Those solemn men in robes who tell women what to do with their wombs but have proven beyond a doubt that they are incapable of telling their priests what they can’t do with their willies, are still at it. I speak, of course, of that bastion of hypocrisy and perversion — the Roman Catholic Church. Herewith a round-up: VATICAN URGED IRISH CHURCH TO LAY OFF My late father’s side of the family is devoutly Irish Roman Catholic, and while my father quietly renounced the church after...

A giant sigh of relief will emanate from the White House once the budget deficit crisis passes. This presumes that the Republicans will have again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory — or reasonable compromise — as they have been in the habit of doing. This however will not be a victory for President Obama and the Democrats as much as a train wreck averted, but there are still plenty of cows to be cleared from the tracks before year’s end and the beginning of serious 2012...

With apologies to Abraham Lincoln, that is the harsh reality facing the Republican Party as it looks into an abyss called 2012. Having learned none of the lessons from its loses in 2006 and 2008 elections and having misread the victories of 2010 as a mandate, the GOP is not only no closer to recapturing the Senate and White House than it was a year ago, it is considerably further way. That is no mean feat, and the reasons are easy to decipher. Party leaders, desperate for short-term votes as opposed...

Much has been written in recent months about the alternate universe in which many Republicans live. It is a universe populated not by hard facts, empirical knowledge and an understanding of economics and history, but by a denial of reality. With the federal debt crisis on center stage, these realities in particular present themselves: * The crisis is a direct result of the profligacy of the Bush era, notably the billions of dollars spent on the Iraq war hard on the heels of a tax cut for the wealthy. *...

Politicians have been invoking the name of God since forever, but in an era when a substantial portion of the Republican base is hard-core Christianist — true believers who openly disparage Islam and other faiths — the practice has become particularly tiresome. And troublesome when you consider the number of homegrown incidents in which Christianists have backed up their beliefs with deadly firearm attacks. This is not to say that John Boehner or Michele Bachmann, to name two especially...

SSH! GENIUS AT WORK The last time that I visited the budget deficit debacle was in a post titled “The Great Republican Retreat of 2011.” The headline pretty much said it all — that the GOP House leadership was hell bent on grabbing defeat from the jaws of compromise — and would rue the day it made promises that defied fiscal reality. After weeks of moving deck chairs on their Titantic, the best that the House leadership has been able to come up with is a balanced budget...

The physical and mental health of presidential candidates has become a paramount concern and Michele Bachmann, who is the frontrunner in some Republican polls, raises troubling questions in both areas. The timing of the revelation that she suffers from weekly crippling stress-induced migraine headaches and mood swings just as her candidacy is surging is no accident. Mainstream Republican bigs like Karl Rove, whose weapons of choice are long knives, know that if the Minnesota congresswoman gets...

An allegation that reporters for Rupert Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World tried to steal personal information from the phones of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center is generating considerable smoke but no fire. This is because the allegation rests entirely on a July 11 story in The Daily Mirror, a News of the World rival, based on an unnamed former New York City police office turned private investigator anonymous that the Murdoch tabloid tried to bribe...

The Republican congressional leadership, unable to keep a single promise of consequence, is bloodied and in retreat, and the imbroglio over the budget deficit is its Waterloo. The retreat is no surprise because Mitch McConnell and John Boehner find themselves between a very big rock and a very hard place. The rock is the reality that Republicans will be blamed if there is a debt default, while the hard place is the right wingers who have hijacked the GOP, demanding lower taxes and smaller government. Compromising...

For students of schadenfreude and cheerleaders for the demise of the newspaper, what’s not to like about the stream of revelations that Rupert Murdoch’s Fleet Street empire is a criminal enterprise? That a man who got filthy rich and amassed enormous political power in Britain, the U.S. and Australia that would have made even Citizen Kane blush is revealed to be a godfather with printing presses rather than machine guns. Unintentional as it was, the revelations come in the wake of “Gone...

I keep asking myself why congressional Republicans are so adamantly opposed to raising taxes and closing tax loopholes for the richest one percent of Americans, the folks who have a greater collective net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent. The oft-cited reason that the John Boehners and Mitch McConnells offer is that raising taxes on the super rich would somehow hurt employment and therefore the economy, and I suppose it is possible that a few fewer Guatemalans would find jobs washing and...

Campaign spending has long been a slippery slope, and finding a balance between private and public interests and wealthy benefactors and nickel-dime contributors has been difficult. But the goal — trying to mitigate the impact of big bucks on election campaigns — has been a worthy one. And one that the Roberts Supreme Court has once again determined to be less worthy than allowing corporations and others with deep pockets to inordinately influence if not outright buy elections. Coming...

There has been a fascinating discussion going on over at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish concerning when America became Rome. That is, when did it forswear faith in its leaders and morality for greed and decadence. The comparison, of course, is somewhat precious as well as a time-worn cliche, but it works well enough for the purposes of trying to figure out why we are going to hell in a hand basket. The reasons that I enunciated in a post titled “Why The American Dream Is Dead”...

