Eric The Blue

Pompous, dumb

Speaking of dopey year-end journalistic retrospectives, check out this one, courtesy of the Star Tribune.  The one beneath the headline "The Election," by Chairman of the Board Mike Sweeney, is particularly dumb.  This notion that divided government is a good thing and that voters know it and choose it--what is the evidence for the claim?  There isn't any.  I'd like to see Mr Sweeney take up the question of why voters deserve praise for an outcome that hardly any of them, as individuals, sought. 

How many voted for a Republican for state legislature and for Mark Dayton for governor?  A hundred and ten town drunks.  Attributing the outcome to the "remarkable" and "fundamental" "wisdom" of the voters is a vacant piety.  Actually, Democrats voted for Democrats, Republicans for Republicans, and this, together with the complications added by a lot of moving parts, including especially Tom Horner's presence in the statewide governor's race, resulted in Republicans winning the legislature while Dayton prevailed (very narrowly) in the gubernatorial election.

Hendrik Hertzberg has more on what the real evidence shows. 

I also want to call attention to the laughably awful, bloated lead-in to the piece: "As we travel through life, buffeted by external and internal forces, sometimes we reach a fork in the road"--and feel the need to say something pompous and dumb.

The year in this and that

Some things you are a sucker for even though you understand in your head that the object of your affection is, you know, messed up.  (That is my idea of the way with-it people talk nowadays.  The Republicans win a lot of elections and with-it people, such as myself, are apt to say something such as, "That is, like, you know, fucking messed up.  Seriously!")

Anyway, like sports. My wife has patiently explained to me, more than once, that it makes no sense to care who wins ball games, that they're just fleeting and meaningless competitions between the multimillionaires of one franchise and the multimillionaires of another, and that it is a fantasy to imagine that the guys in the one colored uniform are "our guys."  No, they are not our guys, they are from Texas or California or possibly the Dominican Republic, and soon as the season is over they will go to one of their multiple residences somewhere away from here and daydream, when not patronizing strip clubs, about selling their services for several million more to another franchise.  Who cares?  She doesn't, and neither should I, says she.

Okay, maybe she is right, technically, but to me it is sort of like arguing that the actor playing Hamlet is only an actor, he's going out after the performance to knock a few back, and you are crazy to be affected in any way because it is not as if anyone really suffered or died, it's just a play, did you not notice how the actors revived to take a bow?  It's not exactly like that, but it's sort of like that, and if being interested makes time pass pleasurably for me then time is passing pleasurably for me. 

The above is all prologue.  The subject of this post is all the year-end rituals, the resolutions and the list-making and the journalistic retrospectives.  All quite stupid, I think.  If you are going to resolve to do better, you should start doing better, now, instead of waiting for the calendar to turn.  The chopping up of time into years, for such things as Nobel Prizes and Academy Awards and the "ten best of this year"--how much sense is there in that?  There is no logical connection between the time it takes for the Earth to travel around the sun and these human activities.  Also, it seems unfair in a random sort of way.  If your book is published in January, it creates a little buzz, and then, eleven months later, it's time for the year-end retrospectives, so it gets a second little buzz that crowds out any initial buzz for the book just published in December, which December book will not ever have a chance to get a year-end buzz because it was published "last year."  Two buzzes to none, and for no very good reason at all.

Notwithstanding, if you are a reader, you might enjoy going here as much as I did.  "Here," for those of you who kept reading, instead of clicking, is the New Yorker's Book Bench Blog and their year-end retrospective, "The Year in Reading."  Compare Tad Friend's breezy look at Franzen's Freedom with those, here and here and here, of Eric the Blue.  Notice that the only book that gets mentioned by two different contributors is The Imperfectionists, a first novel by Tom Rachman--I missed the "initial buzz" on this one.  Find out that Malcolm Gladwell is a self-described lover of "thrillers and airport literature," whereas Rebecca Mead spent a good part of the year with George Eliot.  Also, I did not know, but do now, thanks to Richard Brody, who enjoyed Saul Bellow's letters, that the author of Augie March was still having a hard time making ends meet a decade after that great novel was published.  (Editorial comment, accompanied by mournful string music:  Don't whine to Melville about it.)

