Why I am a Democratic Socialist

I disagree with such neo-liberal claptrap. I will say why below. It is why I am a Democratic Socialist rather than a Clintonian, or worse, a follower of von Mises and the Austrians.
https://t.co/GIbmXvoMx2

 I ran the numbers. If the deficit (net of net interest as % of GDP) is higher with tax cuts then there is better growth the next year than with lower deficits. This is s because bond sales eat the tax cut and stop asset inflation. The more you take from rich, the higher government purchases.

The more money households have for consumption (first order gov employees and transfers and second order - multiplier, from private sector households) the more private sector investment funded by primary share sales and debt.

Asset market activity is pure inflation. Rein in such speculation with a VAT on asset sales of at least 25%. That should also be high income & inheritance surtax rate, all of which will fund war (hot & cold), net interest and debt reduction as ideal tax reform. The other components are a goods and services tax to fund domestic military and civil sending on a regional basis (with a balance requirement so more spending automatically means a higher rate) and a subtraction VAT to cover all social and educational spending, including a much higher child tax credit.

Higher income taxes under Democrats makes lower deficits hold at 3% because asset inflation is lower and government purchases keep economy moving at a nature growth rate, at least until the Austrians come back into power and mes the whole thing up with boom and bust cycles which require huge deficits to both recover from and keep in check.

That deficit management helps the economy comes from the view that both sides must have something to say. Supply side has nothing to say. Growth, by definition requires more spending. Higher taxes fund that and pay down debt.

Higher rates prevent CEOs from charging economic rent through lower wages, benefits and union rights, which they then use to pay themselves and their shareholders in the secondary market (who are busy trying to inflate it, as if that were a good thing. It is not. High rates transfer all savings to the government, so no savings are attempted. The only problem is that sometimes wage and price inflation occurs. If this happens, slightly lower tax rates could control but not eliminate such inflation.

Regarding Citizen Trump

Everyone except is most ardent supporters, who believe the government is a Deep State conspiracy (which may or may not include Fox News) are sure that Trump should not, nor should have ever, been President (even Trump may have known this once). His producer tells us that he would crush and snort his adderall. That we have a President who needs Adderall is a problem in and of itself. He is so ill informed and, frankly stupid or demented (it matters not) that even his close aids try to shield the nation from his whims. He is likely compromised as a Russian agent, who quite crazily thinks that Putin is his agent (which would explain a lot). He believes, as do some in the Administration, that his Tweets are law (they cannot be and anyone who who treats them as such should know better and read the Administrative Procedures Act).

What should we do about Citizen Trump? The powers that be are letting the status quo continue, with staff stopping too much damage at the White House and agency levels, but everyone is not in on the scheme. In due time, there will be a report and, after pretending to object, the Senate Republicans will urge him to resign or be ousted. He will either be indicted or pardoned (depending on whether Pence is involved or not) and will likely do what disgraced President's usually do at first, get sick. He could die first and solve that problem, while his kids face the legal music. Indeed, they deserve to for humoring their father in his dotage.

The really sane thing to do, and it is what should have been done as soon as verifiable information was received showing he was likely compromised, is to arrest him and then worry about the investigation finishing later. This can be done before or after the 25th Amendment is invoked. There is no reason not to do both of these things today. Whether he is held at Walter Reed in the Presidential suite or D.C.'s Correctional Treatment Facility makes no difference to me. Just get him away from the red phone and put Pence in as the acting President - even if he is also compromised (although he can be arrested much more easily and forced to resign if he is).

There is a final option (no, not euthanasia). Get the congressional Gang of Four together (Pelosi, McCarthy, McConnell and Schumer) and meet with the Vice President and Cabinet and invoke the 25th Amendment without telling Trump, his family or his inner circle. Give him memos like he is President. Even give him legislation to sign occasionally, but make sure he is out of the decision loop. Have Pence act for him quietly. He can have any official documents signed with the autopen and he can initial the real ones with the standard MP for over the auto signature. Have all agency heads and Congress deal with Pence quietly as acting President. Let everyone but Putin know what is going on and if he catches on, simply don't let him communicate with anyone but Pence. If he still makes trouble, have the Deep State take care of him.

