QUOD LICET JOVI, NON LICET BOVI

In other words, "what is permitted to gods, is not permitted to oxen."

So America, the next time y'all are milling about, lowing in your pens, and you feel the urge to get uppity, just remember this little bit of wisdom.

You are the cattle
they are the gods.

This is why Tiger Woods and his affairs are jaw droppingly relevant while the laundry list of innocents slaughtered by our masters under the all inclusive term "collateral damage" will be, always and forever, completely & totally irrelevant.

Just as your death will be.

Whatever the circumstances of its occurrence.

Can I get a MOO.

C'mon, put your backs into it


MOO !

There, that's much better.

Good day.

Un-Fucking-Believable

VATICAN CITY – The Vatican heatedly defended Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday, claiming accusations that he helped cover up the actions of pedophile priests are part of an anti-Catholic "hate" campaign targeting the pope for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

Vatican Radio broadcast comments by two senior cardinals explaining "the motive for these attacks" on the pope and the Vatican newspaper chipped in with spirited comments from another top cardinal.

"The pope defends life and the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, in a world in which powerful lobbies would like to impose a completely different" agenda, Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, head of the disciplinary commission for Holy See officials, said on the radio.

Herranz didn't identify the lobbies but "defense of life" is Vatican shorthand for anti-abortion efforts.

Also arguing that Benedict's promotion of conservative family models had provoked the so-called attacks was the Vatican's dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano.

"By now, it's a cultural contrast," Sodano told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. "The pope embodies moral truths that aren't accepted, and so, the shortcomings and errors of priests are used as weapons against the church."

Shortcomings? If this is code for priests cumming inside little children, then I can see the logic here. Otherwise, these dipshits are even bigger dipshits than I originally thought. Blaming gay folk & pro-choice advocates shows exactly how desperate the Church has become.

Also rallying to Benedict's side was Italian Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, who heads the Vatican City State's governing apparatus.

The pope "has done all that he could have" against sex abuse by clergy of minors, Lajolo said on Vatican radio, decrying what he described as a campaign of "hatred against the Catholic church."

Be serious. The entire Catholic infrastructure "did all they could do" to cover up the criminal behavior of their brethren & ensured they would have access to new children. That's it. Anyone who believes otherwise is woefully delusional.

Sex abuse allegations, as well as accusations of cover-ups by diocesan bishops and Vatican officials, have swept across Europe in recent weeks. Benedict has been criticized for not halting the actions of abusive priests when he was a Vatican cardinal and earlier while he was the archbishop of Munich in his native Germany.

The mainland European scandals — in Germany, Italy, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland — are erupting after decades of abuse cases in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and other areas.

In Germany, nearly 2,700 people called the church's sexual abuse hotline in the first three days it was operating, a Catholic church spokesman said Tuesday.A team of psychologists and other experts have spoken with 394 people so far, ranging from several minutes up to an hour, Trier Diocese spokesman Stephan Kronenburg said.

"Most callers reported cases of sexual abuse," he told The Associated Press.

Damn those 2,700 gay pro-choice folk & their malicious lies, eh?

Benedict has ignored victims' demands that he accept responsibility for what they say is his own personal and institutional responsibility for failing to swiftly kick abusive priests out of the priesthood, or at least keep them away from children.

Oh the persecution, oh the humanity.

But he has been protected by a vanguard of senior Vatican prelates who are fending off what they contend is an orchestrated attempt to attack the leader of the world's more than 1 billion Catholics.

The Vatican No. 2 official, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, rebuffed questions about the pontiff's silence on the topic, indicating that Benedict was standing firm.

"He's a strong pope," he told reporters after arriving Tuesday in Chile. The Italian news agency ANSA quoted him as calling Benedict a "great prophet of the Third Millennium."

"A great prophet of the Third Millennium?" Hmmmmm...a prophet this astute should have foreseen the groundswell of criticism that would follow in the wake of the Church's decision to obfuscate & shield abusers instead of...oh, I don't know...say, calling the cops on them.

Bertone, now the Holy See's secretary of state but formerly Benedict's deputy when the future pope, then-called Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, headed the Vatican's morals office, has himself been swept up in the scandals.

During a May 1998 meeting at the Vatican, Bertone told Wisconsin bishops to halt a church trial against an ailing priest who was accused of sexually abusing 200 deaf children, according to a Vatican transcript. The priest died soon afterward.

"It's not true, it's not true! We have documented the opposite," ANSA quoted Bertone as saying in Chile. "Let's not talk about this topic now, because otherwise we'll be here all day verifying precisely the action taken by me and by his eminence."

Child abuse enablers, like birds of a feather, evidently flock together.

