Later On

Digby in Salon:

I thought I’d seen every permutation of "I know you are but what am I" politics, but this "why do you make me beat you?" comment by Eric Cantor takes the cake:

I want to stress this and it’s very important. Legitimate threats should be treated as security issues and should be dealt with by the appropriate law enforcement officials. It is reckless to use these incidents as media vehicles for political gain.

That is why I have deep concerns that some, Chris Van Hollen and Tim Kaine in particular, are dangerously fanning the flames by suggesting that these incidents be used as a political weapon. Security threats against members of Congress is not a partisan issue and they should never be treated that way. To use such threats as political weapons is reprehensible.

I’m not naive enough to think that letters, statements or press releases will prevent anyone disturbed enough to commit violence from acting. But I do know that such letters, statements and press releases can very easily fan the flames. By ratcheting up the rhetoric, some will only enflame these situations to dangerous levels. Enough is enough. It has to stop.

That makes my head hurt. So, threats should be taken seriously, but not discussed publicly because it might make the threatening thugs mad and then they might get violent. And sadly, it would then be the victim’s fault for complaining. In fact, the Democrats are being completely irresponsible for even bringing this up and the Republican grown-ups have rightly stepped to put a stop to it before they provoke any more violence.

In fact, they’re mad as hell too and they’re not going to take it anymore:

National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Andy Sere said that while his organization doesn’t condone the actions of the person or people who cut a gas line at Perriello’s brother’s house (apparently under the impression that the home was the congressman’s), Perriello is not the victim.

"Central and Southside Virginians are the ones who are going to have the bear the burden of increased taxes," Sere told The Roanoke Times. "What you’re seeing is a frustration among his constituents who believe he’s not listening to them."

… "we’re not going to allow Tom Perriello to use one isolated incident as a cynical ploy to distract Virginians from the higher taxes and Medicare cuts he just imposed on them."

Well, that’s a relief. These Democrats who are forcing good people to threaten and intimidate them need to know that this wouldn’t happen if they’d just do as they are told. There’s nothing unreasonable about that.

Update: Check out this e-mail. Ugh. The "murderers" (Democrats) have made daddy very mad and now he’s going to have to hurt them.

Nicholas Kulish and Katrin Bennhold in the NY Times :

The future Pope Benedict XVI was kept more closely apprised of a sexual abuse case in Germany than previous church statements have suggested, raising fresh questions about his handling of a scandal unfolding under his direct supervision before he rose to the top of the church’s hierarchy.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope and archbishop in Munich at the time, was copied on a memo that informed him that a priest, whom he had approved sending to therapy in 1980 to overcome pedophilia, would be returned to pastoral work within days of beginning psychiatric treatment. The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in another parish.

An initial statement on the matter issued earlier this month by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising placed full responsibility for the decision to allow the priest to resume his duties on Cardinal Ratzinger’s deputy, the Rev. Gerhard Gruber. But the memo, whose existence was confirmed by two church officials, shows that the future pope not only led a meeting on Jan. 15, 1980, approving the transfer of the priest, but was also kept informed about the priest’s reassignment.

What part he played in the decision making, and how much interest he showed in the case of the troubled priest, who had molested multiple boys in his previous job, remains unclear. But the personnel chief who handled the matter from the beginning, the Rev. Friedrich Fahr, “always remained personally, exceptionally connected” to Cardinal Ratzinger, the church said.

The case of the German priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, has acquired fresh relevance because it unfolded at a time when Cardinal Ratzinger, who was later put in charge of handling thousands of abuse cases on behalf of the Vatican, was in a position to refer the priest for prosecution, or at least to stop him from coming into contact with children. The German Archdiocese has acknowledged that “bad mistakes” were made in the handling of Father Hullermann, though it attributed those mistakes to people reporting to Cardinal Ratzinger rather than to the cardinal himself.

Church officials defend Benedict by saying the memo was routine and was “unlikely to have landed on the archbishop’s desk,” according to the Rev. Lorenz Wolf, judicial vicar at the Munich Archdiocese. But Father Wolf said he could not rule out that Cardinal Ratzinger had read it.

According to Father Wolf, who spoke with Father Gruber this week at the request of The New York Times, Father Gruber, the former vicar general, said that he could not remember a detailed conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger about Father Hullermann, but that Father Gruber refused to rule out that “the name had come up.”