Inform the main stream media. Leave Fox News out of the joke. It is funnier that way. If they find out, they won't tell and if they do, no one will believe them anyway. Quit reporting on Trump's tweets or public statements. Indeed, quit going to White House press briefings, or if you do, ask Sarah Sanders directly if Trump is being bypassed. Whether she knows or not, she will say he is not. From that point on, stop broadcasting the briefings (although you can create real Fake News to let Trump think he is still in charge.

Stop covering his tweets. No one would want their dotering parent subject to the ridicule he constantly earns. Decorum demands you treat them as the ramblings of the sick old man he is. He is likely not smart enough to notice the difference. If and when he does, let him quietly resign. Don't even worry about impeachment - or when we do it, do it quietly and treat him as we all treated President Reagan after he left public life due to his illness. At some point, take him down to Mar O Largo and let him golf every day.

In other words, make him the star of his own Truman Show. Anything to get him off the news and get us out of danger.

More on celibacy

In the first hundred years there were Pastors (another word for bishop or overseer) and deacons (which did include females and with all such being prayed over like an ordination.

Priests were a later invention when city churches became larger than a parish, mostly because the pastors became hierarchs rather than having each congregation having its own overseer - making some Pastors more equal than others and violating what the Lord said to James and John - do not give yourselves titles as the Gentiles do.

There were four patriarchs in the early Church. Peter at Antioch, Paul in Rome and Asia Minor, Mark in Alexandria and James bar Hoses in Jerusalem. 

Ordination of women deacons and their functioning as apostles who had seen the risen Lord is well documented. Pastors did not inherit this role until the last such witness had died.

Paul was celibate, which was rare for a Pharisee (unless he had been in Quomran, possibly with John the Baptist - likely guesses except for the founding Patriarchs). 

Clement of Antioch is a good example of how Patriarchs went from founders to the bishops we know. We don't know whether he was married.

Celibacy was practiced individually, mostly by the Dessert Fathers and mystics but sacred continence was Roman and misogynistic (you have offered no reason refuting that because you cannot. Any amount of research into both its ancient and current practice makes it obvious as do Augustine's Confessions.).

Anachronists cite ancient history using language that is as much superstition as tradition. The first is either bigotry or cowardice (in general, not just you) and the second is mutable because it is a practice by the Church rather than eternal truth. It collapses once we (like the Orthodox) repudiate it as anathema and heterodox.

Sacred Continence is a Hellenistic (Neoplatonic/Stoic) imposition on the Church. It was part of the culture which killed Jesus Maccabees and his brothers, Jesus of Nazareth and his brothers and later brothers who died by the hands of Nero and Diocletian.

It is still in practice and is the source, not the consequence of an all male asexual priesthood. That it regards congress with women as a source of impurity is without question, This view also colored Augustine's doctrines on Original Sin as coming through sexual congress - so of course ordaining women, even as deacons, became unthinkable (he did not understand that Eden was an allegory about blame, not a transactional view of salvation as posited by Ambrose, his contemporary).

Adding hellenism aka stoicism to the Church was misogynistic. Celibacy came about  when the practice of daily Mass became standard. It only became a question of medieval property rights during the high middle ages, when it was definitively instituted.

If you look at Catholic Hellenistic sexual doctrine from the Sacred Continence of the 4th Century to Humane and Evangelium Vitae, the asexual bias is most clear. Neither doctrine is the result of normal sexuality. It thinks of the eunuch as  blessed rather than outside the standard normal distribution (aka disordered as in out of the "normal" order).

The most extreme form of male asexuality is misogyny, upon which sacred continence is based (because it considers women to be a source of impurity) and continues to the resistance to female ordination (by the she-man woman haters club) because they fear spiritual intimacy with women. Their loss and ours. The only way out is ordaining both the married and women, starting with abandoning the Hellenistic relic which is Sacred Continence.

