Month: April 2010

We Used To Call Them Republicans

by digby

Here’s yet more evidence that the teabaggers are not some new group of voters with a specific set of concerns brought on by current government policies. They are Republicans — and I would bet that 90% of them were Bush worshippers who cared nothing about the economic policies of the period between 2000 and 2008:

The individuals who make up the Tea Party movement are largely conservative and get their news from Fox; they’re generally old and of moderate to low income; and they’re fairly convinced that their taxes are going to rise in the next few years, even though they likely won’t.

Those conclusions are part of a new study put together by The Winston Group, a conservative-leaning polling and strategy firm run by the former director of planning for former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. And they provide a telling new window on the political force that has revamped the Republican Party and altered the landscape of the 2010 elections.

In the course of conducting three national surveys of 1,000 registered voters, Winston was able to peg the percentage of the public that identifies itself with the Tea Party at roughly 17 percent. The group pledges that it is independent of any particular party (indeed 28 percent of Tea Party respondents in the Winston survey labeled their affiliation as such). But on pretty much every defining political or demographic issue, the movement lines up with the GOP or conservative alternatives.

Sixty-five percent of Tea Party respondents called themselves “conservative” compared to the 33 percent of all respondents who did the same. Just eight percent of Tea Party respondents said they were “liberal.” [And I would bet that 99% of those “liberals” were either lying or nuts — ed.]

Forty-seven percent of Tea Party respondents said that Fox News was either the top or second source of news they turn to, compared with 19 percent of the overall public who said the same thing.

More than 80 percent (81 percent) of Tea Party respondents expressed very little approval of Barack Obama’s job as president, which exceeded disapproval levels held even by Republicans (77%) and conservatives (79%).

These are angry older white conservatives, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has watched a townhall meeting or a tea party rally. In fact, it’s obvious to anyone with eyes.

The fact that these people are so ideologically opposed to policies and programs on which they depend is the question that should have the political scientists and sociologists intrigued:

All these data points suggest that the Tea Party crowd is comprised predominantly of conservatives. And, not surprisingly, the demographics of the movement seemingly align with those who traditionally vote for the conservative candidate as well. Fifty-six percent of Tea Party respondents are male; 22 percent are over the age of 65 (compared with just 14 percent who are between the ages of 18 and 34); and 23 percent fall in the income range of $50,000 and $75,000.

It’s the type of group that would likely benefit the most from Democratic governance, with commitments to Social Security, Medicare, and middle-class job creation. But the Tea Party crowd is decidedly sour on the Democratic agenda. Fifty-six percent of Tea Party respondents said they believe cutting spending will create jobs. And while a huge chunk won’t see their taxes affected if the Bush tax cuts expire for those making over $250,000, 82 percent think they will, in fact, go up.

Truthfully, these people have a much bigger problem than taxes going up in any case. There are wealthy plutocrats who are trying to take away the money one which they survive. But it looks as though they will happily help them do that because they are being brainwashed by right wing media (owned by the same plutocrats)into believing that they have more to fear from a modest, market based health care reform than people who want to gut social security and tilt the playing field ever more steeply to the top 1% of earners.

It’s a great scam, but it’s nothing new. It’s one that these particular folks have been falling for for a long, long time. There have always been people in this country who would rather be personally poor than pay taxes which might also benefit someone they don’t like. It’s just the way they think. The big money boyz are very adept at exploiting this.

The teabaggers aren’t really populists or libertarians although their “ideology” contains a smattering of incomprehensible slogans from both populist and libertarian thinking. They are conservative movement robots, which isn’t really ideological at all but rather an emotional outlet for resentment and anger at all the “others” who these adherents believe are either getting ahead at their expense or looking down their elitist noses at them. It’s really not about politics at all.

As Matt Stoller perspicaciously observed when I once asked “why are they so angry?”:

As long as individuals can stand up outside of the tribe and claim Americanism as their own, the right is revealed as weak, because it is their own lies about themselves that they cannot stand. Proof in the form of our existence is enough to make them angry. This is why, as Digby wonders, they keep getting madder as they keep gaining power. They are not really after a conservative agenda in terms of policy; they are not even after power, really. They are after a complete and utter subjugation of the American consciousness to their tribal mentality. And they will not stop until they get it. Hence, the culture wars. And now, the real wars. And unfortunately, I don’t think they are done.