Benedict is well known for handling priestly abuse cases in the Vatican before he became pope. While some have criticized his role in adjudicating such cases over the past two decades, he has also won praise from victims’ advocates for taking the issue more seriously, apologizing to American victims in 2008.

The future pope’s time in Munich, in the broader sweep of his life story, has until now been viewed mostly as a steppingstone on the road to the Vatican. But this period in his career has recently come under scrutiny — particularly six decisive weeks from December 1979 to February 1980.

In that short span, a review of letters, meeting minutes and documents from personnel files shows, Father Hullermann went from disgrace and suspension from his duties in Essen to working without restrictions as a priest in Munich, despite the fact that he was described in the letter requesting his transfer as a potential “danger.”

In September 1979, the chaplain was removed from his congregation after three sets of parents told his superior, the Rev. Norbert Essink, that he had molested their sons, charges he did not deny, according to notes taken by the superior and still in Father Hullermann’s personnel file in Essen.

In that short span, a review of letters, meeting minutes and documents from personnel files shows, Father Hullermann went from disgrace and suspension from his duties in Essen to working without restrictions as a priest in Munich, despite the fact that he was described in the letter requesting his transfer as a potential “danger.”

In September 1979, the chaplain was removed from his congregation after three sets of parents told his superior, the Rev. Norbert Essink, that he had molested their sons, charges he did not deny, according to notes taken by the superior and still in Father Hullermann’s personnel file in Essen…

Continue reading. Few seem to believe that a micromanager like Ratzinger would not have followed the example of all other archbishops and involved himself directly in such a matter affecting a priest. It seems much more likely that they are simply lying in an effort to protect what’s left of his reputation.

Nicole Winfield for Associated Press:

Two Wisconsin bishops urged the Vatican office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI — to let them conduct a church trial against a priest accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys, but the Vatican ordered the process halted, church and Vatican documents show.

Despite the grave allegations, Ratzinger’s deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ruled that the alleged molestation had occurred too long ago and the accused priest, Rev. Lawrence Murphy, should instead repent and be restricted from celebrating Mass outside of his diocese.

The New York Times broke the story Thursday, adding fuel to an already swirling scandal about the way the Vatican in general, and Benedict in particular, have handled reports of priests raping children over the years.

On Thursday, a group of clerical abuse victims provided the documentation to reporters outside the Vatican, where they staged a press conference to denounce Benedict’s handling of the case. During the conference, a policeman asked for their documents and they were subsequently detained, police said.

"The goal of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was to keep this secret," said Peter Isely, Milwaukee-based director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.

"This is the most incontrovertible case of pedophilia you could get," Isely said, flanked by photos of other clerical abuse victims and a poster of Ratzinger. "We need to know why he (the pope) did not let us know about him (Murphy) and why he didn’t let the police know about him and why he did not condemn him and why he did not take his collar away from him." …

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Thank goodness this sort chicanery will stop. Thanks to The Eldest, for pointing out this article by Jan Jarvis, reporting for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

At birth, Houston Tracy let out a single loud cry before his father cut the cord and handed him to a nurse.

Instantly, Doug Tracy knew something was wrong with his son.

"He wasn’t turning pink fast enough," Tracy said. "When they listened to his chest, they realized he had an issue."

That turned out to be d-transposition of the great arteries, a defect in which the two major vessels that carry blood away from the heart are reversed. The condition causes babies to turn blue.

Surgery would correct it, but within days of Houston’s birth March 15, Tracy learned that his application for health insurance to cover his son had been denied. The reason: a pre-existing condition.

"How can he have a pre-existing condition if the baby didn’t exist until now?" Tracy asked.

New federal legislation that will prevent insurance companies from denying children coverage based on a pre-existing condition comes too late for the Tracys. The legislation, passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama this week, won’t go into effect until September.

But Houston, who is hospitalized at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, needs coverage now.

Without surgery, babies with this condition often die soon after birth, although some may live as long as a year, said Dr. Steve Muyskens, a pediatric cardiologist.

"In his case, we had to intervene in the first days of life," Muyskens said.

With this condition, oxygen-rich blood goes back to the lungs and oxygen-poor blood goes back to the body, depriving it of oxygen and damaging the heart muscle. Surgery to move the arteries to their normal position is usually done within three to five days of birth. It basically involves swapping the misplaced arteries.

"It sounds simple, but it’s complex because you have to move tiny coronary arteries that in a baby are 1 to 2 millimeters," Muyskens said.

