• The fighting that began Wednesday in Mumbai is continuing today. Nearly 200 people have been confirmed dead so far, with almost 300 others injured. Militants are still fighting and holding (and killing) hostages in the Taj Mahal hotel and in a Jewish community center. [NY Times, Huffington Post, NY Times]
• Barack Obama has issued a statement condemning the attacks. [Washington Post]
• The Iraqi Parliament has passed the Status of Forces Agreement, which could have us out by 2010, but will have us out no later than 2012. [Washington Independent]
• In other news, former First Lady Barbara Bush has been moved out of the ICU following surgery to repair a perforated stomach ulcer. [CNN]

• The Vatican says that cell phones and the Internet are killing our souls. Fuck, seriously, is there anything fun you're allowed to do as a Catholic anymore? (Click through for a bonus picture of Pope Benedict in a funny, non-Pope hat.) [Telegraph]
• Iowa's Supreme Court will hear an equal protection challenge to its gay marriage ban, which may or may not invalidate the marriage of the 2 people who managed to get married in the 9 business hours the ban was struck down before the court issued a stay. [LA Times]
• The police have charged someone in the murder of Arkansas reporter Anne Pressley, who was beaten to death in her home last month. Despite the extreme level of violence that police initially said indicated it could be someone that knew and hated her, it turns out it was a random attack by a violent psycho named Curtis Lavelle Vance. [MSNBC]
• Mitchell Wade, the former defense contractor who bribed the shit out of former Congressman Duke Cunningham, apparently bribed other people and is singing like a canary. He's implicated at least 5 other thus-far-unnamed Congressmen and various other government officials. [Washington Post]
• The Congressional probe of all of Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel's (D-New York) shady business dealings will be done before the new Congress is sworn in, according to Nancy Pelosi. This means, in all likelihood, that he'll get a slap on the wrist and continue on as Chairman, which is how it always worked when the Republicans ran Congress that Pelosi promised to change when she came to power. [Washington Post]
• Now that Democrats have voted to keep Joe Lieberman in his position of power atop the Senator Homeland Security Committee, someone bothered to notice that he gave a bunch of money to Republican Senatorial candidates, too. [Washington Post]
• Jill Biden might keep teaching at a D.C.-area community college as Second Lady, which would make her the first Second Lady to carry on with a paying job after moving into the Vice Presidential Mansion. Also, she's probably cooler than you even thought she was. [Politico]
• And although Hillary Clinton hasn't officially been offered or officially accepted a gig as Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, let alone resigned her Senate seat, New York State Attorney General (and enormous asshole) Andrew Cuomo has already begun a whisper campaign to make himself the front runner in the race to be appointed to the seat. Earlier this year, Andrew Cuomo referred to Barack Obama with a racial slur, which his staff rushed to cover up and intimidate bloggers and reporters from covering, swearing that the racially-loaded term "shucking and jiving" was no such thing. Hopefully, someone reminds Governor David Patterson of this every time he gets a damn phone call encouraging him to appoint Andrew Cuomo to anything. [NY Times, Pam's House Blend]

MOE: Yo I am here, barely, at an airport hotel that is not actually an airport hotel, more an airport adjacent hotel located nearby a Westfield Mall, but this is where the JetBlue flyer with the friendly Nationwide Hospitality Inc. operator got me the $69 rate, and my god, I am tired, maybe because here it is five in the morning, but news that New Jersey school officials want to ban Red Bull just reminded me I am no longer in school and therefore should probably go locate myself something containing Guarana.

