Random Thoughts

2011 February 20 by Frank Monaldo.

Headlines

If you happened by a newsstand on Tuesday morning February 15, you might have sighted the headline of the Washington Post “Obama Budget Makes Deep Cuts, Cautious trades.’’ The irony is the the first sentence of the article by Lori Montgomery was at war with the headline . She more cautiously explained that, “President Obama submitted a budget blueprint for fiscal 2012 on Monday full of surgical cuts and cautious trade-offs…” Which is it? Were the cuts “deep” or “surgical?”

The conflict between the headline and the article must have been noticed, because the later online editions substituted the headline: “Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal 2012 focuses on education, energy, research”

Perhaps showing a healthy separation between the news and an editorial pages, the editors of the Post did not find the budget cuts either deep or surgical. They concluded that on the subject of the budget, “the President punted… Having been given the chance, the cover and the push by the fiscal commission he created to take bold steps to raise revenue and curb entitlement spending, President Obama, in his fiscal 2012 budget proposal, chose instead to duck.”

Those Signs Again

Any group of people with the energy to take time out of their normal activities to engage in protest are, by definition, the most passionate. Among these, one can find the deliberate and wise as well as angry and bitter, and even mean spirited.

During the protests this week in Wisconsin against proposals by Republican Governor Scott Walker along with the Republican state house to have some public employees contribute to their health and retirement plans, some protesters ported particularly very nasty signs. These included ones that equated Scott with Hitler and another with cross hairs centered on a picture of the governor.

It would be unfair to extrapolate from those signs that the entire group of protesters were mean spirited, rather than robustly making their feeling known. However, if those protesters were sympathetic to Tea Party, we would be directed by the Left to make exactly.those extrapolations.

Religious Oppression

Officals of the University of California-Davis recently defined religious discrimination as:

“The loss of power and privilege to those who do not practice the dominant culture’s religion. In the United States, this is institutionalized oppressions toward those who are not Christian.’’

This proclamation is wrong on so many levels. First, although discrimination is easier for dominant group to implement, it certainly does not preclude minority groups from exercising discrimination. Second, the fact the the university could issue such a definition indicates that the dominant view on that campus is secular humanism. If, for the sake of argument, we adopt the university’s point of view, the we could re-write the university’s definition as:

“The loss of power and privilege to those who do not practice the dominant culture’s religion. At the university, this is institutionalized oppressions toward those who are religious.’’

Fortunately, the university recognized the error after Christians on campus complained and pulled the definition. I suppose we should congratulate the university, but one wonders about an institutional culture that could produce such a definition in the first place.

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