Being unfamiliar about Ron DeSantis - who moves and talks in places unattractive to me - I see on Breitbart the man is an unimaginative cliche monger, apart from his being a demagogue.
The item sends him much love, after all it is Breitbart, but then it quotes him, and the bullshit shines through:
“You gotta be ready for battle. So put on the full armor of God,” he
said, triggering a round of applause. “Take a stand against the left’s
schemes. Stand firm with the belt of truth buckled around your waist.
You will face fire from flaming arrows, but the shield of faith will
protect you.”
[...] “We’re just getting warmed up. I’ve only begun to fight,” he declared.
“I’m standing my ground, walking the line all the way through the finish
line, and I can tell you this. With your help and everybody behind us,
there is no doubt in my mind that come November, we are going to keep
the state of Florida free.”
He is mentioned by some as "Presidential." Sad. Florida also has Gaetz and Rubio. and alligators and now non-native giant snakes - invasive species. (Wikipedia)
And Sinkholes. And Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Bless Florida.
I could get on the guy's emailing list to see if his trying to shake me as a money tree is done with the same tired lines, or if he gets more creative when soliciting cash.
Not really caring to do so, I won't. But it is an interesting question. Does he dumb down his emailing or does he think perhaps the email audience is less needful of dumbing-down than his presumed predominantly apprehensive whitemaleJudeoChristocentric live audiences? Live audiences on his wavelength and him seeming mindfully on theirs:
By the Miami Herald Editorial Board -
-image omitted-
A proposed law would “prevent all
kinds of discrimination” at Florida public schools and workplaces,
based on the principle that “all individuals are created equal” and that
teachers should teach, not indoctrinate.
But despite the
platitudes its sponsor used to describe Senate Bill 148 and House Bill
7, this is not an effort to stop real discrimination. The true intent of
the legislation advancing in the Florida Senate
is to provide state cover for students and employees offended by
diversity training at private companies and by classroom lectures about
racism, sexism and homophobia.
The plan is to subvert what we
have historically considered as discrimination. And the way it’s
happening is through a proposal aimed at protecting certain people —
straight, white men, for the most part — whose sensitivities require
shielding via state policing of what teachers and diversity trainers
say.
[...] SB 148 puts into official words Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which
stands for “Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act.” He
announced the proposal last month at a rally-style news conference,
where he dared to invoke Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call to judge people on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin.
It’s
under the pretense of following MLK’s teachings that Republicans in
Florida and other states have banned critical race theory, an academic
theory that looks at racism at the systemic level and how laws that
appear to be neutral can propagate it.
Under the conservative
narrative, discussing slavery, segregation and discrimination is fine as
long as it’s a thing of history or an abstract concept that doesn’t
make people question whether they are complicit in perpetuating bigotry.
The WOKE bill, filed by Hialeah Sen. Manny Diaz, has a veneer
of social righteousness. [...] that no
“individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of
psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex or
national origin.”
Sounds
good, except the legislation leaves plenty of room for someone to claim
“discrimination” based on discomfort — which is sometimes bound to be
part of discussions that seek to make people reflect on their own
prejudices.
The bill bans training that makes people feel they
“bear responsibility” for “actions committed in the past by other
members of the same race, color, sex or national origin,” [...]
There is in the op-ed a BOTTOM LINE:
Drumming up outrage
It’s easier to
drum up outrage against esoteric enemies like critical race theory and
“wokeness” than it is to outline real problems. Vague concepts (how many
people actually know what critical race theory even means?) wind up
with vague fixes that people with an ax to grind can then abuse.
NO! Ron DeSantis is not that scheming and backhanded, is he? Say it ain't so.
..........................................
Now the big question. The one readers might have feared to ask. Or postponed asking.
Wtf read Breitbart?
Answering that question leaves DeSantis behind, for other fertile explorations.
