A really interesting story, a writer who admits to his pre-judgements going in. good job Gene.
Snowbound: "Savoonga. Va-voom. Bunga bunga. Funny, no?
I thought so, too, when I first saw it. It gave me an idea for a funny story. In the dead of winter, I would pack up and blindly head to Savoonga, unannounced and unprepared. No research at all, no planning beyond the booking of a room, if there was one to be had.
The whole thing was an inside joke, one with a swagger. It is a journalist's conceit that a good reporter can find a great story anywhere--in any life, however humble, and in any place, however unwelcoming."

The case of the runaway bride: Facing her pending wedding, the talk of her small town, with 600 invited guests and 14 bridesmaids, having already endured eight wedding showers, she just ran away, then covered with a twisted story about being kidnapped. . Here is a case of a grown woman, 32 years old, who just couldn’t say no. .I think you could argue that this is more than just “wedding jitters,” this is more like temporary insanity. And no wonder. We inculcate girls with the idea that this is their big day. Then they discover that they must go through with it for the sake everyone else. God forbid they should disappoint anyone. So whose big day is it?
The ironic thing is that if you google “kidnapped bride” today you get a story about women in Kyrgyzstan who are literally kidnapped by the groom and his friends and forced to marry. No choice at all.
FRONTLINE/WORLD . Kyrgyzstan - The Kidnapped Bride . Index page | PBS FRONTLINE/World ¬ The Kidnapped Bride ¬ The resurgence of a banned cutom ¬
Stories from a small planet. www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/kyrgyzstan


href="http://pittsburghlive.com/x/style/homegarden/s_329805.html">When wedding bells set off alarms - PittsburghLIVE.com: "The runaway bride had been scheduled to marry John Mason in an elaborate wedding with 14 bridesmaids, 14 groomsmen and 600 guests. News reports have said the wedding was the talk of the town and the bride had eight wedding showers.
'It turns out that Miss Wilbanks basically felt the pressure of this large wedding and could not handle it,' said Duluth Police Chief Randy Belcher. He described the woman as very upset, and said no criminal charges will be filed.
At Big Day Wedding Center in the Strip District -- a one-stop shop for couples looking to sample cake, tuxedos and gowns -- reaction to Wilbanks' disappearance ranged from giggles to disbelief to, at least among veteran workers at Carlisle's, unabashed anger.
'She's spoiled and selfish,' said Kathy Gallagher, of Sewickley, who has helped brides through the ever-agonizing task of picking gowns for more than two decades. 'She put everybody through this agony just because she couldn't decide what to do. It's annoying.' "

Our Leader U.S. President George W. Bush is pictured in various states pushing his plan for restructuring Social Security at an event in Falls Church, Virginia April 29, 2005. President Bush attempted to break a political deadlock on overhauling Social Security with a proposal to limit the growth in future benefits for wealthier Americans and protect the benefits of low-income workers. REUTERS/Jason Reed 

why did i have to go through three blogs to finally get to this absurdity!!!!!!!!!
Think Progress � Bush Redefines �Better Off�: "Bush Redefines �Better Off�
Last night, President Bush talked about cutting Social Security benefits for �people who are better off.� Who are these people? Bush adopted a proposal created by a guy named Richard Posen called �progressive price indexing.� That proposal would cut benefits for everyone except �the bottom 30 percent of earners, or those who make less than about $20,000 currently.� "

Another Bush Failure
Bush, Saudi Fail to Reach Deal to Lower Gas Prices: "Bush, Saudi Fail to Reach Deal to Lower Gas Prices"

this is a really good article about the problems and perils of the large research I universitites as we refer to them around here, and it features UA!

The New York Times > Education > Education Life > The Undergraduate Experience: Survival of the Fittest: "IKE most large universities, the University of Arizona is a virtual city: 37,000 students and nearly 14,000 employees on a sprawling campus in Tucson of 174 buildings and 11,000 parking spots. Also like most of the country's colleges and universities, it is not particularly selective. Arizona admits 83 percent of its applicants, although most graduated in the top half of their high school class. They sit in numbing lecture halls with 500 classmates; the only instructor they may know is a teaching assistant, and they are, for all intents and purposes, anonymous."

climbing season! 

