Sherry Chandler

Gas has hit $3.35 a gallon in Paris, Kentucky, and yet, driving along Main Street, you’d think the backbone of the local economy is car lots and gas stations. Car lots seem to just keep on proliferating and expanding, even onto land fills. How can that be, I wonder, in these recessionary times?

The Vatican, not really very important to my inner Southern Baptist but with tremendous influence in developing countries, has given us a new list of Seven Sins. These are sins with a “social resonance,” which apparently means we all have to police one another? You think? Here’s the bare list from the NYTimes:

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

On those last four, good thing George W. Bush is a Methodist, though he might be able to balance out stem-cell research against creating excessive wealth and poverty.

Old sins aren’t off the hook yet. Time Online explains:

Bishop Girotti said … that two mortal sins which continued to preoccupy the Vatican were abortion, which offended “the dignity and rights of women”, and paedophilia, which had even infected the clergy itself and so had exposed the “human and institutional fragility of the Church”.

The mass media had “blown up” the issue “to discredit the Church”, but the Church itself was taking steps to deal with it.

As Pharyngula points out, there may be a bit of hypocrisy in the Catholic Church preaching against excessive wealth and pedophilia. I have some doubts about their overwhelming concern for “the dignity and rights of women.” Let’s see, I have the right not to be able to control my own body?? No birth control, no abortion. Guess I won’t be converting soon.

If you need a little help with all this, The Falcon’s Gyre points the way: Answer Me Jesus.

Washington Monthly is running a series of articles, No Torture, No Exceptions, from 35 national political leaders from Nancy Pelosi to Jimmy Carter. Worth looking into.

And Mother Jones has eighteen things you’ve already forgotten about the media’s flawed coverage of Iraq.

We now have two Muslims in Congress. Andre Carson won his special election race in Indiana by 11 points. Are we sure it would be political suicide for Obama to ask, so what if I were a Muslim?

Meanwhile, Kentucky’s Stream Saver bill fell two votes short of getting out of the Kentucky House Appropriations and Revenue Committee.

The committee voted 13-12 to adopt a committee substitute to House Bill 526 that would have inserted the so-called Stream Saver legislation into a decoy measure that would provide tax breaks for camel feed. Fifteen votes were needed to adopt the substitute bill.

Three lawmakers abstained, including: Rep. Scott Brinkman, R-Louisville; Rep. Bob DeWeese, R-Louisville and Rep. Danny Ford, R-Mt. Vernon.

One lawmaker, Rep. Mike Denham, D-Maysville, left the committee meeting before the vote was taken. He returned shortly after the vote was taken.

And from Mark Hebert at WHAS:

The vote came after coal miners, at the urging of the Kentucky Coal Association, delivered more than a dozen big boxes containing a total of 100,000 signed petitions to the carpet in front of the A and R committee. The petitions called on lawmakers to vote against the bill, claiming it would cost thousands of mining jobs. It appears a handful of legislators decided not to vote yes or no, leaving the bill in limbo, but defeated, for the time being.

Meanwhile, Tom Tomorrow asks the burning question of the day: How difficult is it not to hire four thousand dollar prostitutes? Says he:

I know a lot of people who manage to make it through their daily lives without even hiring a two thousand dollar prostitute.

Via Atrios

Fed by February rains, our ephemeral stream is running again. If you stand at a certain place on the farm road, you can see the water flowing down through the alfalfa and orchard grass to collect in this low crease between two ridges. At that point it is a mere squelchiness in the grass, though the temperature is always several degrees cooler in the swag on summer nights, even in droughty August. A hundred feet or so on down the rise, the stream actually begins to cut a channel. Lots of deer tracks in the mud along the ill-defined banks.