Michael Austin

This was a very awesome gesture by Michael Kay. Baseball, man.

@baseballcrank Which I believe was the D's intention. They wanted Trump because they thought they could beat him.

LOL. The conviction had no effect because the effect was baked in by the indictments. It was the indictments that marked the large, dramatic, immediately visible pivot towards Trump in the primary. DeSantis never recovered the position relative to Trump that he held on the eve of the Bragg indictment.

Every parish in the Diocese of Lincoln tithes to support Catholic education. That generosity translates into roughly $5,000 per student — a scholarship, in effect, that each parish extends to every child enrolled in our schools. The true cost of educating a child at the elementary level runs about $7,000 per year. Without the parish subsidy, families would bear that full cost. Your tithing is what helps make a Catholic education possible for so many students, and what a gift it is to give the gift of a Catholic education! Our Catholic schools remain among the most accessible in the country because our parishes understand that education is a work of the whole Church, not just of individual families. I am deeply grateful for that generosity, and I pray it will continue for generations to come. See how your tithing can impact your local school. This is just one example from St. Michael Catholic Church & School in Lincoln: youtube.com/watch?v=Zv_AS0…

@RepLaLota I may be wrong, but isn't this because Catholics are buried in a Catholic cemetery?

Nearly 1 in 5 of our nation’s Veterans are Catholic. And while atheists, humanists, and nearly 100 other belief systems can choose their symbol on a VA cemetery headstone, Catholics still cannot choose a crucifix as their emblem of belief. That is why I am advocating that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs add the crucifix as an eligible emblem at our national cemeteries. Their faith deserves to be represented, and I will keep fighting until it is.

@pyradius @jasonc_nc After @jasonc_nc solves fire trucks and building fire codes he’ll have time to move on to solving market-distorting farm subsidies

Crazy story out of Qatar: A British couple honeymooned in Doha, where the wife was harassed at the Ritz-Carlton pool by two men who told her she'd "fall in love" after he slept with her. The hotel gaslit her, with management denying the CCTV backed her story despite their own WhatsApp messages saying the opposite. Her husband posted a TripAdvisor review calling the hotel "unsafe for women." The hotel got it pulled, then a hotel employee filed a defamation complaint against him under Qatar's cybercrime laws. Nearly a year later, when he returned to Qatar for work, he was detained, informed he'd been tried in absentia and fined, and then held for four nights in a deportation centre. The deportation order lasts five years, which severely hurts his career as a Middle East healthcare consultant. In other words, Marriott International, an American company, used Qatari law to silence a complaint about a woman being sexually harassed at their property.

There is a way past the absurd and deeply divisive “war” between the President and the Pope, which has been enthusiastically ginned up by the press. And it is indicated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2309 to be precise. After laying out the various criteria for determining a just war—proportionality, last resort, declaration by a competent authority, reasonable hope of success, etc.—the Catechism points out that “the evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.” The assumption is that the just war principles function, to use the technical term, as heuristic devices, designed to guide the practical decision-making of those civil authorities who have to adjudicate matters of war and peace. The role of the Church, therefore, is to call for peace and to urge that any conflict be strictly circumscribed by the moral constraints of the just war criteria. But it is not the role of the Church to evaluate whether a particular war is just or unjust. That appraisal belongs to the civil authorities, who, one presumes, have requisite knowledge of conditions on the ground. So, is the war in question truly the last resort? Is there really a balance between the good to be attained and the destruction caused by the war? Are combatants and non-combatants being properly distinguished in the waging of the conflict? Do the belligerents have right intention? Is there a reasonable hope of success? The posing of those questions—indeed the insistence upon their moral relevance—belongs rightly to the Church, but the answering of them belongs to the civil authorities. The Pope has said, on numerous occasions, that he is not a politician and that his role is not the determination of any nation's foreign policy. But he has just as clearly said that he will continue to speak for peace and for moral constraint. In making both of these claims, he is operating perfectly within the framework of paragraph 2309 of the Catechism. If we understand that the Pope and the President have qualitatively different roles to play in the determination of moral action in regard to war, we can, I hope, extricate ourselves from the completely unhelpful narrative of “Pope vs. President.”

I received a great phone call out of the blue from a very prominent progressive who agreed with my column in the @PostOpinions this week. I mean a guy of such stature that I felt obliged to call him "Mr. __" when I called back. His point was something that had not occurred to me as to why progressives might also be worried about the decline in public companies. His view was that governance of public companies is more transparent and accoutable to the public than private companies. In addition, because ordinary Americans can invest in public companies it creates a greater democratization of corporate ownership in the country. Finally, he noted that the supply of public companies is declining at the same time demand for stock ownership has surged as more and more ordinary Americans are investing in public companies through retirement plans and the like.

I like and often agree with takes by @jimmy_esq, but his obsession with @JoshMBlackman is the least Jimmy Buffett thing ever.

@ProfMJCleveland @VertexPharma Amen

🥲🥲🥲Thank you dear God (and @VertexPharma): Since DS was 14 days old, so for nearly 17 years, he has cultured staph aureus for every throat culture but now 4. Every monthly culture for first year & every quarterly culture since 1, except 1 time following IV antibiotics & 1 time last year. But he has now gone 2 quarterly throat cultures with NOTHING cultured. No staph. Nothing. This is 6 months after he started Alfytrek which gets his CFTR function to its highest level. Dear God, please, please, please mean that his CF gene functions good enough to work as "normal" peoples' do and from colonializing bacterias, especially the horribly dangerous ones. Amen.

The USCCB’s Just War Error by Richard Cassleman firstthings.com/the-usccbs-jus…

@James_Martell_ We absolutely want that, and we don't want you anywhere near it.

Someone who emerges with great credit from the Iran crisis is Pope Leo, who waited to issued a specific condemnation of US policy until President Trump made a threat that was clearly incompatible with a just war. He did so based on the prospect of apocalyptic disaster rather than as part of a papal political crusade against the US administration – a fantasy propagated by ultra-partisan liberal Catholics. Leo doesn’t approve of Trump, we can assume, but unlike his predecessor he’s responsible and even-handed in the exercise of his authority on the international stage.

One can only think here of what the Delphic oracle said to Croesus of Lydia in the Histories: if you march against the Persians, you will destroy a great empire. I hope someone remembers how this prophecy was fulfilled.

Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs. Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals. Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD.

Praise ye the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his power. Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness. Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp.

@dlongenecker1 I waited 1.75 hrs for confession on Sunday. I've been wondering if this is connected to the growth of the number of converts. Many people called to confession? I don't know, but the Holy Spirit is moving.

Do some churches not offer confession during Holy Week? If so no wonder we were so busy. I was in the confessional for just under three hours this afternoon and my parochial vicar for nearly two.

@ProfMJCleveland newadvent.org/summa/2094.htm

@ProfMJCleveland this respect, whatever pertains to this inclination belongs to the natural law; for instance, to shun ignorance, to avoid offending those among whom one has to live, and other such things regarding the above inclination.

I thought Aquinas identified 5??