Liz Trotta is one of Fox News' most odious pundits, and we have covered her long enough to know. Her latest screed against women being sexually abused or raped in the military isn't remarkable for her, but it's still remarkable for its overall cruelty factor towards women. Conservative cruelty had been ramped up in DC since the Clinton White House era. Then that hatred of Bill was extended to the working class of America, and with the emergence of the Breitbarts of the world, cruelty targeting the poor is as high as it's ever been. It's become profitable for some and many want in. Cruelty is a defining characteristic for their current ideology now. Here's what Trotta had to say via Digby and Media Matters on women in the military:

During a segment about new rules regarding women in the military, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta attacked the Department of Defense for increasing spending on support programs for victims of sexual assault. Trotta also reacted to a Pentagon report showing a 64% increase in violent sexual assaults since 2006 by stating: "Well, what did they expect? These people are in close contact."

Have you read anything more sickening in the last 24 hours? Since we're focused on the GOP 2012 primary, our news cycle has been one long vomit-fest. "What did they expect?" That's Trotta's response to women being raped in the military. Later in the interview, she then dismissed crimes against women in the military without missing a beat.

SHAWN: Well, you certainly want the people fighting the war to be protected from anything that could be illegal.

TROTTA: Oh, look, I mean, that's — nice try Eric. This whole question of women in the military has not been aired properly, and it's the great sleeping giant.

What an odious person. Maybe Trotta can find a tea party congressman to introduce a new bill into the House that states women must expect to be sexually abused or raped when they join the military and not look to be protected. On another Fox show, Liz downplays Lara Logan after she was sexually attacked by a mob because she should have expected to be felt up.

Digby wraps it up by saying:

That's nice. Lara Logan was "felt up." And women in the military should be prepared to be raped by their fellow soldiers as part of the gig. She's one tough gal. And one despicable human being.

She's lining up a new defense for men in any high pressure work environment to be allowed to sexually assault a woman because she's too close to him at the time that he was stressed out.

Transcripts below the fold.

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I don't know a lot about football, but I know a fair amount about abuse and abusers. Abusers take away the lives and innocence of their helpless victims and do it with no remorse. You cannot listen to this interview with Jerry Sandusky without knowing in the pit of your stomach that his answers do nothing but strengthen his victims' case against him.

Bob Costas did a great job of confronting Sandusky with the accusations brought forward in his accusers' Grand Jury testimony, but Sandusky didn't do an especially great job of defending himself. This is because there is no defense for the kind of allegations he faces. Honestly, there were points in this interview that made me ill, because Sandusky's responses were typical dodges.

Take, for example, his answer to the direct question about the incident in the shower with the 10-year old boy. Costas spared nothing, reading straight from the grand jury testimony, including the "rhythmic slapping" description. It was graphic and horrible. This is Sandusky's response:

"We were showering and horsing around and he [the boy] actually turned all the showers on and was actually sliding across the floor and we were, as I recall, possibly like snapping a towel," Sandusky said. McQueary's allegations were never reported to the police.

Mediaite has more:

In one of the more sickening parts of the interview, Sandusky gave his account of the event witnessed by assistant coach Mike McQueary, who says he saw Sandusky raping a 10 year-old boy in the shower at Penn State. Unable to explain why McQueary would lie about such a thing, Costas asked Sandusky what did happen when McQueary encountered him and the boy. Just in case anyone doubts the veracity of Sandusky’s version, he helpfully uses the term “actually” twice, just to underscore the actualness of what actually happened. Sandusky told Costas, “Okay. We were showering and horsing around, and he actually turned all the showers on and was actually sliding across the floor and we were, as I recall, possibly like snapping a towel, horseplay.”

The term "horsing around" is one with some pretty strong sexual connotations. While it's often used as a substitute for the term "horseplay", meaning rough-and-tumble behavior, it's also used as a euphemism for play with sexual connotations, due in part to the actual biology of horses and their sexual behavior. Sandusky uses it more than once, particularly when discussing his showers with those young boys. But to Sandusky's lawyer, Joseph Amendola, it's all just "jock behavior."

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Pope Benedict is finally commenting on the behavior of the Church over their handling of the multitudes of sexual abuse cases that have haunted the Vatican for decades and damaged scores of children in the process.

SF Chronicle:

After weeks of futile damage control, the Vatican is headed in a more honest direction. Pope Benedict XVI is promising to end the church's disgraceful dodging of a worldwide scandal over sex abuse of children by priests.