ALASKA NEWS

Ice Condition: "The current conditions on the Tanana River are as follows:

We will no longer be taking ice measurements due to the amount of water on top of the ice and it is beginning to rot in the center layer of ice. The last ice measurement was taken on April 21st, 2005 the ice was 35.5 inches thick. On Wedensday April 20th, the weather warmed up considerably compared to the 20 - 25 degree weather we had the four days prior! It was 61 degrees in the sun on Friday April 22nd and it is predicted to remain warm! At this time the Nenana river ice has gone out, the main channel is running and we are starting to see ice flow from upper river, however the water is very low. The Tanana river is holding steady. The ice on the Tanana river, where the Tripod is setting, remains solid from bank to bank however there is a lot of water on top of the ice and you can see dark spots in the ice where the ice is rotting. "

News-Miner - Associated Press: "Climbing season begins at Mount McKinley "

Journalists screw up.. yes, it happens,
"The Detroit Free Press has decided to allow star sportswriter Mitch Albom to resume his column after taking disciplinary action against him and four other.
Albom was suspended after writing about a Final Four basketball game before it happened, which produced a torrent of negative publicity when two players whom Albom reported were at the game did not show up. Albom apologized and the Free Press launched an investigation.
The paper did not name the staffers involved or describe what punishment they or Albom received. Albom's critics predicted he would get off easy because he is a best-selling author, radio host and ESPN commentator -- Publisher Carole Leigh Hutton killed a negative review of Albom's latest book in 2003.
In a letter to readers, Hutton said: 'We took into account many factors, including the seriousness of the offense, the importance of our credibility, the history of those involved and Albom's 20 stellar years at the Free Press.'"
Reporter screw up #2
Eric Slater, who was canned by the Los Angeles Times last week over a badly botched assignment, is the first to admit he was guilty of "sloppy reporting. . . . It was the worst story I've written in my life."
But he says the punishment was too harsh and there was no way he made anything up. "I believe the L.A. Times thought I was Jayson Blair," Slater says, referring to the serial fabricator at the New York Times.

In a March 29 piece on fraternity hazing at California State University, Chico, Slater said a pledge at a nearby college died of alcohol poisoning; he did not die but was hospitalized. Slater got Chico's population wrong and quoted the university president, although Slater did not speak to him and was citing previously published interviews.
In dismissing the 11-year veteran, the Times said an editor had gone to Chico and concluded that "the quotations from anonymous sources and from two named sources, a Mike Rodriguez and a Paul Greene, could not be verified."
"I got lazy," Slater says, adding that he conducted the interviews in bars and did not have phone numbers for Rodriguez and Greene. He says he could not prove he was in Chico because he slept 30 miles away on a side trip to pick up a BMW motorcycle. He also says the story "morphed, evolved and devolved" during a torturous editing process but that he takes "full responsibility" for the mistakes.
"Should I have been reprimanded or demoted? Yes," says Slater, who won an award for his coverage of Afghanistan. But he argued the mistakes "didn't warrant my dismissal."
This is from Wash posts Kurz, otherwise titled Drudge at 10: Now He's Fun:

Foreign Policy Disputes Are Subtext in Battle Over Bolton: "Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, was so committed to principles ensuring U.S. power that he was willing to make his case relentlessly all the way to the top, even with Powell or Powell's deputy, Richard L. Armitage. That won him allies, particularly among neoconservatives in Vice President Cheney's office and among Pentagon policymakers."

three strikes?
the repub hoisted by their own, .........you know....
i always thought that if left to their own devices the Reps. would hang themsleves. eventually. I admit the wait has been long and painful, and we may not be at the end yet.
in a separate analyisis (see above) Post reporters call the Bolton nomination a straight grab for power- -
not that that should be news to any of us- but occaisionally, if you have the stomach to pay attention, the truth eeks out of the veil of spin. its about potisioning the US as a unilateral bully. Its about power. oh, go read foucault.

"New York Post columnist John Podhoretz details the GOP's woes--and doesn't blame the media (all that much):

'Republicans and conservatives are beginning to panic a little. Ever since the Terry Schiavo controversy took its unexpected turn against the Right in polls -- I say 'unexpected' because major Democratic politicians acted as though they thought the issue would benefit the GOP when it was taken up in Congress back in February -- Republicans are privately worried that they're losing touch with the American people.
'The president's decision to focus the first months of his second term on Social Security reform seems to have backfired, with the public reacting skeptically and nervously about any change to the national pension system. And the media assault on House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is beginning to pay off, in part because DeLay's undeniable tactical brilliance as a legislator is matched only by his advanced case of foot-in-mouth disease.
'Meanwhile, the president's daring nomination of John Bolton as U.N. ambassador is in danger not because of media bias but because three Republican senators are evidently afraid of voting for someone who is accused (probably falsely) of being mean to his underlings. . . ."

