And this is why I love Michael Kinsley

This must be the best thing written yet on the MoveOn.org pseudo-scandal:

How Dare You.

These days, mock outrage is used by every side of every dispute. It's fair enough to criticize something your opponent said while secretly thanking your lucky stars that he said it. The fuss over this MoveOn.org ad is something else: it is the result of a desperate scavenging for umbrage material. When so many people are clamoring for a chance to swoon that they each have to take a number and when the landscape is so littered with folks lying prostrate and pretending to be dead that it starts to look like the end of a Civil War battle re-enactment, this isn't spontaneous mass outrage. This is choreography.

But that quote's just a good summation -- you have to read the whole thing for the real juicy bits.

Blog note: I don't have haloscan comments working for some odd reason, and I'm still playing around with the template. Hopefully I'll get it all squared away this weekend and things will be back to normal.

Technical Problems

For whatever reason, the blog's template seems to have disappeared. I thought at first that it was a Blogger glitch that they'd work out, but apparently the url where the template was stored is no longer operative. So I'm going to have to get off my lazy ass and make a new template I guess.

Irony Watch

In this article, we learn of the Pope attacking his fellow Europeans for not having enough children:

Pope Benedict XVI blasted Europeans for being selfish and not having enough children, in a sermon on Saturday at the 850-year-old pilgrimage site of Mariazell in Austria.

"Europe has become child-poor. We want everything for ourselves and place little trust in the future," the pope told a crowd of faithful from his canopied area at an open-air, afternoon mass that took place under heavy rain.

Not long after saying this, the Pope went on to defend celibacy.