One of the reasons I’m visiting family this week is to determine the value of a trove of 1960s era comic books that my mom kept in a sealed wooden crate for more than 40 years. My brother and I have been amazed at the almost new condition of a lot of the books.

And here’s an interesting bit of 60s trivia; in a few issues of some of the Marvel comics, we’ve discovered the following advertisement for Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and their new album, “We’re Only In It For the Money.” I’d totally forgotten about this one.

This ad was in Daredevil #38, from March 1968. Check out the condition of this book; it looks like it just came off the rack in a store.

Probably the most valuable book we’ve found so far is this one: X-Men #1. Even in its somewhat beat-up state, it’s still worth quite a bit of money. (Certainly more than 12 cents.) The interior is completely intact, the inks are still bright, and the paper is only slightly yellowed.

I’ve always thought that art is a lie, an interesting lie. And I’ll sort of listen to the “lie” and try to imagine the world which makes that lie true… what that world must be like, and what would have to happen for us to get from this world to that one.

— Brian Eno

An instant YouTube classic — Louis Armstrong sings “What a Wonderful Word,” Slipknot-style.

Youtube Video

(Hat tip: Tara at Dangerous Minds.)

Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

— Robert Frost

The American Medical Association is now officially endorsing President Obama’s health care legislation: AMA Supports House Passage of Health System Reform.

Washington, D.C. – After careful review and consideration, the American Medical Association (AMA) today announced its qualified support for the current health reform bill as a step toward providing coverage to all Americans and improving our nation’s health system.

“The pending bill is imperfect, but we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to something as important as the health of Americans,” said J. James Rohack, M.D., AMA president. “By extending health coverage to the vast majority of the uninsured, improving competition and choice in the insurance marketplace, promoting prevention and wellness, reducing administrative burdens, and promoting clinical comparative effectiveness research, this bill will help patients and their physicians.”

“While the final product is certainly not what we would have devised, we strongly support the parts of this bill that are desperately needed by millions of Americans who are struggling to get or keep health insurance coverage,” Dr. Rohack said. “We will continue to work with Congress and the administration to solve important issues that cannot be addressed through the reconciliation process.”

“This is not the last step, but the next step toward real health system reform,” Dr. Rohack said. “We will remain actively engaged with Congress and the administration to ensure that before Congress adjourns there are additional important changes to our health system. Congress must act to preserve access to care for seniors and military families by permanently repealing the Medicare physician payment formula that will cut Medicare payments by 21 percent next month. According to an AARP poll, nearly 90 percent of people age 50 and older are concerned that the Medicare physician payment cuts threaten their access to care.”

“Congress must also move immediately to correct problems with the Independent Payment Advisory Board,” Dr. Rohack said. “The current IPAB framework could result in misguided payment cuts that undermine access to care and destabilize health care delivery. The AMA will be relentless in our pursuit of permanent repeal of the Medicare physician payment formula, corrections to IPAB, and other important changes that we outlined in a letter today to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”

“Every day physicians see the devastating effect that being uninsured has on the health of our patients: They live sicker and die younger,” Dr. Rohack said. “Physicians dedicate their lives to helping patients live healthier and longer, and we have an historic opportunity to do just that.”

Comedy Central is sure getting some mileage out of Glenn Beck’s increasingly loony shows. Let’s face it — Beck is a comedy goldmine. We should get on our knees and give thanks to Fox News for bringing him into our living rooms, America.

Here’s Jon Stewart piling on.

Comedy Central Video

Stephen Colbert investigates Glenn Beck’s peculiar aversion to churches that preach “social justice,” and interviews Jesuit priest Father James Martin (who gets off the best line).

Comedy Central Video

How would you like to stand like a God before the crest of a monster billow, always rushing to the bottom of a hill and never reaching its base, and to come rushing in for a half mile at express speed, in graceful attitude, until you reach the beach and step easily from the wave?

— Duke Kahanamoku

Every day seems to bring ever more horrifying new revelations about the German Catholic school child abuse scandal. Today we learned that the German archdiocese headed by Josef Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) ignored a psychiatrist’s repeated warnings about a priest accused of molesting children, and simply let the priest continue preying on young boys for many years: German Diocese Ignored Abuse Warnings, Doctor Says.

“I said, ‘For God’s sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children,’ ” the psychiatrist, Dr. Werner Huth, said in a telephone interview from Munich. “I was very unhappy about the entire story.”

Dr. Huth said he was concerned enough that he set three conditions for treating the priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann: that he stay away from young people and alcohol and be supervised by another priest at all times.