MEGAN: Doing Crappy Hour from the West Coast sucks balls in a way that no one who hasn't done it can ever understand. But that might be because I consider 5 am a time to strive to stay up until, not an hour to get up at.
MEGAN: If it helps, check out the long cool drink of water in this picture and rejoice that somewhere in the bowels of CNN.com, there is a Jezebel looking out for us.
MOE: Yeah I actually forgot to reset my alarm and so woke up around 3:45, but holy SHIT that picture is ridiculous. The gun is um scary though. Also, Obama's hip is hurting? Isn't that a body part whose inflammation we'd usually associate with John McCain…or his mom? Unless…

MEGAN: Um, I'll just say that sometimes after sex my hips hurt, but I have an old ballet injury to explain that, but if that's why Obama's hurts, well, go Michelle!
MEGAN: In other flotsam, by the way, SF mayor Gavin Newsom got straight-married this weekend... in Montana.
MOE: Yeah I bet the wedding I was at was better. Um before I forget can I just say I am fucking sick of shit like "Caroline Kennedy for VP???!!?" which is the only thing worse than "Chuck Hagel for VP????!!!?" which is to say, "WHY AM I READING THIS GO ON VACATION!!!!??!!!"
MEGAN: Everyone for VP!!!

MEGAN: I mean, McCain's got to pick someone before the Olympics start because no one will be paying attention otherwise, or so goes the meme, but I'll bet Obama's VP will interrupt Olympic coverage.
MOE: And then there's this story. I guess I'll listen to it, because really what better things do we have to do? Discuss the half trillion dollar budget deficit planned for 2009 — that's a record, by the way — or how the Frannie Freddie bailout is supposedly the largest government bailout since the New Deal?? Yeah, didn't think so. Although who knows, it's still early, I could see us getting into that shit.
MEGAN: We could talk about the protests at the Vatican to lift the ban on birth control, too.
MOE: Oh how serendipitous I was thinking of lifting my personal ban on that in response to public sentiment as well. I wonder if someone told the Vatican about me and they were like "oh jesus christ we do not want to be responsible for that person procreating." Seriously though, I don't know if this is going to have much of an impact in the Benedict administration.

MEGAN: I'm going to say... exactly none. The Pope listens to God, not the people of the world OR the AIDS rate in Africa. That's God's plan, or do Catholics not believe in predestination? It's so hard to remember CCD.
MOE: In other news does another fifty pointless deaths indicate violence returned to The Iraq? Petraeus seems to think maybe . Oh, and is Afghanistan a narco-state …I kind of want to actually read that one, because I found myself realizing the other day that I really did not know how Colombia had come to control 90% of the cocaine trade exactly and whether there are other countries with power vacuums and the climate and topographical conditions to get in on that, since heroin is, like, probably not as big a moneymaker.
MEGAN: Hahahaha, "returned" to Iraq. You're such a comic genius. Or else Petraeus is.

MOE: Hey I am going to miss how you actually get it when I am being sarcastic.

MEGAN: Although my dad got up and made me coffee this morning, I have yet to get a chance to get up and drink it because in your honor I read Maureen Dowd. That was painful.
MEGAN: But probably not quite as painful as Barack having to submit to an interview in Paris from La Dowd.

MOE: oh GOD.
MOE: I'm not bothering to blockquote this because there's no way anyone would confuse it for anything I would write and even if you charged me with parodying Dowd I could never come up with Even for Sarkozy the American, who loves everything in our culture from Sylvester Stallone to Gloria Gaynor, it was a wild gush over a new Washington crush.

MEGAN: Or how about this awfulness: Obama kept his cool through a week where he was treated as a cross between the Dalai Lama and Johnny Depp. I mean, in my mind, she says this in a little girl voice even more highly pitched than my own.
MEGAN: OK, also, now I have to ask what the fuck?
MOE: Okay this Afghanistan story is really fucking interesting. Basically, post-September 11 Afghanistan is the one kind of situation where this drug war we've been fighting for the past 20 years really comes in handy, as we learned previously from the story of that narcotics guy who successfully interrogated KSM. But the Pentagon, by some combination of generalized Bush Administration wrongheadedness, generalized Bush Administration ineptitude, generalized turf protection and listening to Hamid Karzai, not only systematically undermined the DEA's mission in the country and everyone involved with the drug war, but the whole idea that heroin was bad at all, which in turn just led to the continued flow of this massive spigot of funding to the Taliban and sundry other evildoers.

