This cartoon by Mike Luckovich at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution gets it just right.

Atrios pummels Senator Frist with some great material documenting Frist’s past comments about his holdings in HCA and undermining his credibility. Via Atrios, some excerpts from an ABC Report: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.

Major hypocrisy at the top of the Vatican hierarchy. . . The effort to ban gay-conceptualizers rather than gay-actualizers from the Catholic priesthood is just outright hypocritical and a violation of the rights of those who want to work in established Catholocism as a priest.

Yesterday TWN gave Vice President Cheney some credit for focusing on the aftermath of Katrina and the coming onslaught from Rita — while Karl Rove politicked at big fundraisers in North Dakota.

Senator Bill Frist’s holdings in HCA, a hospital holding firm that his family helped build, has been a conflict-of-interest for him during his entire time as a Senator — but he seems to have only just realized this as he readies himself to make a run for the White House.

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.