St Thomas Aquinas is a prime asexual example if you believe the apocryphical tale that his father tried to dissuade him from joining the priesthood by hiring a courtesan to seduce him,. A heterosexual celibate would have thanked her for her attention gently and showed her the door. Thomas came at her with a torch. A hetero gentleman does not do such things.

Sadly, the glorification of this kind of sexuality does affect Catholic males, including my father's generation, which led to both the sexual revolution as the next generation said bosh and to its damage due to its unrealistic nature. Many left the Church, never to return. It is why many people ignore Reconciliation. because of the focus on sexual scruples and the normal activity of masturbation, which likely helped identify immature males to asexual predators whose only sexuality is malformed. At least the gay ones are polite enough not to pick on children and look for consensuality rather than practicing rape.

Luckily, the bad old days are almost over. If the Church were honest about the Orthodox declaration in 1922 under Melitos that Anglican Orders are valid (and it was the whole Synod and therefore authoritative), their adoption of female ordination is well within their patricial authority. This puts the kibosh on Roman efforts to bring back the high church protestants, especially when (not if) Francis recognizes the 1922 declaration as being for the whole of Christendom, which will allow the Anglicans to be the organ of unity, especially for the English speaking world and the American Church.

This may sound fanciful but it makes sense if you desire Catholic unity rather than Catholic exceptionalism. The latter is what the Lord promised when he said that the gates of Hell will not overtake the Church. This guarantee does not extend to any Rump exceptionalists that will likely look to Burke as their messiah. No matter. The old view will die off. Unity will bring the Nones back to the Church, especially the youth.

A House Divided on Abortion

The planet is not dying, but the GOP is and so is this issue. The last two "pro-;life Presidents put up candidates who believe Roe is settled law - as they were taught in Ivy League law schools. The theory of the case that Scalia pushed (that the states could grant personhood) has been demolished along with the protection of traditional marriage and the view that the 14th Amendment only applies to Freemen and not Latinos or women and certainly not gays.

Roe was as much about legal authority as whether first trimester embryos and fetuses are legal persons. You are on the wrong side of the legal authority argument and no, Brown offers you no hope, because it did not overturn ideas about Race - it overturned state supremacy on the issue. Brown and Roe take the same view on this. Overturning Roe would bring Plessy back!

Not being murdered depends on legal personhood, which is determined federally. It is also a right granted by legislation, not one that is protected by the Constitution, which only governs rights against the state, not its responsibilities.

I know most of the "what about the babies" crowd don't like to face the legal issues, but you must if you are telling people that they must vote pro-life to be both Catholic and in a state of grace. It is not a sin to not be ignorant of those legal niceties. It just makes your argument both foolish and fraudulent.

You should pay attention to what I am saying, since you will not only be ineffective when you do, but you will ignore what the Magisterium says about fighting abortion, which is to guarantee a living wage to families so they don't have to resort to abortion. (Yes, it really says that and in doing so condemns the fiscal insanity that is the GOP).

Switching to one of the emerging Democratic parties (the DLC or DSA factions) will make you part of the solution if you embrace what the Popes say about economic justice. Staying with the GOP assures that those who would stop abortion are a house divided.

Getting to DC Statehood

If this is the same as the 1993 bill then it needs amending. That bill punted on commuter taxes by leaving the national capital service area in the residual district, putting it beyond the reach of new Columbia commuter taxation. This deal was made with members who are no longer in Congress. We can do better by making a commuter tax deal and directing the funds to VA and md for them to fund prisons and mental health residential facilities for chronic patients whose only alternative is jail or the streets. We also need language to give MD general assembly a vote to choose between retro and statehood, thus satisfying Republican demands that it be considered. Either way, DC voters would get a vote to accept or reject statehood or retrocession, preserving the status quo.