The pope held an emotional meeting with abuse victims on a trip to Malta and later told a public gathering in St. Peter's Square that the church would take action. The details remain vague, but Benedict's acknowledgement of the problem and need for solutions is a huge step forward.

It shouldn't have taken this long. After years of turmoil over sex abuse in this country, accounts of mistreatment surfaced in Europe and South America.

It was a familiar pattern: a church hierarchy that transferred predator priests and avoided responsibility.

The Vatican's first reaction was as disheartening as the reports of abuse. The church denounced the media and other critics. It played the bureaucracy card, suggesting it was a problem for local bishops, not Rome.

The furor deepened amid reports that Benedict, while a church leader in Germany, overlooked warnings about an abusive priest. In the face of these troubles, the pope said little beyond the need for Catholics to "do penance."...read on

The outside pressure finally got to the Vatican and forced Pope Benedict to respond publicly, which is something he's tried to avoid up until now. It's a sad state when the Infallible has to admit to the disgrace that the church has allowed to fester because of their Mob-like approach. We'll see what they do, but we can only "pray" that they do take all the necessary steps that keep these priests' hands off children, and if a molestation does happen, not to pass the pedophile onto another unsuspecting parish.

But the following story isn't very helpful to making their new promises even sound credible. From the Daily Dish:

In Australia, the police are increasingly frustrated at the Catholic church's refusal to fire abusive and rapist priests.

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VICTORIA Police has called for sweeping changes to the way Melbourne's Catholic Church deals with sex crime allegations, as The Age reveals that only one priest has been defrocked for abuse in the past 14 years. Nearly 300 allegations of sexual abuse have been substantiated by church investigations since 1996, when the ''Melbourne Response'' was set up to deal with complaints. It is believed the abuses were perpetrated by approximately 100 priests, a figure the church will not confirm. Just one priest has been defrocked as a result.

Well, the story came out one day before the Pope made his new pledge, so I guess he's covered his bases. Yeah, right.

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Oh, how right on the mark South Park was about Bill Donohue. Apparently his thuggery and vile language that he uses has clearly seeped into the Vatican.

This is indefensible.

A senior Vatican priest, speaking before Pope Benedict XVI at a Good Friday service, compared the world’s outrage at sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church to the persecution of the Jews, prompting angry responses from victims’ advocates and consternation from Jewish groups.

The Vatican spokesman quickly distanced the Vatican from the remarks, which came on the day Christians mark the Crucifixion. They underscored how much the Catholic Church has felt under attack from recent news reports and from criticism over how it has handled charges of child molesting against priests in the past.

The pope and his bishops have denounced abuses in the church, but many prelates and Vatican officials have lashed back at news reports that Benedict failed to act strongly enough against pedophile priests, once as archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1980 and once as a leader of the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Vatican has denied that he was at fault, and Vatican officials have variously described the reports as “deceitful,” an effort to undermine the church and a “defamatory campaign.”

Speaking in St. Peter’s Basilica, the priest, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, took note that Easter and Passover fell during the same week this year, and said he was led to think of the Jews. “They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence, and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms,” said Father Cantalamessa, who serves under the title of preacher of the papal household.

Let me see if I've got this straight: A Vatican priest tried to equate the uproar the world is articulating over the horrors their own child-molesting priests have inflicted through the years (and which was covered up by the church hierarchy) with the systemic genocide practiced against the Jews. It leaves me numb.

This is something Bill Donohue would say on cable TV--although he has a reputation for attacking Jews himself. Every day that goes by, these men of the cloth disgrace the religion they represent. How dare they? I guess Father Cantalamessa couldn't utter a word of remorse at his Mass for the hundreds and hundreds of children that have been irrevocably damaged by the sexual violence priests have brought upon their lives. He did offer up a tepid mention of them, though.

Father Cantalamessa’s comments about the Jews came toward the end of a long talk about Scripture, the nature of violence and the sacrifice of Jesus. He also spoke at length about violence against women, but gave only slight mention of the children and adolescents who had been molested by priests. “I am not speaking here of violence against children, of which unfortunately also elements of the clergy are stained; of that there is sufficient talk outside of here,” he said.

Here's a list of some of the sins of the church just as a reminder to Father Cantalamessa as he makes his absurd claims on Good Friday.