On Easter, the most important day in the Catholic faith, the Vatican broke with tradition and began its service in St. Peter's Square with a ringing defense of Benedict delivered by Cardinal Sodano.

The logic behind this Easter display puzzled me. But, if one accepts that Christ "rose" from the dead, then one can draw an analogy with the way all those saucy little kinder-flirts made those priest's wattled old penises rise from the dead also.

The Vatican newspaper quoted Sodano on Tuesday as saying the church is "certainly" suffering because of pedophile priests but he asserted that "Benedict XVI has apologized several times."

The Church is suffering? Poor little victims. I'd feel bad if I weren't giggling so hard.

"But it's not Christ's fault if Judas betrayed" him, Sodano said. "It's not a bishop's fault if one of his priests is stained by grave wrongdoing. And certainly the pontiff is not responsible."

"Behind the unjust attacks on the pope are visions of the family and of life that run contrary to the Gospel," Sodano said. "Now the accusation of pedophile is being brandished against the church."

Again, these supposedly holy men miss the point entirely, don't they? If they would have immediately dealt with the abuse instead of covering it up, no one would be blaming them for the actions of their priestly "Judases." But they didn't, did they?

He noted that past popes have also been criticized, including the "offensive against Pius XII for his conduct during the last World War as well as that against Paul VI" for his encyclical against birth control, the cardinal said.

Pius has been accused by Jewish groups and some scholars as not having done enough to save Jews from the Holocaust, although the Vatican contends he used behind-the-scene diplomacy to help them. Benedict has hailed Pius as a "great" pontiff, who is being considered for possible beatification.

"Behind-the scene diplomacy?" It must have been so far "behind-the scene" that no one has been able to find any evidence of it. Although, there appears to be oodles of evidence that the Church did more to help fleeing Nazis than they did fleeing Jews. Those nefarious gay pro-choice historians must be "behind-the-scenes" revising history again.

Vatican Radio, presenting listeners with some of the most vehement counterattacks yet, depicted the church as a victim.

"There are those who fear the media campaign of anti-Catholic hatred can degenerate," Vatican Radio said.

It noted anti-Catholic graffiti on walls of a church outside Viterbo, a town near Rome, and reminded listeners that a bishop was attacked by a man during Easter Mass in Muenster, Germany. The bishop fought back with an incense bowl.

The radio likened the recent campaign to the persecution suffered by early Christian martyrs. "The crowds, incited by the slanders of the powerful, would lynch the Christians," the radio said.

"The slander of the powerful?" Wow. Someone should point out to the Vatican radio that
a. abused children aren't very powerful
b. since the Church opened the Pandora's Box of lynched Christians, someone should point out the thousands of folk the Church turned into crispy human tater-tots.

In Munich, meanwhile, an independent lawyer hired by the Catholic church wrapped up his investigation of abuse allegations at the southern Ettal monastery.

"The investigation clearly shows a system of abuse that lasted for decades," Thomas Pfister told The Associated Press.

There were some cases of sexual abuse at Ettal but most victims who came forward were physically abused and most cases took place before 1990, Pfister said in a telephone interview.

The lawyer declined to elaborate as his final report will be published next week.

I am utterly amazed at the intellectual contortions these yoo-hoos must go through to keep believing they're right. I suppose that, being Christian, mental contortions are something they're quite adept at using.
Still, this "woe is me, I'm the real victim here" is low even for the Vatican, who has a long & sordid history of cruising on the low side of the road.

Incredible.

Our Tax Dollars At Work

The Joy Of Context-Less Media

Yesterday, on ABC's This Week, Larry Summers, Obama's economic advisor, prattled on about nothing. You can see it here. His appearance encapsulates one glaring aspect of our IQ challenged news media, namely that "experts" are continually trotted out & given forums for their "opinions" without anyone mentioning their history and past affiliations.

Over the years, Summers has been a prime mover in the deregulation of our financial system that led to our collective economic ass raping and the emptying of our national piggy bank.

But, even before that, Summers was a member of that elite Harvard team that gang fucked the Russian economy in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Along with folk like Jonathan Hay & Andrei Shleifer, Summers took the Russian's heartfelt desire for a democratic economic system & ground it under their greedy boot heels.
What the Russians got was a small clique of uber-rich, while the rest of the population sucked wind.
A system of government that's very similar to what we have here in the the Red, White, & Blue Dildo.
The mess they made of the Russian economy led to the rise of ex-KGB hardliner Vladimir Putin & his facade of democracy.

Evidently, in America, well connected criminals not only avoid jail, they get to rise up, again & again, like the elite zombies they are, to gang rape us over & over on another day.