Dr. Huth said he issued the explicit warnings — both written and oral — before the future pope, then Joseph Ratzinger, archbishop of Munich and Freising, left Germany for a position in the Vatican in 1982.

In 1980, after abuse complaints from parents in Essen that the priest did not deny, Archbishop Ratzinger approved a decision to move the priest to Munich for therapy.

Despite the psychiatrist’s warnings, Father Hullermann was allowed to return to parish work almost immediately after his therapy began, interacting with children as well as adults. Less than five years later, he was accused of molesting other boys, and in 1986 he was convicted of sexual abuse in Bavaria.

Benedict’s deputy at the time, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, said he was to blame for that personnel decision, referring to what he called “serious mistakes.”

I’m still out of town visiting family; posting will be sporadic for a few more days because I’m not always going to have a web connection. In the meantime, here’s a midday open thread. Remember to wash behind your ears, don’t eat with your entrenching tool, and above all, play nice.

Newsmax columnist and wingnut blogger Pamela “Shrieking Harpy” Geller is losing her marbles today over being contacted by census workers, calling them “Census Stalkers.”

For the past month I have been called, harassed and visited by a Pamela Childs of the Census Bureau, who was pursuing me for an interview. Knowing my rights under the law, even under the current coup, I did not respond. I filled out my form — that which is required by law — but still received calls, visits, notes. Daily.

At one point, I left a message saying I would not speak to her. Period.

A week passed, and now I am being harassed again by another census goose stepper. They want to interview me poisonally.

It’s pretty clear Obama intends to use the census to fix the next and future elections so as to ensure his Radical Left polices prevail for the long-term.

Morris points out that Obama will:

1. Legalize millions of illegal aliens
2. Use Acorn to “assist” with the next census

Census goons prying into my private life. Welcome to Oganda.

“Stalkers.” “The current coup.” “Census goose stepper.” “Census goons.” “Oganda.”

It’s a cornucopia of crazy.

Also at Geller’s hate hole today, she finds a new reason to bash Obama — the President who is simultaneously a master schemer with a secret plan to turn America into a Nazi-like state, and an ignorant illiterate who doesn’t even know how to hold a pen.

Every time I see BHO sign another bill, I am fascinated at how he holds a pen. He holds a pen like an illiterate. Have you seen it? Like a little kid who just learned how to write and he signs a scribble.

He makes an O instead of an X.

Just sayin.

In such an ugly time the true protest is beauty.

— Phil Ochs

Hawaiian public service officials are normally the most laid-back public service officials in the country; to get on their last nerves you really have to work at it.

But the Birther kooks are nothing if not persistent: Hawaii Birthers Bill: State May Start Ignoring Requests For Obama Citizenship.

HONOLULU — Birthers beware: Hawaii may start ignoring your repeated requests for proof that President Barack Obama was born here.

As the state continues to receive e-mails seeking Obama’s birth certificate, the state House Judiciary Committee heard a bill Tuesday permitting government officials to ignore people who won’t give up.

“Sometimes we may be dealing with a cohort of people who believe lack of evidence is evidence of a conspiracy,” said Lorrin Kim, chief of the Hawaii Department of Health’s Office of Planning, Policy and Program Development. …

Hawaii Health Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino issued statements last year and in October 2008 saying that she’s seen vital records that prove Obama is a natural-born American citizen.

But the state still gets between 10 and 20 e-mails seeking verification of Obama’s birth each week, most of them from outside Hawaii, Kim said Tuesday.

A few of these requesters continue to pepper the Health Department with the same letters seeking the same information, even after they’re told state law bars release of a certified birth certificate to anyone who does not have a tangible interest. Responding wastes time and money, Kim said.

Here’s a midday music break with the Pat Metheny Group, from a 1992 performance at Japan’s “Live Under the Sky” music festival.

Youtube Video

Attorney General Eric Holder is turning into quite a rambunctious cowboy: If bin Laden is found, he’ll be killed, Holder says.

Osama bin Laden “will never appear in an American courtroom,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told House members at a hearing Tuesday.

“Let’s deal with the reality here,” Holder said in response to questions from Rep. John Culberson (R-Tex.). “The reality is, we will be reading Miranda rights to a corpse.”

We’ll kick off this St. Patrick’s Day with an open thread, LGF greetings and salutations to all Irish readers (which includes me), and an old bit of Irish doggerel for the occasion.

Saint Patrick was a gentleman
Who through strategy and stealth
Drove all the snakes from Ireland
Here’s a drinkee to his health!
But not too many drinkees
Lest we lose ourselves and then…
Forget the good Saint Patrick
And see them snakes again!

— Author unknown

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they’d never expect it.

— Jack Handey

The investigations into child abuse in Germany’s Catholic schools are continuing to widen, now getting close to Pope Benedict himself, as his brother Georg Ratzinger has been implicated in covering up the systemic child abuse (with the now well-known Catholic Church practice of moving priests around to different parishes) — and he is also accused of physically battering children himself.

Christopher Hitchens has a scathing piece on this true outrage at Slate: The Great Catholic Cover-Up.

There are two separate but related matters here: First, the individual responsibility of the pope in one instance of this moral nightmare and, second, his more general and institutional responsibility for the wider lawbreaking and for the shame and disgrace that goes with it. The first story is easily told, and it is not denied by anybody. In 1979, an 11-year-old German boy identified as Wilfried F. was taken on a vacation trip to the mountains by a priest. After that, he was administered alcohol, locked in his bedroom, stripped naked, and forced to suck the penis of his confessor. (Why do we limit ourselves to calling this sort of thing “abuse”?) The offending cleric was transferred from Essen to Munich for “therapy” by a decision of then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, and assurances were given that he would no longer have children in his care. But it took no time for Ratzinger’s deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, to return him to “pastoral” work, where he soon enough resumed his career of sexual assault.

It is, of course, claimed, and it will no doubt later be partially un-claimed, that Ratzinger himself knew nothing of this second outrage. I quote, here, from the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a former employee of the Vatican Embassy in Washington and an early critic of the Catholic Church’s sloth in responding to child-rape allegations. “Nonsense,” he says. “Pope Benedict is a micromanager. He’s the old style. Anything like that would necessarily have been brought to his attention. Tell the vicar general to find a better line. What he’s trying to do, obviously, is protect the pope.”

This is common or garden stuff, very familiar to American and Australian and Irish Catholics whose children’s rape and torture, and the cover-up of same by the tactic of moving rapists and torturers from parish to parish, has been painstakingly and comprehensively exposed. It’s on a level with the recent belated admission by the pope’s brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, that while he knew nothing about sexual assault at the choir school he ran between 1964 and 1994, now that he remembers it, he is sorry for his practice of slapping the boys around.

Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith” (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church’s own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated “in the most secretive way … restrained by a perpetual silence … and everyone … is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication.” (My italics).

Read the whole thing…

Here’s Bruce Hornsby with an excellent solo version of “In the Low Country,” from his latest album Levitate.

Youtube Video

The Onion reports on an initiative among the nation’s bigots to develop new state of the art slurs to keep pace with rising numbers of multi-racial births.

WASHINGTON—A coalition of the nation’s most fervent bigots convened in Washington Monday to address growing concerns that the production of hateful new racial slurs has failed to keep pace with the rise in mixed-race births.

According to representatives from the American Racists and Bigots Council (ARBC), the growing number of children born to parents of different ethnicities has posed a real challenge to the nation’s hate-speech developers—a challenge they say threatens their way of life.

“The world is changing, and we, the hateful and ignorant of America, need to change with it,” ARBC chairman Tom Branson said at a rally Monday. “The time has come for our ugly, intolerant rhetoric to step into the 21st century. Our disgusting, dehumanizing slurs simply must reflect the terrifying new global society we now live in.”

Added Branson, “In order to continue going backward, we first have to move forward.”

According to statistics provided by the coalition, a rise in the birthrate of mixed-race Americans has left millions of confused racists with absolutely nothing prejudiced to say when confronted by a person of indeterminate or complex background. What frightens the coalition most is data suggesting that by 2015, ignorant bigots everywhere could be powerless when it comes to reducing mixed-raced individuals to profoundly uninformed cultural stereotypes.

Heh.

Hillary Clinton dialed down the diplomatic confrontation with Israel this morning, pledging that the US has “an unshakeable bond” with Israel, and dismissing suggestions that the relationship between the US and Israel was at its worst point in decades.

“We have an absolute commitment to Israel’s security. We have a close, unshakeable bond between the United States and Israel,” Clinton told a news briefing.

Her comments marked a turn after days of tough U.S. talk following Israel’s announcement last week that it would approve construction of a housing project in East Jerusalem, a move which infuriated the Palestinians and put hopes for resumption of Middle East peace talks on hold. …

“We share common values and a commitment to a democratic future for the world, and we are both committed to a two-state solution” for Israel and the Palestinians, she said. “But that doesn’t mean that we are going to agree. We don’t agree with any of our international partners on everything.”

