Arianna Seems A Tad Upset

Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that the last week should have been spent trashing the late pontiff. His many achievements — taking on communism, embracing the Third World, speaking out for the poor, and standing up against war — surely deserved recognition and praise. But you’d think the wall-to-wall coverage would have included some serious discussion of the two tragic failures of his reign: his woeful mishandling of the church’s child molestation scandal, and how his archaic position on condoms contributed to the deaths of millions of people, especially in Africa.

The molestation outrage is a black mark that can’t be whitewashed.

Over 11,000 children were sexually abused and close to $1 billion in settlement money has been paid out, but the pope did not go much beyond decrying “the sins of some of our brothers.” He never met with any victims, he never offered practical solutions to dealing with the problem, he never addressed the decades-long cover-up of the abuse. He even rejected a “zero tolerance” policy calling for the immediate removal of molester-priests, concerned that it was too harsh.

Too harsh?! This is a man who wouldn’t allow a priest to become a bishop unless he was unequivocally opposed to masturbation, premarital sex and condoms. So, in his perversion pecking order, you had to be dead-set against “self-love” but when it came to buggering little kids, there was some wiggle room.

Read the column in it's entirety here...

In additional news, the government doesn't actually issue a flat-out denial that it's covering up millions of dollars of Halliburton deals.

The Mirror (UK) reports that they have US documents outlining our plan to stay in Iraq through 2009. I'm not sure how much stock I put in that paper, but I'll keep that number in the back of my head and see how it turns out.

Bush Reaches into New Jersey To Screw Up Our Prescription Drug Program - STAY AWAY FROM MY STATE, GODDAMMIT!

Thank god LOST is a repeat and I can give extra ratings to 60 Minutes tomorrow... They are interviewing Giuliana Sgrena, who says the US lied about the shooting.

A former U.S. Marine captain who led an elite combat unit in Iraq says that encounters at military checkpoints are often confusing, sometimes with tragic results.

"The hand and arm signals are hard to see; they're hard to interpret," says Nathaniel Fick. "The warning shots are difficult to see...almost impossible to hear in a speeding car at a long distance and the warning shot into the engine block is...Hollywood fantasy most of the time."

After struggling with the Pentagon's checkpoint procedures, Fick tells Pelley that he improvised a solution; he stole a traffic sign. "At every checkpoint we set up after that, we put the stop sign down the road near the wire and it was hugely successful," he says.

They put up STOP SIGNS and it was hugely successful. Didn't I just talk about the dehumanization of Iraqis? Didn't the article mention that some soldiers would yell "Stop! Stop!" knowing full-well that most Iraqis don't know what that means before filling the car with bullets and slaughtering entire families? Wow. I just went back to get the direct link for that story and realized I had removed a lot of that article from my concious thinking because it was so atrocious. Man, the human mind is fascinating. But I digress...

Terry Jones' Let them eat bombs -

A report to the UN human rights commission in Geneva has concluded that Iraqi children were actually better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now.

This, of course, comes as a bitter blow for all those of us who, like George Bush and Tony Blair, honestly believe that children thrive best when we drop bombs on them from a great height, destroy their cities and blow up hospitals, schools and power stations.

It now appears that, far from improving the quality of life for Iraqi youngsters, the US-led military assault on Iraq has inexplicably doubled the number of children under five suffering from malnutrition. Under Saddam, about 4% of children under five were going hungry, whereas by the end of last year almost 8% were suffering.

Wow. Very interesting.