Bristol Palin says in her new memwow that she lost her virginity to Levi Johnston after becoming squiffed on wine coolers on a camping trip. Many of the usual anti-Palin suspects have declared that she was raped, which under a literal reading of the Alaska rape statute she may well have been. But that is beside the point. The point is that Bristol chose to continue to have a physical relationship with Levi, she became pregnant after a tumble in her bedroom at the Palin manse, bore a child and...

(This week alone Kiko’s House, my home blog, received two more emails from people whose Golden Retrievers had died much too young. Portions of this post were first published in 2006.) It’s not hard to see why Golden Retrievers are among the most popular breeds in the U.S. year in and year out. They’re cuddly cute as puppies and beautiful as adults. They’re great around kids, energetic, intelligent, intensely loyal and easy to train. In fact, they often train their owners. But...

Perhaps no one knows when O.J. Simpson hit bottom — probably not even The Juice himself — but it probably occurred sometime in the run-up to the 1995 slaying deaths of his wife and Ron Goldman, which I concluded as a journalist who covered the story nonstop from murders to acquittal were a consequence of a cocaine-fueled binge, a fit of jealousy, or most likely both. In any event, it is sadly obvious that Simpson, whose good looks have faded at age 64, has been bottom crawling since...

As jurisprudence goes, the last few years have seen legal thinking so daft that one could conclude that it was the babblings of psycho ward inmates. The hand’s down babbler in chief is, of course, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who in writing for the majority in turning aside a lawsuit against Wal-Mart by women employees “reasoned” that the failure of the retail giant to have a uniform employment policy which may result in systematic gender bias has no standing because there...

OH FOR THE GOOD OLD DAYS! The Republican Party has long been the party of war, and one has to go all the way back to Herbert Hoover, a committed pacifist, to find a Republican president who was not a hawk. Dwight Eisenhower gets a slide both because he inherited the Korean conflict and probably understood the horrors of war better than any president since George Washington. So it is no surprise that war fits comfortably with the contemporary Republican embrace of American exceptionalism,...

If Republicans understood what was going on behind the scenes with the U.S. military they’d probably blow a gasket. As Nicholas Kristof notes, the armed forces are downright liberal and socialist, which is to say that in many respects they represent the antithesis of contemporary Republicanism. First of all, they are a huge melting pot that draws soldiers, sailors and airmen from diverse backgrounds, whereas the Republican Party is white, white, white. They invest in the best...

When the change was made uptown / And the big man joined the band / From the coastline to the city / All the little pretties raise their hands. — “10th AVENUE FREEZE OUT” I am old enough and fortunate enough to have seen Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band early on, including two shows at a small club in 1973. While Bruce was the main attraction, Clarence Clemons dominated the tiny stage. Many years later, I saw the band again at a huge outdoor stadium and Clarence still...

One of the best decisions that I ever made was to take a deep breath after 10 years in the newspaper business, some of it spent covering big stories in exotic locales, and ponder my future. The upshot was that I quit the business to learn something that I had long yearned to do — be a carpenter. I ended up apprenticing to a fine carpenter nearly 10 years my junior and over the next two years learned how to build houses (and some rather pricey ones at that) from the foundations up, including...

JULIA ORMOND AS SMILLA My appetite for great murder mysteries is never sated. For me they are like eating popcorn and a welcome escape from the heavier foods that make up my literary diet such as historical tracts, biographies and scientific tomes. Over the years, I’ve read my way through the great murder mystery writers — Dashielle Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ellery Queen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and P.D. James, to name but a few — and thought I had pretty much...

Sarah Palin practices politics as lap dance, and we’re the suckers who pay the price. Members of our jaded national press corps eagerly stuff hundred dollar bills into her g-string, even as they wink at one another to show that they don’t take her seriously. ~ JOE McGINNISS In the greatest political anti-climax since Newt Gingrich’s latest president run collapsed, the state of Alaska today vomited up 24,199 pages of emails that half-term Governor Sarah Palin had sent and...

A COUPLE OF LOVE BUGS: RUDY AND BERNIE In yet another sign of the weakness of the field of Republican presidential wannabes, America’s Mayor is making noises that he might throw his hat in the ring and Bill Kristol, whose almost unblemished record of getting stuff wrong as the doyen of what remains of the neocon movement, is all warm between the legs in a way he hasn’t been since he first was smitten with Sarah Palin. Three years on even Kristol knows that Palin couldn’t be elected...

It is beyond dispute that Wall Street hijinks were the primary cause of the Bush Recession, the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, and that the stock and other financial markets are justly viewed with great suspicion by many Americans. This explains why the 2005 Bush administration initiative to privatize Social Security through savings accounts controlled by Wall Street died a quick death, and there is no doubt that had it been enacted the consequences would have been...