The Dish

NIAC highlights a comment made by one of Mackey's readers:

Qom is in many ways the heart of the last Revolution (how it ended up anyway) and its aftermath. Until now, the regime has tried very very hard to isolate Qom from the protest movement. The security presence there has always been reported as very high to prevent any protests. […] With today’s protests in Qom, and the clergy’s close-up view of it (perhaps for the first time for some of them) it will be interesting to see what the Qom clergy does in the days and weeks to come.

NIAC adds:

The next day to watch is Sunday, when two major days of mourning coincide: the day of mourning for Ayatollah Montazeri (the seventh day after his death) and the religious holiday of Ashura, which marks the martyrdom of the Imam Hossein.

Thomas P Barnett notes how certainty and moral responsibility can become less important to the Catholic hierarchy: when it involves covering up the rape and sexual abuse of teens and kids. My civil marriage? It's black and white. Their decades-long criminal conspiracy to protect child abuse?

The lawyer sprang his big question: You could have prevented someone from hurting people and you decided not to. Why? The witness was Edward M. Egan, then the Roman Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, Conn. The question was about a priest who had been accused of sexually molesting children.

“I didn’t make a decision one way or the other,” said Bishop Egan, whom the lawyer suggested had failed to act quickly against the cleric. “I kept working on it until I resolved the decision.”

They make Bill Clinton look honest.

A reader writes:

I live in Laredo, and when I heard the news, my first thought was, "typical."  This is just the sort of backwards, inexplicable crap that happens in Laredo every day.  I wish I could explain to you why this city of a quarter of a million people has 2 major hospitals, but no 24-hour pharmacy.  Or how our only Outback Steakhouse just went bankrupt a few weeks ago.  Or why there are "eight liner" gambling establishments on every corner, along with our rampant poverty.  Or how Laredo has three colleges campuses, but now, no bookstore.

There's an odd mix of politics and xenophobia at work on Laredo.  It's the biggest inland port in America, but it's also a closed culture, two hours from any other major population area.  In Laredo, you're either a paisano or you're not, and people like it that way.  Laredoans sometimes joke that Laredo is "occupied territory" — it's not quite Texas, and not quite Mexico.

As you might expect, the drug trade is big here too. 

While certainly most cities have a criminal underground, in Laredo, it's practically out in the open.  An estimated 20% of Laredo's population are somehow connected to trafficking.  It's reasonable to suspect that the drug culture is at the root of the vast majority of Laredo's problems.

Our literacy rate is 47%, compared to the national average of about 80%.  Most kids here grow up learning both English and Spanish, but never really master either language, and when they speak, they unconsciously switch back and forth between languages.  We have a library system, but the selections are sparse compared to libraries in other similarly-sized cities.

I realize this sounds like nothing more than a disjointed rant against Laredo.  I wish I could give you something more profound, but even having lived here 5 years, I still don't understand this place.  I can tell you that, for native Laredoans and those that choose to spend their lives here, most of them love the city the way it is and wouldn't want to live anywhere else.  They don't want it to change, even when it's changing for the better.

For myself, the closing of the B.Dalton won't affect me too much, since I've been using Amazon Prime to buy all my books ever since moving here.  Perhaps I'm the reason the bookstore went under?  ;-)

That 47% figure, in fact, is the lowest of any American city surveyed in the last census. And ABC News called the US-Mexican border at Laredo "the most lucrative drug corridor in North America." More on the city here.

A small silver lining to the recession: people find the time to make mash-ups like this:

Max Blumenthal makes an obvious point:

The abrupt exhaustion of the war on Christmas cannot be explained only by the near flatline of cerebral activity Christian right leaders have displayed this year. The crusade was a boon for right-wing fundraising and ratings throughout the years of George W. Bush, whom the right depended on to advance its social agenda. But now that Barack Obama is in office, the conservative movement no longer needs holiday hobgoblins to energize its forces. It has moved beyond the war on Christmas to an all-out assault on the White House and Democratic-led Congress. Satan’s new address is on Pennsylvania Avenue.

A reader writes:

I have one small quibble with your post (and the LA Times article) about the closing of the last bookstore in Laredo, TX. While the people of Laredo's options for buying books have been seriously diminished with the closing of the B. Dalton it is not really accurate to say that their only choice is to go online.  These days you can find a surprisingly large selection of books (and certainly all bestsellers) at Target, Walmart, and even grocery stores all of which Laredo has in abundance.  Moreover, Laredo has a number of college bookstores where people can buy popular books in addition to books for school.  I understand the symbolic significance of there being no bookstore in a city the size of Laredo (really I do, I work as a manager at a bookstore), but it is a mistake to assume that the people there suddenly have no place to go and purchase books in their town.

A list (pdf).

(Hat tip: Smith)