The Dish

Chris Good has a helpful report on the pro-legalization campaign in California:

[T]his will be a legitimate campaign operation. Tax Cannabis is already airing a radio ad in the state's largest and most expensive media markets, L.A. and San Francisco, featuring a former law enforcement official.

"This isn't some…whim of a couple of hippies," said [SCN Strategies'] Dan Newman, who is handling communications for Tax Cannabis. "It's a serious, well crafted, well funded campaign that was put together very carefully and professionally run and hopes to win."

About the law itself:

Right now, the campaign is working to secure endorsements, and the language of the ballot initiative was crafted, Newman said, with an eye toward garnering a broad base of support. It does not simply legalize pot outright: it allows individual counties to regulate the sale and possession to adults over 21, which would likely create a similar effect as "dry counties," where alcohol can't be sold. It does not legalize possession of marijuana on school grounds, or driving while impaired. The entire proposition is posted here.

You might think that a magazine founded in part on intellectual Catholicism would have something to say about a church crisis that many now see as the worst since the Reformation. You'd be wrong. National Review has nothing on its home-page and The Corner has in a week only two brief references to official church authorities in defending the Pope. 

Any journalistic institution can cover what it likes, as far as I'm concerned. Equally, I can notice when it seems struck silent. But I do this not out of bloggy rivalry, but because it reveals, I think, a deeper truth. Once you surrender your intellect to authority, i.e. once your ideas about something are subject to the approval of a given authority-figure, rather than simply following one's own mind and judgment, you have given up the task of critical thinking. You are a propagandist for institutions (GOP, Limbaugh, RNC, the Vatican). Sometimes, the interests of the institutions – as perceived by the institutions – are best served by silence. And so silence reigns at NRO.

If you want to see a symptom of the intellectual decline of orthodox Catholicism, look no further. That's part of the church's crisis too.

TED captions Kirk Citron’s short speech:

How many of today’s headlines will matter in 100 years? 1000? Kirk Citron’s “Long News” project collects stories that not only matter today, but will resonate for decades — even centuries — to come.

But the point of news is that it’s news, not that it’s analysis or wisdom or even knowledge in any meaningful way. And the point of journalism is to present the news of the day – le jour. If it lasts much longer than that, it ceases to be journalism. And what people find interesting today may indeed by silly or irrelevant or obscure or meaningless from the vantage point of history or scholarship. But that’s why we have history and scholarship.

One of the greatest fallacies of our time is simply the inability to understand that there are different modes of discourse and understanding. If they are understood in context, they do not contradict each other. They supplement each other. And the attempt to reduce news to something worthy and long-lasting is simply a category error. It has nothing more to add to the conversation that that.

Except fathomless smugness.

Gideon Rachman thinks it's very temporary.

Bruce Bartlett says yes:

[C]onservatives should have shifted their support to Hillary Clinton in 2008, when it became reasonably clear that it was going to be a Democratic year. Refusing to consider that option gave us Obama, and much more liberal policies than we probably would have gotten under a President Hillary Clinton.

Chait responds:

[A]ny significant adversity would probably have caused [Clinton] to retreat. In the wake of Scott Brown’s victory, her chief political strategist, Mark Penn, urged Democrats to abandon health care reform. (“Break it down and start with the easy stuff like electronic medical records first and work up to the harder parts year after year.”) That’s probably the sort of strategy Clinton would have followed if she had won.

I think Bruce needs a qualifier: “ideological conservatives.”

His book is so filled with error and propaganda it made Fred Hiatt rush to give the torture-supporter a columnist slot. Media Matters is a group I remain somewhat skeptical of, but the data they have assembled on "Courting Disaster" is truly impressive.

Pew's poll, released last week, found massive support for medical marijuana:

 [73%] say they favor their state allowing the sale and use of marijuana for medical purposes if it is prescribed by a doctor, while 23% are opposed. Support for legalizing medical marijuana spans all major political and demographic groups, and is equally high in states that have and have not already passed laws on this issue.

On complete legalization:

41% of the public thinks the use of marijuana should be made legal while 52% do not. In 2008, 35% said it should be legal and 57% said the use of marijuana should not be legal, according to data from the General Social Survey. Twenty years ago, only 16% of the public said the use of marijuana should be legal and 81% said it should not be legal.

The reaction of the Vatican to the sound of that tsunami coming closer has, so far, been almost exactly what the American experience would counsel against. The key lesson the church should have learned from America is that there is no stopping the reports of abuse that, once unleashed, will snowball. One victim's courage will embolden another. Cases will multiply. The only faintly coherent thing to do is to get out in front of all of it, expose everything you know, take full responsibility, beg for forgiveness and then take the massive financial hit (though less massive in Europe, presumably, because of its less generous and less tort-friendly judicial system.)

So what does the Vatican do? It actually plays the anti-Semitism card and compares the German Pope to the victims of the Holocaust! Pulling a Wieseltier in this context is truly gob-smacking as p.r. Then it has the Vatican elite rush in a smoky flurry of starched lace to protect the Pope. Sodano broke with protocol to declare:

“Holy Father, the people of God are with you, and do not let themselves be impressed by the gossip of the moment, by the challenges that sometimes strike at the community of believers,” Cardinal Sodano said. The cardinal referred to the apostle Peter’s account of Jesus during the passion: “When he was reviled, reviled not again.”

So the crimes against the defenseless now coming to light are once again "the gossip of the moment". Gossip. Anyone who can use the term gossip to refer to highly credible, indeed indisputable, cases where priests raped children and the Pope himself once either looked away, or actively enabled the abuse to continue to protect the reputation of the church … is too far gone to understand what is happening right now.

So they do what they cannot help doing. They go into the bunker.

But there is no way out of that bunker.

(Photo: Graffiti reading 'pedophiles go to jail' and 'church = mafia = state' are seen on a wall of the Church of St Eutizio in Soriano on Easter Monday on April 5, 2010. Pope Benedict XVI, facing heavy criticism over the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse scandals, spoke of priests' special responsibility to society during an Easter Monday prayer. Soriano is a small city 80 Km from Rome. By Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images.)

Felix Salmon applies Clay Shirky's thoughts on complexity-driven destruction to finance:

We have reached a level of institutional complexity which renders radical simplification impossible, short of outright collapse. We can see this even in relatively simple structures like that of U.S. financial regulators: such things are much easier to create than to abolish, and so they tend to multiply. But it’s even more true of finance more generally. The world’s biggest banks must become much simpler; the world’s biggest banks won’t become much simpler. The conclusion is not a pretty one.

Is running an international organization which was, in essence, a conspiracy to commit and cover up the abuse of minors, a crime? Even if you are a head of state? One UN judge says yes – and that the Pope can indeed be prosecuted.