If occasionally touching base with the Renaissance hedge fund - Long Island - Mercer guy's toy publication, (and daughter Rebeckah's - she loves it), you see Breitbart sometimes publishing things other outlets such as Strib pass over. Breitbart may spin the news stupidly, but it is reported there, sometimes, when not mentioned at all in sites I more regularly read.
ROME — Pope Francis has demoted the leader of the
conservative Opus Dei group from bishop to priest, revoking the
structure ordained by Saint John Paul II.
In an apostolic letter ironically titled “Ad Charisma Tuendum”
(In defense of the charism), Pope Francis reversed measures enacted by
Saint John Paul II in 1982 that ensured that the Opus Dei personal
prelature would always be governed by a bishop, thus guaranteeing a
certain degree of independence and flexibility.
[...] In explaining why in the future the head of Opus Dei will no longer
be a bishop, Francis states that for the good of the group’s “particular
gift of the Spirit,” what is needed is “a form of government based more
on charism than on hierarchical authority.”
In 1982, Saint John Paul II established Opus Dei as the Catholic
Church’s first personal prelature under the leadership of its own bishop
with his apostolic constitutionUt Sit, giving it a juridical configuration “suited to its specific characteristics.” John Paul wrote in that text:
The Ordinary of the Prelature Opus Dei is its Prelate,
whose election, which has to be carried out as established in general
and particular law, has to be confirmed by the Roman Pontiff. The
Prelature is under the Sacred Congregation for Bishops, and will also
deal directly with the other Congregations or Departments of the Roman
Curia, according to the nature of the matter involved.
Later, in 2001, John Paul reiterated the appropriateness of having Opus Dei governed by its own bishop.
Pope John Paul said in March of that year:
You are here representing the components by which the
Prelature is organically structured, that is, priests and lay faithful,
men and women, headed by their own Prelate. This hierarchical nature of
Opus Dei, established in the Apostolic Constitution by which I erected
the Prelature, offers a starting point for pastoral considerations full
of practical applications.
I wish to emphasize, John Paul continued:
…that the membership of the lay faithful in their own
particular Churches and in the Prelature, into which they are
incorporated, enables the special mission of the Prelature to converge
with the evangelizing efforts of each particular Church, as envisaged by
the Second Vatican Council in desiring the figure of personal
prelatures.
In an attempt to explain why Pope Francis felt compelled to demote Opus Dei’s leadership, some have had cited the decades-old public hostility with which the pope’s Jesuit order has regarded Opus Dei.
Other have underscored Francis’s personal animosity toward Opus Dei and his aggravation years ago that his own brother was close to the organization.
Whatever the pope’s personal reasons for humiliating Opus Dei, the
measure will not do much to dissuade those who see Francis as vindictive
toward those he views as unaligned with his priorities and merciful
only toward those who share his progressive leanings.
While the pope has consistently marginalized groups that do not share his pastoral slant, he has simultaneously elevated members of his own Jesuit order in a manner unprecedented since the notoriously nepotistic era of the Renaissance.
Well, in the hierarchy of the Roman Church, Francis is Pope, isn't he? Like it. Love it. Francis oversees all. Leonard Leo or Sam Alito can be unhappy, even distressed to where they'd shit a brick when Francis steps on their loves but they are lay believers, not otherwise, and Francis is Pope. Their world is hierarchical that way.
The heated meetings between the Order’s constitutional working group
and Cardinal Tomasi, the Pope’s personal representative, were meant to
conclude in a programme of reforms.
The Vatican sought to grant an expanded but controversial governing
role to the Fras – known as the Professed Knights (or Knights of
Justice) – under the spiritual authority of the Pope.
But after a draft of the controversial new constitution was leaked to the Pillar,
a Catholic website, the non-professed knights of second and third class
have begun to fight back with force characteristic of an order which
distinguished itself at the Siege of Rhodes in 1523 and the Siege of
Malta in 1565.
The proposed new draft reforms aim to hand over power and
administrative control to just a tiny band of professed knights – around
just 39 in total, who have taken vows of poverty, chastity and
obedience.
