Fighting terror and hurricanes. Bullets and Butter.
Topic: General News.

Things are really going from bad to weird, as Lou Reed would say. Another US city is being evacuated and this time more than a million and a half people are being displaced. (This on top of the million or so from New Orleans.) As if this whole evacuation wasn’t crazy enough already, just a few hours ago a bus with 45 elderly evacuees blew up on the highway out of Houston killing at least 24.

Just unbelievable. There are traffic jams that go on for 20 miles, people are moving at 10 miles an hour, if they’re lucky, and some are getting stuck on the roadside because they’ve run out of gas, which is in short supply, or they’re breaking down from overheating and there’s no water.

This hurricane is going to be rolling through in just a few hours, what are the local authorities going to if people are still stuck on the highway? You can already start to imagine something much worse than Katrina coming.

Not to say that I don’t have confidence in the gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight being capable of handling another crisis, or anything. [They’re already gassing up Air Force One for a fly over of Houston, when it’s all over.] I just hope this time, someone at the White House, or at FEMA, is watching CNN.

W., with his usual firm grip on reality, said in a speech on Wednesday, that he’s been “thinking a lot” (It’s hard work. Hard work!), about 9/11 and Katrina and the terrorists are “the kind of people who look at Katrina and wish they had caused it. We’re in a war against these people.” Wait, we’re in a war against hurricanes? I’m confused, what did he just say?

So, we should trust him to be able to handle another crisis because so far his leadership on the “war on terror” has been so stellar? This is Karl Rove’s strategy to resuscitate the Boy’s poll numbers? I think right now most people are just crossing their fingers desperately hoping this idiot doesn’t get us all killed.

Butter, Bullets, and a manned mission to Mars.

In a spectacularly well-timed announcement, NASA says they’re going to spend $100 billion for a manned mission to Mars. These guys can’t even pick up the trash at the International Space Station without a 1 in 52 chance of the shuttle blowing up and they’re going to Mars? Good location for a George W. Bush presidential library, though.

Don’t worry, be happy. W. says now is not the time to pull out of Iraq. We can have bullets and butter we can afford it all. No act of terror or nature is going to force us out of Iraq. “No matter how many car bombs there are, these terrorists cannot stop the march of freedom.”

So, he’s basically conceding that we can’t stop the car bombs. So, bring ‘em on! In an interesting bit of history revision, W. said yesterday “to leave Iraq now would be to repeat costly mistakes of the past that led to the attacks of September the 11th, 2001.” Before the invasion, we had to go in to prevent another 9/11, now we have to stay to prevent another 9/11.

Congress says money grows on trees:

I keep hearing the like’s of William Cristal and David Brooks droning on about how we’re ‘the wealthiest nation on earth’ and we can have two wars and recover from two massive hurricanes. If my only source of money is a Visa card, am I wealthy? I would like to know how we’re going to afford to rebuild New Orleans, rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan and pay for Don Young’s bridge to nowhere.

This is just insanity, sooner or later our creditors are going to seriously ask themselves if we’re good for it. Congress’ solution is tax cuts and set asides, but I don’t see how sticking it to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is going to solve our financial problems. Cutting social programs and diverting taxpayer money to politically connected faith-based charities is not an answer.
Doesn’t it just seem like our government has just lost its ability to function?

This administration and the congress are totally incapable of dealing with this crisis we’re in. The hurricanes, the wars, the raising oil prices----and we’re not even into the winter heating oil crisis yet----this government just can’t deal. This is how coups get started in banana republics and we’re starting to look like the wackiest banana republic in the west. In 1931 the government pretty much threw up its hands two years into the Depression and Hubert Hoover suggested what the country needed was a poem. At that time, the only question was who would take over after Hoover, the communists or the fascists? I don’t know, you think another day of prayer will do the trick?

Cloaca Catholica:

Just do what the Catholic Church does in a crisis, ignore it. I wrote yesterday about the Philadelphia Archdiocese and their little pedophile problem, which a Philadelphia Grand Jury called “A continuous, concerted campaign of cover up.” Cardinal Justin Rigali, the current head of the Archdiocese, says no one should read the Grand Jury report. “I don’t think it’s of value to families…It’s prolonged explanations of abuse” are “very graphic.”

Yeah, it not family reading material, for sure. Having to read about Father John Mulholland and his bondage, scat fetish and little boys isn’t very conducive to keeping the donation plate full.
Mulholland is still a priest, even though the Church concluded that a letter he sent to a boy with pictures of painful bondage and a message saying, “prepare to break me on vacation,” showed that he was “a disturbed individual in need of mental health intervention.” One report had Mulholland stringing up a boy and “piercing him or at least jabbing him with some instrument over his body.”

Cardinal Rigali says it’s a shame the Grand Jury report doesn’t show the “great efforts by the Archdiocese” to prevent further sexual abuse. Mulholland was cleared of any wrong doing in 2004, and is now ministering to a nursing home, so it would appear their efforts aren’t good enough.
I wonder what the Pope has to say about all of this. He after all, has a little cover up problem of his own.

Herr Ratzinger has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit in Texas involving the cover up of the abuse of three boys by a seminarian named Juan Carlos Patino-Arango, who is currently on the lam. The AP writes that, “the lawsuit alleges that the former cardinal, who headed the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith before becoming Pontiff, was involved in a conspiracy to hide Patino-Arango’s crimes and help him escape prosecution.” Imagine that!

In any case, the US State Department has stepped in to keep the Holy Father from having to deal with it. Assistant US Attorney General Peter Keisler has told the judge in the case that to allow the lawsuit to proceed would be “incompatible with the United States’ foreign policy interests,” because the Pope enjoys the immunity as head of state of the Holy See. So, how did we get away with arresting Manuel Noriega, he was a head of state too, right? And Saddam, wasn’t he a head of state? But in this case, it’s in our foreign policy interest to keep priests from having to stand trial for sexually abusing children.

Nazis, child abusers, what the diff?