He was right.

And if I may offer just a little word of warning. Everyone on our side of the aisle seems to find great solace in the idea that the youth of this country are liberal and therefore this kind of thinking is going to die off. I would just remind everyone that many of these current teabaggers are members of what was once the largest, most liberal generation in history. An amazing number of young people always seem to turn into conservative old jerks. Go figure. Perhaps the larger cohort of people of color will change this.

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Oh, What Does He Know?

by digby

Spy Talk:

Michael Sulick, head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, told a student audience last week that the spy agency has seen no fall-off in intelligence since waterboarding was banned by the Obama administration.

“I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint,” Sulick told students and some faculty members at Fordham University, his alma mater, on March 25.

Apparently this fellow has failed to consult Liz Cheney, the reigning expert on interrogation and torture. I think she knows just a little bit more about this than he does.

h/t to bb

Shooting Mock Fish In A Barrel

by tristero

I’m a vegetarian. I suppose I’m supposed to be horrified by this rant, but I’m not. Just the opposite. I think he’s essentially right.

All diets are arbitrarily constrained. Many Americans eat cows but are repulsed by the thought of eating a cat or a dog or a gerbil. Some folks in the South love squirrel. The French love snails and frog legs. Icelanders consume rotted shark. I know some people who did volunteer work in Africa villages and came back raving about the taste of honey ants and grasshoppers (for some reason, they both drew the line at eating cockroaches; I can’t imagine why).

There’s really no reason not to eat any of these things other than cultural familiarity. To quote W.C. Fields, somewhat out of context, properly cooked, they’re delicious.

Likewise, a vegetarian diet is more of the same. It is not logical, or especially healthy,* nor is it moral. Like all other diets, it arbitrarily permits and limits certain foods and food groups. That is all it is. It’s most certainly not an opportunity to feel holier than thou and preach to the unenlightened. It is a discipline.

Now, most folks think of limitations as restrictions on freedom. But limitations can empower creativity.** What I like about being vegetarian is that it requires me to come up with interesting and tasty meals, either ones I eat in restaurants or ones that I’ve recently learned to make myself. It may seem paradoxical, but after becoming vegetarian some 30 years ago, my willingness to eat diverse foods dramatically increased. Jerusalem artichokes, celery root, seitan, quinoa, strange unpronounceably-named gnarly tubers that look like the eggs of a monster from the planet Gnortfth… totally awesome. I probably never would have bothered to find out about these great foods if I could have easily popped a burger into my face. Nor would I have explored vegetarian cuisines like India’s, one of the great achievements of humanity, up there with the works of Bach, Finnish sauna, or Gnawa drumming.

I understand the moral arguments for not eating meat, and some of them are ones I very much agree with on an emotional level. But the only compelling ones, ie, the ones that pass the test of reason for me, are ecological. Meat produced in the vast quantities and in the manner it is made in the modern world is a direct contributor to global warming/climate change. It simply has to stop, and eventually it will, or we will burger ourselves to death. And Ruhlman is absolutely right:

Wake up! It’s not about the ducks and the lobsters. It’s about the corn and the oil. About big business and powerful lobbying in DC. They want your money and that’s all they want. They want your money and you can give it to them or withhold it. Make good choices about what you buy and what you eat and what you feed your kids.

I fully agree. Where Ruhlman and I part company is this:

Loquacious and moral vegetarians may annoy him (and even me, sometimes), but they have zero power. Ruhlman’s efforts, as well as the efforts of all the gods he invokes – Bourdain, Rachael Ray (!), Steingarten, Emeril – would be far better utilized by focusing like a microwave beam (do microwaves beam? do they focus? well, you get the idea) on Big Ag, not by complaining about some powerless veggie’s latest moralistic rhetoric. I sincerely doubt that the occasional excess, even from a Times critic, obscures or deflects the attention of anyone serious about food issues from the real problem.