I think that Obama's campaign line of hope & change was just a condensed version of his real message:

(Y'all better) HOPE (we wear a condom
after we) CHANGE (positions for a better
corn-holing angle).

Is this a great cuntry or what?

















(The correct answer would be "or what.")

God's Away On Business (Armageddon Needs A Lot Of Prep Time, Okay?)

CLAYTON, Mich. - This tiny village was to be ground zero for a Christian revolution sparked by the planned killing of a local law enforcement officer and then snowballing into a violent battle and nationwide revolution, said an indictment unsealed Monday against nine men accused in the plot.

I can't help wondering why folk like this think their plots will "spark a nationwide revolution?"
People shoot each other every fucking day.
There has to be a good reason...

Let's see...

Clayton resident Dick Ream (I'm not making this up) said,

"They had a militia meeting every month. There were guys in uniform running around. Some of them had guns. It was no real surprise, with all these people being part of the militia, that something must have been up."

Donna Stone, ex-wife of "Captain Hamtaro" David Brian Stone, had this to say,

"It started out as a Christian thing. You go to church. You pray. You run around the woods with automatic weapons playing Army. I think David started to take it a little too far."

"Too far" huh? I think the ex Mrs. Stone is quite the master of understatement. (& yes I made some of that quote up.)

The Christian-based, anti-government group is said to believe that the end times forecast in Biblical scripture is near, and that the men planned to be soldiers fighting alongside Jesus Christ.

All righty then. Now that explains everything.

Their website has this neat quote:

"Preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive"

Oh no! They want to erase every Bible. Those...those nefariously demonic bastards. I can see why we need a nationwide revolution. Crates & crates of half blank Bibles would be fucking horrible.

They also have this handy picture of the notorious "Revelation Beast."



So, if you happen to see a giant triceratops with a bear coming of one armpit and a lion coming out of the other armpit, it's best to "bug out." And no one, I mean NO ONE bugs out like this guy.





Oh shit...did I say "bug out?" My bad. I meant to say bug fuck.


Seriously though, I have to give these guys some credit. To spend their weekends huffing through the brush shooting at imaginary enemies would make me feel utterly foolish. Kind of like an 8 year old playing at war. After giggling at...I mean...after watching their videos I can't help wondering how long they'd survive if someone was actually shooting at them.

5 minutes? 10 minutes?

Although, I am encouraged to know that Armageddon will have a nifty rocking soundtrack.

The government, evidently addicted to empty rhetoric & hyperbole, had this to say,

"The arrests have dealt a severe blow to a dangerous organization that today stands accused of conspiring to levy war against the United States."

Be serious. As far as crackpot Christianity goes, this is all pretty much par for the course here in the US Asylum.
On the up side, at least these guys weren't molesting deaf kids in between bouts of Jesus inspired war games.

NEW YORK – Milwaukee's Roman Catholic archbishop warned a top Vatican office led by the future Pope Benedict XVI about a priest who may have molested as many as 200 deaf boys, according to documents obtained by The New York Times, but the priest was never defrocked.

The documents were provided by two lawyers who have filed lawsuits alleging the Archdiocese of Milwaukee didn't take sufficient action against the Rev. Lawrence Murphy. The priest, who died in 1998, worked at the former St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis from 1950 to 1975.

In 1996, then-Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland sent letters about Murphy to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which was led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope. Weakland received no response from Ratzinger, the Times reported.

Eight months later, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarciscio Bertone — now the Vatican's secretary of state — told the Wisconsin bishops to begin secret disciplinary proceedings, according to the documents. But Bertone halted that process after Murphy wrote to Ratzinger saying he already had repented, was ailing and that the case's statute of limitations had run out, the Times reported.

The documents contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.

Weakland also wrote to a different Vatican office in March 1997, saying an attorney's impending lawsuit would make the case public.

The documents emerged even as the Vatican deals with an ever-widening church abuse scandal sweeping several European countries. Benedict last week issued an unprecedented letter to Ireland addressing the 16 years of church cover-up scandals here. But he has yet to say anything about his handling of a case in Germany known to have developed when, as cardinal, he oversaw the Munich Archdiocese from 1977 to 1982.

The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a spokesman for the Vatican, said in a statement that the Vatican was not told about the abuse allegations against Murphy until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated and dropped the case. Lombardi also said that Murphy's age, poor health and a lack of more recent allegations were factors in the decision not to defrock him.

He noted "the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties" and that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith suggested the Milwaukee archbishop consider such things as restricting Murphy's public ministry and requiring that he "accept full responsibility for the gravity of his acts."