Journalists make mistakes

Drudge at 10: Now He's Fun: "Eric Slater, who was canned by the Los Angeles Times last week over a badly botched assignment, is the first to admit he was guilty of 'sloppy reporting. . . . It was the worst story I've written in my life.'
But he says the punishment was too harsh and there was no way he made anything up. 'I believe the L.A. Times thought I was Jayson Blair,' Slater says, referring to the serial fabricator at the New York Times.

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In a March 29 piece on fraternity hazing at California State University, Chico, Slater said a pledge at a nearby college died of alcohol poisoning; he did not die but was hospitalized. Slater got Chico's population wrong and quoted the university president, although Slater did not speak to him and was citing previously published interviews.
In dismissing the 11-year veteran, the Times said an editor had gone to Chico and concluded that 'the quotations from anonymous sources and from two named sources, a Mike Rodriguez and a Paul Greene, could not be verified.'
'I got lazy,' Slater says, adding that he conducted the interviews in bars and did not have phone numbers for Rodriguez and Greene. He says he could not prove he was in Chico because he slept 30 miles away on a side trip to pick up a BMW motorcycle. He also says the story 'morphed, evolved and devolved' during a torturous editing process but that he takes 'full responsibility' for the mistakes.
'Should I have been reprimanded or demoted? Yes,' says Slater, who won an award for his coverage of Afghanistan. But he argued the mistakes 'didn't warrant my dismissal.'"

New Scientist Breaking News - World's largest iceberg 'goes bump in the night': "The world�s largest iceberg has finally crashed into a massive tongue of ice floating in Antarctic waters.
The predicted �collision of the century�- between the B15-A iceberg and the Drygalski ice tongue - had been expected to happen on 15 January 2005 in McMurdo Sound in the Ross Sea. But the icy colossus instead became stranded on a shallow seamount a few kilometres away from the 70-km-long tongue - starving penguins and blocking shipping supply routes to Antarctic bases.
Now, after breaking free in early April, the ice giant has finally scraped the side of the long-lived Drygalski ice tongue, an extension of the David glacier into the ocean. An image snapped by the European Space Agency�s Envisat satellite on 15 April shows a 5-km-long section of the ice tongue breaking off at its seaward end as the bottle-shaped iceberg brushes past."

let us now consider gonzo journalism, for a change of pace, may he rest in peace. This is an exceptional reaction to thompson. The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Gonzo Nights: "By bringing narcotics into his prose, he introduced a hallucinatory element into nonfiction writing, his own kind of magic realism. He took the American realist tradition and ran it through a wood chipper. "

visit Tom Delay's [FUN} House of scandal:
then write to stevens murkowski, young, or your own reps and senators to protest their support of this [un]holy alliance getting ready for the "nucular" option in the senate, and already guilty of destroying the ethis committee in the house.

Tom Delay's House of Scandal

Falling wages for wage earners- how are we going to keep the consumer economy consuming if workers do not get paid enough to survive? this is the lesson we were supposed to have learned after the great depression, but somehow, some parts of our economic superstructure just don't get it.
The New York Times > Business > Falling Fortunes of Wage Earners: "eginning in the mid-1990's, pay increases for most workers slowly but steadily outpaced the rate of inflation, improving the living standards for nearly all Americans. But an unexpected reversal last year in those gains has set off a vigorous debate among economists over whether the decline is just a temporary dip or portends a deeper shift that may cause the pay of average Americans to lag for years to come."

here we go again, what is their problem, anyway?
The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: A New Attack on Women's Sports: "he Bush administration has mounted a surreptitious new attack on Title IX, the 33-year-old law that has exponentially expanded the participation of girls and women in sports."

"Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy's opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles 'is a good ground of impeachment.'"

