that John McCain is more than fair with his female employees, while Barack Obama -- at the expense of the women who work for him -- quietly perpetuates the very same pay-equity divide that he loudly denounces. Of all people, the Democratic standard bearer should understand that equal pay begins at home.


http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/378772_murdockonline12.html

Obama = Fidel

In Rememberence of the Unnessecary Loss of Innocent Americans who Perished as the Result of Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001

I write this of course deeply troubled by the fact that their deaths are used to advance the political agenda of politicians on both sides. What happened on September 11, 2001 should never be forgotten by Americans, however, it should not be drawn into politics. Every politician, I'm sure, showed Patriotism on that fateful day either by their actions, words, or among family members. This event is the Pearl Harbor of our time, except perhaps more frightening now because we still haven't tracked down the man who orchestrated this attack. Pearl Harbor drew Americans into WWII for about 4 years. It's now 7 years since the twin towers, pentagon, and hillside in Pennsylvania were taken out by hijacked airplanes containing hundreds of terrified passengers, yet the "war on terror" still lingers. 9/11 has not been lost on us. It certainly is not lost on me.

Every year on this day I am a college freshman again. The events of that day replay in my mind, from the way I heard the news to what I did before I went to bed. The shock of the towers crashing into the earth is reborn every year. The disbelief that the towers no longer exist still hits me hard. The first time I saw the skyline without those monuments, a tribute to the nineteenth/twentieth century working class Americans who erected them, I bit my lip hard to hold back tears. In their place is a hole in the ground where many Americans died against their will that Tuesday (I'm pretty sure it was a Tuesday).

Anyway September 11, 2001 began rather ubruptly. It was one of two days in a week that I didn't have 8am class, so I was taking full advantage of it. The sound of the telephone cut through my dream and since I was on the bottom bunk I had to answer it. I must say that I answered the phone rather rudely (I regret that to this day). It was my roommate's mom, so I woke her up and handed the phone to her. Then I crawled back into bed and tried to go back to sleep. The only thing I recall from my roommate's end of the conversation was her saying "Oh my God!" She then jumped off the top bunk and turned on the television. I got rather annoyed, thinking she had turned on something like Oprah, but when I glanced at the television I saw one of the towers had smoke coming out of it. I sat up in my bed and watched in stunned silence as the newscaster described what had happened.

Moments later the second tower was hit and I saw it live. My roommate and I were speechless. We didn't know whether to believe it was real or not. But it was. We kept our eyes glued to the moniter, watching the replays over and over. The broadcast cut to the pentagon in DC saying it too was under attack. We were getting scared. My roommate was from Chicago so we were both praying nothing would happen there. The news then cut back to the WTC and we watched as one building collapsed and soon later the other one too. We didn't leave our room until 11am. I had to go to class, which of course ended up being cancelled. I walked back to my residence hall, considered going to lunch but was not hungry so I went back to my room. I lived on the top floor of my residence hall and I remember watching people gather in the "mall" for a prayer session. I watched from my room (I could hear it all) and I took a picture of the crowd...the most people I have ever seen in the AMU mall ever. Later that evening MU held a mass, which I attended with some of my friends.

The resolve that Americans have shown since that day has been amazing. I am proud of the way our country responded to the attack and I was proud of how we all bonded together and put aside our partisan bickering. I am proud to be an American.

We will never forget those who lost their lives on that day, or those who became ill from the clean up. God bless you.

Obama Plagarizes...........from a cartoon?!?!?!

While campaigning in Terre Haute, Indiana last Friday, Obama said the following: "John McCain says he’s about change, too. And so, I guess his whole angle is, ‘Watch out, George Bush. Except for economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, foreign policy and Karl Rove-style politics … we’re really gonna shake things up in Washington." Coincidentally, he stole this quote (without attribution) from a Washington Post Cartoonist. Read the full story here: http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/10/obama-repeatedly-quotes-cartoonist-while-on-campaign-trail/

Here is the cartoon in question:

Interestingly enough, this is not the only cartoon Obama has plagarized from. Bob the Builder anyone??

Yes we can plagarize from children's cartoons! And the political cartoonists provide even better campaign material. Now thats change you can believe in. Oh yes you can.