Christmas burdens

Christmas!  I'd forgotten how burdensome it is.  I'm not speaking figuratively.  You get all these gifts, you drive home, it's late, also really cold, and you have to carry all this stuff in and it takes a lot of trips--garage to door, garage to door, garage to door but this time you have to do some rearranging so that there is room inside the door, then garage to door again . . . .  Since it can't just sit inside the door, you next have to find a place to put it, an exercise that reveals burdens of Christmases past. 

And that is just Christmas Eve.  The next day, you're with the other side of the family, and at some hour--like when you're packing up to leave--the quality of being overfed, a literal fact attested to by a roiling gut, seems an apt metaphor for the whole experience.  This is how it seemed to me five years ago, and now I have three young kids with sets of dueling grandparents and fawning aunts, so you can imagine. 

I think maybe my in-laws understand.  They came through with the perfect gift for me: a hundred-dollar (!) gift card to one of Minneapolis's best liquor stores.  And I got myself a Modern Library Little Dorrit and a Penguin abridged version of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  The post-Christmas period is looking pretty good.

General theory of UConn

The women's basketball team at the University of Connecticut (the UConn Huskies) won its 89th consecutive game last night.  The victory, over 22nd-ranked Florida State, by a lopsided score of 93-62, broke the previous record held by the UCLA men's team, which won 88 games in a row back in the 1970s.  UConn's record-tying 88th consecutive win, over 12th-ranked Ohio State, was by a score of 81-60.  Last year UConn had its second straight undefeated season and, naturally, its second straight national championship.  The Huskies won the championship game of their regional tournament by forty points and their national semifinal by twenty points before prevailing in the championship game by just six points over Stanford.

There's been a lot of talk about just why UConn is so good.  No doubt they have a good coach, who is probably an even better recruiter, and their past success makes it easier to attract the best players.  But I wonder, too, whether there isn't a kind of pointy-headed, mathematical explanation akin to Stephen Jay Gould's account of why no baseball batters hit .400 anymore. 

It used to be fairly common for major-league baseball batters to hit for an average above .400, but no one has now done it since 1941, when Ted Williams averaged .406.  It probably isn't the case that Williams, Hornsby, Cobb and others were better hitters than the best contemporary batters.  But they were playing in a day when baseball was still a comparatively young game, the best strategies had yet to be devised (or discovered), and, consequently, there was more variation within the system of all batting averages.  And more variation meant the outliers were "outier," farther from the mean, possibly even north of .400.

The UConn women's team, in this view of things, is not just a great team--it is a great team playing in the (relatively) early development of the women's game, when the distance between the best team and most teams is greater than it is in the men's game now and will be in the women's game sometime in the future. More variation within the system of women's collegiate basketball means that the very best team is less apt to suffer an upset, because the gap between the best and the typical is greater.  A long winning streak is more likely to occur.

If you are skeptical, you probably won't be persuaded by the fact that the general theory would predict that UCLA's record, if ever surpassed, would be surpassed by a women's team.  After all, there is around a fifty-fifty chance of that without introducing any other considerations.  But what if the average margin of victory in all collegiate women's games was somewhat greater than the average margin of victory in all men's games? I think that would be strong evidence of greater variation within women's basketball. 

I don't have the energy to track the results of all collegiate basketball games.  If you'd like to, please tell me what you discover, as I'd be very interested.  Meanwhile, I think I will track the score differential in all men's and women's games played this season in the Big Ten Conference.  Then I will do the same for the NCAA tournament games.  That should give some idea.  I'll report in on what I find out.

POSTSCRIPT: For what it is worth, I've looked at the scores in last year's NCAA Division One Basketball Tournaments.  In the women's games, the average margin of victory was 16.4 points (14.5 points in games not involving UConn).  Whereas in the men's tournament, the average margin of victory was just 10.4 points.  It's not a lot of data--just 63 outcomes in each tournament--but the women's games were on average considerably more one-sided, suggesting more variation among the entrants.

In the Times

Here, from a New York Times story on Saturday's Senate vote on the Dream Act, a sentence that a lot of readers unschooled in the inscrutable byways of America's political system might naturally think needs a copy editor:

The 55-41 vote in favor of the bill, which is known as the Dream Act, effectively kills it for this year.

But, no, it is a fact that, despite being supported by 57% of senators present to vote, the Dream Act is dead, at least for now--and, considering that there will be a lot more Republicans voting in the next Congress, probably for a long while.  The counterintuitive truth of the Times's sentence must be credited, if that is the word, to the fact that bringing a bill to a "final vote" requires 60 supporters in the 100-member US Senate.  Since 55 < 60, it matters not that the Dream Act is supported by a clear majority of senators.  For in the Senate, we do not have "majority rules," but, rather, "super majority rules," which often seems the practical equivalent of "minority rules."

