Basketball coach won't cave to pressure from the ultra-conservative Archbishop of St. Louis

Looks like the Archbishop of St. Louis, the one who wanted to deny communion to John Kerry in 2004, has met his match. The basketball coach of St. Louis University, Rick Majerus, supports Hillary Clinton, a women's right to choose and stem cell research. The Archbishop wants to quash him -- and the coach is having none of it:

Majerus took a typically defiant stand in an interview published Thursday in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

"These beliefs are ingrained in me," Majerus told the paper. "And my First Amendment right to free speech supersedes anything that the archbishop would order me to do. My dad fought on Okinawa in World War II. My uncle died in World War II. I had classmates die in Vietnam. And it was to preserve our way of life, so people like me could have an opinion."

Good answer.

I grew up Catholic, very Catholic -- and it still annoys me every time one of the church's hierarchy gets all sanctimonious and self-righteous about a social issue, but especially stem cell research. Their hands are dirty, really dirty -- and many of the men who lead the church are rife with hypocrisy and double standards. To deny the science and promise of stem cell research is just dastardly and evil. The Archbishop may get his name in the media and on tv with this crazy talk, but does anyone take him seriously? He's a caricature. Read the rest of this post...

Michael's Best Movies of 2007

You'll all recall my friend Michael who now has his own pop culture blog in NY. Well he just came out with his top movies of 2007 list (he'll be doing the top CDs next week). Here are his picks (he does a mini-review of each movie on his site):

1. The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
2. Lars and the Real Girl
3. Zodiac
4. The Wind That Shakes The Barley
5. There Will Be Blood
6. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
7. L’Iceberg
8. Michael Clayton
9. Ratatouille
10. Once
11. The Host
12. This Is England
13. Superbad
14. Control
15. The Bourne Ultimatum

Read the rest of this post...

Reid Issues Ultimatum: More Time Or No Wiretaps

More from HuffPost. Read the rest of this post...

Peggy Noonan: 'George W. Bush Destroyed The Republican Party'

You'll recall that Noonan was one of Ronald Reagan's top speech writers. Just more evidence of how divided Republicans are heading into this election. Read the rest of this post...

The pill protects against cancer

Interesting. I'm sure the flat-earth society will have something to say about this.

Women on the birth control pill are protected from ovarian cancer, even decades after they stop taking it, scientists said.

British researchers found that women taking the pill for 15 years halved their chances of developing ovarian cancer, and that the risk remained low more than 30 years later, though protection weakened over time.

Read the rest of this post...

CNBC: To say "recession" only helps bring recession

Did they hire a Bush pro-war person to spin this nonsense? Everyone knows that market sentiment can drag down or pick up a market, but this is downright idiotic. When we lose billions upon billions and inflation cuts into average Americans living expenses, what the hell else are people supposed to think? Maybe if you're the CEO of Dow Chemical, sure, you don't have a care in the world. Filling the tank in the limo is done by someone else and what decent CEO buys grocery's? For everyone else, a spade is a spade and we call it as we see it.

"We're over-reacting to the recession word," Dow Chemical Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris told CNBC. "Lots of people get together and talk to each other and people believe the psychology."

Of course. I'm sure all of the multi-million dollar per year salary types who own hundreds of thousands of shares in Fortune 500 companies all have the same questions about this nasty "recession" talk. "Let them eat cake" if you will. This only goes to show just how divided we are as a country. People living in the stratosphere of wealth have no idea how the rest are living. He actually makes the point quite nicely, proving just how clueless he is about life in 2008. Read the rest of this post...

Who will prop up the bond insurers during the meltdown?

Who needs regulation and oversight anyway? Surely there are billions of extra cash just laying around to bail out this next group, right? If these cowboys weren't dragging us all down, it would be easier to let them lose so much money, but because of their own failures, we're all having to pay the price for greed and incompetence.

Regulators fear a possible chain of events in which the troubled bond insurers, MBIA and Ambac, might be unable to keep their promise to pay investors if borrowers default on their debt.

That could leave the buyers of the bonds — including many banks and pension funds — on the hook for untold billions of dollars in losses, shaking confidence in the financial system.

To avoid a possible crisis, insurance regulators met with representatives of about a dozen banks on Wednesday to discuss ways to shore up the insurers by injecting fresh capital, much as Wall Street firms have turned to outside investors recently after suffering steep losses related to subprime mortgages.

Read the rest of this post...

Bush forging secret defense treaty with Iraq?

Troubling indeed, but does anyone honestly believe that the Democrats in Congress wouldn't vote en masse for a treaty committing us to Iraq for the next 100 years? Please. All Bush has to do is say "Osama!" and the Democrats will cave like, well, Democrats. Don't threaten what you're not willing to follow through on.

President Bush's plan to forge a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government that could commit the US military to defending Iraq's security would be the first time such a sweeping mutual defense compact has been enacted without congressional approval, according to legal specialists.