And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty (washingtonpost.com):

Bush's performance came straight from the right-wing playbook for the attack on Social SecurityThe Rich Are Behind Trust Fund Myth: "he staged a photo-op pilgrimage to the four-drawer cabinet in the Parkersburg facility in which the trust fund's bond certificates are filed and briefly riffled through the pages. Then, smirking inanely for an audience of handpicked supporters, he ridiculed the idea that 'the retirement security for future generations is sitting in a filing cabinet.'

'There is no 'trust fund,' ' he added, 'just IOUs.' "

Timberjay Newspapers Online: "President Bush�s campaign to partially privatize Social Security is descending into absurd theater. This week, the President showed up at the federal Bureau of Public Debt, television cameras in tow, to make the rather bizarre argument that the government he oversees can�t be trusted to make good on its debts."

All that and more,
how did the republicans ever get to the point where judges must dotheir bidding---or else? even the nyt says this is scary
The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: The Judges Made Them Do It: "horrifying even by the rock-bottom standards of the campaign that Republican zealots are conducting against the nation's judiciary. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, rose in the chamber and dared to argue that recent courthouse violence might be explained by distress about judges who 'are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public.' The frustration 'builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in' violence, said Mr. Cornyn, a former member of the Texas Supreme Court who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which supposedly protects the Constitution and its guarantee of an independent judiciary."

ou ou ou ou ou!!!!!
two nasty headlines in two different major papers on the same day!!!!!!
The New York Times > Washington > Political Groups Paid Two Relatives of House Leader: "The wife and daughter of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have been paid more than $500,000 since 2001 by Mr. DeLay's political action and campaign committees, "

the Housing Bubble- you know you are there when the janitor is investing in speculative condos in Florida. And yes, there have been real estate buybbles before. Just remember houston, Oklahoma and Alaska in 1986. Today a report that something like 20% of all real estate is being bought by invfestors, read speculators. THe post below is one letter of many in response to an article:
The Great Real Estate Bubble
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The main reason investors should worry about real estate bubbles is this: most experts say that real estate bubbles are simply impossible

On a site called:
http://www.maxfunds.com/archives/000397.php

: "Other interesting articles related to this topic are at:
It's about the World real estate bubble, but it applies here.
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=1794899
Britain's housing boom threatened by record bankruptcies
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040408/325/eqm4b.html
How healthy is the US banking system?
http://www.brookesnews.com/040504usams.html
Housing Bubble
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0404.wallace-wells.html
Housing Bubble
http://www.virginiabusiness.com/magazine/yr2004/feb04/ideas.shtml
Housing Bubble
http://www.baconsrebellion.com/Issues03/11-17/Housing_bubble.htm
Problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2002/2924fannie_mae.html
Housing Bubble
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4724213/
Housing Bubble
http://www.greekshares.com/real_estate.asp
Watch for news reports of slowing real estate sales that should begin in the 3rd quarter 2004 through the 1st quarter of 2005 immediately following any increase in rates by the Federal Reserve. Two increases by consecutive meetings of the Federal Reserve will officially launch the begining of a real estate crash in California and more so in San Diego, if not for the actual impact of the increase then for the psychology of back to back increases.
Remember to ask yourself this question about those who say there's no real estate bubble: What's their bias? The only people who are denying the obvious are those who stand to profit from it, real estate agents, lenders, title companies, and anybody who's so leveraged that any small decline in property value will destroy them.
Posted by: banker at April 4, 2005 02:59 PM "

More Dirt on DeLay; and Now, the Seattle connection with big wig law firm Preston Gates. This just amplifies the story reported today in page one the washington post. see below.Seattle Weekly: News: Following the Money by Rick Anderson: "Following the Money
The Seattle-based Preston Gates Ellis law firm is attracting more attention as the Tom DeLay investigations widen."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28319-2005Apr5.html

Daily Kos :: Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.: "The Day (New London, Connecticut)
Sobering Economic News
The next time anyone tells you the economy is getting stronger, take these facts into account:
The dollar has fallen by 31 percent in value versus the euro since 2002. ...
Some analysts expect the dollar to lose almost another 10 percent versus the euro, so it would take $1.40 dollars to equal a euro. They expect the dollar to fall against the Japanese yen, too.
The U.S. budget deficit is now 3.5 percent of the total Gross Domestic Product and the trade deficit is worse, at 6.3 percent of GDP. Together, the deficits are about to exceed $1 trillion annualized. ,,,
Stocks, measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, fell 2.6 percent in the first quarter of the year, compared with 0.9 percent in the same period last year.
The central banks of Asian countries, notably China and Japan, now hold $1 trillion in dollar-denominated reserves. ...
This is what the great Bush policy of tax cuts and spending increases have visited on the American people: a sputtering economy, huge budget and trade deficits and a dollar worth much less than before."