Imagine if other areas of human competetive endeavor operated along the same line.  We might then read in the sports pages:

Today, in NFL action, the Chicago Bears failed to defeat the Minnesota Vikings when, at the end of the fourth quarter, the Bears led, but only by 30 - 21.  In the waning minutes of play, the Vikings, trailing 30 - 14, drove 67 yards for a touchdown, and when Ryan Longwell added the extra point the Bears found themselves with fewer than 60% of all the points scored in the game.  The Vikings were jubilant over their come-from-behind victorious non-loss.

Or, staying within the political arena:

The Republicans, who hold a 42 - 58 advantage in the US Senate . . . .

There are various ways of trying to impress upon skeptics the profoundly undemocratic nature of this state of affairs.  For example: since every state, no matter how small its population, gets two senators, the 60 per cent rule means that the 21 smallest states, which have less than 12% of the country's population, hold what amounts to a legislative veto power over senators representing 88% of the people.

Enough drizzle.  In sunnier news, this same Senate, over the same weekend, repealed DADT ("Don't Ask, Don't Tell"), thereby clearing the way for homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces.  If I were one of them, I think I'd be happy, though in a peculiar ironical sort of way, seeing as how military training consists to a considerable degree in helping people to get over their previous aversion to killing other human beings.  Fewer and fewer are excluded from the privilege.

Maybe in the 18th century

You know the world according to Adam Smith, wherein the invisible hand of the unencumbered market creates a paradise here on earth.  Was there ever anything to it?  A recent news article details how, according to a lawsuit filed by Minnesota attorney general Lori Swanson, the Discover Card company signs customers up for expensive and unwanted products, such as identity theft protection and credit score monitoring:

The suit alleges that Discover's telemarketers lulled cardholders into thinking they were getting a "courtesy call," then read a sales script so quickly -- often running sentences together and skipping over key words -- that many cardholders reflexively said, "Yes," or, "OK." Discover treated these responses as agreements to sign up for a new product, even when there was no clear consent and the customer did not understand the terms, the lawsuit alleges.

This business practice reminds me of my first cell phone contract.  It was for two years, with Sprint.  While the contract was running, my work made a BlackBerry available to me, so I was eager to ditch the phone that I hardly ever used anyway.  On the 731st day I made the call, and was told that I would be assessed a $200 "early termination fee."  Turns out I had at one point decided to save a few bucks by changing my text messaging plan--I rarely used the phone but I never texted--and, the Sprint representative explained, in the voice of Hal from 2001, I had at this time consented to a new two-year contract, which began to run on that day. Now I was terminating well before the "new" contract was up.

It 's ridiculous that making a minor change to a billing option would result in a new contract.  But the other point, relating to the case against Discover, is that I never would have made the change had it been made clear to me that I was signing up for another two years.  

In the wonderful world of Adam Smith, there are willing sellers and willing buyers.   Now we have companies that sell people things without their consent.  It's like they had the idea: Why advertise?  You can try to persuade people to buy things they don't need, but it is more efficient just to send them a bill for it.

The private sector is a mostly seamless advertisement for big government.  You go, Lori Swanson!

Minnesota Majority weighs in on Emmer case, proves itself more despicable than he is

Tom Emmer Wednesday conceded the Minnesota governor's race to DFLer Mark Dayton.  He said all the right things and has been widely praised for being "gracious."  One inclined toward cynicism might suggest that the "graciousness" was begat of having been deprived of a leg to stand on.  Just as it became clear that the manual recount would confirm the election-night count, showing an 8800-vote margin for Dayton, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision rejecting Emmer's claim that some precincts had erred by reconciling ballot counts with voter receipts instead of with voter signatures. 

Still, Emmer has been more responsible than many of his admiring supporters.  In the weeks between the election and his tardy concession, one sometimes got the impression that the state Republican party, and especially its chairman, Tony Sutton, was more than Emmer responsible for the strategy of making frivolous challenges to ballots plainly marked for Dayton and for hinting that a court challenge to Dayton's election might be forthcoming.  And today, on the editorial page of the Star Tribune, two leaders of Minnesota Majority, an inaptly named right-wing organization, argue that the Supreme Court's dismissal of Emmer's petition regarding ballot reconciliation is not just flawed but corrupt. 

