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Pope Benedict XVI has opened Holy Week indicating that he will “not be intimidated” by accusations against the Vatican over the clerical sex abuse crisis.

In his Palm Sunday address the Pope said that Jesus Christ “leads us towards courage which does not allow us to be intimidated by the chatter of dominant opinions, towards patience which supports and sustains others”.

So the fact that the dominant opinion is that sex with little boys is illegal will not intimidate him.

In his homily today the Pope addressed himself to young people, reminding them that “Christian life is a path, or pilgrimage with Christ, a walk in the direction that he has chosen and shows us”.

When Michael Jackson addressed young people in his homely, he was sued. Remember that.

Now I’ve read the linked article twice, and I fail to see another way to interpret these remarks. Is it just me?

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Fed up with waiting, President Barack Obama announced Saturday he would bypass a vacationing Senate and name 15 people to key administration jobs, wielding for the first time the blunt political tool known as the recess appointment.

The move immediately deepened the divide between the Democratic president and Republicans in the Senate following a long, bruising fight over health care. Obama revealed his decision by blistering Republicans, accusing them of holding up nominees for months solely to try to score a political advantage on him.

“I simply cannot allow partisan politics to stand in the way of the basic functioning of government,” Obama said in a statement.

The 15 appointees to boards and agencies include the contentious choice of union lawyer Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. Republicans had blocked his nomination on grounds he would bring a radical pro-union agenda to the job, and they called on Obama not to appoint Becker over the recess.

Obama went ahead anyway, while also choosing a second member for the labor board so that four of its five slots will be filled. The labor board, which referees labor-management disputes, has had a majority of its seats vacant for more than two years, raising questions about the legality of its rulings.

Overall, the appointments will take place through next week, allowing people to make the transition to their new jobs, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki. said. The news of Becker’s appointment drew the quickest ire from Republicans.

“Once again the administration showed that it had little respect for the time honored constitutional roles and procedures of Congress,” said Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Obama’s foe in the 2008 presidential election. “This is clear payback by the administration to organized labor.”

John, you’re really getting senile. Check the actions of W.

(update- meant to do the video Marcel-Jan pointed out in his first comment as the second video – copy paste error – thanks, Marcel-Jan!)

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The Vatican’s chief spokesman on Saturday praised the US Catholic church for what he said were its successful efforts in curbing sexual abuse of minors by priests.

[..]

‘An impartial observer will not fail to notice that the authority of the pope and the intense and coherent commitment of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have not been weakened, rather they have been confirmed in their support and guidance to bishops to combat and root out the blight of abuse wherever it appears,’ Lombardi said.

A river in Egypt springs to mind…

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Sony Entertainment has shut down Beyonce’s official YouTube site. Congrats to Sony Entertainment for wisely spending its legal dollars and working on behalf of its artists. Truly, you deserve many laws and secret treaties passed to protect your “business model” (how else could such a delicate flower survive the harsh realities of the real world?).

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The telecommunications giant AT&T said on Friday that it would take a $1 billion noncash accounting charge in the first quarter because of the health care overhaul and might cut benefits it offers.

Don’t let the head line fool you.

The charges are related to a 2003 law providing a prescription-drug benefit under Medicare. At the time it was adopted, some companies were threatening to drop drug coverage for their retirees, since this would now be available through Medicare. Congress voted them a 28% tax-free subsidy for continuing to provide coverage to retirees eligible for Medicare.
The subsidies caused the cost of companies’ obligations for retiree benefits to decline. AT&T, for example, saw its obligation drop by $1.6 billion at the time. ”

Boo hoo. The companies are loosing a subsidy and now are complaining and making it look at more health care bill defects. Bullshit. In the end, a single payer system, aka the so called public option, will be the only solution. To expect profit motivated companies to ever live up to their commitments and social responsibilities to their employees is fantasy.

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As outrage mounted over the latest Catholic Church sex scandal, writer Christopher Hitchens called for the arrest of Pope Benedict XVI, and singer Sinead O’Connor said the pope should face a criminal investigation.

[..]

Experts in canon law say only a heavenly bolt of lightning can take the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger from power as the supreme leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

“The only person who can fire him is God,” said the Rev. Thomas Doyle, who worked at the Vatican embassy in Washington, D.C., and was one of the first whistle blowers when the sex scandals broke in 1984.

“A pope is never forced to resign, not under the current canon law,” said Robert Mickens, the Vatican correspondent for the Tablet weekly. “A pope can voluntarily resign, but it’s interesting… Who would take his resignation?”

Prediction: if the pressure on the church gets worse, Ratzinger will have some unexpected unforeseen cardiac problems, and we’ll have a new pope, carefully selected for his background.

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At birth, Houston Tracy let out a single loud cry before his father cut the cord and handed him to a nurse.

Instantly, Doug Tracy knew something was wrong with his son.

“He wasn’t turning pink fast enough,” Tracy said. “When they listened to his chest, they realized he had an issue.”