We also need the Council to abolish shadow positions and convert our senators to the real thing so that they can reopen the 20 citizens lawsuit by presenting their credentials and then be rejected. Until they do the case is not ripe.

Second, we need to modify the 20 citizens suit (which the DC AG may want to join as counsel - they need to meet with him ASAP) to limit the complaint from calling the entire arrangement unconstitutional (which it is mot because of the District clause and because the other examples discussed by LaRoache in the original cases were solved politically making his approach non judistiable) to a simple complaint that the charter is really our constitution and that no other state legislature can amend its constitution accept by having either a plebiscite or identical passage with an intervening election (which would not be applicable in DC in any case). The fact that the charter was adopted by plebiscite means that all amendment's must be. The Council could test this By putting all intervening amendment's on the ballot and putting in a charter amendment requiring all congressional amendment's be put to a vote. The US DOJ could not let that slide and we would get what George wanted, which was DOJ arguing that DC is a colony and forcing the SCOTUS to settle the issue by agreeing that DC voters can veto congressional acts over them or by agreeing that DC is a plantation and its citizens slaves.

We could also do an initiative for DC voters to demand that Congress be expelled. This can be done in two ways. They can leave or they can redraw the boundaries so that only congressional office and parking space, the Capitol building and grounds and the library of Congress as the residual District with the remaining area made a territory pending passage of HR 51 as above. This is another way to get the case into federal court as the board of elections would have to refuse the request or allow it which would have justice sue DC to remove the amendment from the ballot. Indeed, all measures described above (real senators, ratifying congressional changes, replacing district titles with state titles in the charter, requiring ratification votes to amend the charter, ratifying the proposed 1987 constitution with or without any further changes by the council and expelling Congress) should be put before voters in either a special election or in November 2020. There is nothing like an election to educate citizens and scheduling a special election gets it in front of the court faster, possibly with a three judge panel to expedite SCOTUS action by the 2020 election, thus nationalizing the issue. Of course such a legal strategy may just force the GOP to geek and pass HR 51.

Are you fokking kidding me??!!

Tonight, the NY Times put up a story revealing that the National Security Division of the FBI had cause to investigate the President as a Russian agent before he even fired Director Comey. The story is at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/us/politics/fbi-trump-russia-inquiry.html I have only one question: Are you fokking kidding me??!!

This was not the time to appoint a Special Counsel and conduct a years long investigation into whether the President might be impeached or indicted. That is simply the wrong mindset. While it is what one would expect from career prosecutors, who are used to building cases, this is not enough!  If you believe a Russian spy is running the government, you remove the spy - you do not investigate him!

If the evidence is as strong as the article hints at, the proper move is to have a meeting with the Vice President. You present him with the evidence after first double checking whether he is compromised as well, even to the extent of asking him. If he is not, you have him convene the Cabinet, share the information, put him on the disabled list and go public with it so that he can be immediately removed. If there is still evidence that shows he is dead to rights, you do not wait. If the members of the Cabinet are in cahoots with the conspiracy to the extent that they will not remove him, you show your cards and force them to resign. Invoke the 25th Amendment and worry about impeachment later.

You don't wait then and we should not be waiting now. Even if the Vice President is compromised by this point, you first get rid of a cancerous presidency and let him resign or not based on his own conscience. Don't even worry about the President's party. If your investigation is good enough to be alarmed, then treat the matter as alarming and ring the alarm bells!

A President who is so implicated should have resigned by now, whether a Russian spy or not. This President does not have enough honor to do that. He is a danger to the nation. The tradition of peaceful transfer of power is all well and good, but not when the President is spy. For Heaven's sake, act like it! You are being like a teenager, who when you say now,she says OK and does nothing.

Note to Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein: Grow the Fokk up and Act! Stop waiting to perfect your case! You do not build a case. You act! Now!  Tonight!  

Fokk Me!

