Cheap shots 8/17

Guardian:

The armed forces will take two years to recover from their involvement in the Olympic Games because so many personnel have been deployed at short notice and taken away from normal duties, the military's chief planner for the Games has said.

All right, people? Invading England between now and 2015 is not cricket, and anybody who tries it is an unspeakable cad. I'm looking at you, Ecuador. Verbum sap and all that.

British infantry uniforms. From Wikipedia.

Think Progress on Romney's Medicare plan:

Just a day after Mitt Romney told reporters, “my plan for Medicare is very similar to [Paul Ryan's] plan for Medicare,” former New Hampshire governor and Romney campaign chair John Sununu insisted on Tuesday morning that the former Massachusetts governor’s vision form Medicare reform is “very different” from Ryan’s proposal.

Thanks for setting us straight on that, Governor Sununu. Where'd you get a look at that plan, anyway? Any plans to let Romney see it?

Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post:

During their travels the pair clearly had a ball. At one point, I was told, Ryan was busy in the car -- "eating cherry pie with the governor." In other words, this was a buddy movie in the making....

Ryan, a protégé of conservative intellectuals Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp, has always been a man in love with ideas.

One hardly knows where to start. You don't think "eating cherry pie" has some bizarre sexual reference? No, guess not. 

I was wondering which buddy movie: Easy Rider? Thelma and Louise? Never mind.

And don't fall in love with ideas!

If you fall in love with an idea, you won't notice all the other beautiful ideas you bump into, and you could miss some really spectacular dates. One of life's great pleasures is dumping a previously adored idea: then you're back in the game and free to flirt. What's the prettiest part of your idea's body?  Now, what's the ugliest part? Does your idea respect you?

From the businessy website Logic + Emotion, from which the above text is palimpsested.

As of this morning, members of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot have been given sentences of two years for "hooliganism" (Jeez, haven't heard that word since Andropov was party leader!) in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. It seems like a pretty harsh sentence. Demonstrators arrested outside the courtroom included the great Garry Kasparov, said to have been beaten as they hustled him away. We'll see how Tsar Vladimir, who appears to have enjoyed looking magnanimous on the subject a couple of weeks ago, follows up.

They are musicians too. Here is the offending piece with moderately good sound. I think Musorgsky might have kind of liked it.

Obama made me do it!

Rick Santorum's latest sally, as Think Progress reports it:

We have a president who, for the first time in American history, is directly assaulting the First Amendment and freedom of religion. He is going to tell you what to do in the practice of your faith. He is forcing business people right now to do things that are against their conscience, that they will have to — if you’re a Catholic — you’ll have to go to confession … to confess that you are complying with a government program that is a sin in the Catholic Church.

Confession? Confession? The padre must be pretty horrified to know what you've been up to, too! Try breaking it gently: "Well, Father, I didn't exactly rape any altar boys, saving your presence... but I... You know I run this very large and Catholic business, and I have to get the employees health insurance, and they... Oh, God, Father, they made me get the kind with the birth control included! I was helpless in their fiendish grasp!" Long as you don't get in the booth with a bishop you should be OK...

Then again, if you look at the following, from a National Catholic Reporter survey of October 2011 (via Catholic Globe),  you might take an alternative view:

Mass attendance by "pre-Vatican II" Catholics, born in 1940 or before, slipped to 54 percent, down 10 percentage points from the high recorded in the 1999 survey, but it still topped all age groups. The rate for "Vatican II" Catholics, those born 1941-60, is 31 percent; for "post-Vatican II" Catholics born 1961-78, 29 percent; and for "millennial" Catholics born since 1979, 23 percent.

Older Catholics cited "I'm just not a religious person" as the reason they don't go to Mass more often, while younger Catholics cited family responsibilities as their principal reason.

Still, healthy majorities in all age groups agreed with the statements, "I cannot imagine being anything but a Catholic" and "being a Catholic is a very important part of who I am." But no majority in any age group agreed with the statement, "Church is among the most important influences on my life."

If Obama's really getting them into church, and confessing, that's a lot better than you all are doing. You owe him a vote of thanks, and if you ask me you should really canonize the guy. Santo Subito!