The proposal has exasperated the lay members of the Order who believe
it would effectively “downgrade the role of the laity” and make most
lay knights and dames like “associate members”.
Following the leak, Cardinal Tomasi has now reportedly backtracked in
the face of “fierce opposition” from within the highest ranks of the
Order, including its aristocratic German Chancellor Albrecht Von
Boeselager and senior knights, dames and officers in Britain and other
European countries.
Boeselager has already stepped aside from the process after admitting
that he could not accept the proposed reforms in good conscience and
Sehnaoui took his place as chairman of the constitutional reform
committee.
Leonard Leo, possibly only "an associate member?" What next? Expulsion from the Federalist Society? However, Daily Beast in reporting indirectly suggests that Maltese Knight LL might see kinship with Burke now with the Knights, in light of Burke's politics and the dreaded Leo's insinuation into the U.S. Supreme Court his and the Federalist Society's blessed and anointed like-minded Catholic Draconian dregs. Daily Beast being unkind to Burke:
Cardinal Raymond Burke is a 66-year-old guy who lives in Rome,
dresses like Queen Elizabeth, and talks like someone who majored in
misogyny at some bogus, backwoods, Bible-banging tent school. Until Pope
Francis stripped him of the powerful Vatican post Pope Benedict had
handed him, Burke behaved like the Catholic Church’s version of Ted
Cruz, operating with an ego and an attitude that proclaimed him to
always be right on matters of doctrine and dogma.
Burke’s new post
makes him the equivalent of a head waiter at the annual Knights of
Malta Communion breakfast, but the demotion has only emboldened him. A
few days ago the former archbishop of St. Louis was interviewed by some
pamphlet geared to restoring guy-talk in Catholicism, and Burke did not
disappoint.
“Unfortunately, the radical feminist movement strongly
influenced the Church, leading the Church to constantly address women’s
issues at the expense of addressing critical issues important to men,”
Burke told the correspondent from a pamphlet called (get this) The New
Emangelization.
“Sadly,” he pointed out, “the Church has not
effectively reacted to these destructive cultural forces; instead the
Church has become too influenced by radical feminism and has largely
ignored the serious needs of men.”
As
I read Burke’s manifesto on his desire for more arm-wrestling,
towel-snapping, locker-room guys to play larger roles in Catholicism, a
couple of thoughts went round and round in the carousel within my
noggin: those attending mass today in too many American parishes
resemble people sitting around the day-room of an assisted living
facility. God love them but they are old, committed, and slowly
disappearing.
The church in the United States is not exactly a
growth industry. Parishes are being closed or merged. There are too few
priests and not exactly a lot of people lining up for a vocation that
requires and insists on celibacy.
The second, almost immediate
thought was of a woman I knew quite well whose husband died young,
leaving her with a few children and an absence of both money and
employment in a struggling New England factory town where the paper
mills and textile plants were heading south at a pace that soon left
Main Street looking like abandoned property.
She buried her
husband on a bitter cold December morning two days before Christmas
during John F. Kennedy’s first year in the White House. She could curse
in Gaelic and pray in Latin.
She had no job, but quickly, within
weeks of her husband’s death, she began working at the rectory of the
large Irish parish where the church steeple was just about the highest
point in town, built by other immigrants in the 19th century
as a bold statement announcing their arrival. She did the priest’s
laundry, washed and ironed altar linens and vestments, and prepared
lunch and supper for four or five priests, two of them veterans of World
War II.
She took home less than $60 a week. She went back to
school, enrolling in one of what was then called a “teacher’s college”
in the old Massachusetts community college system.
After she got
her diploma she began teaching fourth and fifth grade at the parish
parochial school, where she remained for three decades. She went to mass
every day of the week and prayed nearly as much as she breathed. When
her youngest boy was in Vietnam she became a daily communicant, a
routine that continued after his war service ended.
Her faith was
stronger than steel. Her belief that God was all-knowing and forgiving
was unshakeable. She was in the forgiveness business and had a deep
understanding of human frailty, an insight that never left her until she
died at 93.