Kurz, quoting Salon's Eric Boehlert who indeed nails the press:

Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a story that had supposedly set off a 'furious debate' nationwide? That's how Newsweek.com described the Schiavo story this week. Although it's not clear how a country can have a 'furious debate' when two-thirds of its citizens agree on the issue. . . . But the 'furious debate' angle has been a crucial selling point in the Schiavo story in part because editors and producers could never justify the extraordinary amount of time and resources they set aside for the story if reporters made plain in covering it every day that the issue was being driven by a very small minority who were out of step with the mainstream. . . .

"What is telling about the excessive coverage is how right-wing activists, with heavy-hitter help from Washington, were able to lead the press around, as if on a leash, for nearly two weeks as they pumped up what had been a long-simmering (seven years) family legal dispute and turned it into the most-covered story since a tsunami in Asia three months ago left approximately 300,000 people dead or missing."


washingtonpost.com: Media Notes Extra: "washingtonpost.com > Nation








Add Media Notes to your personal home page.





End of an Anchor Era
Monday, Apr 04, 2005; 8:46 AM

In the fall of 1988, Michael Dukakis was droning on in his impassive way when Ted Koppel cut him short: 'I still don't think you get it.' At that moment, the cognoscenti concluded, the presidential campaign was over.
In the summer of 1996, Koppel packed up and left the Republican convention in San Diego, assailing it as a non-news event and sparking a round of media soul-searching over such stage-managed extravaganzas.
In the spring of 2004, Koppel read the names of every American who had died in Iraq, prompting some affiliates to boycott his program as an unacceptably political statement.
What is it about Koppel's generation of larger-than-life anchors that their careers became so intertwined with the narrative of American history as experienced through the small screen? In a business where hotshot personalities come and go with the frequency of 'American Idol' contestants, why have the recent departures of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and now the 25-year host of 'Nightlin"

The deeper meanings of schaivism are becoming plain, as Andrew Sullivan notes here, after quoting one eric cohen who asserts that we should NOT be able to make any kind of choice that denies life.
www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: "So if we reject the 'autonomy regime,' what replaces it? The moral obligation to keep even people in PVS in permanent medical care, regardless of her own wishes or that of the family. But Cohen is somewhat vague on how this new regime can be imposed. The only possibility, it seems to me, is that the law state emphatically that living wills are not dispositive, that family wishes are not relevant, and that the law set a series of medical or moral criteria to determine whether to keep someone alive indefinitely. Doctors and families would be obliged to obey such laws. The state would be obliged to enforce them - through the police power if necessary. What if the family could not afford the care? Presumably the state would be required to provide it. So let us be plain: the theoconservative vision would remove the right of individuals to decide their own fate in such cases, and would exclude the family from such a decision as well. Indeed, the law might even compel the family to provide care as long as they were capable of doing so. My 'what if?' is a real one. And the theocon right has answered it. They want an end to the 'autonomy regime.' They have gone from saying that a pregnant mother has no autonomy over her own body because another human being is involved to saying that a person has no ultimate autonomy over her own body at all. These are the stakes. The very foundation of modern freedom - autonomy over one's own physical body - is now under attack. And if a theocon government won't allow you control over your own body, what else do you have left?"