Here's just a little reminder of the history that makes this comparison particularly distasteful:

The Crusades

Pope Urban II, anxious to assert Rome's authority in the east, sent a military expedition in 1095 to reconquer the holy land. The crusaders ravaged the countries they passed through and massacred the Muslim, Jewish and even Christian population of Jerusalem after capturing it in 1099. After 200 years of conflict Muslim armies drove them out for good, but the crusaders' symbol of the red cross remains provocative.

The Inquisition

The attempt to combat suspected apostates, Jews and Muslims at the time of the Reformation spawned tribunals in Europe and the new world that tortured and executed thousands. Ecclesiastical queasiness about flowing blood led to the use of racks, thumbscrews and red-hot metal instead of blades; 2,000 people were burned at the stake during the tenure of Spain's first grand inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada.

The Holocaust

Pope Pius XII never publicly condemned the Nazis' persecution of Jews, even when they were being rounded up and deported from Rome. His silence is partly blamed for the failure of Germany's Catholics to resist Hitler. Anti-Jewish Catholic doctrines such as the claim that the Jews murdered Christ were said to have ideologically underpinned nazism. Vatican officials allegedly helped Nazis escape Europe after the war.

I have a rule about bringing politics into the LNMC because it's all about the music so I obeyed my own rules. I wanted to give a shout out to Sinead O'Connor for writing a terrific op-ed in the Washington Post about the Sex scandal that has rocked Ireland involving the Catholic Church and the Pope.

In October 2005, a report sponsored by the Irish government identified more than 100 allegations of sexual abuse by priests in Ferns, a small town 70 miles south of Dublin, between 1962 and 2002. Accused priests weren't investigated by police; they were deemed to be suffering a "moral" problem. In 2009, a similar report implicated Dublin archbishops in hiding sexual abuse scandals between 1975 and 2004.

Why was such criminal behavior tolerated? The "very prominent role which the Church has played in Irish life is the very reason why abuses by a minority of its members were allowed to go unchecked," the 2009 report said.

Despite the church's long entanglement with the Irish government, Pope Benedict's so-called apology takes no responsibility for the transgressions of Irish priests. His letter states that "the Church in Ireland must first acknowledge before the Lord and before others the serious sins committed against defenceless children." What about the Vatican's complicity in those sins?

Benedict's apology gives the impression that he heard about abuse only recently, and it presents him as a fellow victim: "I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them." But Benedict's infamous 2001 letter to bishops around the world ordered them to keep sexual abuse allegations secret under threat of excommunication -- updating a noxious church policy, expressed in a 1962 document, that both priests accused of sex crimes and their victims "observe the strictest secret" and be "restrained by a perpetual silence....read on

Please reads the full op-ed. It's quite powerful. I remember when she tore up the Pope's picture on SNL (Youtube news report embedded here) and the visceral reaction she received over it. It was as if she committed a form of sexual abuse on the church and the Pope. Artists that take a stand like she did risk their entire careers to shed light on injustices. Anyway, she's my hero.

These scandals have really hurt me deeply even though I no longer adhere to all the teachings or rituals of the Catholic Church as I once did. Italians, just like the Irish revered the Catholic church and I grew up as a child and young adult in that world. What she did in 1992 was courageous and necessary, but to see the reality play out now in real time is so disturbing. And I'm positive we'll see a lot more.

Thank you, Sinead.

Popablility:

The Pope played a leading role in a systematic cover-up of child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests, according to a shocking documentary to be screened by the BBC tonight.

In 2001, while he was a cardinal, he issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church's interests ahead of child safety.

The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated.

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Cardinal Ratzinger reinforced the strict cover-up policy by introducing a new principle: that the Vatican must have what it calls Exclusive Competence. In other words, he commanded that all child abuse allegations should be dealt with direct by Rome.

Patrick Wall, a former Vatican-approved enforcer of the Crimen Sollicitationis in America, tells the programme: "I found out I wasn't working for a holy institution, but an institution that was wholly concentrated on protecting itself."

If this information had been exposed a few years ago, would Cardinal Ratzinger had ever been named Pope? I can't wrap my head around this. Forget if he's the Pope now. What type of human being would cover up crimes against the children? He obviously had a lot of experience in this matter.

Has anybody seen Bill Donohue lately? Maybe he'll go on TV again and blame the Hollywood Jews for this mess too.

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And there's this one where he calls some abuse cases "gold diggers" in Ireland.

