Ted Widmer is the kind of historian who makes everything yesterday seem like it is happening now. He is also politically connected. He journeyed these last couple of years every month from his home in Chestertown, Maryland to New York to serve as Bill Clinton’s intellectual ‘foil’ as the former president sorted out his memoirs….
Sam Seder is holding the fort down at Air America’s Majority Report on his own tonight and has squeezed me into his show at about 8:30 p.m. We might be discussing the Vatican’s labor problems with pre-ordained, wannabe priests who “might” be gay.
Earlier I suggested that the EU should find a way to block the Vatican from utilizing euros. But that just doesn’t make much sense. People want to buy those rosaries, candles and pictures of Popes — dead and alive.
Dick Cheney did the right thing in cancelling the fundraiser he was scheduled to do this weekend along with Senator Rick Santorum so that he could focus on America’s hurricane challenges. Fascinating though that just about everyone in the White House is off committed to fundraisers. . .
The Vatican’s new campaign to bar the ordination of priests based on sexual orientation, as opposed to behavior, violates the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The Vatican is not a member of the European Union but straddles being a church and state within Italy, which is a member.
Europe is pulling back from its take-Iran-to-the-brink pledge to refer Iran’s nuclear activities to the U.S. Security Council. While this may sound sensible to some, the ice we are all on is getting dangerously thinner.
I visited the Vatican in early August and met a person who is deeply “embedded” in the world of those who run Vatican City and who govern the global machinery of the Catholic Church.
Senator Frank Lautenberg has just sent President Bush a letter decrying Karl Rove’s negligence as the “point person for disaster coordination and recovery” in the White House. Rove is departing Washington today to attend fundraising events in North Dakota while Hurricane Rita slams into Texas.
We finished the second major conference in our series trying to reframe the way policymakers think about our national response to terrorism. This session was called Beyond Bullets: Economic Strategies in the Fight Against Terrorism, and the roster of speakers is here.
