Just a quickie today: the way the death of Terri Schiavo neatly segued into the death of the Pope has encouraged the US conservative right to go ahead and politicise the Pope to try and carry forward the momentum generated by the Schiavo debacle. Hence, lots of nice, respectful stuff about JP2. The problem is that this is quite different to what these people were saying about the same Pope when he opposed the war in Iraq.
Instapundit, for one, has been very nicey-nicey about the Pope. But, as Justin Raimondo points out in a lovely bit of Google site:searching, Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds has a long record of being perfectly vile about the same beloved religious leader. Surely some mistake?
Another blogger picked up an even starker example of hypocrisy from Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. The problem is that these people don't care enough to even be embarrassed.
Also post-Schiavo, Republican Senator John Cornyn has made an extraordinary statement saying that violence against judges is understandable in the circumstances (those circumstances being: judges actually interpreting the law as it's written). This isn't some theoretical issue - the mother and husband of US Judge Joan Lefkow were murdered recently by someone who didn't like her work. It's terrorism, and a Republican senator is making excuses for it. These people are scary. AmericaBlog has the details.
I love the way One Good Move does things: Norm has a nice little package on the unintended consequences of sexual abstinence pledges by American teenagers, including a highly scurrilous take on the issue by Bill Maher, which is well worth your boss's bandwidth …
And that'll do you. If you're interested, I'm talking to Chris Knox about the reissued and scrubbed-up Toy Love album just before 1pm on my Wire show today. Should be good fun. Also trying to get someone from TelstraClear to talk de-peering at about 12.30. You can listen in here.
PS: Andi Henderson picked up a great little typo (JT's, not mine) in my cut-and-paste from Tamihere's deleted blog yesterday. Referring to 3 News, he said: "Who looks at their ethnics, their standards, their morality?" Hmmm ...