Today, MSW criticized a new female member of Congress for calling Trump a Motherfucker. I disrespectfully disagreed, as below.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/new-members-congress-need-deploy-self-discipline

Any publicity is good publicity, especially for a back bencher, if they spell your name right. For Congresswoman Tlaib, that is hard to do without looking at it in the article. She is still a back bencher and spellcheck will recognize Tlaib but not Tlaib's.. Rep. Ocasio y Cortez is not doing much better, especially because people hyphenate her name rather than use the correct Spanish form, which I have done. The difference is Rep. Tlaib's fifteen minutes of fame have probably ended. Rep. Ocasio is just getting started, although she also has a long way to go.

Rep. Tlaib's  comments were not profane, just vulgar. (I still want to type Tailb and spellcheck still does not recognize it.) The word vulgar has the same root as vulgate, as in the Latin Vulgate Bible. It means the common tongue. People often say pardon my French when it is used, but the word is not a French word, it is German, derived from the word Fokken, which is to penetrate, although there is nothing penetrating about the mind of Trump. It is only vulgar in the english speaking world because of immigration and World War I. I will not validate the ban on these words because doing so would only abet such racism. I will use the german rather than dashes and see if it is flagged. If not, I will fokking sue Facebook for discrimination based on national origin. As for George's list, only four five and six can no longer be said on TV, and four and five are only bad because they are not Politically Correct as a slur against women and gays.

If Tlaib had called him a G_ddamn Motherfokker, she would have been using profanity, however she would still be inaccurate.  Trump is a Motherfokking Idiot with delusions of G_dhead. (note my treatment of the name of G_d). He is totally incompetent to do the job he ran for, so his party is full of enough motherfokking fools who nominated him. He was never a good negotiator, unless asking your father for money (who was also a motherfokking racist) or selling out your country to a crypto-commie bastard are considered making a good deal. Trump is also four and five, by the way.

If being well salted lets one be salty, then I must qualify to use the term motherfucker, since I have been around Washington for way too long, having first walked into the Capitol 35 years ago today as an intern.  As an intern, if I had used the term motherfucker, Senator Jepsen would have sent me home to Iowa, which has enough Germans to make use of the word Fokk a colloquialism. I am now an expert on tax policy and if I do not make comments on the Tax Policy Center web page, people would wonder where I was. In tax policy circles, I am considered a though leader and I would still not use vulgarity on their site (and if I don't clean this screed up on Facebook, I will get flagged. Indeed, MSW's article may be flagged for even mentioning the word.

Rep. Tlaib's only sin was using the term with the camera on. At least Senator Romney did not think he was being taped by a waiter when he talked about the 47% of non-taxpayers who would never vote for him - and he was right because he broke the 13th Commandment - Thou shalt not get caught. It was an open secret that the Clintons cuss like sailors, until the books Primary Colors and Game Change (I had to look this up, but that is likely a senior moment) outed them officially, but not on tape. This represented a lack of professional decorum, more on the part of the authors than the media. Nixon also used such vulgarity and he was no idiot, but still had the same delusions of G_dhead as Trump, although Trump is much worse and (to repeat myself) is an idiot.

I posted these comment on the NCR Facebook page an some Fokking Troll asked the stupid question "What does abortions do?" Probably a Russian Bot (note the bad grammar), but it gave me a chance to unload on him, as follows (and if Gene is a Russian Bot, his programmer was not even born when I started in the pro-life movement):

Gene, how does that fokking apply to the use of the work Fokk. In this context, which was having the right to call someone else a motherfokker, I first jumped into the pro-life movement in college and had devised a way for the Holy See to "adopt" all the unborn as Vatican citizens and then get Reagan to make an agreement recognizing that fact, thus allowing states to ban abortion. It was politely ignored with a letter from the Apostolic Delegate. 