By the way, Michael Ruhlman is a good guy (at least about food! I have no idea what his politics are but I can’t imagine he’s anything but a liberal). He’s the author, among other things of Ratio, a terrific book if you are new to cooking but no longer a rank beginner. It provides you with a bunch of basic proportions for common foods – bread, pasta, stock, custards – and then says, basically, improvise from there, put whatever you want in that bread once you know the proper proportion of flour to water to salt, experiment.

Come to think of it, cooking from ratios is the food analog to how music gets written, so naturally I’d be drawn to it. (grin)

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*A mostly vegetarian diet is very healthy. But a diet consisting entirely of non-animal products requires the vegetarian to think very carefully about adequate sources of protein as well as iron and other things. You can, and people do, get very sick from a vegetarian diet. Obviously, that is no reason not to maintain one if you behave responsibly.

**Cue some idiot to opine, “So, are you suggesting that totalitarianism is good for creativity?” Sigh.

Catholic Priest Continued To Rape Boys

by tristero

What the hell were they thinking? I’ve tried to wrap my mind around it and can’t quite grasp why the Vatican decided, on Good Friday, to grossly insult Jews. Here is the best that I can come up with.

The purpose of this sick little tactic is to change the subject. The Vatican is counting upon a journalistic truth: There is only so much room in the news for stories about any topic or group, say, for instance, Catholic priests. The time spent arguing about what a priest said is time NOT spent finding out more about what numerous priests actually did. At first, that’s doesn’t seem like much of a change of subject – after all, what that priest said, was pretty awful – but it is.

Instead of denouncing evil deeds, we are being urged to denounce evil words.

Evil words are very bad, but from the standpoint of people trying to manage a huge crisis, they are more easily explained and excused than evil deeds. And sure enough, they’ve started the process of diffusing the anger. Let’s follow it and see what happens:

Vatican spokesman the Rev Federico Lombardi later contacted the Associated Press news agency to say Father Cantalamessa was not speaking as a Vatican official.

He said such a comparison could “lead to misunderstandings and is not an official position of the Catholic Church”.

Uh huh:

However, Fr Cantalamessa’s sermon was printed in full on the front page of the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.

Get it? All this time you’ve spent reading about this he said/she said bullshit is time you have not spent reading about this:

Father Murphy, who is accused of molesting as many as 200 boys at the school near Milwaukee, also used his family’s lakefront cottage as a lure in his sexual advances, bringing youths from the school into his home beginning at least in the early 1960s.

What has recently come to light in fresh documents and interviews is that he was in the company of boys not only from the Milwaukee area but in the Northwoods region. Two in the area have accused Father Murphy of abuse, one at the isolated family cottage and the other, as late as 1978, at a youth detention center near Boulder Junction.

Speaking with a therapist years later, Father Murphy denied having any sexual contact “with any person” after leaving the school for the deaf in 1974.

Got that? A boy-raping Catholic priest was not punished, either by the Church or the police. He was simply allowed to retire. Where he happily continued raping young boys.

If it is your job to manage an obscenely large and disgusting scandal, it is far, far better to shift everyone’s focus onto some batty priest’s intemperate and “unofficial” remarks than do nothing and have people learn even more salacious details about priest/boy buggery. And that is why that batty priest compared outrage over the coddling of sexual abusers to anti-Semitism.

Evidence that this is a deliberately planned and executed strategy of media relations can be found by examining the actual words the actually-not-so-batty priest said. Tellingly, it was not the priest who actually made the comparison. He’ll have you believe that he just noted it:

By a rare coincidence, this year our Easter falls on the same week of the Jewish Passover which is the ancestor and matrix within which it was formed. This pushes us to direct a thought to our Jewish brothers. They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms. I received in this week the letter of a Jewish friend and, with his permission, I share here a part of it.