Have you ever noticed that when conservatives are always against “special rights,” or affirmative action, except when they feel discriminated against? Take two issues traveling through cyberspace and the blogosphere right now: the dearth of women and minority opinion makers in newspapers and on talk shows, on the one hand, and the lack of appropriately conservative professors on the other.
"These diversity grievances follow the usual logic: Victim-group X is not proportionally represented in some field; therefore the field's gatekeepers are discriminating against X's members," wrote Heather MacDonald in the conservative National Review Online. "The argument presumes that there are large numbers of qualified Xs out there who, absent discrimination, would be proportionally represented in the challenged field."
Heather was writing on the topic of the pundits. Ironic isn’t it? This is the same group who sponsored the survey of college professors and found out too many of them were liberal democrats, and then announced that conservative candidates for professor jobs must be discriminated against. While decrying “victimhood” the conservatives are the first ones to cry “victim” at the least suggestion that they are not getting (more than) their fair share. They built their whole PR apparatus on the idea that they don’t get a fair deal in the liberal dominated media.
Have they ever stopped to wonder if just perhaps, the open-ended inquiry in academics does not suit those of a conservative ideological temperament? Or the under-paid jobs in Academia do not attract the brightest conservative hopefuls who would rather work on K street?
With Tom DeLay’s efforts to control the K street pipeline, and make sure that his conservative friends are all hired to lobby him and his friends, there just are not that many high paying jobs for liberals. Rape and pillage corporate lawyer? Nah. Anderson accountant? Wouldn’t work. That could explain their wholesale retreat to academia. For the most part, the nature of academia is just not conducive to the satisfaction of a free enterprise republican. Except one of my (un) favorite conservative/libertarian economics professors in Fairbanks who screamed loudly about the hand-out economy and how we should all support free enterprise and private property. Too bad the feds got his airplane when they busted him for smuggling alcohol and pot into dry villages.
Just another typical libertarian moralistic hypocrite.


In Punditland, a Little Imagination Could Yield Needed Diversity (washingtonpost.com): "'These diversity grievances follow the usual logic: Victim-group X is not proportionally represented in some field; therefore the field's gatekeepers are discriminating against X's members,' wrote Heather MacDonald in the conservative National Review Online. 'The argument presumes that there are large numbers of qualified Xs out there who, absent discrimination, would be proportionally represented in the challenged field.'
Conservative columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin told me that the whole debate was silly, and that what was more important was ideological diversity.
'It's ideological diversity that's the huge problem,' Malkin said. 'And when it comes to conservative women on the op-ed pages, these liberal women don't consider them diverse -- they treat us as if we are men. The insults that I have gotten over the years from a lot of liberal women . . . . You know a lot of conservative women politicians get the same kind of thing, so I don't really give it much chuck.' "

Heresy:May he Rest in Peace
I find myself thinking of the coverage of the death of the pope as a twenty-four seven advertising blitz for Catholicism as somehow more holy, more reverent, than other religions, despite being perhaps the most irrelevant.
Post the priest pedophilia scandals, the Boston archdiocese among others, has summarily closed down something like eighty local parishes. As the parishioners occupied their churches, if found myself wondering when the Catholic church would just disintegrate. At what point do you finally decide that it is the fellowship of your local church, the worship service itself that is important , not the connection to and orders from the hierarchy in Rome. After all, even before the bankruptcies, moral and monetary, the church was having trouble supplying priests for all the parishes. So if your local church can’t have a priest, a spiritual leader, or you can’t even have a local church, why not just take over the church, dis-affiliate, and hire one of those apostate spiritual leaders, the former priests who have married for example. Join with your neighbors, take your spiritually into your own hands, and support your own church.
I confess that that is how my religion works, it is democratic, and grass roots. Doesn’t that seem more American. Perhaps that is why I have never understood the idea of the pope as relevant at all. What difference does he make? Why should the beliefs of this guy in Rome dictate to the rest of us on abortion rights, birth control, gay marriage. The worst of it is that the Pope’s views seem only to matter in regards to conservative viewpoints. When do we hear about the social gospel, caring for the poor? Anti-war? Getting rid of the death penalty? The inherent right to health care?
Never, it seems.
May he rest in peace.
The New York Times > Week in Review > Catholics in America: A Restive People: "nation has more Catholics now than ever before, some 65 million and growing, fed by a steady flow of immigrants. Many who attend Mass regularly are passionately engaged in their parishes. But many others have drifted away, and Mass attendance has fallen steadily throughout John Paul II's papacy. Fewer families are sending their children to Catholic schools every year.
The pope has inspired men to join the priesthood, but a nationwide shortage of priests has nonetheless grown so acute that many parishes have none of their own. At the same time, many priests and bishops quietly complain that the Vatican has centralized authority more than ever, leaving less able to respond flexibly to the concerns of American parishioners. And the church continues to reel from the effects of the clergy sex-abuse scandal, with more priests accused of molestation nearly every week and with the mounting cost of compensating victims driving several dioceses to seek bankruptcy protection."