Doug and Kim Tracy, who live in Crowley and are self-employed, carry health insurance on their other two children. They said they cannot afford insurance for themselves.

They paid out of pocket for Kim Tracy’s neonatal care and the baby’s delivery. Doug Tracy said they were told that they could apply for insurance for Houston within 30 days of his birth.

A spokeswoman for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas declined to comment but issued a statement saying, "Our policy is that if a family has existing coverage with us, a baby can be added to the contract within 31 days without the need for underwriting to assess the baby’s eligibility."

But that’s only if the parents have coverage, said the spokeswoman, Margaret Jarvis. Read that with the emphasis on parents…

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Very nice shave, using the Omega 48 boar brush and Institut Karité’s 25% shea-butter shaving soap. The Gillette NEW (new in 1921) did a great job with a still sharp Bolzano blade, and then a splash of Alt Innsbruck finished the task.

Very grim news.

The owlet hatched today is named Austin, sibling of Max and Pattison. The Wife observed in the chat stream someone asking, "How do you tell the owlets apart?", getting the immediate answer, "By their names, silly!"

Karoli at Crooks & Liars typed this out from a PDF:

Based on your understanding of health care reform, circle “T” for true or “F” for false for each statement.

1. Starting in 2014, most Americans will have to have a minimum amount of health insurance or else pay a penalty of $95 or .5% of household income, whichever is greater. T F
2. In the health insurance marketplace created by the reform bill, individuals and employees will be assigned insurance plans based on their needs, rather than choosing the plans for themselves. T F
3. In 2014, the government will launch a new health insurance company which will compete against private companies. T F
4. 4. Under the new health care law, employers will be required to offer health insurance to all workers. T F
5. Starting later this year, the government will give tax credits to small business owners who want to offer their employees health insurance. T F
6. Despite the reform, insurance companies will still be able to deny an individual coverage based on his or her age and/or medical condition. T F
7. Under the new plan, federal money cannot be used to pay for abortions, except in cases currently allowed by law, such as rape, incest or when the pregnant woman’s life is in danger. T F
8. To pay for the new insurance plans, individuals and employers will pay premiums; the rest will be covered by new taxes on high-cost employer-sponsored group health plans and tanning bed use; additional payroll taxes for people who earn more than $200,000 per year, and fees to be collected from health care companies, drug makers, manufacturers of medical devices and insurance companies. T F
9. Starting in 2014, all illegal immigrants will be able to purchase health insurance through the government. T F
10. The health insurance reform will result in an estimated 16 million new Medicaid recipients. T F

 

You can find the answers here—but give it a go first, eh?

Maybe this isn’t Armageddon yet. It really wasn’t clear that it was to begin:

(a) when the House passed the Senate bill

(b) when Obama signed that into law

(c) when reconciliation finally passed both Senate and House

(d) when Obama signs that.

I’ll be interested in what happens when the reconciliation bill is signed. If Armageddon hasn’t already happened, that will be the moment.

Have a happy Armageddon.

Just had an interesting epiphany in conversation with The Wife. Let me begin with an illustrative anecdote.

Once when we were in the Downtown Baltimore Childcare Center (DBCC), The Eldest pointed out a long window, a rectangle placed on its side, installed just a few inches above floor level in the wall separating the infant room from the toddler room. Toddlers are fascinated by infants and love to watch them crawl around and play, and infants are similarly intrigued by toddlers staggering about in the other room. The window enables a two-way zoo, with each seeing the other as the object.

So I realized about my intermittent exchanges with a far-Right friend from high school days. I can see clearly where he is wrong, and I can point out contradictions in his position and respond rationally to every argument—to no avail. But, I realized, he undoubtedly views me the same way: no matter how many times he repeats a statement, I don’t seem to grasp it. I just blather back some long string of words that makes some far-fetched argument. In other words, each of us views the other as (a) incredibly stubborn, (b) refusing to recognize what’s wrong about his position, and (c) unable to accept (or perhaps even understand) information that conflicts with his views. It’s another two-way zoo.

Another beautiful day here in Monterey. I think Armageddon is being MUCH better than portrayed.

Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy:

Retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, the former top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, has been under investigation for over a year amid allegations he grossly mismanaged a Pentagon-funded research center.

Barno currently runs the National Defense University’s Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, which was established in 2000 and brings together thinkers from 25 countries across the broader Middle East for dialogue and education. NESA is the youngest of five such regional centers at NDU, and lists 21 faculty members and four senior leaders on its website.

