Volcanic Ash

President Obama had to cancel his trip to Poland and I'm waiting for a visitors who are delayed by the Icelandic volcano ( great name for a wrestler).

A-Rod just surpassed Mark McGwire in the home run sweepstakes. And my first baseball card of the season is Ken Griffey,Jr.

Donna Leon's new Brunetti novel Question of Belief (Atlantic Monthly, 2010) is out two months earlier than expected. A wonderful way to have a cheap vacation to Venice. For the reader, it's great Brunetti's family is out of the picture for most of the book and the book unwinds with daily life in Venice during a sultry summer. We're not plunged into the politics of people smuggling or toxic waste dumps like previous books. An elderly aunt of one of Brunetti's colleagues seems to be falling prey to a faith healer and a clerk to the Court with an impeccable record is murdered.

Jonathan Kellerman in his new mystery Deception continues the saga of Dr. Delaware and Milo, his gay LAPD detective with the murder of a substitute teacher to a private prep school in L.A. We are spared Delaware's endless musings about possible motives and plots that have marred some of Kellerman's latest mysteries. This time he has enough plot without convolutions and tells the story well.

Speaking of L.A., the neo-Nazis tried to imitate their teabagger brothers and got their asses whipped by a counter-protest. The counter-protestors were arrested. They don't make Nazis like they used to.

A new group, Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, has been formed by Binyamin Korn, former executive director of the Zionist Organization of America. He likens Baked Alaska to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and says she is the strongest friend Israel has in the United States. He didn't mention that her theological views call for all Jews returning to Israel so they can be exterminated in the end time.

Israel's news monitoring service MEMRI many months ago ran a speech by a Hamas leader who said that the Islamists' best allies in the United States are the militia members because even though they hate Muslims they want to destroy the United States.

Captain in the Revolutionary Army of Baby Jesus, Rick Santorum, the man whose name is associated with the fluids remaining after gay sex, claims that President Obama like the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor "assaulted the soul of America."

In her reaction to the federal court rejecting the National Prayer Day, Baked Alaska laughed at any notion that "God should be separated from any state." She asked her audience to create " a prayer shield " to protect her from media "deception."

Jacob Weissberg wrote a piece "Who killed the Responsible Republican?" He's asking some of the same questions many of us are. Alot of us are circling around the years 1993-94. John Dean because he believes the Gingrich conservatives polarized the country deliberately. And I because this date is roughly the time the Christian Right seized control of the Republican party apparatus. Jacob concludes the culprit is none other than Bill Kristol. He claims starting with his Kill Hillarycare memo in 1993 and his follow-up memos to Republicans not to cooperate with Democrats on social or economic matters Kristol set the destructive machine in motion.

Mitch McConnell today accused President Obama of politicizing financial reform like he did healthcare. Let's see--"We agree things should be fixed, I propose my solutions, you reject them repeatedly and not offer any of your own--I'm the one politicizing the issue." The Republicans are resorting to the old 75 votes for reform logic. Remember Senator Grassley said health reform should have 80 votes to pass the Senate. Now they're down to 75. And now President Obama has to tour the country to drum up support for fixing a broke system.

Wall Street is spreading the rumors that the federal case against Goldman Sachs is just Obama's attempt to pressure Congress to pass economic reform. Good try. Goldman Sachs has known they were under investigation for over a year. But they don't seem to care--they're passing out $3.5 billion in bonuses tomorrow. I guess so everyone indicted can cover their legal bills and family expenses during the trial process.

Both John McCain and George Will have come out against any proposed VAT tax, which was only mentioned passingly by Paul Volcker as a possible solution to the deficit. Will says that if it is approved, the federal income tax should be repealed.

Norm Scheiber in the April 14 New Republic writes about Republican strategies in "When the Starved Beast Bites Back". He approves Paul Krugman's assesssment that the GOP is trying to force another fiscal crisis so as to eliminate entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. But Scheiber warns that history isn't kind to political parties that trigger such economic collapses. He writes that the Republican base has hemmed the GOP in on any strategies that would actually involve increasing revenues to the government. The Tax Cut fetish means that Republicans can not be reliable partners in reducing the deficit and that if they ever inherited such a crisis they could not handle it.

What triggered the article was the news that the Deficit Commission will convene soon and that liberals are afraid that this will be another example of Democrats having to adopt some of the Republican strategeis as their own. A big problem for the Commission is that they will be looking at Social Security and Medicare, which take up 21% of the federal budget each, but will not be looking at the Defense Budget, which is about an equal percent of federal expenditures. Couple this to popular opinion polls which show that the only budget cuts that have any support is 70% believing that cutting foreign aid would make a difference. Foreign aid is only about 1% of the whole national budget.

If you want to follow the whole Rasmussen poll argument, Nate Silver does an excellent analysis of the questions these polls have raised during this mid-year at www.fivethirtyeight.com .

The American Library Association has released their list of the most banned books in America. There are the usual children and young adult books that deal with sex, drugs, divorce and real life. Then there are some oldies but goodies: Number 4 is Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird; Number 6 is J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye; and Number 9 is Alice Walker's The Color Purple. The entire "Twilight series" is banned for its "religious point of view".

The University of Minnesota's Mosaic Project, created after 9/11 to measure America's tolerance for other people, released its findings. Much to their astonishment, the most hated people in the United States were not Muslims, but atheists. A Pew Foundation poll about religious attitudes show a rapid following off of a belief in God by younger people. The percentage is less than half of the older generation. They likened this trend to the secularization of Europe. I think it is a response to the fundamentalist Christians in this country and the fact that they are identified as the "Christians". How repulsive can you get? Would you want to hang around with those guys?

The Pope's approval rating has plummeted to 35% because of the pedophile scandals. One American priest even called for him to resign, which naturally provoked calls from conservative Catholics that the priest be de-frocked. Brits such as Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens want to arrest the Pope for 'crimes against humanity". They and British lawyers claim the Pope does not have diplomatic immunity. I believe as head of the Vatican State, which is represented at the United Nations, he does.

The Vatican's attempt to link the pedophile scandal to homosexuality doesn't hold up both in terms of science but also to the facts of the case. The majority of children molested by priests under the age of 9 are little girls, not little boys. The lion's share of those near-teens are boys. Studies of Irish priests who have molested children show that they were heterosexually inclined.

I can't help thinking of Bob Tyrell's observation that since public schools have failed in the United States, parents should try Catholic Schools. The implications of that are a little rough for the children.

I finally located where the Vatican exorcist may have come up with the idea that demons are most likely to inhabit women's bodies. The early Christian theologian from North Africa, Tertullian wrote "Woman is a temple built over a sewer; the gateway to the Devil." I don't think misogyny has anything to do with it.

Governor Crist of Florida is being sentenced to a political purgatory of his own after vetoing the Education Bill, supported by Jeb Bush which would end--among other things--tenure for teachers or merit pay based on advanced education. Connie Mack stepped down as his campaign chairman and Mitt Romney is rushing into the state to back Marco Rubio. Crist's previous crime was to embrace President Obama and support the stimulus package--which did allow for the largest middle-class tax break in history. But Republicans tax cuts are more valuable than democratic tax cuts as teabagger polls indicate. Next up in Florida is a bill that would allow the state to fund religious schools. Let's see how Crist fares on that.