Weekend Update - April 17th

(Okay, in all honesty, the backyard project has been put on hold because of high water tables. Or table. Or something. It all boils down to this: We've had too much rain lately to do any serious digging. The ground is saturated. When the wind blows hard and you look out your window and see waves on your lawn ... well, you get my general drift here. But the good news is that the toilet is dutifully doing its duty for the time being. We await the great drying. But I digress ...)

• We'll give them a little break, at least. The Catholic Church has done some good, somewhere, I suppose. Those orphanages maybe. The ones where they didn't beat or sexually molest the children. There are some, aren't there? But c'mon. Isn't it time for this criminal organization to end? Verily, is the Catholic Church and its dank, nefarious heart, the Vatican, with its attendant red-robed apologists, unreformed child rapists and a leader who is, as Richard Dawkins rightly declares, "a leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds ... a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence," is it safe to say this archaic and vile institution is finally nearing its end? Mark Morford reports.
• Okay, this one gets a little complicated for us average boomer slackers, but you may have noticed something happened to the economy lately. Well, the government has brought charges against a firm called Goldman Sachs. Basically Goldman was pushing investors to invest in stuff that they (Goldman and others) were betting against. Here is a cheerful story of how badly things can go wrong, when bad people have no oversight. Click HERE.
• What?! "Favoring the constitutional right to bear arms over others' concerns about gun safety, Gov. Jan Brewer on Friday signed into law a bill making Arizona the third state allowing people to carry a concealed weapon without requiring a permit." Good Gosh Almighty.
• Paul Krugman writes: On Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, called for the abolition of municipal fire departments. Firefighters, he declared, “won’t solve the problems that led to recent fires. They will make them worse.” The existence of fire departments, he went on, “not only allows for taxpayer-funded bailouts of burning buildings; it institutionalizes them.” He concluded, “The way to solve this problem is to let the people who make the mistakes that lead to fires pay for them. We won’t solve this problem until the biggest buildings are allowed to burn.” Okay, so he's fibbing a bit. But it's a good point.
• There's really no substitute for hanging out at the New Orleans' Riverside Hilton bar during the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. Only there can you relax in comfort and enjoy a Caesar salad while being lectured to by the president of the Louisiana Women's Republican Club on why the idea of a secular American republic is "a lie sent directly from the flaming pits of Hell," and why secular Jews must accept the Word of God before the coming Final Battle, after which it will be too late. This may be the creepiest Republican story I've ever posted on Bad Hat. Read it at your own risk.