He said: “I am following with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the Church, the Pope and all the faithful by the whole world. The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism. Therefore I desire to express to you personally, to the Pope and to the whole Church my solidarity as Jew of dialogue and of all those that in the Jewish world (and there are many) share these sentiments of brotherhood. Our Passover and yours are undoubtedly different, but we both live with Messianic hope that surely will reunite us in the love of our common Father. I wish you and all Catholics a Good Easter.”

That’s right. You can’t blame that Catholic priest for such a bizarre comparison. After all, it was his friend, the Jew, who said it.

This oh-so-convenient Letter From A Hebrew is such a cynical tactic, but it’s a cynical tactic that works. I can come up with only one way to confront it but it depends upon media outlets being aware that they are being manipulated and who won’t permit themselves to be.

The Vatican is counting upon stories of the Good Friday sermon to squeeze out stories about more revelations of priestly diddling, Instead, the media should report both, with an emphasis on the most important of the two stories, the unspeakably awful sexual abuse and coverup.

In short, if the Vatican wants to double down on this story, the media should, too. The Vatican is counting on substituting one story for another. The media should run with both. Double the focus on the Church and its myriad sexual abuse scandals.

That’s the last thing the Vatican wants. And so, as they realize it is in their interest not to make the story any bigger than it already is, I think there’s a chance the hateful, bigoted remarks would rapidly end.

That’s would be a very good thing. Nowhere near as good as bringing everyone involved in the abuse and coverup to justice, but putting a lid on hateful speech is a good thing, nevertheless.

Protecting The Nobles

by digby

In case you had any doubts as to the reliability of the climate crisis “skeptics,” this should put it to rest. This is the very picture of wingnut welfare for a cause. The Guardian reports:

A Greenpeace investigation has identified a little-known, privately owned US oil company as the paymaster of global warming sceptics in the US and Europe.The environmental campaign group accuses Kansas-based Koch Industries, which owns refineries and operates oil pipelines, of funding 35 conservative and libertarian groups, as well as more than 20 congressmen and senators. Between them, Greenpeace says, these groups and individuals have spread misinformation about climate science and led a sustained assault on climate scientists and green alternatives to fossil fuels.Greenpeace says that Koch Industries donated nearly $48m (£31.8m) to climate opposition groups between 1997-2008. From 2005-2008, it donated $25m to groups opposed to climate change, nearly three times as much as higher-profile funders that time such as oil company ExxonMobil. Koch also spent $5.7m on political campaigns and $37m on direct lobbying to support fossil fuels.[…]
“Koch industries is playing a quiet but dominant role in the global warming debate. This private, out-of-sight corporation has become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition. On repeated occasions organisations funded by Koch foundations have led the assault on climate science and scientists, ‘green jobs’, renewable energy and climate policy progress,” it says.

We know all about Koch industries here in the US:

The groups include many of the best-known conservative thinktanks in the US, like Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato institute, the Manhattan Institute and the Foundation for research on economics and the environment. All have been involved in “spinning” the “climategate” story or are at the forefront of the anti-global warming debate, says Greenpeace.Koch Industries is a $100bn-a-year conglomerate dominated by petroleum and chemical interests, with operations in nearly 60 countries and 70,000 employees. It owns refineries which process more than 800,000 barrels of crude oil a day in the US, as well as a refinery in Holland. It has held leases on the heavily polluting tar-sand fields of Alberta, Canada and has interests in coal, oil exploration, chemicals, forestry, and pipelines.The majority of the group’s assets are owned and controlled by Charles and David Koch, two of the four sons of the company’s founder. They have been identified by Forbes magazine as the joint ninth richest Americans and the 19th richest men in the world, each worth between $14-16bn.Koch has also contributed money to politicians, the report said, listing 17 Republicans and four Democrats whose campaign funds got more than $10,000from the company.

I think this illustrates something very important about the nature of the propaganda machine. The Kochs are oil people and they are trying to protect their industry. That’s obvious. But the most insidious of the right wing funders are more than just crass greedheads intent upon keeping their heaps of money piling high. These people are also protecting a worldview and an aristocracy 0f wealth and privilege. They created and funded those think tanks to cover all bases of the wealth and privilege, not just their own specific industries.

