Sunday, March 28, 2010

A few quickies, eh?

Because I'm on vacation and it's late at night and because I'm feeling lazy--here's some scattershot random comments--

On Eric Cantor:



So, a shot was fired through his office window, except it wasn't so much fired as came down around, and it wasn't so much his office as the building and is not in anyway mentioned on his website or anywhere else where a highly-motivated angry person could have found out about its existence and then fired wildly in the general vicinity of it, hitting part of the building if not the actual office itself by merest happenstance?

Shit, it is rough being a Republican these days.

Pope Benedict XVI




Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys

Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.


He knew, and didn't act. That is actually the most damning thing I will say. NO flowery language, no hyperbole, no trying to make it look "bad". It is bad. He knew. He knew in this case, and he knew in other cases. And kids just kept getting hurt. What worse actually is there to say?

McCampaign + Palin:





Don't they just look like the Fonz and the Shark?


That picture is almost all I have to say about Palin's magnanimous decision to campaign on behalf of the man who launched her to A-list prominence in the GOP, when so many of his campaign staff from '08 were way less than kind to her, and when he himself is a candidate who is currently in the primary stage against an actual loon of the first order--and is feeling the heat.

Why is McCampaign in trouble against a somewhat dimwitted and possibly insane Teabagger? Well, it's because he doesn't come across as genuinely conservative. And he also says incredibly dumb things such as pretty much allowing that he will continue to obstruct progress in the Senate and not ever bring any earmark money back to his state. So, he wants to be re-elected to do nothing for AZ?

Why should they want him? But really, Palin is doing a mitvah for him--she actually will be doing the heavy-lifting for his campaign with whatever time she spends on it--

Again.

No comments:

Nancy Mace is not Okay

  This picture is a screencap from Rep. Mace's own Twitter-feed (I'm still not calling it "X") and this is s few days in t...