Ratzo to Retire

Pope Benedict XVI [Joe Ratzinger] of the Roman Catholic Church has decided to resign from his post due to ill health, the Vatican has announced.

"The pope announced that he will leave his ministry at 8:00 pm (19:00 GMT) on February 28," said a Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi, on Monday.

  al Jazeera

Really? I thought popes just reign until they die. Surely they weren't all fit as a fiddle right up to their deathbed.

The last pope to resign was Pope Gregory XII, who stepped down in 1415 in a deal to end the Great Western Schism among competing papal claimants.

Yeah, that's a long time ago. And it had nothing to do with health.

Color me skeptical. But it smells like the typical politician's retiring to spend more time with his family. And when that happens, you can almost bet there's a scandal or uncomfortable situation to be avoided. And we all know that Ratzinger has a suspect past, Hitler youth and child abuse cover-up included. Something smells fishy. And it isn't Friday.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

OK, I'll Start....IOKIYAD

When are we going to start seeing the ubiquitous IOKIYAR from the Bush years changed to reflect its now appropriate reference to Democrats?

[In] broad terms, the conversation generated by the confirmation hearing of John O. Brennan, his nominee for C.I.A. director, underscored the degree to which Mr. Obama has embraced some of Mr. Bush’s approach to counterterrorism, right down to a secret legal memo authorizing presidential action unfettered by outside forces.

[...]

By emphasizing drone strikes, Mr. Obama need not bother with the tricky issues of detention and interrogation because terrorists tracked down on his watch are generally incinerated from the sky, not captured and questioned. By dispensing with concerns about due process, he avoids a more traditional war that he fears could lead to American boots on the ground.

[...]

Particularly stark has been the secret memo authorizing the targeted killing of American citizens deemed terrorists under certain circumstances without judicial review.

[...]

“That memo coming out, I think, was a wake-up call,” said Christopher Anders, senior legislative counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union. “These last few days, it was like being back in the Bush days.”

“It’s causing a lot of cognitive dissonance for a lot of people,” he added. “It’s not the President Obama they thought they knew.”

  NYT

And where have these people been the last six years?

Some liberals acknowledged in recent days that they were willing to accept policies they once would have deplored as long as they were in Mr. Obama’s hands, not Mr. Bush’s.

“We trust the president,” former Gov. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan said on Current TV. “And if this was Bush, I think that we would all be more up in arms because we wouldn’t trust that he would strike in a very targeted way and try to minimize damage rather than contain collateral damage.”

Provide your own comment. It will probably be something like this:

“That’s not how we make policy,” said Douglas Ollivant, a former national security aide under Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama and now a fellow at the New America Foundation. “We make policy assuming that people in power might abuse it. To do otherwise is foolish.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

A report published later is expected to detail Irish government knowledge of what went on in Magdalene laundries.

The laundries were Catholic-run workhouses that operated in Ireland from the 1920s to the mid-1990s. Girls considered "troubled" or what were then called "fallen women" were sent there and did unpaid manual work.

[...]

The last Magdalene asylum in Ireland, in Waterford, closed in 1996 .

[...]

In the late 1990s former inmates began to speak out about their treatment.

They told horrifying stories of sexual, psychological and physical abuse .

[...]

The women toiled behind locked doors unable to leave after being admitted and while the laundries were paid, they received no wages

[...]

One survivor, Maureen Sullivan, 60, was sent to a Magdalene laundry in New Ross, County Wexford, at the age of 12.

Maureen's father died leaving a widow and three children.

Her mother re-married and Maureen claims she was abused by her stepfather.

The nuns noticed, called in a priest and convinced her mother that Maureen would be going to a "lovely school".

Maureen Sullivan: "We had no rights. My name was taken off me"

She said she never saw her school books again, was forced to work night and day, seven days a week, and was given a new name, Frances.

[...]

Ms Sullivan said her day began at six in the morning, and finished at nine at night.

She would have to scrub and polish floors, work in the laundry and then make rosary beads and knit Aran sweaters.

"Everything was taken from me; my name, my rights as a child to go out and play with other children, my rights to communicate with other people," she adds.

[...]

It has been estimated that up to 30,000 women passed through such laundries in Ireland.

The congregations which ran them were the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, the Religious Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.

  BBC

...but hey, call yourself what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

One of the most prominent members of the Westboro Baptist church has left it after spending her life as part of the fervently anti-gay movement.

Megan Phelps-Roper, who looked after social media for the church best known for its slogan “God hates fags”, announced her departure in a post on the blogging platform Medium in which she also revealed her younger sister Grace, 19, was also leaving.