That turned out to be d-transposition of the great arteries, a defect in which the two major vessels that carry blood away from the heart are reversed. The condition causes babies to turn blue.

Surgery would correct it, but within days of Houston’s birth March 15, Tracy learned that his application for health insurance to cover his son had been denied. The reason: a pre-existing condition.

“How can he have a pre-existing condition if the baby didn’t exist until now?” Tracy asked.

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News Corp will charge readers for online versions of its UK Times and Sunday Times newspapers from June, becoming the first media firm to test consumers’ appetite to pay for mass-market news online.

Access to two new websites for the two titles will cost 1 pound ($1.49) per day or 2 pounds for a week. Subscribers to the print versions will get free access, News Corp said on Friday.

“This is just the start,” said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News Corp’s British newspaper unit News International which also publishes the Sun daily tabloid and sister paper The News of the World on Sundays.

Make a note in your calendar – June 1th, the UK Times will effectively disappear from the net, probably never to be heard of again.

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Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire may sound like a dry website, but its subject and content is fascinating. In the 7th Century BC King Assurbanipal of Assyria built a library that was to contain all the world’s knowledge. Destroyed by the Medes in 612 BC, the library was not rediscovered until the 1840s. 28000 clay tablets written in Akkadian have been found. 1600 can be read online, all translated into English. It’s a somewhat overwhelming amount, but there’s a lovely highlights section, which even includes pictures of the pillow-shaped writing tablets. For a thorough overview, you can listen to the In Our Time episode about the Library of Nineveh. The most famous text to have been found in Nineveh is undoubtedly the Epic of Gilgamesh. The story of its decipherment and the controversies that ensued, is interesting in its own right.

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In an article noting reported racial epithets shouted at Democratic officials during a recent Washington, D.C., tea party protest, The Washington Times quoted Dale Robertson, founder of teaparty.org, as saying that Democrats are “trying to label the tea party, but I’ve never seen any racial slurs.” However, Robertson himself was reportedly kicked out of a 2009 tea party event at which he carried a sign reading, “Congress = Slaveowner, Taxpayer = Niggar [sic].”

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For a head of government to visit the White House and not pose for photographers is rare. For a key ally to be left to his own devices while the President withdraws to have dinner in private was, until this week, unheard of. Yet that is how Binyamin Netanyahu was treated by President Obama on Tuesday night, according to Israeli reports on a trip viewed in Jerusalem as a humiliation.

After failing to extract a written promise of concessions on settlements, Mr Obama walked out of his meeting with Mr Netanyahu but invited him to stay at the White House, consult with advisers and “let me know if there is anything new”, a US congressman, who spoke to the Prime Minister, said.

“It was awful,” the congressman said. One Israeli newspaper called the meeting “a hazing in stages”, poisoned by such mistrust that the Israeli delegation eventually left rather than risk being eavesdropped on a White House telephone line. Another said that the Prime Minister had received “the treatment reserved for the President of Equatorial Guinea”.

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Ito, according to an SEC insider, is the SEC supervisor at the center of a redacted inspector general report into “misuse of government computer resources and official time” late last year in which he admitted to attempting to view sites like www.fuck-my-wife.com and analsins.com from his Los Angeles office more than 1,800 times over a 17-day period. Though the inspector general’s report called Ito’s porn obsession a “serious matter” that “could have discredited the SEC” and recommended “disciplinary action up to and including dismissal,” the insider says Ito still has his job and hasn’t been disciplined in any outwardly evident way. In fact, Ito has held on to the promotion he received just before the investigation into his workplace porn habits began.

[..]

To put that in perspective, just days later, on September 15, Lehmann Brothers went bankrupt. The day after that, the federal government took control of AIG.

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Late last week came word of a major scandal from the UK Daily Mail. In the three years since he stepped down as prime minister, Blair pocketed more than $30 million in oil revenues from his secret dealings with a South Korean oil consortium, UI Energy Corporation. Despite all his best efforts to keep his connection to UI secret, word is spreading like wildfire throughout the U.K.

Now, you might ask, that he’s no longer in government and has his own company, Blair Associates, why would anyone care what his business dealings are? Well, for openers, Mr. Blair is also the West’s envoy to the Middle East. Of concern to British politicians, too, is that a former prime minister has been stone cold silent about being on the payroll of an immense multinational oil corporation, specializing in oil exploration in Iraq, and one that coincidentally happens to find itself in another challenging part of the globe.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Blair isn’t the only prominent politician on UI’s payroll. Others reportedly include former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke, as well as politicians like Congressman Stephen J. Solarz, former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, former ambassador to Egypt, Nicholas A. Belites, and U.S. Commander for the Middle East General John P. Abizaid. And, these are just the ones who acknowledge any association with the oil conglommerate.

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Just when you thought the iPad might be able to breathe some life back into the failing print industry, the industry itself seems dead set on making sure that doesn’t happen. Well, certain parties within the industry at least, like maybe News Corp. for instance, if a recent report appearing in the Wall Street Journal about planned iPad subscription pricing is any indication.