Minnesota Majority is a bete noire of mine.  I'm used to people and organizations not agreeing with me.  But this outfit, under the guise of being "a nonprofit government watchdog," deliberately undermines public confidence in the democratic process if that process results in Democrats or liberals winning elections and advancing a policy agenda that Minnesota Majority opposes.  Let us take a look at the technical issues involved, which I think show Emmer's case, and that made by Minnesota Majority in today's op-ed, are both utterly without merit.

The law in question is Minn Stat Sec 204C.20.  The "election register" referred to in subdivision 1 no longer exists.  The statute should be updated.  The fundamental requirement, however, is plainly that the number of ballots counted in a precinct must match the number of voters.  The statute envisions that the number of voters be determined by counting the signatures of people who sign in at the polling place before voting.  But actual practice in many precincts, especially more populous ones (which tend to vote Democratic), is to give voters who sign in a receipt, which is then exchanged for a ballot, and at the end of the evening officials reconcile the number of ballots with the number of turned-in receipts.  The idea is to avoid the very cumbersome task of going through the sign-in book, counting signatures on a page, turning the page, counting more, and on and on: the book is thick in urban precincts, and a mismatch between ballots and signatures would usually be caused by an inaccurate count of signatures.  It is very much easier to count receipts, which has been permitted by administrative rule for years and years, without any protest from the Republican party or Minnesota Majority, and has, as I say, been the actual practice in a lot of precincts for as long as the rule has permitted it.

The remedy for an excess of ballots at the end of the day is set out in subdivision 2:

If there is still an excess of properly marked ballots, the election judges shall replace them in the box, and one election judge, without looking, shall withdraw from the box a number of ballots equal to the excess. The withdrawn ballots shall not be counted but shall be preserved as provided in subdivision 4.

This is the provision that undoubtedly attracted the attention of Team Emmer.  Their candidate, after all, had lost by only around 9,000 votes, and here is a plausible way of changing the tally.  If they could get a court to hold that the administrative rule was an illegal substitute for the statutory language calling for the matching of ballots to signatures, then they could quite possibly get a lot of ballots thrown out in urban precincts that voted for Dayton.

One problem with this is, as I mentioned above, that the practice of reconciling ballots with receipts has been used for years without anyone complaining.  It's been used for years because, especially in precincts where there may be more than a thousand ballots cast, counting receipts is faster and more accurate.  This has not been a disputed matter until Emmer raised the issue after he had narrowly lost.  The logic behind the method is really nothing more than: a=b and b=c means that a=c.  You get a receipt only when you have signed, you trade the receipt for the ballot, and turn in your marked ballot.  The number of ballots therefore should match the number of receipts (and signatures, but it's faster and easier to count receipts).

The Supreme Court had no trouble seeing the weakness in Emmer's argument and voted unanimously to deny his petition.  Three of the justices were appointed by Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota's Republican governor.  What can Minnesota Majority see that they could not?

A conspiracy, it seems:

The justices may have been considering factors other than simply interpreting the law when they issued their short-sighted decision.  Preventing another drawn out elecion contest, or protecting the state's bureaucracy from criticism or even prosecution, for example.

You see, the fix is in.  The Supreme Court is part of the effort to shield an election process that is fundamentally corrupt.  These are very serious charges.  What is the evidence for them?  None is forthcoming.  Of course, it is not just the justices of the Supreme Court, including those appointed by Governor Pawlenty, who are in on the effort to subvert  the law and the democratic process:

At the end of Election Day, election judges are under pressure to balance election records.  If the receipt count does not match the ballot count, judges have been known to rectify the situation by simply tearing off a few more receipts and moving them to the other stack.  Magically, the totals are then in balance! 

I love the way in which the authors try to disguise their lameness with the awkward construction, "have been known to."  Have been known by whom?  When? Is there any evidence it happened in this election?  They don't say.  It is clear, however, that nefarious activity is occurring at the polls:

If a ballot box can be stuffed, extra ballot receipts can even more easily be torn-off [sic] to equal the number of ballots.  The fact that there weren't as many voters as ballots would never be detected.

In the world according to Minnesota Majority, an excess of ballots can only be explained by "ballot box stuffing." Small, human errors that cancel each other out?  No, there is fraud and corruption, Minnesota Majority knows it, and you would, too, if the justices of the Supreme Court were not part of the conspiracy to keep you in the dark.