MEGAN: Wait, Karzai is pro-heroin? Or just anti doing terribly much about it? Anyway, didn't you know that Mary Jane is the Great Satan of our time? Or is it oxycodone? Or meth? Or can we just ask what it is about modern life that so many people feel the need to alter their consciousness to escape it? Because I know what it is about my life, but I'd sort of be interested to know if I'm unique in that.
MOE:

A lot of intelligence — much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here — indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described “jihad against corruption,” told me and other American officials that he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt — some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai — also a Pashtun — had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people.

MEGAN: Is there some reason it matters that they're both Pashtun? Also, in an barely-stable government, I can sort of see the reason if he thinks that the narco-corruption isn't one of the destabilizing forces.
MOE: Well the news here is that no only has opium production grown — a UN report says 80% of poppies in the south were planted in the last two years — it is funding the insurgency and making farmers rich and Afghan officials all the way up to Karzai continue to say things like "it's tradition and poverty makes them do it and we don't want you to dust our crops aerially with pesticides because our poor farmers will think it is poison coming from the sky" when such things are demonstrably not true.
MEGAN: Crop dusting didn't really make us — or the Colombian government — a ton of friends when we did it there either but we didn't exactly stop doing it.
MOE: Well we haven't apparently started doing it in Afghanistan. The point is twofold, though. It's not so much that, according to this guy, how do you keep Afghanistan from becoming the Colombia of opiates, but whether you can use what you learned in Colombia to cut off the flow of funds to the insurgency, I think, I am not through yet though. I mean, I guess eventually, as in Colombia, everyone is in the business, on both sides, and then everything is just …really violent until someone like Uribe comes in and decides to grant wholescale amnesty to pretty much anyone who asks.

MOE:

Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term.

MEGAN: Awww, he's like a mini GWB, just with drugs instead of oil!
MOE: Hahaha the chief of the anticorruption commission is a convicted heroin dealer.
MOE: And here's our little microcosm of the whole damn thing:

At the same time, the 101st Airborne arrived in eastern Afghanistan. Its commanders promptly informed Ambassador Wood that they would only permit crop eradication if the State Department paid large cash stipends to the farmers for the value of their opium crop. Payment for eradication, however, is disastrous counternarcotics policy: If you pay cash for poppies, farmers keep the cash and grow poppies again next year for more cash. And farmers who grow less-lucrative crops start growing poppies so that they can get the money, too. Drug experts call this type of offer a “perverse incentive,” and it has never worked anywhere in the world.

Sort of like the drug war has never worked anywhere in the world?

MEGAN:

KarzaiBush was playing us like a fiddle: the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Talibanin Iraq; Karzai’sBush's friends could get rich off the drugoil trade; he could blame the Westliberals for hisour problems; and in 20092004 he would be elected to a new term.

MOE: Or Bush could blame the Middle East for his problems?
MEGAN: Hell, that shit doesn't even work in U.S. farm policy. You pay subsidies for wheat, they grow more wheat. You pay subsidies to let marginal lands grow wild, people plant on marginal lands for a year or two to collect the subsidies.
MOE: It would be a more direct counterpart.
MOE: Okay here is something depressing (or heartening?) Check the fucking comments. Some of the stuff that has been "recommended" is basically illiterate.

MOE: Such as

2008 8:35 am
After I saw American Gangster, I knew that the increase in heroin production was no accident. I'm sure the DEA is involved in shipping the drugs back to American cities. It's no wonder we can't see the coffins unloaded at Andrews Airforce Base.
— Jane, Royal Oak, MI
Recommended by 7 Readers

MEGAN: You know, there's a growing debate about whether to allow comments on newspapers' websites for exactly that reason. Like, I know Gawker employs a person (hey, Kaila! your hair is probably lovely today!) whose job it is to weed out the crazies and I've looked in the bin and WHOO boy are there some crazy people out there who write some crazy ass shit. But I guess because newspapers have higher comment volumes, or higher crazy volumes or haven't been able to figure out how to monetize their websites, they can't manage that shit?
MOE: Incidentally that other drug is in the news today too.

