Holy Father making it difficult for right-wing Americans to disagree

Sometime I wonder how politicians are able to say some of the things they say and still keep a straight face.

For the last 30 years or so, as we have reduced government regulation of big money more and more, wealth has been traveling upward in our society. The top 1 percent of wage earners in our society have nearly tripled their percentage of our national income.

Supply-side economics didn't make any sense when it first came on the scene, and it makes even less sense now. Why anyone thought making the richest people even richer would somehow help the working class is beyond me, but Republicans have been far better at selling their message than Democrats in recent years.

It helps that the so-called "liberal media" is really only liberal when it comes to social issues. Whenever it comes to questioning things like our economic system or what if anything we do to help the less fortunate among us, you can pretty much count on the media standing up for the status quo.

Those on the right seem to be favoring a much more punitive system. They claim that unemployment insurance makes people less likely to look for work, even though there are roughly three unemployed for every available job. And then they have the nerve to say that those who won't work should not be allowed to eat.

Of course their "Christian" message is anything but, even if they do have the evangelists of the so-called Christian Right marching with them in lock-step. They have also been reasonably successful getting the votes of older Catholics as well, but the new pope has made that far more problematic.

It had to come as a big shock to the right wing when Pope Francis started attacking unrestrained capitalism as one of the world's biggest problems.

Talk radio hosts said the pope was pushing Marxism, although it's hard to believe any of them would recognize Marxism if it came up behind them and bit them.

Last year's vice-presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan, has made a big deal of his Catholicism and has spoken of how his austerity plans are somehow more moral than the government actually helping the poor.

He had been able to get away with it because he was in the right place issues-wise when it came to the church's stance on abortion and homosexuality. But when Francis replaced Benedict at the head of the church, he said Catholics were wasting too much time on peripheral issues like same-sex marriage and that they should concentrate more on Christ's admonition to care for the poor.

That put Ryan in a tough place, and he came out of it on the attack.

“The guy is from Argentina, they haven’t had real capitalism in Argentina,” Ryan said. “They have crony capitalism in Argentina. They don’t have a true free enterprise system.”

And we do? We have a system in which contacts don't matter, where the best always finish first?

Sorry, Rep. Ryan, but your free-market ideal doesn't exist, and even if it did, unrestrained capitalism was never a good thing in this country.

But I guess it makes it difficult when the leader of your church says you're walking down the wrong path.

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Jennifer Jones

I've once again been watching one of my favorite World War II era movies, David O. Selznick's "Since You Went Away." The movie is a look at the Home Front in 1943, with Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple as a mother and her two daughters at home in Ohio while the man of the house is in the service in the Pacific.

John Cromwell is listed as the director, but it was very much Selznick's deal and it's a lovely movie.

Of course the movie is in black and white, and there are several places -- a canteen dance and a railroad station, to name two -- in which shadows are used brilliantly.

There are many wonderful things in the movie, but one of the nicest is the way it ends. "Since You Went Away was released in July 1944, when things were definitely looking up but the end was still not in sight. The last thing audiences see on the screen is the house, with these words superimposed:

"Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord."