VATICAN INVADES NEW YORK! - Nudes and Leather at 11:00

It's a beautiful day in the Big Apple and at last check we haven't had any 22-inning baseball games today (unlike Colorado at San Diego last night). Thank God!

And speaking of God, some German drag queen with a taste for Gucci loafers and Balenciaga evening gowns arrived in town this morning from D.C. He had tons of police and Secret Service protection (the SS has to cover so many dignitaries in New York City over the course of a year, that they have their own fleet of opaque-windowed, heavily-armored Ford SUV's which they keep right here, rather than dragging a fleet of them up and down I-95 from D.C. every time some foreign head of state arrives in town). His Smarminess had so much protection that the Fashionable Upper East Side was virtually impassable by 11:00 a.m. today, when his Dragginess was addressing the United Nations.

But I will say this for the old queen. He had sense enough to come on a Friday before Passover, when at least half the city had taken the day off. This lessened the burden on traffic. Downside? It also increased the burden on everything else.

I hear tell that he's apologizing to anyone who'll listen for all the kids whose lives were ruined by pedophile priests over the decades.

Would it kill him to sweeten the deal a little with some cash and prizes?

Nobody knows better than me what it means to have had your childhood eaten alive by uncaring adults who were only interested in their own, self-centered, desires. I wasn't sexually abused as a child, but that's just about the only form of abuse I was spared. And I know that cash and prizes won't even begin to make things right.

But it's a start.

Look, I don't know this guy. But I do know something about his past, and I'm not talking about his stint in the Hitler Youth during WWII. I'm talking about his years as the Secretary of State for the Vatican under John Paul II. Years when he was known as the Pontiff's Rottweiler for his uncompromising views on everything from abortion, to stem cell research, to women's place in the church, to gay rights.

His positions are well known to reside somewhere to the right of Attilla the Nun Hun.

He is, truly, one of the last absolute monarchs on the face of the earth. Everyone in the church serves at his pleasure. And his alone. Never deceive yourselves that he is, somehow, a pawn in Vatican politics... he IS Vatican politics. He can change the church with the stroke of a pen. He has that power and nobody in the church's hierarchy can do a thing to stop him.

He is, after all, infallible when speaking ex cathedra, i.e. "from the throne."

It's good to be the King!