Men of God

Homosexuality and the church, they go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Only if the chocolate continually and openly denounced the peanut butter, but kept opening up Reese's Peanut Butter Cup factories in secret all over the world.

Now, if I were to say "Vatican Gay Prostitution Ring", the natural response would be "Which one?" Well, I'm talking about the one that's going on now, not all the other ones.

"Put on some music, swallow a Viagra, and adelante!"

That's the headline in Europe today following reports that a papal aide used an intermediary in an elite Vatican choir to solicit young male choristers and seminarians for prostitution.

Police wiretaps are expected to result in charges against Angelo Balducci, 63, a Papal Gentleman, as lay attendant are called, and the former chairman of the Holy See's Public Works Department, which is itself caught up in a corruption investigation.

According to police, Balducci regularly contacted Chinedu Ehiem Thomas, a Nigerian man who sings in St. Peter's Cappella Giulia, to engage the sexual services of young male members of the choir, along with seminarians and undocumented immigrants seeking residency status.

Prostitution, corruption and fucking over immigrants just for the hell of it. Truly these are men of God. With this scandal actually taking place within the Vatican this time, I wonder if the Pope will be able to ignore it like he and his predecessor ignored so many other scandals? Is the Pope Catholic? Of course he will. It'll be chalked up to a case of "boys will be boys", "what else is the choir there for, anyway", with a healthy dose of "nothing to see here."

But even with this going on we still get a healthy does of moralizing and hypocritical behavior from the Church in the meantime. Like in DC, where the city council passed a law making gay marriage legal there. The church, in response, naturally cut all benefits it paid its workers so they wouldn't have to pay a benefit to a gay couple and then completely shuttered its foster care and adoption programs so that there was no chance a gay might adopt or foster an orphan. For good measure they also shuttered the homeless shelter program. Gays can get married, so fuck everyone's benefits, see you later dirty orphans, and get bent homeless.

I'm sure if gay couple were willing to put out in exchange for a kid, pay a little hush money under the table, and were doing it to keep an immigrant from adopting a child, the Church would have been happy to oblige. So bang up job, Catholicism. When you aren't busy covering up or engaging in massive, horrific crimes, you're taking cheap political stands that harm the lives of people who work for you, children, and the homeless. Just like Jesus would, I assume. I bet you really earnestly wonder why church attendance and religious identification are down, too. I can't see why either.

Broken In Brief: Dobbs, O'Reilly to declare love live tonight

NEW YORK--Fresh off being bribed to leave his amicable departure from CNN, Lou Dobbs will be a featured guest on tonight's episode of The O'Reilly Factor. While the official network line claims that Dobbs will be there to discuss the circumstances surrounding his resignation with a sympathetic ear -- O'Reilly has repeatedly defended Dobbs -- TheseBastards has learned that the two cable news heavyweights may have ulterior motives.

"They are over the moon for each other," gushed a high-level Fox News source, on condition of anonymity for fear of inducing vomit. "When they met a couple years ago at a Minuteman fundraiser/book burning in Arizona, it was love at first sight."

Apparently, the two were very moved by last week's episode of Oprah wherein Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi professed their love for one another. Given the abrupt nature of Dobbs' departure from CNN and O'Reilly's exclusive access to the portly xenophobe, the parties believe that this is the ideal moment to show the world just how deeply and passionately they respect each other over and over and over again.

Among the things they reportedly hope to pledge to each other tonight are a vow to defend the borders "standing back to back, shotguns in hand as the Mexicans stream over the fence," a solemn pledge to never stop trying to couch their elitist, right wing proclamations with the veil of working class populism, and to officially sign off on a schedule that designates which one of them is the "power bottom" over alternate two-week periods.

"It's just going to be so beautiful," the same source said, their eyes welling up with tears.

If the Dobbs/O'Reilly commitment ceremony goes off as well as hoped, it is expected Fox News will soon announce that a similar love jubilee will take place on Friday night between pundit Sean Hannity and a life-sized cardboard cutout of himself.

The source would neither confirm nor deny any amorous plans for Glenn Beck.

