Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Mueller of Regensburg apologizes September 21, 2007, for reappointing a convicted pedophile priest to a parish in the Bavarian town of Riekofen, Germany. The priest was arrested August 30 for sexually abusing an under-age altar boy. Residents of Riekofen were angry that they were not told about Kramer’s criminal history and the town’s mayor accused Mueller of covering up the priest’s past. By Johannes Simon/Getty.
Oh, the umbrage:
When we try to untangle this web of accusation and innuendo, Giuliani appears to be suggesting that it is unacceptable for a Senator to express skepticism about anything said by a general in uniform. If he believes that, he does not understand democracy. I am shocked by this. In fact, if Giuliani doesn’t apologize, and if the other Republican candidates don’t condemn this commercial, I think I’m going to faint.
Now that TimesSelect is dead, the archives of the Times are available to anyone. Kottke went to town: reports of Custer’s last stand, the Titanic, San Francisco earthquake, and this:
The first mention of the World Wide Web in the Times in February 1993. According to the article, the purpose of the web is "[to make] available physicists’ research from many locations". Also notable are this John Markoff article on the internet being overwhelmed by heavy traffic and growth…in 1993, and a piece, also by Markoff, on the Mosaic web browser.
I loved this 1993 prediction:
"Free services like those on the Internet can’t continue indefinitely," said Alexis Rosen, the president and founder of the Panix service. Because informal news about events on the network flows so quickly through electronic word of mouth, what Mr. Rosen called "flash crowds" are beginning to appear with increasing frequency to instantly clog computer systems.
I’m on the Chris Matthews Show this Sunday.
A reader proffers an answer to the question:
Because, speaking as a former Baptist, there is a correlation between being a Baptist and saying and believing things that are blush-inducing to non-Baptists. Off the top of my head, these include making straight-faced professions of belief in the imminence of the Rapture (where the faithful will be magicked up to Heaven while the heathen masses endure a Wagnerian spectacle of Hell on Earth) and maintaining that the Grand Canyon was formed by the 40 days and 40 nights of rain that gave everybody but Noah so much trouble, and that the ubiquitous and overlapping evidence for an Old Earth is a Baroque kind of divine fraud.
We ridicule people who believe absurd things for non-religious reasons all the time, and nobody bats an eye. Think about how the media represent believers in alien abductions — if you believe that aliens in UFOs are currently invisibly abducting thousands of Americans, you’re branded a lunatic. If you believe that God is planning to invisibly abduct millions of Americans a few years from now (and that you will be among the elect), you have a good shot at a political career in the South.
I wouldn’t be quite so blunt. But for me, the evolution issue is very hard to get past. Those who believe that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and that human life has not evolved from more primitive forms are people I cannot engage with in civil discourse. To posit faith in things unprovable and unknowable is one thing. To posit faith in something demonstrably falsifiable is another. I simply have no tolerance for creationism or for those who enable it. Creationists are as much an insult to reasonable Christians as they are to rational thought. And they perpetuate the notion that religious faith is indistinguishable from idiocy.
Anti-anti-Islamophobia. Some intemperate language from a usually temperate island.
Marc Ambinder recalls another Judith cell-phone call in Rudy’s recent past:
A contest to write a 50,000 word novel … in a month. At least the organizers are honest:
Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.
Now the scary part: 13,000 people completed the task last year.
The word association to my left comes from the latest Pew survey. Mark Blumenthal comments:
I am struck by the remarkable the degree to which Democrats see Clinton as "tough" and "smart," but give Obama points for "energetic" and "optimistic."Note the way this data dovetails with the apparent strategies of the two campaigns: This week Obama releases a new ad that embraces hope, optimism and bipartisanship. Meanwhile, Clinton releases a health care plan reflecting her "smart, pragmatic" side and, as Andrew Sullivan reminds us, "calls Cheney Darth Vader."
John McCain’s sudden decision to call himself a Baptist (everyone thought he was an Episcopalian) has reverberated a little in the South:
I don’t care whether Republican presidential candidate John McCain is an Episcopalian or a Baptist.
But the implication in Monday’s paper that he’d been caught at something — outed while trying to pass as an Episcopalian — hit a nerve.
Why do we diss Baptists?
