It is difficult for anyone schooled in the Catholic Church rsquo s social justice tradition not to be moved and moved profoundly by the prospect of near universal health insurance a prospect that took a giant step towards realization early this morning when the Senate invoked cloture on the refor

Marx famously wrote of the idiocy of rural life He was wrong about that as so much else The benefits of rural life are many and those who continue to live in rural communities value their way of life in ways that Marx may not have understood and that other intellectuals continue to scorn but

Well the knives are out Senator Bob Casey has come forward with a compromise proposal regarding federal funding of abortion in the health care reform bill and some pro-life advocates are already piling on Mind you no one really knows precisely what is in the proposal at this point but why let a

Deal Hudson of InsideCatholic com is at it again He has published an article accusing two groups Catholics United and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good with being fake Catholics because of their support for health care reform He admitted to journalistic hyperbole in making the char

Back in 2004 Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman rsquo s campaign coined the word Joe-mentum after their candidate received a slight uptick in the polls There were other wordplays of a similar sort all of which involved inserting the candidate rsquo s first name into a word replacing a syllable

Catholics across the country celebrated the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Saturday Downtown DC saw traffic interrupted for a couple of hours as a procession marched twenty blocks to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception Here in suburban Maryland the fireworks at the nearby church l

When it rains it pours Just when I finish a blogpost about the - hmmmm how to put this gently ndash the unspeakably stupid remarks being made about President Obama rsquo s speech yesterday in Oslo I find an even grosser example of intellectual idiocy over at Huffington Post There Barbara Com

The lack of basic knowledge of the traditions of Western thought is a sore affliction in anyone but in people who are paid to write about important events this lack is criminal The commentary on President Obama rsquo s Nobel lecture in Oslo yesterday has hit new lows in this regard Consider the

There is not another politician in America who could have delivered the speech given by President Barack Obama this morning when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo It was an intellectual tour de force and the force came from his own intellect not from that of his speechwriters This was his

The defeat of the Nelson-Hatch amendment that would have truly barred federal funding of abortion from the health care reform bill is a huge setback for the pro-life movement Today it appears that only one Senator Ben Nelson and a handful of Congressmen stand between health care reform that is t