According to four current and former NESA Center employees, all of whom asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, Barno has been investigated by a special unit of the Defense Department’s Inspector General’s office that focuses on senior officials. The allegations are that he created an office that misspent taxpayer funds, abused contractor employees under threat of termination, awarded jobs based on favoritism rather than merit, and created an overall atmosphere of fear and intimidation at the center.

"I’ve never seen a situation in which such a small agency is mismanaged so badly," said one NESA employee with decades of government experience, who lamented that no official action has yet been taken. "It is to me incredible that you can have, on one hand, such mismanagement and that no one is prepared, evidently, to do anything about it."

In one example cited by all four employees, a senior staffer close to Barno discouraged the use of Arabic at the center, despite its mandate to engage people from Arabic-speaking countries. In a 2008 email sent to the center’s lone Arabic-speaking contractor at the time, obtained by The Cable, Barno’s chief of operations Rosaline Cardarelli wrote the following:

"I often hear you speaking in languages other than English on the phone in the office. Are these conversations official in nature and can English be used instead?"

That contractor was fired shortly thereafter without explanation after only four months on the job. A Muslim, she was let go just as the Ramadan celebration was beginning.

Cardarelli and another top NDU staffer, Wendie White, were the subject of many of the investigator’s questions, said the employees, who told The Cable that the DOD inspector general’s office conducted multiple rounds of interviews over the last year with several NESA employees. It’s not clear if the investigation is still active, although no public report has been issued and Barno remains in his post.

One focus of the investigator, according to the employees, was Barno’s appointment of Cardarelli’s husband, John Ballard, a former professor of strategic studies at the National War College, as the center’s academic dean. An independent committee had recommended another candidate, NESA professor William Olson, but Barno ignored that recommendation and chose Ballard, in what some saw as favoritism. He was then compelled to rework the organizational chart at the center to avoid a conflict of interest whereby Cardarelli would be directly supervising her own husband.

Another focus of the investigation was …

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Andrew Sullivan:

Russell King provides some:

You can’t demand everyone listen to the generals when they say what fits your agenda, and then ignore them when they don’t.

You can’t whine that it’s unfair when people accuse you of exploiting racism for political gain, when your party’s former leader admits you’ve been doing it for decades.

You can’t portray yourself as fighting terrorists when you openly and passionately support terrorists.

You can’t complain about a lack of bipartisanship when you’ve routinely obstructed for the sake of political gain — threatening to filibuster at least 100 pieces of legislation in one session, far more than any other since the procedural tactic was invented — and admitted it.  Some admissions are unintentional, others are made proudly. This is especially true when the bill is the result of decades of compromise between the two parties and is filled with your own ideas.

You can’t question the loyalty of Department of Justice lawyers when you didn’t object when your own Republican president appointed them.

You can’t preach and try to legislate "Family Values" when you: take nude hot tub dips with teenagers (and pay them hush money); cheat on your wife with a secret lover and lie about it to the world; cheat with a staffer’s wife (and pay them off with a new job); pay hookers for sex while wearing a diaper and cheating on your wife; or just enjoying an old fashioned non-kinky cheating on your wife; try to have gay sex in a public toilet; authorize the rape of children in Iraqi prisons to coerce their parents into providing information; seek, look at or have sex with children; replace a guy who cheats on his wife with a guy who cheats on his pregnant wife with his wife’s mother;

Interesting post by Daniel Tenner at Lifehacker.com:

I am the kind of person who takes 30 minutes to an hour to fall asleep, most nights. Falling asleep is an ordeal for me (unless I’m completely exhausted). Don’t get me wrong—it’s not an unpleasant ordeal… there are worse things in life than lying in bed. But I truly envy those people who can just put their head on a pillow and drift off within moments. Oh, such bliss… not for me. I will lie in bed, awake, forever thinking and rethinking whatever happens to be on my mind at the time.

Because of this, I always thought that power napping was not for me. After all, power naps are supposed to last about 20 minutes, and you don’t need to be a maths genius to realise that if it takes you at least half an hour to fall asleep, 20 minutes won’t be enough. So, therefore, I thought, since I can’t fall asleep quickly, I can’t nap.

Fortunately for me, I was completely wrong about this.

