This “solution” bakes the cost of birth control into the premiums charged the bishops and their institutions, but allows them to claim they are not directly funding something they consider odious. It is a jesuitical exercise of form over substance, an art form the Church has made its special province for over a millenium.

As for the bishops, I expect they will apply their arguments on this issue to explain to a carefully listening Mr. Obama why the Church’s “errant” priests ought not to be liable for their sexual crimes. It would offend the conscience to so assert civic over religious authority. Never mind the underlying behavior.

Thank you, Jon, for another elegant piece on this topic.

I would add that governors, state party chairs, top state senate and house pols and all their consultants and top donors would have had a hand in this pie. The banksters have grabbed the four and twenty blackbirds and left burnt crust for former homeowners, their communities and county and state treasuries. This settlement also promises to upset 300 years of land title rules, which will do lots for calming the residential and commercial real estate market.

This process sets a precedent that will make more likely the next bubble and ensure that the banksters will be back for more subsidies, immunities and exemptions from liability. It will make it more likely that standard corporate business models disdain current laws – SEC, IRS, accounting, workplace and environmental rules, ad nauseum – even more than they do now.

Barack Obama, the constitutional lawyer. That is a phrase of praise that belongs in the dustbin. William Howard Taft was a HLS-trained constitutional lawyer. Before becoming president and a supreme court justice, he was a heavyweight machine pol from Cincinnati and governor of the newly acquired imperial colony of the Philippines.

Taft’s tenure in the Philippines was great for American corporations, and for local police and militia. The latter developed state-of-the-art methods for identifying, cataloguing, tracking, intimidating, interrogated, and incarcerating would be political opponents. When we ignore history, we repeat it.

Note to Jane Hamsher:

As is obvious to everyone, David Dayen deserves praise and a national journalism award for his coverage of this issue.

Thanks to you as well for giving him a journalistic home from which to do such sterling work.

This is not a function of religious freedom. The issue is the fair application of employment laws, which should not favor one employer over another, allowing one to discriminate but holding another to common standards.

Politically, of course, this is part of the bishop’s and the hard right’s (a redundant description) national campaign to restrict or ban access to constitutionally protected rights under the guise of religious “freedom” and budgetary arguments.

Mr. Obama can be relied upon to cave on both fronts. It makes one recall that William Howard Taft, before becoming president and a supreme court justice, was one of the harshest colonial governors of the American occupation of the Philippines. He, too, was a Harvard Law School grad and constitutional lawyer who used his scholarship to restrict access to civil rights and enrich his most favored corporate supporters. The difference, apart from his immense girth, was that he admitted to be a Republican and a machine politician.

Hard to imagine a more daring example of false advertising. Then again, Time has been a government propaganda arm since before Stanley Karnow was its Paris correspondent.

The claim that drones offer a superior way to monitor human rights abuses is Orwellian. That might be a possible purpose, but not the most probable or likely purpose to which a security state would use drones. The US claim to be a credible human rights monitor is weak at best. Other states are nearly as poorly qualified.

Drones are overwhelmingly utilized by the state to wage war on the “global” battlefield and to monitor citizens’ ordinary and potential extraordinary behavior. They are a mechanism of control and a vehicle for physical punishment. That they have beneficial potential uses is a fig leaf for their primary uses as weapons of control and punishment.

Tasers, too, were touted as improvements in policing and as a “non-lethal” alternative to the use of a firearm. Their common use, however, is to assert emotional dominance over victims and to apply excessive, illegal violence over non-violent and already controlled victims. And they kill hundreds of people a year, hence, the Orwellian insistence that they are an “alternative” to the use of deadly force.

The correct issue is whether sexual predators are fit to be employed and given authority over the young when they commit felonies using the power given them by their institutions. The issue has nothing to do with sexuality or sexual orientation or parenting. It is about predation, in this case, sexual, and the lengths institutions go to cover it up and thereby abuse the innocent, themselves and the purposes for which they are chartered.

This should have every college and university president in the country reviewing their people and their policies, reinvigorating whistleblower rules, and rethinking their responsibilities to their primary constituents – students and their families – and the purposes for which they sponsor athletics.

This White House garbles its English more than George Bush’s. By “manage”, it means take direction from its private security contractor corporate sponsors. It does not mean “manage” in the sense of direct and supervise. It does not mean disciplining those contractors when they do not perform according to agreed parameters or fail to abide by the thin gruel the USG accepts in the form of its contractual protections from and demands of these corporations. It does mean, however, reward them on a no questions asked basis, just as it does with the banksters.

One of Mr. Cheney’s top priorities was to capture or kill prominent federal regulators, the DoJ, the SEC, and IRS were top of the list. I’d say his game room has mounted in it everything he attempted to bag. Mr. Obama is happy with that state of affairs, too, since his concept of government and its proper function seems as perverse and narrow as his chosen mentor’s, Sen. Lieberman (R, Greenwich & Wall Street).