All is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still.

— T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

Onion Video

Environmentalist Peter Sinclair fires off some pretty good snark at the climate change denial community in his new video, “Flogging the Scientists.” The title comes from denial mob leader Marc Morano, who said about climate scientists, “They deserve to be publicly flogged.”

(Morano’s extreme punishment fantasy sounds oddly similar to what shrieking harpy Pamela Geller said last year about yours truly. What is it with wingnuts and sadistic fantasies?)

It’s not all snark, though. Sinclair also points out some especially outrageous cases of the distortions and lies for which deniers are infamous. And it’s in 720p too.

Youtube Video

I mentioned in a comment that I’m out of town this week visiting family, so if posting seems lighter than usual, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. Here we have a Monday evening open thread, posted from my iPhone, and the little keyboard is very tedious to type on so I’ll stop now.

Vimeo

There is growing tension within the ranks at Fox News over the Glenn Beck Clown Show: Howard Kurtz - The Beck Factor at Fox: Staffers say comments taint their work. (Ya think?)

Fox staffers note that veteran producer Gresham Striegel left the network after clashing with Beck and say the host has surrounded himself with loyalists from Mercury, some of whom remain on that company’s payroll. (Striegel did not respond to a request for comment.) When Fox covers breaking news during Beck’s hour, some journalists say, they are flooded with angry e-mail from viewers about the preemption.

Friction between opinionated cable personalities and journalists has also flared occasionally at MSNBC. But Beck has caused such anguish at Fox that some of its journalists celebrated the failure of last week’s interview with embattled ex-congressman Eric Massa, which Beck pronounced a waste of time.

Love him or hate him, Beck is a talented, often funny broadcaster, a recovering alcoholic with an unabashedly emotional style. Yet even that has caused grousing. Some staffers say they have watched rehearsals, on internal monitors, in which Beck has teared up or paused at the same moments as he later did during the show. Asked about this, Balfe responded sharply: “Glenn reacts the same way to issues whether he knows people are watching or not, and is proud to show his emotions, unlike the cowardly, two-faced critics who hide behind anonymity.”

May I be blunt? The idea that legalizing same sex marriage will lead to bestiality is one of the most stone-dumb reactionary talking points of the religious right. Do these people really think the only reason humans don’t “marry” animals is because it’s against the law? Good grief.

Maybe this says more about them than they’d like to admit.

The latest Neanderthal to pull out this scaaary boogeybeast is John McCain’s Republican opponent in Arizona, tea party Birther candidate J.D. Hayworth: ‘You could marry your horse’. He might as well be wearing a badge that says “I AM SCHTOOPID.”

Former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.) said Sunday that the expansion of state laws allowing gay marriage could lead to people marrying horses.

Hayworth, during an interview with an Orlando, Fla., radio station explained: “You see, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, when it started this move toward same-sex marriage, actually defined marriage - now get this - it defined marriage as simply, ‘the establishment of intimacy.’”

“Now how dangerous is that?” asked Hayworth, who is challenging Sen. John McCain from the right in Arizona’s GOP Senate primary.

“I mean, I don’t mean to be absurd about it, but I guess I can make the point of absurdity with an absurd point,” he continued. “I guess that would mean if you really had affection for your horse, I guess you could marry your horse.”

The former Republican congressman then insisted that the “only way” to prevent men from marrying horses is to create a federal marriage amendment. Hayworth noted that he supports such an amendment.

As mainstream news organizations increasingly find it difficult to turn a profit in the Internet Age, Pew Research has been studying the attitudes of news consumers toward some of the proposed solutions; and the prospects are pretty grim for news organizations to convince consumers to pay for something that they now get for free: Online economics and consumer attitudes.

The biggest question facing online journalism today is how to pay for it. With revenue declining both online and in legacy platforms news organizations say they are intensifying the search for new models. What kind of new advertising options are out there? How will users respond? And would consumers in the marketplace accept pay walls?

To learn more, PEJ and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project collaborated on a national phone survey in January 2010 to explore consumers’ willingness to pay for news online and their attitudes and behavior in response to online advertising.

Over all, the evidence suggests the outlook is difficult both for paywalls and for online display advertising. While most people have not been asked to pay for content, even among the most avid news consumers online, only about one in five at this point say they would be willing to pay, and this does not include less voracious news consumers. At the same time, the vast majority of those online, 8 out of 10, say they basically ignore online ads.

Don’t try to skin your rabbit and keep it as a pet too.

— Joe R. Lansdale