Author: Andrew Sullivan

Among the many truly horrifying aspects of John Paul II's favorite cleric and theocon idol, Marcial Maciel, was his rape and abuse of his own children. When Maciel was 60, he began a secret relationship with a 22 year-old Mexican woman, who already had one son and who had another with Maciel, the purportedly celibate upholder of traditional Catholic morality. Jason Berry has now interviewed the biological son, Raul, and coverage is scheduled tonight by ABC News' indefatigable Brian Ross (blotter story here). We knew all this before, but the details still hint at the evil harbored by John Paul II as Pope:

By Gonzalez's account, he was 10 when Maciel sexually abused him and Omar on a trip to Madrid, in 1989, and photographed them in the process. "My dad told me his uncle, this guy, used to masturbate him, and I have to masturbate him. … Why do you say that to a kid?"

He was nearing eleven when Maciel arranged for Gonzalez to live in Dublin with an Irish family, attend private school and learn English. When the call came to join his father for a weekend in London, he was homesick for his mother. "I started crying. And I said, 'I want to see you, you know.''"

In London, "I saw my dad, and he took me for a walk."

At this point in the interview he began sobbing.

"I knew this was going to happen," he said, of his emotions.

He described a stroll in London as Maciel bought magazines, took him back to the hotel and showed him "hard-core pornography" to arouse and then abuse him.

Steven Berlin Johnson reviews Nick Carr's new book. He disagrees with Carr that the internet is ruining our brains:

Actually sitting down to write out a response to something makes you see it in a new way, often with greater complexity. And that of course is the crucial flipside to the decline of long-form reading in the digital age: the increase in short-form writing. If we are slightly less able to focus because of the distractions of electric text, I suspect it is more than made up for by the fact that we are much more likely to write out our responses to what we do read.

I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age – and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please.

The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking … we'd be getting somewhere.

I'm working on it.

Reihan begins to come around:

My argument re: BP is clearly completely wrong if the WH had nothing to do with BP's decision to establish the fund. I assumed that the WH really did exercise its leverage. But I now get the sense that the WH was trying to take credit for a decision BP reached on its own, to arrest its freefall. And the WH decided to capitalize politically, which is entirely natural.

Stephen Messenger absorbs the latest:

Well, it just keeps getting worse. Around two months ago, after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig sank, BP estimated that some 1,000 barrels of oil were leaking into the Gulf each day. That number was soon revised to 5,000 barrels and later to around 12,000. Then, just last week, those grim figures were raised again, putting the estimates at between 30,000 and 65,000 barrels of oil leaking each day. Now, according to a recently disclosed internal document from BP, that number could have been as high as 100,000 barrels of oil, daily–a fact BP decided to keep secret.

Andrew Revkin tempers that top estimate:

The calculation was for the highest possible theoretical flow if all of the engineered components containing the pressurized oil and gas were to fail. There’s no reason to think this is the flow at this point, but the disconnect between public statements and internal assessments is striking.

In other worst case handwringing, TechBear speculates over news of leaking methane and potential sinkholes. But the Daily What passes along the most terrifying scenario yet.

(Image: Oil lays down the marsh grass in Bay Jimmy June 19, 2010 near Port Sulpher, Louisiana. By Sean Gardner/Getty Images)

Bryan Caplan makes the case for having more children. Will Wilkinson counters:

Increases in average levels of education, levels of disposable income, gender equality, and access to birth control — that is, increases in the ability of people (and especially women) to deliberately control the conditions of their own lives — generally lead people to choose a smaller rather than larger number of children. As far as I can tell, Bryan's response is that it "lacks perspective" to take at face value this truly striking tendency of choice under conditions of increasing personal control. If Bryan really thinks rising education, wealth, and gender equality have somehow made us worse at evaluating the costs and benefits of children, he probably ought to turn in his economist card.

None of this is to say that there aren't excellent reasons to have families larger than the relatively small rich-country norm. It's just that these tend not to be the kinds of reasons economists consider "selfish."

"Gulf disaster needs divine intervention as man's efforts have been futile. Gulf lawmakers designate today Day of Prayer for solution/miracle," – Sarah Palin.

Balko calls the following tweets by Utah's attorney general "shameless":

A solemn day. Barring a stay by Sup Ct, & with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims. Justice

I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims.

We will be streaming live my press conference as soon as I’m told Gardner is dead. Watch it at http://www.attorneygeneral.Utah.gov/live.html

Curt Hopkins frowns:

The issue here is less one of the capital punishment's morality … and more the way this public servant chose to use the service. The tone of Attorney General Shutleff's subsequent Tweets seem strident and unprofessional. All other things being equal, that is any Twitter user's right. But not if you are representing your government, your state and its people.

As does Shani Hilton:

I admit that part of my issue with this is that I think that capital punishment is generally indefensible. But more than that, tweeting about someone's death—even the death of a convicted murderer—strikes me as callous and not fitting for the gravity of the situation. It would be different if, say, he had tweeted a link to a press release. But to send out a message about the end of someone's life so cavalierly. It boggles.

(Osocio has more on the Amnesty ad above.)

Reihan goes to bat for Rep. Barton:

It should go without saying that demanding money from BP is not quite like a playground full of schoolyard bullies kicking a kid when he’s down. For one thing, BP isn’t terribly sympathetic. But that’s precisely the point—the Muslims who were burned alive in Gujarat in 2002 weren’t sympathetic to those who victimized them either. And that’s why we’ve developed long, drawn-out legal processes: to create an orderly society, we at least try to contain and manage our desire for vengeance.

Larison, not exactly a fan of big government, counters.

An insight into what the troops are really facing as they counter Taliban snipers:

Dreher sympathizes with child prodigies and their parents. He talks with "N," a friend with a "severely gifted" child:

Try, he said, to understand what it's like for kids who are so advanced that they can't relate to children their own age. But they don't know why they stand apart; all they know is that they do. They feel like freaks, he said, and in some sense they are freaks. The world tells them that they should just try to get along, and chastises them for being anti-social. N. said that parents often have to endure the well-meaning advice of family members and others who think that they're coddling these hothouse flower children, and the thing to do is to throw 'em in the pool, so to speak, and to make 'em swim.

"What do you do," he told me (and I'm reconstructing this conversation from memory), "with a kid who struggles to do basic math, but who discusses ideas integral to the basis for calculus?