TIME:

The shocking extent of child abuse by clergy in Ireland's parishes and Catholic institutions was exposed last year in two government enquiries, known as the Ryan Report and the Murphy Report. The first described "endemic sexual abuse" at schools and orphanages run by religious orders from the 1930s to the 1990s, while the latter accused the Catholic Church, the state and the Irish police of colluding in the cover up sexual abuse committed by priests in the archdiocese of Dublin.

A rape victim from Ireland slams Donohue over his remarks. "You're views are insane."

And these are the people who want to make decisions about everyone else's personal life:

ESSEN, Germany — The German archdiocese led by the future Pope Benedict XVI ignored repeated warnings in the early 1980s by a psychiatrist treating a priest accused of sexually abusing boys that he should not be allowed to work with children, the psychiatrist said.

“I said, ‘For God’s sake, he desperately has to be kept away from working with children,’” the psychiatrist Werner Huth said in an interview Thursday. “I was very unhappy about the entire story.” Dr. Huth said he was concerned enough that he set three conditions for treating the priest, Peter Hullermann: that he stay away from young people and alcohol and be supervised by another priest at all times.

Dr. Huth said he issued the warnings — explicit, both written and oral — before the future pope, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, left Germany for the Vatican in 1982. In 1980, following abuse complaints from parents in Essen that the priest did not deny, Archbishop Ratzinger approved a decision to move the priest to Munich for therapy.

Despite the psychiatrist’s warnings, Father Hullermann was allowed to return to parish work almost immediately after his therapy began, interacting with children as well as adults. He was promptly accused of molesting other boys and was convicted in 1986 of sexual abuse in Bavaria.

Benedict’s then-deputy, Gerhard Gruber, said that he was to blame for that personnel decision, which he called a “serious mistake.”

This really is a national disgrace. There are numerous studies linking this epidemic of prison sexual abuse to eventual committing of violent crime, yet there seems to be no concerted or sustained effort to force prisons to deal with it at the source. Every once in a while, some kind of report comes out and there's a big fuss, but nothing changes:

The Justice Department reported Thursday that 12 percent of incarcerated juveniles, or more than 3,200 young people, had been raped or sexually abused in the past year by fellow inmates or prison staff, quantifying for the first time a problem that has long troubled lawmakers and human rights advocates.

The report comes as those advocates say that the Obama administration is moving too slowly on reforms that would reduce rape in U.S. prisons and as corrections officials are pressing Justice to overhaul reform proposals it is reviewing.

Four former commissioners on a blue-ribbon prison rape panel that spent years studying the issue say they fear that authorities are deferring to concerns by corrections officials that reforms would cost too much, while not focusing enough on prison safety and the effects of abuse on inmates.

The study by the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reported a "very high rate of staff sexual misconduct" against juvenile inmates. It cited two facilities in Virginia and one in Maryland, among others.

"These figures are appalling," said Pat Nolan, president of Justice Fellowship, a group that advocates for prison reform. "We stripped a prisoner of their ability to defend themselves. They can't control where they go; they can't control whether the shower has a light bulb in it."

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It never stops. Nothing like job security for the Crooks and Liars staff, though:

Down with Tyranny:

[Former Romney financier] Lichfield is named in a federal lawsuit charging that students of the "behavior modification" schools with ties to WWASPS [Worldwide Association of Specialty Schools, founded by Lichfield] were subjected to "physical abuse, emotional abuse and sexual abuse." ...not much has been heard about this in all the yelling and screaming over Hsu even though [Litchfield]'s been bringing in far more money for Flip Flop than Hsu has brought in for Democrats.

DWT wants to know if Romney, Orrin Hatch, and other Lichfield wingnut beneficiaries will return the money or donate it to charity, as Democrats have announced they will do with the Hsu donations. We're waiting....

NOW:

Roughly one in seven of America's active duty military soldiers is a woman, but a NOW investigation found that sexual assault and rape is widespread. One study of National Guard and Reserve forces found that almost one in four women had been assaulted or raped. Last year alone, almost 3,000 soldiers reported sexual assault and rape by other soldiers. On Friday, September 7 (check your local listings), in one of the only national television broadcasts of the issue, NOW features women who speak out for the first time about what happened. One woman recounts her ordeal of rape by her superior officer. Many more don't report the incidents for fear of how it will affect their careers. The shocking phenomenon has a label: military sexual trauma, or MST. NOW meets women courageously battling to overcome their MST, bringing light to an issue that's putting the army in shame. A NOW exclusive investigation.

The NOW website will offer the latest statistics on MST and insight into the challenges of reporting sexual abuse in the military.