MEGAN: OH, speaking of drug wars, I've seen so many freaking meth heads back here. Upstate NY was slow to come to the metholution because of the easy access to good Canadian weed, but I do believe we've finally made it into the 21st century!
MOE: Yesterday I found this old story on Gabriel Garcia Marquez advocating "outlaw American chemists" develop a kind of synthetic cocaine to rival the real deal as a way to combat his own country's addiction to easy money. But um I sort of feel like, that's how we got meth, and meth did not do much good for Colombia.
MEGAN: Or Afghanistan! Meth is for people that can't afford crack, let alone coke, or heroin shipping in for Afghanistan, and who don't mind the side effects like the black teeth and the faster progression to heroin chic and the complete wasted crazy look that horrifies me in a bar to the point where my friend has to remind me to stop staring at the meth head.

Anyway, so…Burkle agrees to give him $100 million. On what basis? Well, Follieri tells him he's got the "right of first refusal" to buy the property and he's tight with this Monsignor named John E. Kozar. Sometimes Follieri would dress up Kozar in nicer robes that he kept in his office so as to pass him off as more than a monsignor.
Now, the Vatican's finances don't have anything to do with the American Catholic Church's. No one knows this better than fucking Monsignor Kozar, who just issued a batch of radio addresses on May 29 with this explanation:

This year was chosen for this project, Monsignor Kozar observed, because of its missionary significance for the Church in the United States. On June 29, 1908, a decree of Pope Pius X removed the designation "mission territory" from the Church in the United States, meaning that we were no longer dependent upon the sacrifices of the Catholics of Europe - through the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, one of the four Pontifical Mission Societies - to support our pastoral and evangelizing needs.

Moreover, the whole point selling off all that property was that the Vatican wasn't footing the bill. If the Vatican had been footing the bill, maybe some pretty art would be in the hands of some post-traumatic altarboys right now, but it's not. Anyway, so yeah, Monsignor Kozar totally knew that Follieri was full of shit, but pretty much every thinking person should have known, particularly Ron Burkle and, like, hello, the people in charge of selling Catholic church properties. But no! Because those people are fucking stupid, as a National Catholic Reporter story revealed in 2006:

“When Raffaello wants to meet with the bishop, they put the touch on from the Vatican and they get the meeting,” said one East Coast diocesan real estate professional. “They’re about as connected as it gets.”

Or here:

How well wired is the Follieri Group? In early 2005, Catholic blogger Domenico Bettinelli, editor of the Catholic World Report, summed it up: “Unless [Andrea Sodano’s] name was Wojtyla, you couldn’t get a better connection.”

Oh look, a Catholic blogger. That guy sure must feel stupid now!

I wonder if it was really a private eye or if it was the FBI. If it was really a private eye, maybe they were representing “supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Cos.” who sued Follieri after accusing him of misappropriating more than $1 million.

Uh, ya think? By the way, Burkle actually sued him for $55 million and according to the Journal the indictment reads reeeeally similarly to his lawsuit, and also, just incidentally, if you were an FBI agent, interviewing you, why would you bother misrepresenting yourself? As a private investigator of all genius covers? Isn't that sort of like me calling up the DA's media relations department for a statement so I could post an update on my Tumblr?

Wow, it’s funny to be caught up in the middle of all this, especially since I really don’t know anything about it.

JESUS MARY AND ALL THE APOSTLES BETTINELLI ARE YOU THE DUMBEST PERSON FUCKING EVER?