I also wrote an unfortunate article in my college paper calling women who had abortions sociopaths. Lucking, I was in DC at the time as an aid to pro-lifer Roger Jepsen, so I avoided being castrated by female classmates. My next trick was having Congress interpret the 14th Amendment to give citizenship rights to the unborn as per Section 5 of the Amendment. This would actually work. Indeed, Justice Thomas tried a similar approach to use judicial authority delegated to the Court by the Civil Rights Act of 1875 *not a typo). Four Republican justices were not buying it (Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia and Alito). I was told that protecting the unborn would be a long slog to change hearts and minds. 

The pro-choicers seem to be winning that argument over time, as everyone who has ever gone to law school considers Roe to be settled law. I agree because Privacy is neither an eminassion or a penumbra. It is the bedrock behind the concept that there are some issues, particularly group class issues, where the moral minority (or majority) must leave individuals alone, thus prohibiting the tyranny of the majority against Latinos, Women, Gays and Catholics by the states. Strike one.

I have noticed that most of the action of the pro-life movement is in raising funds and volunteers for the Republican Party and its network of donors - with the only actions above that trying to look busy by getting actions before the Court, even though they have to know that Roe is not going anywhere. Strike Two.

When I was a doctoral student, I was reviewing films for a class I was leading a seminar in. It brought me to a Dateline special called "The Abortion Clinic." One of the doctors demonstrated why he does not like doing late term abortions, they showed one without being graphic, but felt he had to because the result in terms of female mortality would be unacceptable. He also made it clear that punishing doctors and not women would have the same effect. They also showed the result of a few first trimester abortions. No fetus to be found - they looked just like the results of a period - this is 90% of the cases. Strike Three, one out.

The reality is that any attempt to regulate first trimester abortions would require criminal investigation of not only perceived abortions but also miscarriages. Having been married and having to pick up the pieces after two miscarriages, the thought of that kind of power for the state sickens me. Pop (or pope) fly to center field. Two outs. 

I have a radio show online, although I do not do any shows (the meds are working). I have had more than a few discussions on the show and on Facebook about ending abortion by increasing the child tax credit to living wage levels ($1000 per child per month, distributed with pay - an idea I still support). Ardent pro-life Republicans would have none of it, even though Pope's Leo XIII and Pius XI say that is exactly what must be done to stop abortion. It turns out that pro-life Republicans don't want to subsidize the sexuality of families - so the pro-choice movement is correct - the movement really is about controlling the sexual activity of women. Strike Three - swinging! 

The inning is over, as is the game (and the inherent hellenistic misogyny infusing Catholic sexual teaching since the Church was given over to asexuals who think that their personal oddity is a sign of holiness gets the manager THROWN OUT. 

So, after my mental journey over thirty five years I have the chops to say, go away Troll - and I did not even have to call you an ignorant....well, I won't risk getting this post thrown out, even if I only use the German vulgarity rather than the English equivalent. I will use the term on my own blog, however.

Catholic Sexuality: Hellenism and Self-reliance

Last Friday, there was a comment storm on the National Catholic Reporter site about news that some want to reconsider priestly celibacy. It had the usual anachronists who thought that because Christ did not anoint female priests (he anointed no priests at all), that we could not do so now. Everyone agreed that celibacy stared in the fourth century after Constantine mandated Catholicism for the Empire (although he left Rome out of the great Councils because it was an Aryan backwater).

 I brought up that the issue was not celibacy so much as Sacred Continence, which came from the stoic ideal of asexual friendship as being superior to marital relations. Sacred Continence, which forbids any priest who has had sex with his wife recently from celebrating Mass. Doing so was considered unclean. Indeed, this view dictated Augustine's contention that Original Sin came through birth by women. It is why Christ had to be both asexual and born by a perpetual virgin. The attachment to this gives us the attachment to the Eden myth as reality rather than what it is, a parable about blame. This also led to an asexual bias in Christian morality, so that obvious observations in natural law are ignored because they conflict with the ideal that sexuality for its own sake is wrong and that asexuality is a form of innate holiness, with celibacy merely the discipline to apply that holiness socially.