Napping isn’t sleeping

The reason I was wrong is, napping is not sleeping. To get the benefit of a refreshing power nap, you don’t need to fall asleep. It’s enough to relax yourself and let your thoughts drift off, even while remaining mostly awake. If you can do this properly (it does take some practice), you can power nap even if you find it impossible to fall asleep quickly.

I learned how to nap when I was starting my first start-up, while still working full time at Accenture. It was a pretty hard time for me, and I was constantly tired. Learning to nap allowed me to keep performing in both my job (during the daytime) and my start-up (in the morning and evening), despite my chronic lack of sleep. It’s great to be able to magically transition from a state of mind-numbing exhaustion into a fresh, wakeful mind, in just 20 minutes.

The way I learned to nap was with a tool called …

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Here it is in action:

And another:

Here is what you’re seeing:

Apart from a drum, it’s hard to imagine a simpler musical instrument than the willow flute: it’s a straight tube with a mouthpiece at one end and no toneholes. But far from being a limited toy, the willow flutes developed in Scandinavia (known as the salgflojt in Sweden, the seljefloyte in Norway, and the pitkahuilu in Finland; willow flutes are also traditional in Russia and several other countries) are capable of playing complex melodies over a multi-octave range. It’s all done through harmonics, breath control, and the judicious use of the index finger to cover the end hole.

More information here, including how to order.

I love Evernote and will not ditch it, but I was intrigued by this post at MakeUseOf:

Perish the thought. Why would you ditch Evernote? The one de facto tool that can take care of capturing, annotating, tagging, and organizing all the information that’s out there. If I am sounding too gung ho about this software, I am definitely not alone. Evernote has lots of uses to crow about.

But then the web space of web clipping tools and information managers is not Evernote’s alone. There are many more information chunking tools that are trying to grab a slice of the pie. For us users, it’s all the better because we get many more web clipping tools to play around with.

Online note-taking, web clipping tools are must have tools to keep in our browser toolset. The one advantage that some of these tools bestow is offline access to the saved pages. A bookmark may fail as the link changes, but if you have an offline facsimile stored in your hard drive, then that’s information you can use.

The five web clipping alternatives have their own good points in the way they catch and keep the information for us. Try them out and see if they can serve as good stand-ins as Evernote alternatives…

Continue reading.

Marian Wang at ProPublica:

It’s a subject that has gotten limited play in the American press, but has held the attention of the international press for weeks, even months: In Germany, news of sexual abuse and negligent oversight in the very archdiocese once headed by Pope Benedict XVI has been a developing story, while in Ireland, sexual abuse by the clergy has been in the news for months. The pope wrote a letter to the Irish Catholic Church last week. The letter, while apologizing to abuse victims and urging greater accountability within the church, notably neglected to mention the investigation into what was once his own diocese in Germany. It also failed to quell growing demands for the resignation of leaders in the Irish church who knew sexual abuse was being covered up. Several bishops have offered their resignations to the pope; today, he accepted the resignation of one.

Interested—both as a journalist and a bystander—I called up Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Robinson for some context on the recent flare-up involving clergy scandals in Europe. For seven years, Robinson led The Boston Globe’s investigative unit, which in 2002 and 2003 documented sexual abuse within the Boston Archdiocese. The coverage won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for  Public Service. Robinson is now a professor of journalism at Northeastern University. Here is what he had to say:

I’m sure you’ve been following the Catholic Church abuse scandal that has been flaring up recently in Germany and elsewhere. Tell me a little about how this compares to what you found in Boston.

I’ve been following it with some interest. I’ve always maintained that the problems that were so obvious and widespread in the Boston Archdiocese were no different than any other diocese in the United States, or really anywhere in the developed world. It isn’t that there was something strange in the water in Boston that made priests abuse children. It’s just that because of our good fortune, and our collective good fortune in getting the courts to order the church to release all the personnel files, we got a much better idea in Boston of how common and widespread the problem was. And this part is important, given how focused the church has been everywhere in keeping this covered up.

The situation in Germany is particularly of interest because for years, the pope—then known as Cardinal Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger—oversaw the Munich and Freising Archdiocese. News reports vary on how aware Ratzinger was of a particular priest who had repeatedly molested boys, and one of the pope’s deputies has since taken responsibility for the personnel mistakes that led to further abuse. Your thoughts?