So much for us Catholics and our dogged prosecutory persistence in seeking/missionary zeal for finding the truth, right! I guess that's what I would say, if Ron Burkle and Bill Clinton weren't the biggest suckers in this whole fucking scam. A billionaire and a Rhodes scholar ex-president. Neither of whom ever had to believe in trans-substantiation.

Follieri Charged With Fraud; Claimed Special Vatican Connection [National Catholic Reporter]
Dear Anne Hathaway, If You Don't Read Your Ex-Boyfriend's Indictment You Are Going To Hell
Anne Hathaway's Ex Gets 21 Million Bail With Home Detention
Italy's Man From God [NYT]
Give Anne Hathaway's Ex Credit (Cards) [Fox News]
Vatican Ties Go Just So Far For Follieri Group [Post-Gazette]
Vatican Asks Condoleezza Rice To Help Stop A Sex Abuse Lawsuit [National Catholic Reporter]
Catholic Real Estate Bonanza [National Catholic Reporter]

• God bless Vivienne Westwood for being so undeniably herself. Says the fashion designer-cum-philosopher: "I'd like to do less, but there are people dependent on me now. My thing has always been, just let me finish this pair of trousers and then I can read my book. We've all got to wear something, I suppose. So my advice would be to buy quality. Choose well. I think there's a certain status in seeing someone wearing the same thing over and over again." [Vogue UK]
  
• God bless Heidi Klum. She's just so wise: "[Take] time out for yourself so you can engage in an activity that you really enjoy. [Also, don't] neglect the romance in your life. [And] wear pretty lingerie if you don't want to feel schlumpy." [Vogue UK]
  
• God bless Donatella Versace for saying at the Times Talks on Sunday that her fashion motto is "Don't let the rappers wear more bling than you do!" and that she hopes to be reincarnated as Maya Rudolph. [Fashion Week Daily]

• God bless Agent Provocateur co-founder Joe Corre (who is, incidentally, also the son of Vivienne Westwood) for making his brand's latest advertising campaign, fronted by Kate Moss, actually about his feelings of disdain regarding the Vatican and Catholicism. The apple clearly does not fall far from the tree. [NYMag]
• God bless the Project Runway producers for sticking to their guns and maintaining contracts with NBC rather than following their bastardized show to Lifetime. [Yahoo]
• God bless Burberry for not using Agyness Deyn in its next advertising campaign. [Fashionista]
• God bless Jack White and Karen Elson for seemingly non-stop sex. [Globe and Mail]
• God bless model/tsunami survivor Petra Nemacova for making big money in real estate. [Page Six]
• God bless Margerita Missoni for deigning to look at apartments in Alphabet City, NYC. [Fashionista]
• God bless Giorgio Armani for sorta slighting the Met when talking about last night's Costume Institute Gala: "The superheroes theme is both topical and modern and will, I believe, attract a wider audience than usual to the Costume Institute. I am looking forward to welcoming everyone." (Let us not forget in his first press conference regarding the exhibit, he managed to insult Anna Wintour.) [Vogue UK]
• God bless alice+olivia designer Stacey Bendet, who is reportedly pregnant with baby number one. [Page Six]

• Apparently posting up photos of Britney Spears and labeling her "crazy" is illegal. Does this mean we're part of some sort of underground economy? [E!]
  
• In today's installment of what happens when we read too quickly, we thought this said, "Robot explores giant crayon." [BBC]
  
• Bush's budget director Rob Portman, the only member of the administration who could actually define the word "budget," resigned for "personal reasons." [CNN]
  
• Imagine a future without consensual sex...[Daily Mail]
  
• Per the Vatican, thou shalt not cut off another driver, flick him off, and scream, "I hope you die, motherfucker!" [CNN]
  
• The Rubik's cube gets a "facelift." [ABC News]
  
• Fire in South Carolina the deadliest for firefighters since September 11. [Guardian]
  
• 6 U.S. casualties identified. [DoD]