There is nothing particularly Christian about an asexual bias. although St/.Paul seems to have been an asexual (he was probably not gay). He was a Jew from Tarsus, not Palestine, so this type of Hellenism was easy for him to teach to those he converted to Christianity. He wrote this way before any major persecution of the Church since his own.  Anyone who pays attention to my posts on asexuality in Catholic sexual teaching, and its misogynistic overtones (which also lead to not ordaining women) have heard this all before. Here is the new point.

From Jesus Maccabees to Jesus of Nazareth to the Martyrs for Christ through Nero (666) and Diocletian, the question was the imposition of Hellenistic philosophy on the people of God (first against Judah and then against the Church). It is ironic that after the Church became the religion of the Empire, it fully embraced its Hellenistic sexual ideal. By doing so, it essentially spits on the tombs of all of the martyrs who resisted it, including our Lord. This is a more powerful argument than simply attacking the asexuallity of the clergy, although both have their roots in Hellenistic misogyny. The only way out of this is to ordain women.

Today's debate was about abortion, with one of the usual trolls saying that one cannot be Catholic and pro-choice. I offered the usual arguments on negative and positive rights, the impracticality of regulating first trimester abortions and the dependence of both parties on keeping the issue alive. I will not repeat them here. There are a few new points, however.

There is no longer a Catholic vote, so one cannot say that it is non-Catholic to vote Democratic. The argument is settled on Roe. All eight Justices after Thomas consider it to be settled law. All but a few who have passed the Bar Exam know the reasons why this is the case. The base pro-life vote in the Church is about 43 percent. The base pro-choice vote is about the same. 16% are the mushy middle which jump between parties based on how abortion is dealt with.

If partial birth abortion is the focus of the day, the middle goes Republican (as when Hillary defended the practice to rally her base rather than showing this as another issue where Trump is ignorant - as PBA is already illegal). The middle goes Democratic when it is reminded that the pro-life movement is the GOP at prayer and there is more than just a little opportunism in how they frame the issue. That is how Obama won the Catholic vote in 2008, largely at my urging. Hillary ignored my earlier advice to her and lost the vote for that reason and because she did not take care of Obama voters who won't vote for an all-white ticket.

The antidote for dealing with Roe is to deal with preventing abortion through economic means. So far, nothing new. What is new are my my comments on how the Kingdom of God cannot abide self-reliance.

The Kingdom of God, as Jesus talked about it was not about going to Heaven but bring Heaven to Earth. Jesus said that it was difficult for a rich man to accept the kingdom. It would take the kind of contortions that camels would have to make to go through "the eye of the needle" which was a gate in the city wall where a camel would sit on a sled in a certain way and be pulled through.

Jesus did not have an income ceiling to be saved. What he stressed was faith in God to provide in all things. The primary characteristic of wealth is self reliance. It is hard to accept the Kingdom of God when you rely on yourself. Recall the story of the rich man who finally had his barns fool of grain and died the next day. He was not a fool for having wealth but for depending on it. There are no U-Hauls following hearses.

The Magisterium is very clear about society acting when employers and the free market cannot provide for families. Casti Connubii 119-122 are quite clear that the antidote for abortion is a living wage freely paid or social welfare if the market cannot provide. Charity is a one-time thing. Continuing income supplements are a matter of the public purse (even if granted through tax subsidies like the Child Tax Credit put in originally by Gerald Ford or a Negative Income Tax as described by Milton Friedman. The question is no longer whether such things are good, only if the amounts are adequate. They are not, which is the major driver in abortion - roughly 72 percent of the time.

 The question for pro-lifers is not whether a family supplement is enacted. It is already in place. The question is whether it should be adequate to achieve relative social and economic equality for most families. The USDA estimates that it takes $1000 per child per month to live decently (not including daycare). This would essentially end the need for three-quarters of abortions. Not providing such a support level while banning abortion would be considered cruel by most civilized people. The question for pro-lifers is whether they support an adequate level or whether you believe in the kind of self-reliance that Jesus condemned?