A senior Vatican official is advocating excommunication for researchers working with human stem cells.

Never forget this is the organization that jailed Galileo for being right.

The political right is deeply invested in insisting that global warming isn’t happening, or that if it’s happening it’s not our fault, and in either case we should do nothing about it. It’s an article of faith with them, in no small part because of the degree to which they’re beholden to Big Oil.

Ergo, it’s no surprise they’ve tried to come out with the long knives for Al Gore’s documentary. The first attacks were pretty funny: insisting it was a flop based on radically selective readings of box office receipts. Of course, now that it’s one of the most financially successful documentaries of all time, it’s awful hard to make that stick. Yes, “Cars” made more money. No, no one is surprised by that. No, this doesn’t make “An Inconvenient Truth” a flop.

Comes now boneheads like John Stossel, trotting out long-dismissed canards purporting to undercut the conclusions of the vast majority of climatologists. He doesn’t do well, as Media Matters can show, but at least he didn’t start with attacks on Gore himself, unlike most who oppose his film.

The “liberal” media has gotten all matter of things wrong on the financial tracking story. MediaMatters has a rundown of the top falsehoods.

We’ve not covered it, as it’s been all over the news, but here’s the summary: Warren Buffett is so rich he’s hired Bill Gates to spend his money for him. (Yes, it’s a Colbert line.) The Oracle of Omaha is donating the bulk of his US$44B wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which combats (among other things) disease and poverty in developing countries.

Way to go, right?

Well, it’s angered some Catholic nutjobs and other pro-lifers on account of the Gates Foundation giving money to Planned Parenthood. And by “money” we mean “less than 1 percent of their giving,” not that this matters; PP is an excellent organization that spends most of its time and money on education, well-women exams, the distribution of birth control, and the preservation of access thereto. It is not, as the anti-choicers like to say, “primarily an abortion provider.”

“The merger of Gates and Buffett may spell doom for the families of the developing world,” said the Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, a Roman Catholic priest who is president of Human Life International.

Referring to Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi death camp doctor, Euteneuer said Buffett “will be known as the Dr. Mengele of philanthropy unless he repents.”

We are certain Jesus is very, very proud. Seriously, where the hell do you get off claiming this is anything but a watershed moment in philanthropy? Buffett and Gates are the templates by which we ought to measure the wealthy: they realize their money can make serious changes in the lives of literally millions of people, and they’re acting accordingly. They have no room for dogma or bullshit, and they clearly entertain no wrongheaded notions about denying birth control or contraceptive education because some jackasses think sex is icky.

If your reaction to the most momentous charitable gift ever is to claim it spells doom for the recipients because they might get ahold of some rubbers, well, I’m not sure what the hell is wrong with you. It’s certainly proof that you care more about dogma than you do about people.

The first post-Armstrong Tour will also be missing several other huge names thanks to an enormous doping scandal, it was reported today. Armstrong’s friendly rival, 1997 winner and five time runner-up Jan Ullrich won’t be riding, nor will Ivan Basso. In all, more than fifty cyclists have been implicated in an Spanish doping scandal now several weeks old. Basso and Ullrich have been pulled by their teams (CSC and T-Mobile, respectively), as was Spaniard Franciso Mancebo, who came in 4th last year.

CNN is reporting that T-Mobile has in fact cut all ties with veteran Ullrich, and will require him to prove his innocence to ride for them again. If true, this is a terrible end to Ullrich’s career; in a non-Lance world, he would certainly have won the Tour more than once — as noted above, he was bested only by Lance in 5 of his trips to France.

Blessedly, Americans George Hincapie (Discovery Channel), Levi Leipheimer (Gerolsteiner) and Floyd Landis (Phonak) are thus far untouched. A field free of Ullrich and Basso makes American success more likely, of course, but by no means a certainty.

This crap oughta rile even the reactionary Heathen Attorney.

One: A New Hampshire man has been arrested for videotaping police on his property with the surveillance system he installed for security reasons. Said arrest came after he was sufficiently pissed off by the rude behavior of a cop investigating his son that he took the videotape down to HQ to use it as evidence in a complaint.

Two: You can be found guilty of DUI in Michigan now for having THC residue in your bloodstream from exposure days or weeks earlier even though no impairing effects could be (or can be) shown.

The bad news is that the Texas redistricting map has been largely upheld by the Supremes. Apparently, legislatures can redistrict any damn time they want within some fairly flexible guidelines. Expect redistricting, then, every time control shifts from one party to the other. This can’t be a good idea.

The good news is that those same Supremes also held that Bush does not have the right to try the Gitmo detainees with military tribunals, i.e. kangaroo courts. This, at least, is a pretty big rebuke from the Court on Bush’s assertions of virtually unlimited wartime power.

If they did, the “liberal” media wouldn’t be so happy about discussing charges of treason for the New York Times over the financial snooping program.

Seriously. What. The. Fuck? Treason? For reporting the truth? About a possibly illegal secret program? Bush’s ongoing hostility to the press is well documented, but this is completely beyond the pale. Claiming investigative reporters are “helping the enemy” when they report on possibly extralegal surveillance programs is complete and utter bullshit, and only serves to illustrate how far down the river we’ve been sold.

Majikthise’s got more.

Aaron Spelling has been cancelled by the great ratings body in the sky. He was 83.

IMDB lists 212 producer credits for Spelling, including The Mod Squad, The Rookies, Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, Vega$, Dynasty, T. J. Hooker, Hart to Hart, and Beverly Hills 90210.

Librarian insists police provide subpoena for requested data, as per law. Said librarian may be reprimanded for it, on the grounds that she “put the interests of the library first.” Um, isn’t that her job?

The AT&T v EFF suit over almost-certainly-illegal call record turnover is heating up. The fun part of this is that the government and AT&T are basically saying “there’s a war on, and to even address these allegations or review the evidence is to disclose too much,” which more or less means “secrecy is more important than the rule of law.”

Um, no. We can think of several regimes where that was (or is) the case, but we’re pretty sure we don’t want it as a value in our republic. More at Wired here; the 27BStroke6 blog is covering this pretty well.

Update: Fortunately, it looks like the judge is paying attention, at least based on the questions he’s insisting all sides answer.

In a pretty disappointing move, former White House staffer Mike McCurry is now shilling against Net Neutrality for the big telcos. Trouble is, there’s no real argument against the concept, as this dialog shows.

The biggest joke from the telco argument is the idea that Google or Amazon or whomever is looking for a “free ride” of some kind; it doesn’t even make sense. Obviously those firms pay millions to telcos every year for bandwidth. We here at Heathen pay for our end, too. There is no free ride, as Amazon’s Paul Misener makes clear in the link above.

Go check it out. As they whine about not needing network neutrality, it’s important to remember how brazen and arrogant they’ve been in the past, and how much they’ve just plain lied. Keep in mind, too, how much they totally rolled over for the Feds on this domestic wiretapping thing (except, of course, for Qwest).

Update: As if on cue, we get this announcement from AT&T, who now assert they own all your customer data, even the stuff that they probably ought not be collecting. Evil, we tell you. Evil.

Telcos are lying bastards.

JWZ reports that a restaurant in China is serving food made with human milk, which makes him and us wonder: Is it Vegan?

(Also, this makes us wonder if somewhere there aren’t people who work in a vegan dairy, which just makes us laugh.)