7-Quick Takes

Join the other Quicktakers at This Ain’t the Lyceum.

This content uses referral links. Read our disclosure policy for more info.

1.  The Impossible Novena starts today.  It’s intended to be said every day for nine months, but as novenas are nine of everything, I suppose saying them on the 25th for 9 months would be good too!

2.  Charles Krauthammer had a very sobering editorial in the paper last week entitled, “Obamacare: The reckoning – The Washington Post.”   Here’s an excerpt:

Obamacare was carefully constructed to manipulate the standard 10-year cost projections of the CBO. Because benefits would not fully kick in for four years, President Obama could trumpet 10-year gross costs of less than $1 trillion — $938 billion to be exact. But now that the near-costless years 2010 and 2011 have elapsed, the true 10-year price tag comes into focus. From 2013 through 2022, the CBO reports, the costs of Obamacare come to $1.76 trillion — almost twice the phony original number. It gets worse. Annual gross costs after 2021 are more than a quarter of $1 trillion every year — until the end of time. That, for a new entitlement in a country already drowning in $16 trillion of debt. Constitutionality: Beginning Monday, the Supreme Court will hear challenges to the law. 


The American people, by an astonishing two-thirds majority, want the law and/or the individual mandate tossed out by the court. In practice, however, questions this momentous are generally decided 5 to 4 — i.e., they depend on whatever side of the bed Justice Anthony Kennedy gets out of that morning. Ultimately, the question will hinge on whether the Commerce Clause has any limits. If the federal government can compel a private citizen, under threat of a federally imposed penalty, to engage in a private contract with a private entity (to buy health insurance), is there anything the federal government cannot compel the citizen to do? If Obamacare is upheld, it fundamentally changes the nature of the American social contract. It means the effective end of a government of enumerated powers — i.e., finite, delineated powers beyond which the government may not go, beyond which lies the free realm of the people and their voluntary institutions.

I’m so tempted to start spring break from our homeschool tomorrow just to follow these hearings more closely.

3.  For Mr. Pete’s and Noah’s birthday, Izzy made a cake to resemble the barrel race from “The Hobbit” which they have all been reading during the evenings. I’m sure I’ll have downloaded all my pics by tomorrow!

4.  Once I sell some of this inherited property (that I get to pay property taxes on twice a year – woo hoo- not) I’m thinking of finishing my degree.  I have an associate – wouldn’t be that much more to just finish.  And the main reason for doing so is that I’m sure my medical transcription gigs won’t last forever!

5.  After having a very nice birthday celebration yesterday for Mr. Pete and Noah, Mr. Pete is having a flare up of gout!  As he was icing his poor sore foot this morning we started trying to figure out what this triggers it.  His attacks are always in the spring.  Mr. Pete thought immediately that giving up the sweets for lent and then indulging for his birthday might be the culprit, or perhaps changes in the weather; however, since gout is a metabolic problem with the body’s ability to handle urea – I doubted that.  Then it occurred to me that on Friday night we had Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips – something that we only do once a year, in the spring, during lent. His symptoms started 24 hours later and his toe was in full bloom Sunday morning.  I think we may have found our culprit!

6.  Luckily for Mr. Pete, he got the full 7-CD set of Mark Levin’s audiobook, Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America.  So he can relax today and listen to that. 

7.  This evening, Sam, Gabe, Noah, Izzy and her friend T, will be performing the Faure Requiem Requiem with the parish choir and our orchestra-in-residence.  They have hated their rehearsals.

H A T E  D!  because it was in a Latin and because it was hard, and because there was dissonance and because rehearsals are usually at 7:30 until after nine on a Thursday, and because they are all teens and tweens.  BUT a funny thing happened when they started rehearsing with the orchestra – little bits started to come together here and there, musical phrases started making sense, and now they actually sort of, kinda like it!  Anyway their performance is this evening and I am looking forward to see how they do!

Here are some interesting notes on the piece. 

.