Michael Moore = Jerry Lewis (+ many pounds)
: Shift, the Canadian mag/site, wonders why Michael Moore’s documentary, Bowling for Columbine, is the first chosen to show at Cannes since 1956.
I say it’s the same reason the French take a shining to Jerry Lewis:
They like things that irritate Americans.
What they didn’t know…
: My wise wife asks: If the families of the 9.11 victims knew what we knew today (so far) about the FBI’s bungling of the unconnected dots of clues leading to the terrorist attack, would they have signed on for government grants of money that came with the stipulation that they cannot sue?
Target: Ramallah
: Ken Layne finds two cogent paragraphs in an LA Times story that says there may be evidence tying shoe-bomber Richard Reid with Hamas and Hezbollah. If that’s the case, Ken says quite rightly, then there should be no difference between our response to bin Laden in Afghanistan and our response to these murderers.
Priests and pain
: Peter Manseau writes at Killing the Buddah about his father the former priest watching TV news today:
My father watches and shakes his head. He knew all these guys, knows some of them still. Together they’d grown from altar boys into men of God. John Geoghan, who once remarked he preferred the children of poor families because they were more affectionate, more in need, was a year ahead of my father at the archdiocese seminary. And Paul Shanley — accused of raping a Catholic school boy in, among other places, a confessional — ministered to junkies and street kids in Boston all through the 60s. So did Dad. And so did his good friend George Spagnolia, who thirty years ago offered his church for the wedding of the priest and the nun who would be my father and mother, and who, just last month, left his parish following allegations of abuse. Few in his parish believed the charges against him, but when he admitted he was gay and had not always been celibate, Catholic assumptions pushed him out the door.
Dad’s even dealt with Cardinal Bernard Law, the man at the center of this mess. While shuffling known child-abusers from church to church to save face and hold the priest-shortage at bay, Cardinal Law sought to get priests like my father off the books. A priest who married and refused to be laicized — refused in a sense to declare that he was unfit to be a priest — was thought to be an embarrassment, a public flouter of the authority of the church. The current cardinal and his predecessors have repeatedly called on my father finally to resign his ordination….
Did He walk on water, or surf it?
: A surfer’s Bible in — you get two guesses; no, not SoCal — Australia:
Make God first and he will blow your mind on a daily basis — without a hangover!
Over to you, Bleah. [via Holy Weblog]
Moving day
: Brian Linse gets his own domain. Update those bookmarks.
[For those of you who don’t know how to update bookmarks, on Internet Explorer, right-click on the line in your favorites, click on properties, and change the address. Repeat for Instapundit.
Poison ivy
: I’ve been busy and so I missed my first opportunity to link to Matthew Yglesias‘ reporting on the Jihad commencement speech at Harvard. The story keeps developing; Yglesias met with mucketymucks at Harvard about it today. Good reading.
Assuming the worst
: An apartment building in Encino explodes into flames. We’re all wondering the same thing: Is this the apartment attack the FBI has been warning about? The FBI is going to the site to investigate.
: I have a miserable, rotten chest cold. No, that’s not news. But I have to say that even that makes me ask stupid, paranoid questions. There have been mysterious piles of a white powdery substance showing up on streets around my neighborhood. Looks like sand. But then I got to hacking and I ask: Anthrax?
Well, more absurd things have happened or threaten to. You can see them all on Drudge:
: Now the FBI warns about scuba-diving terrorists.
They’re watching too much James Bond.
Biting the hand
: Andrew Sullivan (he without the working permalinks) is still whining about not writing for the NY Times after he attacks them (or he’s assuming it’s because he attacks them; could just be because they don’t like is writing; it happens; that’s what editors do). But we haven’t heard a peep from him about the affair of the NY Post columnist who was canned after attacking his paper. I think they should start the Association of Canned Complaining Journalists.