Sounds ethical

What are you to do if you're a struggling news paper. Revenues are down debt is up, you decided a long time ago to put your news on the web for free and now no one will ever accept paying for it, and Craigslist is sleeping in your house, driving in your car, eating your food, and screwing your wife. So if you're the Washington Post and you're seeing all these problems there's only one obvious solution: sell access to your journalists for anyone with a sack full of cash.

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it’s a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

Not to say this isn't completely and totally unethical, I mean who wouldn't want to pay the WaPo $25,000 so you could be in the same room with their neoconservative editorial/columnist crew and a blunt object to beat them with? If there's one thing I've always said about the news it's that the regular citizen has too much attention paid to his or her best interests and opinions in the health care debate. Isn't it time the news elite in this country were forced to consider the concerns of lobbyists and insurance CEO's? What better forum than one that is ethically indistinguishable from prostitution? Strike that: forced prostitution. I'm sure the journalists are thrilled to be doing this.

So if you want access to some of the Post's top minds get your $25,000 out, $250,000 if you want to be a part of the whole series of "Salons." See if an extra couple grand can get those journalists to perform some "French-style" reporting on you, maybe even get two of them to perform a "journalism show" like you saw in the seedy, pasty fleshed ink pits of Bangkok. I'm sure the WaPo is up for it. They really need the money.

Glenn Beck is coming for your children

Yes, I understand that book publishing is a business. Yes, I understand that Glenn Beck has a following amongst certain crypto-fascist Morlock factions. And yes, I understand that saying the following might well be a career-limiting act...

But seriously, fuck you, Simon & Schuster:

Today Simon & Schuster announced "a global multi-book, multi-imprint co-publishing agreement" with conservative personality Glenn Beck--a book deal that will put the television host's literary efforts on YA bookshelves, audiobook collections, e-readers, and children's libraries.

Possible titles include Our First Black Hitler, Taxation = Immolation and Dumber Than I Look: How to Get Paid Ungodly Sums of Money to Act Like a Home Shopping Network Host While Soft-Peddling Pseudo-Libertarianism Wrapped in The Flag.

The week in These Bastards

Over a week ago you learned of the heretofore top secret existence of These Bastards, the internet's only source of political commentary & fake news. You've become enthralled with our inexplicable Fritz Haber jokes and marveled as we've become the internet's main source of 'John McCain is Tigh from Battlestar Galactica' references. It's been a busy first week for us at These Bastards as well. Sean moved residences from under one bridge to another, so to better lure wayward billy goats to their doom. Whereas I learned to control all the thoughts of Madeline Albright. All this while straining under blogging conditions that threatened to deplete both our bile sacs and pull our invective muscles.

So the ground rules: all the fake news pieces are under the header 'Broken News' and feature the same tag. There are three as of now and the plan is to put up two a week. If you like it or one of our many spiteful posts don't hesitate to digg it, send it to someone, link it, build a statue to us, or formulate a religion based on our hatred of things. We are not famous after a week and that can only be blamed on the audience. So due diligence people. Formulate your lives around promoting us and spend your time (to the detriment of your professional career and social life) constantly refreshing and reloading this site until you see a new post. THEY CAN COME AT ANY TIME!

We look forward to continuing this blog until such a time as we are arrested for our many secret and vile crimes that cannot be repeated out loud as it would constitute public indecency and mind corruption.

Cognitive dissonance/Splendor

Guess what's back?
The Federal Marriage Amendment, bitches!!!!!!

Simply put the bill wants to make sure that:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.

Now, go click on the cosponsors. Don't worry, I'll wait.

Senator David "the Bayou Whoremaster" Vitter (R-Louisiana) and
Senator Larry "Tap Twice For Love, Once if You're Out of T.P." Craig (R-Idaho)

Not that I think this'll pass, but couldn't you Republicans just knock the names of the two least convincing marriage advocates in politics (unless Mitch McConnell fucked a dog and I didn't hear about it) off the bill?

What I mean is: STOP DOING MY JOB! I'm supposed to take something and make a smug, wiseass remark about it. It's called blogging. You've already done all the work. Gay sex in a bathroom and hookers. For fuck's sake, leave me with something.

EDIT: The General shows us the way.