Apart from raping the rule of law, this is theft, as much as if this administration allowed the taking of oil from federal lands without paying a royalty. In both cases, the government is giving a free and enormously valuable gift to the MOTU, the guys who scream for unregulated capitalism but are the first to line up and suck at the federal teat. This isn’t symbiosis or even smart parasitism, which requires that the parasite not exhaust or kill its host prematurely. These MOTU believe they are Sherman marching to the sea, and the US taxpayer is the state of Georgia.

A claimed withdrawal of “troops” is political sleight of hand unless it includes all mercenaries. During much of the past ten years in Iraq, there were as many highly-paid mercenaries, in effect under sole “control” of the United States, as there were US troops. It gets worse, as mercs have not been bound by any enforceable laws. Their actions have been accountable solely to the US Dept of Justice, which has not found any of them to be worthy of serious investigation, let alone prosecution.

As usual, Mr. Obama’s speech requires more parsing than even Mr. Clinton’s. When he speaks of about US troop withdrawal but does not include withdrawal of mercenaries, he means that tens of thousands of armed troops will remain, many of them enjoying the US taxpayer-financed protection of the world’s biggest “embassy”, which makes Government House in old British Calcutta look like a gardener’s shed.

Generally, it is permissible for enterprises organized as charities under the tax code to advocate for issues, but not individual politicians. In practice, no surprise, the line is pretty vague, given that the issues that most seem to exercise charities active in politics have traditionally been the chief issues that once divided Democrats from Republicans. Examples include economic justice, birth control and abortion, no-fault divorce, expanding the right to vote, and expanding the recognition that the right to marry, to have one’s relationship and commitment recognized in law, ought to apply to all citizens, not just heterosexual men and women.

The Catholic Church ought to set its own house in order before advocating depriving others of their social and legal rights. It ought to stop hiding and promoting the careers of sexual predators and others in its hierarchy who serially abuse their flock. It is still committed to hiding them, and its own institutional acceptance of them. One wonders whether its insistence on hiding and defending predators relates to its innate conservatism or success by those predators in rising to the top.

It seems impossible to unbundle this arch-conservative step from the church’s opposition to ordaining women as priests and to priestly marriage. It is an institution that still rejects modernity, not least in its defacto acceptance of sexual predation and its inability to accept its counterpoint, the natural and healthy breadth of legitimate human sexual activity.

There are those in the Catholic Church for whom economic and social justice are passions worth sacrificing for. But just as Franciscans lost out to the Jesuits, as privilege won out over scripture, there may not be many of them among the church’s top leaders.

The proof of our humanitarian vs. economic motivations is likely to come in how quickly we withdraw, whether we credibly work to replace US troops with an international, usually African-based, peace-keeping force, whether we do not attempt to enlarge our military bases in the region, and whether the political elite that succeeds this no doubt vicious warlord is not just more peaceful, but more beholden to the US and its economic interests.

“Genocide” has been going on for quite some time. Our involvement in Iraq has led to consequences similar to though less complete; our own actions have certainly led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, at a minimum, and to the displacement of millions. And that’s just Iraq.

I could conceive of these actions as being humanitarian had Obama established earlier the public rationale for sending in the military, and had sending in the military been preceded by more credible diplomatic initiatives.

Given Obama’s penchant for expanding our undeclared wars abroad – eg, his considerable expansion of the number of lethal drone attacks and the number of countries in which he uses them – Mr. Obama deserves no benefit of the doubt on this issue. Nor does he deserve it on the issue of whether collateral issues – expanding our economic hegemony over access to rare raw materials – were more persuasive than a belated attempt to reduce the number of unwonted deaths owing to political chaos and corruption.

Follow the money, something Marine Corps Maj-Gen. Smedley Butler knew all about, having fought for two decades in the Banana Wars. The most alarming of many alarming aspects of Obama’s decision to send troops – apart from his utter failure to debate and establish a credible public rationale for this move – is the wide geography he has thrown up. All of these countries have significant problems, many of them related to the corruption of onshore political elites and the offshore corporate elites who hide and use the billions they abscond with. Foreign Aid, for example, does not remotely begin to compensate.

Follow the money. The Congo, in particular, is home to rare metals essential for ubiquitous modern electronics. Whatever the public rationale for the widely dispersed missions Mr. Obama describes, he should explain how this has nothing whatever to do with protecting the flow of raw materials that benefits exclusively the elites on and offshore.

Thank you, Peter. Reporter John Blake is decidedly misleading in a trite MSM-ish way. His comment about Jesus and subprime mortgages trivializes an important issue that lies at the heart of today’s chronic American economic woes. It obscures what ought to be obvious, that a Mediterranean peasant village Jew, revered by his followers as God and who preached the golden rule would find the American version of economic justice an invidious and dangerous contradiction in terms.