This is a serious clash of worldviews as much as a battle over money. It’s a mistake to reduce it to a simple matter of dollars and cents. It’s that, but it’s more than that.

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Teabonics

by digby

I can’t vouch for these signs — for all I know they are all photo-shopped. But if they are real, they certainly do provide for some smug and superior snickering for the liberal elite snobs like us.

As someone who makes public spelling and punctuation errors every day of my life, I’m in no position to gloat and I’m not. But this one truly is amazing for the sheer scale of its arrogance:

There’s not a lot of self-awareness with this crew.

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Sovereign Revolutionaries

by digby

I guess that whole election thing is just too much trouble. These folks seem to want to “restore” America to the 1600s:

The FBI is warning police across the country that an anti-government group’s call to remove governors from office could provoke violence.

The group called the Guardians of the free Republics wants to “restore America” by peacefully dismantling parts of the government, according to its Web site. It sent letters to governors demanding they leave office or be removed.

Investigators do not see threats of violence in the group’s message, but fear the broad call for removal of top state officials could lead others to act out violently. At least two states beefed up security in response.

[…]

The FBI associated the letter with “sovereign citizens,” most of whom believe they are free from all duties of a U.S. citizen, like paying taxes or needing a government license to drive. A small number of these people are armed and resort to violence, according to the intelligence report.

Yeah. It’s just a little bit odd that they’ve only now decided to start demanding that people leave office in three days don’t you think? Was this kind of thing going on while Bush was president? I don’t recall anything like this. It seems pretty clear that it’s the election of the Kenyan usurper and his communist colleagues in the congress that’s spurred this latest outbreak of “sovereignty” fetishists. (They’re always around, but they only get active and find new recruits when the Democrats threaten the constitution by winning an election.)

BTW, what this about?

In the past year, federal agents have seen an increase in “chatter” from an array of domestic extremist groups, which can include radical self-styled militias, white separatists or extreme civil libertarians and sovereign citizens.

What’s an “extreme civil libertarian?” I’m guessing that they are talking about gun owners buying up huge numbers of gun and ammo because I don’t see any fourth amendment “extremists” organizing against unlawful search and seizure or first amendment advocates planning armed revolution. Unless you count the ACLU as among the domestic extremists, I’m thinking “extreme civil libertarian” is a loaded term and I’d rather not see it used in this context. If there are paranoid gun nuts out there, let’s not confuse them with people who believe there should be strict adherence to the bill of rights. They’re just plain old civil libertarians and law abiding citizens who use the courts to adjudicate these matters.

Update: Think Progress has more on Guardians of Free Republics. Seems they’re popular with the Resistnet crowd — the “netroots” of the teabag movement.

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Kitchen Sink Reform

by digby

Following up on my post from yesterday about the financial reform bill, it seems worthwhile to address Paul Krugman’s column today in which he argues for more regulation rather than a breakage of the big bank monopoly. I actually agree that we should go back to a strict regulatory scheme as well, but I have been persuaded by recent events (see Barney Frank’s staffer problem, for example)that the problem of capture is so extreme that regulation won’t ever be enough to fix this problem (at least until we somehow solve the bigger problem of money’s influence in politics.)

I’m with dday: we need to throw the kitchen sink at this problem:

I do not believe it’s so clear-cut that the banks cannot be stopped on this one. But even if it was, that’s not a good enough reason not to pursue every avenue to bring stability to the financial system. That includes the kind of leverage limits and resolution authority Krugman favors, consumer financial protection like Elizabeth Warren has proposed, AND actions that would truly end too big to fail.

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Digging Deeper

by digby

They’re going here on Good Friday? Really?