The report, which, you’ll remember, appeared in the WSJ itself, cited “a person familiar with the matter” as the source of the information that the Journal would be charging $17.99 per month for iPad subscribers when the device launches next month. No, that’s not a typo where I accidentally switched “per month” for “per year.”

I just checked on their site, but you can get a “print AND online” subscription for $2.69 a week, so if the $17.99 is true, they’ve apparently gone utterly insane.

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On Thursday, Mountain View formally announced a behavioral targeting scheme that allows a third-party advertiser to place a piece of Google code on its website that will track your visits to the site and trigger related ads when you hit any one of the hundreds of thousands of other sites in Google’s web-spanning ad network. According to Google, its “content network” – a world of sites that display ads via Google AdSense – reaches 80 per cent of all net users.

[..]

Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network.

I wonder… if marketing is going to depend more and more on these features, and if analysis of users is going to depend more and more on following you around on the web, are we AdBlock users becoming more and more invisible to website owners? Can we expect an interaction in the store that goes like “I saw product X on your website and…” “No you didn’t!” Or perhaps something like “we would like to hire you, but we couldn’t find a trace of you on the internet” “correct – I don’t use Facebook and I have AdBlock turned on”

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In just 18 months, the number of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android phones being shipped has soared to 60,000 a day, and over that period countless new devices have been released by handset makers for sale by carriers worldwide.

Nothing typically moves this fast in wireless. So how has Google done it?

Well, at least part of the answer appears to be that Google is sharing advertising revenues with carriers that use Android, according to multiple sources who are familiar with the deals. In some cases, sources said, Google is also cutting deals with the handset makers. The revenue-sharing agreements only occur when the handsets come with Google applications, like search, maps and gmail, since that is not a requirement of Android.

Buy an iPhone, and the carrier pays Apple. Buy an Android, Google pays the carrier. No wonder carriers are selling lots of androids that way. It’ll be interesting to see what this does to the market.

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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has long been a vocal critic of the Democrat’s health reform efforts, but today he started taking credit for some provisions of the bill, and talking up his own role in crafting the legislation.

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Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

General advice for when someone tries to sell you a happy piece of your past: they don’t have it.

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Following the vote on Sunday, Mike Troxel of the Lynchburg Tea Party posted the address of what he thought was Dem Rep Tom Perriello, with the comment that activists should add a “personal touch” to their anger at Periello — who voted yes on the health care bill — by going to his house. It turns out the address was actually Perriello’s brother’s house, and the FBI are currently investigating the cut gas line that was discovered the next day.

From TPM – “Another tea party activist who reportedly posted Periello’s brother’s address online, Nigel Coleman of the Danville Tea Party, wrote in a blog comment after learning about the mistaken address: ‘Do you mean I posted his brother’s address on my Facebook? Oh well, collateral damage.’ ”

There have been several other vandalism attacks in the wake of the vote, but many involve thrown bricks and smashed windows at the most. Mike Vanderboegh of the Alabama Constitutional Militia has claimed responsibility for some of the attacks, and said in an online posting, “And if we do a proper job, if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat Party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.”

[..]

Number of times traditional media will use the word “terrorism”: 0

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So, friend of mine has a concept of God that I quite enjoy. God is the CEO of adesign corperation. He lives in his office, where he’s got photos of all his projects, algae, fungi, dinosaurs,virii, mammals, and of course, a little thing of early man. He’s kept largely out of the loop from the rest of the Company, which is run by Satan, who runs the Marketing Division, who came up with the brilliant ad campaign of offering Man civilization, basically promising them they can totally be like God if they keep trying – without telling them having Civilization violates their Warranty. So Heaven is now mostly about dealing with the hundred billion million claims for heavenly grace from warranty-violated souls – so the office does everything in its’ power to make sure God never gets wind of this.

Which is fine by him, he mostly built Earth for his Beetle collection. Loves the damn things.

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SPIEGEL ONLINE: According to the constitution of Bhutan, the people should not become richer every year, but happier. The little Asian kingdom wants to achieve this with a socially equitable society and better protection of the environment. Is this a better approach?

Hertz: Definitely. GDP only measures a small part of economic success. Some really important aspects are ignored. Take sustainability, for example. It’s absurd that a country can have high growth rates because it has a lot of polluting industry. The quality of the air, health, progress made by women, child care and social cohesion — these are all important economic factors. GDP does not show how innovative an economy is. Nor does it show if the products being produced will be successful in the long run or will be out of fashion tomorrow. But, up to now, there has not been a substitute for GDP.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Experts say that growth is important for creating wealth.

Hertz: This has never been proven. The economy of a country can grow enormously, and the majority of the population remain poor. Russia is an example. The country has huge growth rates, but only few people benefit from this. For more than 25 years, the gap between the richest and the poorest has been increasing. There is absolutely no correlation between an equitable society and GDP growth. The reasons why a country’s economy grows can also be very negative. Wars are good for growth, for example. So are natural disasters. Haiti will have high growth rates because, after the earthquake, everything has to be rebuilt.