Despicable. 

Emmer: the beat goes on

At home Friday morning--I'm on family leave from work on account of the birth, on Nov. 16, of daughter Claire Beth Jorgenson (8 lbs, 8 oz; ten fingers and toes; a mouth and nose, eyes and ears, all right where you'd expect them to be)--I heard MPR report that Crazy Tom Emmer had called a press conference for 10:30.  I thought: Oh no, he's going to concede the election and prove that he's not as crazy as I've been saying!

Not to worry.  He isn't quitting, he's switching to a different mode of craziness.  His plan had been to challenge, during the manual recount, the validity of ballots cast for his opponent, DFLer Mark Dayton, who according to the election-night count had defeated Emmer by around 8800 votes.  But these challenges were deemed "frivolous" by local election officials, and, when examples of the challenged ballots were printed in the newspaper and put up on the Web, the community of sane people became disgusted with the tactics of Team Emmer, which, as Justice Paul Anderson of the Minnesota Supreme Court and member of the State Canvassing Board pointed out, amounted to a thinly veiled effort to disenfranchise Dayton voters.  The new strategy is to withdraw the challenges and renew the claim, already rejected by the State Supreme Court, that local election officials failed to reconcile the number of voters with the number of ballots cast.

The new old strategy is superior in the respect that it is not subject to eloquent rebuttal merely by showing examples of challenged ballots that are plainly marked for Dayton.  Instead, Team Emmer is darkly suggesting, without any evidence, that ballots that were not marked by a legal voter are being counted because local election officials are not following the law.

When I show up at my polling place on Election Day, I sign a roster and am presented with a receipt.  Farther down the line, I turn in the receipt to a different election worker, who hands me a ballot.  After marking the ballot, I feed it into a machine and yet another election worker smiles and gives me an "I voted" sticker.  State law requires that at the end of the day these election workers verify that the number of ballots matches the number of voters.  Some precincts do this by matching ballots to signatures (the letter of the law); others, by matching ballots to receipts, which is faster, more accurate, and permitted by administrative rule. 

Emmer has spoken of "an assault on American voting laws" but it is hard to tell what exactly he means. That some precincts failed to perform any kind of reconciliation?  There is no evidence this is true.  That the administrative rule is illegitimate and that the much more difficult task of reconciling ballots with signatures has to be performed?  There is no reason to believe this would result in a more accurate count.  Besides, any difference, from either a failure to reconcile or a reconciliation by receipts instead of by signatures, would be at the margins, and Emmer was outpolled by almost 9000 votes. 

The loose, bombastic talk about "an assault on American voting laws" is irresponsible and should be understood as just another instance of the paranoid style in American politics. There is one explanation of the election-night result, now confirmed by the manual recount, that does not depend upon a corrupt election system, outlaw election officials, and a conspiracy against the GOP that nevertheless did not prevent Republicans from making large gains in the state legislature:

Dayton won the election.  He got around 8800 more votes than anyone else.  Instead of wasting our time and money, Tom Emmer should shut up and go away. 

 

The nonreversal reversal (II)

In a column printed last Sunday, Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman lavished praise upon Crazy Tom Emmer, the Republican party's failed gubernatorial candidate, for stating in an interview that he would not contest the result of the recount now underway unless there was some reasonable prospect of prevailing on the merits and being declared the winner.  Here is the meaty part of Emmer's statement, as reported by Coleman:

"I don't want to put myself or others through a futile process," he told the Pioneer Press. He isn't throwing in the towel, he hastened to add. But if the manual recount -- due to be finished, with a declared winner, by Dec. 14 -- doesn't turn up evidence of major irregularities, and if Dayton's margin remains beyond reach, Emmer said, he will not go to court to prolong the uncertainty.

"If ... we're on the short end, we're done," he said.

Coleman permits the adjective "statesmanlike" to creep into his description of this one reasonable speech act.  Since Sunday, however, the actual recount has begun, and Emmer is looking like the sweet old pope who blathers about reconciliation while the local archdiocese seeks to intimidate victims of clergy abuse.  Here is Coleman's paper reporting on the shifting Republican tactics during days one and two of the manual recount in Washington County, just east of St Paul:

On Monday, Republican observers asserted that ballots that had no marked vote for either gubernatorial candidate implied a vote for Emmer.  On Tuesday, Emmer representatives abandoned that practice. . . .

