Gluemeat

Bush can keep talking about creating a free and democratic Iraq, but I would wager he’s  wanting an Iraq brand of freedom: al-Arabiya, one of the Middle East’s top 24-hour news channels, has been ordered to stop broadcasting from Baghdad for a month.

This is the second time al-Arabiya is censored by the Iraqi government since the US invasion.
Al-Jazeera was banned two years ago and still remains blacklisted in Iraq.

Hitler and Stalin were posessed by the devil and Harry Potter needs an exorcism.  That’s the gist of the Vatican’s top exorcism guru chief Father Gabriele Amorth.
Father Amorth is Pope Benedict XVI’s top “caster out of demons” and spoke about these issues during an interview on Vatican Radio.  He suggested that the amplitude of the atrocities both men carried out is proof enough of demonic possession.
But not only Hitler was under ol’ Beezebub’s thumb; the whole Nazi party was:

“Of course the Devil exists and he can not only possess a single person but also groups and entire populations. I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed.”

Hm, entire populations, eh?  Suddenly, my hometown is starting to make sense to me.

As for Harry Potter, well, we all know how much the Vatican loves the idea of children reading escapist novels, but Father Amorth is convinced that Satan’s got it good on Harry’s person; Harry’s fictional person.

“Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil.”

I bet he hopes Voldemort kills Harry in the last novel.

I don’t want to come off as, you know, a dingaling, but doesn’t saying that a guy like Hitler was possessed by Satan kind of absolves the man from his crimes?  You know, to the degree that he wasn’t in full control of himself?

What’s the message we should be getting here?

One more thing: at least Father Amorth seems to understand the amplitude of certain events, unlike other folks.

And the Vatican takes another giant step back to the Middle Ages:

A Vatican official has said the Catholic church will excommunicate a medical team who performed Colombia’s first legal abortion on an 11-year-old girl, who was eight weeks pregnant after being raped by her stepfather.

The Columbian cardinal who came up with this brilliant show of compassion has said that even lawmakers who make these acts possible should be put up for exclusion from the Church for making this “abomniable crime” possible.

What about the abomniable crime of a child being raped and empregnated by a family member? But no, it’s so bloody important to defend these backwards principles, there’s no time to properly defend the victim, whose life will be scarred with not only the memory of being raped by her mother’s boyfriend, who had been abusing her since she was seven, but of having gone through with the abortion process. Nah, we wouldn’t want that to rest on our collective consciousness now. It’s too insignificant.

So I guess we need to congratulate the stepfather for not using a prophylactic, right?