I don’t know of any archdiocese where the archbishop or the cardinal archbishop was not kept fully informed and in most cases was not heavily involved in decision-making involving any priest who was accused of abusing minors. In every diocese in the U.S.,  including those headed by cardinals, there was personal knowledge by the cardinal archbishop when news of abuse surfaced. It was true in Boston, it was true in L.A., it was true in Chicago.

The fact we have one archbishop in Munich that claims not to know anything is enough to make one suspicious. So the question is, if there was complicity by the pope himself, how do you get the evidence? And the evidence is in the recollections of priests who were involved who would know, the evidence is in the personnel files, and I’m not sure under German law whether there is any way whether civil authorities could force the release of those files. … One thing is certain. The church went to such great lengths to protect its bishops and archbishops in the U.S., you can imagine how far they’ll go to protect the reputation of the pope.

It seemed that in the Boston situation, documents were really key to tying higher-ups in the Catholic Church to what was happening with the priests in Boston. Do you think that’s going to be possible elsewhere? …

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CNN reports:

The Supreme Court granted a temporary stay of execution late Wednesday for a condemned Texas inmate who is requesting DNA testing of evidence in his case.

The order was handed down less than an hour before Henry "Hank" Skinner, 47, was scheduled to be executed by injection for the New Year’s Eve 1993 killings of his live-in girlfriend and her two sons.

The Supreme Court granted the temporary stay while it considers whether to take up Skinner’s broader appeal. It was not immediately clear when the court might consider the case, but there was no indication a decision would be made before Thursday.

Skinner’s attorneys maintain that DNA testing of the evidence could establish his innocence and determine the real killer.

"This action suggests that the court believes there are important issues that require closer examination," defense attorney Robert Owen said of the temporary stay. "We remain hopeful that the court will agree to hear Mr. Skinner’s case and ultimately allow him the chance to prove his innocence through DNA testing."

Skinner heard the news while he was eating what was to be his last meal, according to Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

He expressed relief and surprise, saying, "I had made up my mind I was going to die" and "I feel like I really won today," according to Lyons.

Skinner said he is "eager to get the DNA testing so I can prove my innocence and get the hell out of here," according to Lyons.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has received more than 8,000 letters from Skinner’s advocates urging a stay, according to the Innocence Project and Change.org, whose members and supporters have sent the letters through their Web sites.

State Sen. Rodney Ellis and state Rep. Elliott Naishtat were among those who have called for a reprieve.

"It has come to my attention that there are numerous problems with Mr. Skinner’s case that raise serious questions regarding the fairness of his trial and whether or not he is guilty," Ellis wrote in a letter to Perry on Tuesday.

Word about the case has spread as far as France, where …

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Matthew Yglesias:

Tom Friedman becomes the latest in a very long string of pundits to blame congressional polarization on partisan gerrymandering of House districts. As Joshua Tucker points out no matter how many times people say this, there’s still no evidence that it’s true. You can see this pretty quickly if you consider that the Senate features perfect partisan sorting—Olympia Snowe is more conservative than all the Democrats and Ben Nelson is more liberal than all the Republicans. Senators are responsive to public opinion to some extent—Snowe is more liberal than other Republicans and Nelson more conservative than other Democrats—but only to a limited extent. You have lots of examples of two different senators representing the exact same state, and they amass very different voting records.

More rigorously, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have a paper called “Does Gerrymandering Cause Polarization?” The answer is no:

Both pundits and scholars have blamed increasing levels of partisan conflict and polarization in Congress on the effects of partisan gerrymandering. We assess whether there is a strong causal relationship between congressional districting and polarization. We find very little evidence for such a link. First, we show that congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences. Second, we conduct simulations to gauge the level of polarization under various “neutral” districting procedures. We find that the actual levels of polarization are not much higher than those produced by the simulations. We do find that gerrymandering has increased the Republican seat share in the House; however, this increase is not an important source of polarization.

Note also that historically polarization has been the rule in American politics. The times we live in are typical, not exceptional. It just happens to be the case that a lot of people alive today were acculturated to the unusual non-polarized politics of the 1930s-1970s in which the salience of racial issues scrambled partisan/ideological configurations. I think polarization is a good thing but even if you disagree the only proven way to minimize it is to have a large and influential white supremacist movement obtain substantial congressional representation.

Laurie Goodstein in the NY Times:

Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.

In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.

But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.

“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.

The New York Times obtained the documents, which the church fought to keep secret, from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, the lawyers for five men who have brought four lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The documents include letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims’ affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Father Murphy and minutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican.

Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.

Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.

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