For small blessings we should all be thankful!  I had to read that paragraph twice and even then could not really credit it.  Alas, it is roughly consistent with the tactics pursued by Emmer partisans in other recount venues.  In Hennepin County, for example, where almost a quarter of the ballots were cast (and where I live and work), elections manager Rachel Smith pleaded with Emmer's people to cease and desist with the frivolous challenges so that the recount could proceed apace and be completed, ontime, by the first part of next week.  For this she  was criticized by GOP state party chair Tony Sutton, who said Rachel appeared "definitely hostile to our right to challenge."  It's more like a right to be ridiculous.  You can go here and view for yourself examples of ballots challenged by the GOP.  If these are not votes for Mark Dayton, the Democrat, then no one voted in the election.

Despite Coleman's panegyric on Emmer's reasonableness, the nightmare scenario is still a depressing possibility.  Team Emmer could continue to delay the recount, and then, when its results are finally certified, and Emmer remains behind Dayton by well over 8,000 votes, the inevitable outcome could be further delayed by a court challenge that would likely prevent governor-elect Dayton from assuming his responsibilities on January 3.  Instead, the current governor, Tim Pawlenty, a Republican with presidential aspirations, could remain in office to make decisions that the people of Minnesota chose Dayton to make.

What argument would be made in a legal challenge to the election result?  An article in today's Star Tribune sheds light on this question by quoting, not Tom Emmer (the good cop), but state GOP chair Tony Sutton (the bad cop):

Sutton said Republicans could explore two fronts in a possible court case after recounted vote totals are certified by the state Dec. 14. Republicans have claimed that local election officials never properly reconciled the number of votes with the number of voters and in some cases, failed to remove so-called excess votes. That case was already made to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which promptly rejected it.

Sutton maintains the matter is still "a potential issue in a contest."

The other issue is Minnesota's law allowing registered voters to vouch for unregistered voters on Election Day. Republicans have raised complaints about the voucher law before, but have never offered any evidence of wrongdoing.

So as of today the Republican case, as articulated by Chairman Sutton, rests on one argument that the state supreme court has already rejected and another one for which there is no evidence.  It seems crazy, but these are the people who on Monday of this week were arguing that a vote for no one should count as a vote for Emmer.  Both strategies--the frivolous ballot challenges and a frivolous election contest after the manual recount confirms that Dayton won--make sense only if the object is to delay.

The nonreversal reversal (I)

The local archdiocese of the Catholic Church has withdrawn its request to be reimbursed for court costs by a plaintiff, Jim Keenan, whose lawsuit alleging child molestation by a priest was thrown out under the statute of limitations.  I wrote about the subject here.  That Keenan was molested as a youth by Father Thomas Adamson is beyond dispute.  The Church spent $64,000 getting the case dismissed on a technicality and, having succeeded in that effort, turned its attention next to recovering from Keenan the costs it had incurred shielding itself from his charge.  Despicable!

The public reasons given for dropping the request for reimbursement concern Keenan's recent bankruptcy after a business interest collapsed.  "If Mr Keenan is bankrupt, the question should be asked, 'Does it make sense to pursue a claim of cost against someone who is bankrupt?'" said Andrew Eisenzimmer, an archdiocesan lawyer whose statement was quoted in today's Star Tribune newspaper article about the case.

Apparently it makes sense to recover the money from a victim of child molestation by one of the Church's pedophilic priests--but not from a bankrupt.  The article also quotes some academic in Nevada who says he was "astounded" by the Church's effort to collect, since the action "appears to conflict with the message from Pope Benedict, who recently met with victims and apologized." 

The capacity to be "astounded" requires too lofty a view of the moral status of the Catholic Church.  Here is a more realistic theory of the case:

The Church has adopted a two-track strategy for responding to the sexual abuse scandals.  When the cameras are rolling, like when the pope is meeting with victims of abuse, the talk is all theological--we hear of the Church's own "sin" and "shame" and the need for "reconciliation," etc.  Meanwhile, when hardly anyone is looking, the Church does what it can to silence, intimidate, and harass victims of priestly abuse.  Sometimes it gets confused and plays bad cop when it should be the good one acting.  Then those who are large and in charge--in this case John Nienstedt, archbishop of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis--send out lackeys like this Eisenzimmer character to perform a ridiculous dance.