[...]

Phelps-Roper writes: “We know that we’ve done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn’t the goal, but it was one of the outcomes. We wish it weren’t so, and regret that hurt.

[...]

“We know that we can’t undo our whole lives. We can’t even say we’d want to if we could; we are who we are because of all the experiences that brought us to this point. What we can do is try to find a better way to live from here on. That’s our focus.”

[...]

The church has a small congregation, largely made up of the extended family of the Reverend Fred Phelps, the grandfather of Megan and Grace Phelps-Roper. Their mother, Shirley Lynn Phelps-Roper, is one of its most outspoken representatives.

[...]

As well as picketing military funerals, the church also pickets sporting events, concerts and other occasions in the apparent hope of publicity. As well as being anti-gay, it is also anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic and anti-Chinese.

[...]

In an accompanying Medium piece, Damsel, Arise: A Westboro Scion Leaves Her Church, Jeff Chu describes what led Megan, who was named by the Kansas City Star as “the future leader” of the church, to leave in November.

Chu writes that her ephiphany over Westborough’s hateful dogma began with a Twitter discussion with Jewish blog Jewlicious’s David Abitbol.

  Raw Story

It's Sunday

 

The sexual abuse of parishioners—particularly children—by members of the clergy has become a defining scandal for the Catholic Church, changing the dynamics between priests and their flocks as lay Catholics demand accountability from Rome. But before crises in Boston and other American cities, a group of brave, deaf men in Milwaukee began speaking out in the 1970s about a priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, who abused as many as 200 of them. Mea Maxima Culpa, a new documentary about their experiences and their courage, premiere[d] on HBO [February 4].

  Think Progress

To the surprise of absolutely nobody currently wearing my eyeballs, the Clan Of The Red Beanie has decided that the latest concession by the administration on the matter of contraceptive coverage is not sufficient to answer its demands that the Presbyterian charpeople in its employ be held to a cockeyed doctrine that most Catholics have been ignoring since 1965.

[...]

Now, they want the Hobby Lobby loophole, too. This is coming from Dolan, the clown in New York who has a more-than-cameo role in Alex Gibney's new HBO movie about the horrendous abuse scandal that took place at a school for the deaf in Milwaukee.

[...]

The Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States has become a form of putrescence in the body politic. Long before its current meddling, it made a mockery of the civil law in ways that are grotesque and genuinely evil. It betrayed both the faith of its laity -- including me -- and its responsibilities as an institution of civil society. It abandoned its obligations to its fellow citizens, whether they are Catholic or not. It is in no position to demand anything from them. It should be ridiculed, and then ignored.

  Charlie Pierce

Hack Hacked

The email accounts of six Bush family members and close friends were hacked, according to a report published late Thursday by The Smoking Gun.

The hacker uploaded emails and photos to a website, revealing confidential information such as phone numbers and addresses, intimate details about former President George H.W. Bush’s recent hospitalization, and self-portraits painted by former President George W. Bush.

  The Hill

Ha! So now we know how he's spending his retirement. Painting pictures of himself. How perfectly in character. (Come to think of it, that may be how he spent a lot of his time while supposedly on the job, too - and all that vacation time.)

And not just any old pictures...

I wonder who he emailed it to.

Images at Houston chronicle and Smoking Gun.

The Brennan Confirmation Hearing

They never laid a glove on him — not, I suspect, that many of them wanted to do so — and John Brennan looked very comfortable in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee during his extended job interview to become the head of the CIA. [...T]here was about the hearing a feeling of pure show, because both sides were operating under a tacit agreement that there are things that the American people must not, and should not, know about what is being done in their name. Once that agreement is struck, once that private communion is joined, the fundamentals of self-government are left behind.

[...]

It was most clear when Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a persistent critic of the administration's drone program, asked Brennan point-blank whether the president could order a drone strike on an American citizen inside the United States and Brennan didn't — or couldn't — give him an answer.

[...]

And the hearing, remarkably, went on as though nothing untoward had happened.

He also couldn't answer straight out whether waterboarding is torture. He hid behind legalities as Carl Levin fumed. "I am not a lawyer," Brennan kept saying. People kept congratulating him for the blunt, straight answers he was giving. It was like watching an exotic tribe worship in its native tongue.

  Charlie Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Fourth Estate As State Propaganda

[E]xtreme levels of subservience to US government authority is embedded in the ethos of the establishment American media. They see themselves not as watchdogs over the state but as loyal agents of it.

[...]