I called her “my mother the nun.”
So when I
read Raymond Burke clowning it up with his bogus beliefs that the
Catholic Church has lost a few steps because of the absence of “manly
men,” I could hear Mom muttering, “pol’thoin” (asshole) to describe him.
That description would have been applied for many reasons but the
biggest would be the most obvious: Burke is a guy whose most firm belief
is in himself and his own pronouncements.
The cost of his gilded,
ornate vestments could feed a family of four across a decade. He has
exhausted himself and more than a few who have had to listen to him
trying to ban pro-choice politicians from receiving communion. He has
attacked St. Louis University basketball coach Rick Majerus for
attending a Hillary Clinton rally and tried to prevent Sheryl Crow from
giving a concert to raise money for a Catholic hospital.
Last
year, as Pope Francis began turning the lights back on within a church
that has seen legions depart simply because so many in the clergy said
so little about the criminality and obstruction of justice surrounding
the reality of sexual abusers wearing roman collars, Burke said, “There
is a strong sense that the Church is like a ship without a rudder.”
Burke, Matt Birk, each feeling social recognition of greater opportunity for the females among us is a threat to - motherhood? To patriarchy, for sure.
Leonard Leo packing OUR court with HIS Roe killers. And wrong on everything else. While LL keeps thumping his chest like Tarzan over his Maltese Knighthood.
What a bunch. Citizens United is an apt legacy to judge all of them by.
Cut Matt Birk some slack. He bears no direct (or distant) responsibility for Citizens United, although if he's said anything against it reporting of such a thing has not percolated to me. Hike the ball for Jesus. Careers are for those who deserve one. Motherhood is underappreciated. Burke and Birk. Kindred spirits?
........................................
Anyway, that whole line of thought was triggered by Breitbart's report of Francis chopping Opus Dei down a few notches; as he did with Raymond Burke, while tightening Vatican [a/k/a Papal] hands in guidance of Opus Dei -AND- while lessening its "special status" per John Paul II, after (but in parallel to) squeezing a tighter Papal hand to Knights of Malta (and his exile of Raymond Burke to cerimonial duty there).
Absent Breitbart's "Francis update" reporting being serendipitously encountered, this post would have been shorter and limited to Breitbart/DeSantis.
Readers can judge if that seems good or bad - the growth of the post to more widely encompass Crabgrass justification for reading Breitbart -AND- thereby showing how an enlarged playing field is something not incompatible with general politics expressed on this site.
Those concerned more with DeSantis alone, be tolerant, please. If you made it this far in the post without moving on to other Internet content earlier, perhaps you might be glad to have learned things you'd not already known about Francis' Papacy.
________UPDATE________
The conduct and decision making of the first Jesuit Pope in the history of the Roman Church since founding of the Order (also the first South American Pope) is major news, with readers possibly seeing it as more news than a Ron DeSantis cliche-riddled speech, from yesterday, more of the same to follow. At a bet Leonard Leo and some whom Leo got boosted to the top court regularly keep abreast of Vatican happenings. Biden and Pelosi too.
_________FURTHER UPDATE_________
Raymond Burke instigated a personal website, winter of 2019. He has mass scheduled online, this month, for the future. On his personal website Raymond Burke has published his belief that Catholic politicians who support abortion should be denied communion. This view is not universally held within the Roman Church. In December, 2020, right-wing Minnesota outlet "Alpha News" published a Burke homily online, of which it approved. His favoring of elaborate vestments is apparent. An anonymous Ramsey, MN, blogger has republished it.
Crabgrass sees little merit to the man, Burke, or his supporters, relative to Francis or otherwise, but opinions can differ.
Interested readers may follow those links.
_________FURTHER UPDATE________
This year's news in the Roman Church reaches the Knights of Malta leadership and reform effort, here and here, a German schism concern, and the College of Cardinals becoming "less European." (A small sample of current news, not researched to aim to be at all exhaustive.)