A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — which have included reports about Pope Benedict XVI’s oversight role in two cases — to the persecution of the Jews, sharply raising the volume in the Vatican’s counterattack. The remarks, on the day Christians mark the crucifixion, underscored how much the Catholic Church has felt under attack from recent news reports and criticism over how it has handled charges of child molestation against priests in the past, and sought to focus attention on the church as the central victim. In recent weeks, Vatican officials and many bishops have angrily denounced news reports that Benedict failed to act strongly enough against pedophile priests, once as archbishop of Munich and Friesing in 1980 and once as a leader of a powerful Vatican congregation in the 1990s. Benedict sat looking downward when the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, who holds the office of preacher of the papal household, delivered his remarks in the traditional prayer service in St. Peter’s Basilica. Wearing the brown cassock of a Franciscan, Father Cantalamessa took note that Easter and Passover were falling during the same week this year, saying he was led to think of the Jews. “They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” he said. Father Cantalamessa quoted from what he said was a letter from an unnamed Jewish friend. “I am following the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole word,” he said the friend wrote. “The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”

That takes some real chutzpah all right. This is from just 10 years ago:

Defying warnings from some theologians that the unprecedented apology would undermine the church’s authority, the 79-year-old pontiff asked God to forgive the persecution of the Jews. “We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood.”

Wearing the purple vestments of lenten mourning, the Pope sought pardon for seven categories of sin: general sins; sins in the service of truth; sins against Christian unity; against the Jews; against respect for love, peace and cultures; against the dignity of women and minorities; and against human rights.

Ethnic groups had endured “contempt for their cultures and religious traditions”. Women were “all too often humiliated and marginalised”. Trust in wealth and power had obscured the church’s responsibility to the poor and oppressed.

There was no reference to homosexuals, who had asked to be included for suffering theocratic violence. The Pope did not identify guilty individuals or name the crusades, the Inquisition or the Holocaust, but the references were clear.

Five Vatican cardinals and two bishops confessed sins on behalf of the church during the ceremony. Cardinal Edward Cassidy recalled the “sufferings of the people of Israel” asked divine pardon for the “sins committed by not a few [Catholics] against the people of the covenant”.

Several Jewish leaders praised the sermon as historic and significant but Israel’s chief rabbi said he was deeply frustrated by the Pope’s failure to mention the Holocaust, and described the service as “a severely warped view of history”.

Rabbi Israel Meir Lau joined other Israelis in expressing hope that the pope had omitted acknowledging the church’s passivity during the Holocaust only because he was planning a specific apology during next week’s pilgrimage to the holy land.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the congregation of the doctrine of the faith, confessed to the sins of the congregation’s predecessor, the Inquisition. “Even men of the church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the Gospel,” he said…

Fine. To sin is human and forgiveness divine and all that. To then compare critics of the church’s cover up of its epidemic of child molestation to anti-semitism just ten years later (on Good Friday!) is verging on farce.

Here’s just a little reminder of the history that makes this comparison particularly distasteful:

The Crusades

Pope Urban II, anxious to assert Rome’s authority in the east, sent a military expedition in 1095 to reconquer the holy land. The crusaders ravaged the countries they passed through and massacred the Muslim, Jewish and even Christian population of Jerusalem after capturing it in 1099. After 200 years of conflict Muslim armies drove them out for good, but the crusaders’ symbol of the red cross remains provocative.

The Inquisition

The attempt to combat suspected apostates, Jews and Muslims at the time of the Reformation spawned tribunals in Europe and the new world that tortured and executed thousands. Ecclesiastical queasiness about flowing blood led to the use of racks, thumbscrews and red-hot metal instead of blades; 2,000 people were burned at the stake during the tenure of Spain’s first grand inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada.

The Holocaust

Pope Pius XII never publicly condemned the Nazis’ persecution of Jews, even when they were being rounded up and deported from Rome. His silence is partly blamed for the failure of Germany’s Catholics to resist Hitler. Anti-Jewish Catholic doctrines such as the claim that the Jews murdered Christ were said to have ideologically underpinned nazism. Vatican officials allegedly helped Nazis escape Europe after the war.

It’s really not in good taste for a powerful church with that history to compare criticism of itself to the persecution of the Jews. Coming from a church which taught for years on easter that “the Jews killed Jesus” to do it on Good Friday is especially rich — just ask Mel Gibson about that.