The Times obtained the Murphy documents from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, attorneys for five men who have sued the Milwaukee archdiocese alleging fraud. The newspaper said the documents included letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims' affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Murphy and minutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican.

Anderson said he would e-mail the documents to the AP on Thursday. He said in a phone interview Wednesday night that they show the Vatican was more concerned about possible publicity than about the abuse allegations.

"Instead of removing him from the priesthood, they just gave him a free pass," Anderson said. "In this case, it's a free pass at the highest level."

After Murphy was removed from the school in 1974, he went to northern Wisconsin, where he spent the rest of his life working in parishes, schools and, according to one lawsuit, a juvenile detention center.

Previously released court documents show Weakland oversaw a 1993 evaluation of Murphy that concluded the priest likely assaulted up to 200 students at the school.

Weakland resigned as archbishop in 2002 after admitting the archdiocese secretly paid $450,000 to a man who accused him of sexual abuse.

Spook Show

In the murky world of corporate espionage, who ya gonna call?

*****

*****

*****

*****

Shhhh!! It's a secret.

They're still watching...

Stick A Fork In His Ass Already, He's Done

"The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel, and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides, and a dark wind blows. The government is corrupt, and we're on so many drugs, with the radio on and the curtains drawn. We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death. The sun has fallen down, and the billboards are all leering, and the flags are all dead at the top of their polls."

After yesterday's Tea Party video post, I started thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was edited to make these Tea Party folk look foolish by dwelling on...ummmm...well, the complete fools amongst them.
So I went through a bunch of Tea Party blogs, wallowing in their dreck for an hour or two.

Nope.

The video wasn't skewed. These people are idiots.

Here's one of my fav's, proudly posted by a Tea Partier.




Highlights:

@ O:26, check out the look on the guys face with the green VOTE YES badge on his shirt.
@ 0:38, we have the chubby guy screaming "I want everyone to get ready. Your gun in one hand & a Bible in the other, and we'll take back our country!"
@ 1:07, the dissenters and free speech lovers have the Socialist contingent removed by the coppers.
@ 1:33 we have the very brave black girl who doesn't let a little thing like being outnumbered deter her.
@ 1:35, you can hear the fat white guy say, "I don't need anything. I got plenty of money."
@ 1:57 one can plainly see that dissent has a lot in common with tailgate parties. Apparently both come with fan gear. Is this guy serious? What's he going to do? Die on someone & hope they get injured in the fall?
@ 2:12 we have the equally clueless Obama supporter who actually thinks there's help coming. I give her credit for having bigger balls than those Christian poontangs laughing at her. Like all good Christians they offer hymns and nothing else. If these folk are heaven bound, I'm glad I'm not.
@ 2:55 we have the Cult of the Flag joining hands with the Cult of the Cross and...ummmm...singing more hymns.
Hitler would have understood.

The real winners here won't be the people, that's for damn sure. It will be the GOP.
Being Bad Cops in every episode of Law & New World Order, they're quite accustomed to ratcheting up fear & then capitalizing on it. I think Fear & Tax Cuts pretty much comprise the entire GOP party platform. And nobody does pants shitting fear like an American.

The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism."

The strategy was detailed in a confidential party fundraising presentation, obtained by POLITICO, which also outlines how “ego-driven” wealthy donors can be tapped with offers of access and “tchochkes.”

The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart to top donors and fundraisers at a party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida on February 18, a source at the gathering said.

In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives.

The presentation explains the Republican fundraising in simple terms.

"What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate...?" it asks.

The answer: "Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”

Manipulating donors with crude caricatures and playing on their fears is hardly unique to Republicans or to the RNC – Democrats raised millions off George W. Bush in similar terms – but rarely is it practiced in such cartoonish terms.

One page, headed “The Evil Empire,” pictures Obama as the Joker from Batman, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leaders Harry Reid are depicted as Cruella DeVille and Scooby Doo, respectively.

The document, which two Republican sources said was prepared by the party’s finance staff, comes as Chairman Michael Steele struggles to retain the trust and allegiance of major donors, who can give as much as $30,400 a year to the party.

Under Steele, the RNC has shifted toward a reliance on small donors, but the document reveals extensive, confidential details of the strategy for luring wealthy checkwriters, which range from luxury retreats in California wine country to tickets to a professional fight in Las Vegas.

Good job GOP.

Now, let's hope you all see the wisdom in the idea of rallying clueless redneck America around her:



I think that she would make the perfect captain for this red, white, and blue Titanic as it finishes the last leg of its journey into that really big fucking iceberg up ahead.

No...no...I have a better idea:

President Glenn Beck

Enjoy America!