The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was the massive $700 billion dollar bailout that was rushed through government with almost no public discussion in the fall of 2008, when everyone was being panicked by alarms that there was the danger of a massive meltdown of the financial system. [Read more…]
I have written before about Monsignor William Lynn who was convicted of covering up sex abuse by a priest in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He has now been sentenced to three to six years in prison and becomes the highest ranking member of the Catholic Church to serve time for offenses associated with sexual abuse. [Read more…]
The radical journalist died after a two-year struggle with cancer. His close colleague Jeffrey St. Clair said that he had kept his illness a tight secret, telling only his closest friends, not wanting to chronicle his own last days in the manner of Christopher Hitchens, his fellow British expatriate, one-time colleague, and later adversary when Hitchens abandoned his left-wing politics and joined up with the Bush administration and the neoconservatives in their warmongering. [Read more…]
There has been a sharp rise in the number of whooping cough cases in the US this year, with the number of cases expected to be the worst in five decades, although it was hoped at one time in the 1970s that it might be entirely eradicated. [Read more…]
I have written before about Jonathan Morris, a Catholic priest who is a Fox News favorite and a member of the infamous Legion of Christ order. (See here and here for more about that odious group and its disgusting founder.)
In one call-in program titled Father Knows Best, someone asks Morris “How did Adam and Eve’s kids have kids?” Morris actually seems taken aback by this question, as if it had never occurred to him before. He flounders around, going off on tangents about other mysteries to which we have no answers such as whether Adam had a belly button and then riffs for a while on original sin. It is obvious to even his co-hosts that he is not able to answer the question. It is quite the spectacle. [Read more…]
Those of us who were appalled by the Jerry Sandusky affair tend to feel that no punishment, from whatever quarter, is sufficient to make amends. But Dave Zirin argues that while what Penn State allowed to happen with Sandusky was terrible, the NCAA should not be the body that exacts monetary punishments for things that lie outside its jurisdiction, and that this represents a dangerous over-reach by a purely private and unaccountable and process-free body into the financial affairs of a public university. [Read more…]
Apparently the people who attended the Tony Robbins program paid anywhere between $600 to $2,000. The blame for those who were burned during the fire-walking climax is being placed on them, saying that they must have been ‘out of state’, which is apparently the technical term for not having the proper mental attitude. Even some of those who were burned say that it was their own fault for not having the right frame of mind despite Robbins’s careful preparation. Some of them repeat it even after getting burned. [Read more…]
In a new post that follows up the events that I wrote about before, science writer Carl Zimmer describes his back-and-forth with the intelligent design creationists. [Read more…]
Readers of this blog know that I am very slow to respond to breaking news. I am usually far behind even other bloggers, let alone news media commentators, in giving my take on such events. It is not out of laziness (ok, maybe a little) or being out of touch. I follow the news closely and usually am aware of things soon after they occur. [Read more…]
The TV show Seinfeld takes a look at the oft-discussed puzzle of the strange humor of some of the cartoons that appear in the New Yorker magazine and how they get selected.
Here are a couple of jokes (not from the magazine) that are not nearly as obscure but they took me a little while to get them. (The first one via reader Norm.)