In fairness, they have been working on it:

February 6, 2008

A Catholic Good Friday prayer from the pre-Vatican II Tridentine Mass will no longer ask that God “remove the veil from the hearts” of Jews, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said yesterday.

It will also drop an allusion to Jewish “blindness” and forgo a passage asking that Jews “be delivered from their darkness.” A new prayer, released Monday by the Vatican, still asks that Jews “acknowledge Jesus Christ.”

Baby steps folks …

I suspect that the Church hierarchy is becoming defiant now because of earlier skepticism about that decision by Pope John Paul to ask for forgiveness for these sins back in 2000. Conservatives in the church were very concerned that it would open a floodgate of requests for apologies. (What did they know and when did they know it ….)

You can understand why any organization would worry about such a thing, I suppose. But this isn’t just any organization, it’s a church. And this is a sex scandal involving children. It is a horrible, horrible moral failing, as big as anything we’ve ever seen from religious leaders. Their God may forgive them for all this but I’ve never heard that anyone believes He’s susceptible to spin or stonewalling. Meanwhile, secular authorities have a right to deal with this in any case, but especially after it’s been proven that the church not only failed for decade after decade not only to protect the kids in its care, it actively covered these crimes up. No amount of outraged victimization or slick damage control is going to fix that.

Tristero weighs in:

Wow

by tristero

Just wow:

A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — which have included reports about Pope Benedict XVI’s oversight role in two cases — to the persecution of the Jews…

Did I read that properly? That can’t be true. There must be some misunderstanding:

Father Cantalamessa took note that Easter and Passover were falling during the same week this year, saying he was led to think of the Jews. “They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” he said.

Who the fuck approved this shit?

Comparing the well-earned disgust the entire world rightly feels over the system-wide rape of women and children by Catholic priests to the demented bigotry of Anti-Semitism is way, way, WAY beyond offensive.

I say this as someone whose deep respect for a wide spectrum of religious belief, and of Catholics especially, is a matter of long public record . Note to Vatican:

Cut it out, you stupid assholes. You are managing to accomplish the impossible: making the awful situation YOU refused to deal with a whole lot worse. Back off. NOW.

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Removing The Core

by digby

Karl’s getting a little bit nervous:

My advice to them is to keep their distance from any single party and instead influence both parties on debt, spending and an over-reaching federal government. Allowing third-party movements to co-opt the tea partiers’ good name, which is happening in Nevada, will only serve to elect opponents of the tea party philosophy of low-taxes and fiscal restraint. It could also discredit the tea party movement.

A small fraction of the tea partiers’ leadership are ambitious individuals who haven’t been able to hold office in either the GOP or Democratic Party. Some are from fringe groups like the John Birch Society or the remnants of the LaRouchies. Others see the tea party movement as a recruiting pool for volunteers for Ron Paul’s next presidential bid.

If tea party groups are to maximize their influence on policy, they must now begin the difficult task of disassociating themselves from cranks and conspiracy nuts. This includes 9/11 deniers, “birthers” who insist Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., and militia supporters espousing something vaguely close to armed rebellion.

He omits the Freedomworks/FOX effect for obvious reasons. But the fact is that there will be no purging of the crazies until they shut up Beck and Limbaugh — and that isn’t happening any time soon. And I’m fairly sure Karl couldn’t give a damn.

It’s the third party thing that really has him worried. He was around during the Perot years and he knows very well that the teabaggers are the latest permutation of the “angry white male” (and the women who love them) faction — the base of the Republican Party. If they go third party it is very likely the Democrats will win in spite of themselves.

If crazy birthers and truthers and Jesus militia members agreed to only vote Republican, he’d be perfectly happy to have them in the fold. He knows very well they’ll settle right down and become good little robots once the Republicans are safely in charge. But they get uppity when the Big Boyz are out of power and start doing silly things like run third party candidates and screw up the whole plan. They’re hard to control when they get all het up over the hippies and the blacks ruining everything.

I’m thinking that if they can’t get them under control we might see something like a Jim DeMint candidacy. It might be the only way they can keep them in the tent.

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