[Y]et again, the US media has been caught working together to conceal obviously newsworthy government secrets. On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that two years ago, the Obama administration established a base in Saudi Arabia from which it deploys drones to kill numerous people in Yemen. including US citizen Anwar Awlaki and, two weeks, later his 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman. The US base was built after the US launched a December, 2009 cruise missile/cluster-bomb attack that slaughtered dozens of Yemeni women and children. But the Post admitted that it - along with multiple other US media outlets - had long known [“more than a year “] about the Saudi Arabia drone base but had acted in unison to conceal it from the US public.

[...]

The "other news organization" which the Post references is the New York Times. The NYT - in a very good article yesterday on the role played by CIA nominee John Brennan in US drones strikes in Yemen - reported that Brennan "work[ed] closely with neighboring Saudi Arabia to gain approval for a secret CIA drone base there that is used for American strikes". As the paper's Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan, explained, the NYT was one of the papers which "had withheld the location of that base at the request of the CIA", but had decided now to report it. That was why the Post did so.

[...]

As usual, the excuses for concealing this information are frivolous. Indeed, as the Guardian's Roy Greenslade noted, "the location of several drone bases was published as long ago as September last year on at least one news website, as this item on the North America Inter Press Service illustrates." Gawker's Adrian Chen documents numerous other instances where the base had been publicly disclosed.

[...]

The same dynamic drives most of these acts of US media self-censorship. It has nothing to do with legitimate claims of national security. Indeed, none of these facts - once they were finally reported - ultimately resulted in any harm. Instead, it has everything to do with obeying government dictates; shielding high-level government officials from embarrassing revelations; protecting even the most extreme government deceit and illegality; and keeping the domestic population of the US (their readers) ignorant of the vital acts in which their own government is engaged.

  Glenn Greenwald

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Really, He Always WANTED To

"Today, as part of the president's ongoing commitment to consult with Congress on national security matters, the president directed the Department of Justice to provide the congressional Intelligence committees access to classified Office of Legal Counsel advice related to the subject of the Department of Justice White Paper," the unidentified official said.

  The Hill

Commitment to consult after being outed by leaks.

On the other hand...

Most of the people killed by the Lethal Presidency have not been American citizens.

Most of the people killed by the Lethal Presidency have not been Al Qaeda leaders.

Most of the people killed by the Lethal Presidency have not warranted a white paper.

  Charlie Pierce

Further on Leaked White Paper Re "Targeted Killing"

The powers it claims are broad and, as Isikoff pointed out on Rachel Maddow's show, actually contradict some of the administration's public statements and enter into Orwell's world of false language rendered to conceal an arguments "too brutal for most people to take."  Consider the notion of "imminence." Last year Eric Holder claimed that a lethal strike against an American citizen can only be made if to protect against "an imminent threat of violent attack." But the white paper states that imminence "does not require that the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons or interests will take place in the significant future." Effectively, the word "imminence" has no meaning beyond "we think you're a bad guy."

The white paper further claims that it can carry out operations "with the consent of the host nation's government," and then moves on to declare that such operations would still be lawful "after a determination that the host nation is unwilling or unable to suppress the threat posed by the individual targeted." In other words, we will ask your consent, but we don't really need it.

This kind of language -- imminence that isn't, consent at gun-point -- runs throughout the white paper. It authorizes, for instance, not just the killing of Al Qaeda leaders, but of any "an associated force." Who determines what constitutes "an associated force?" The same people ordering the killing.

I don't want to be thick-witted here. [...] But practically, much of our foreign policy now depends on the hope of benevolent dictators and philosopher kings. The law can't help. The law is what the kings say it is.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

What is so extraordinary about this moment in American life is that tens of millions of people are ferociously defending the Second Amendment, and throw the name of the Constitution around like it's sacred, and yet they utter not one peep when its basic principles are shaken to their foundation. And let's be honest about why the right doesn't attack Obama for this outrageous violation of the founding principles of the country: They don't want to look weak, and they think that it only affects people they don't mind seeing die anyway. As for the idea that Al-Qaeda is so much of a threat that it requires extraordinary extensions of the president's powers, I can only say that the United States didn't need a sovereign while facing the Nazis or Communist Russia, both of which were infinitely more resourceful and threatening than a bunch of camel-humpers living in remote caves in the most desolate places on earth. Rome didn't need a sovereign for five hundred years, while facing half a dozen truly existential threats. We all know how that turned out. At least they knew when they had an emperor. They had a ceremony and everything. Obama just has a white paper.

  Charlie Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.