After World War II, for example - when the United States gave security commitments to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and NATO members - Presidents Truman and Eisenhower designated the agreements as treaties requiring Senate ratification. In 1985, when President Ronald Reagan guaranteed that the US military would defend the Marshall Islands and Micronesia if they were attacked, the compacts were put to a vote by both chambers of Congress.

By contrast, Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki have already agreed that a coming compact will include the United States providing "security assurances and commitments" to Iraq to deter any foreign invasion or internal terrorism by "outlaw groups." But a top White House official has also said that Bush does not intend to submit the deal to Congress.....

But the "long-term relationship of cooperation and friendship" outlined in November goes far beyond an ordinary status-of-forces agreement. It would include promises of debt forgiveness, economic and technical aid, facilitating "especially American investments" in Iraq - and the security commitments, according to Bush and Maliki's joint declaration last November....

However, [General Douglas Lute, Bush's deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan] may have offered a clue to the administration's legal arguments during the November press conference when he noted that "We have about a hundred agreements similar to the one envisioned for the US and Iraq already in place, and the vast majority of those are below the level of a treaty." Johndroe, the White House spokesman, also mentioned the existence of such agreements in a Globe interview this week.

Legal specialists, however, say that the numerous pacts that were completed without congressional consent are not similar to the agreement Bush and Maliki outlined in November.

Read the rest of this post...

John McCain wasn't so proud of our troops during the 1990s

John McCain last night:

If we do what Senator Clinton said what she wanted to do night before last and wave the white flag of surrender and set a date for withdrawal, we will have expenses American blood and treasure will have one.... We're defending freedom. That's one of the obligations of being the world superpower.... I'm so proud that the jobs that the men and women in the military are doing there. And they don't want us to raise the white flag of surrender like Senator Clinton does. They know they can win. And the message to you and to me is let us win.

So then why was John McCain in favor of "surrender" and waving the white flag when US forces went to Haiti, and when US forces went to Somalia? Isn't McCain interested in defending freedom in those countries? Wasn't it an obligation of a superpower ten years ago when McCain demanded our withdrawal? Was McCain not proud of our men and women in the military who fought in Haiti and Somalia? Why didn't John McCain let them win? If John McCain is going to claim that per se "withdrawal equals surrender" then the media needs to ask him why he wasn't as much a traitor to our country in the 1990s. He can't have it both ways. Read the rest of this post...

With one day til South Carolina, latest polls show Obama lead.

South Carolina Democrats vote tomorrow. Not an understatement to say this past week was very intense -- one of the most intense and contentious of the campaign so far. Two recent polls in South Carolina give the lead to Obama.

The latest daily tracking from Reuters/CSPAN/Zogby shows tightening in the race:

Barack Obama has a 13-point lead on rival Hillary Clinton but his support has eroded slightly on the eve of South Carolina's Democratic presidential primary, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Friday.

Obama's edge on Clinton slipped by two points overnight but remained in double digits, 38 percent to 25 percent, in the rolling poll, with John Edwards gaining two points to climb to 21 percent and inch closer to second place.

McClatchy/MSNBC:

The statewide landscape, as of Wednesday night:

# Obama, 38 percent.

# Clinton, 30 percent.

# Edwards, 19 percent.

# Undecided, 13 percent.

The poll's error margin was plus or minus 5 percentage points.

We'll know the statewide landscape tomorrow night. Read the rest of this post...

Friday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

As John pointed out last night, Hillary was endorsed by the NY Times. Very interesting that Rudy didn't get his hometown paper's endorsement -- McCain gets it. Nobody likes Rudy -- especially those who know him well.

Start threading. Read the rest of this post...

Surprise! Another 30,000 records lost

If organizations are unable to protect our personal data, why are they allowed to even have it? If it's that important to them, there ought to be enough protections put in place to protect individuals. Credit monitoring is an OK start, but it's still not addressing the problem. What's so difficult to understand about this never ending loss of data? Read the rest of this post...

"Systemic deficit in ethical values within the banking industry"

Remember when banks were stodgy, low risk and trustworthy? It's certainly not your fathers banking industry today, with crazy investments leading to highest of high gains and lowest of low losses. Why should anyone trust banks to properly tend to our hard earned money? The Societe Generale story continues to unravel and it's ugly. On the somewhat positive side, it should be noted that the SocGen CEO immediately offered to resign (that was rejected by the board) and he will not take a salary until June. I've said it countless times before, but after 9/11, how many resignations did we see in America? After all of the failures we've seen on Wall Street, how many executives offered to resign without massive handouts? Have we really sunk this low?

Look at Wall Street where platinum parachutes have kindly been handed out following horrendous losses. Spin it however you like, but losing billions upon billions whether by iffy business based on smoke and mirrors or a single trader (which I struggle to believe), this is fundamentally wrong and should not be rewarded. I don't give a damn what's in a contract, it's wrong to keep rewarding failed executives. They have no issue with riding roughshod over others who have contracts and it's high time we start doing the same or modernize our contracts. We need a change in attitudes in the industry and beyond. These people are trashing our system and it's high time we demand change. Read the rest of this post...

IRS totally unprepared to process stimulus checks

The Keystone freaking cops. Read the rest of this post...