Sweet Sixteen

• Via skippy, "March Madness"-style brackets for the Papal election.  Not quite the way it's done, but amusing in its way.
• Via Avedon's Sideshow, news that the Tea Party in Maryland actually sponsored a bill to forbid Maryland's agencies and workers from assisting in National Defense Authorization Act arrests/detainments.  (Scroll down:  It's Juice #3)  Civil liberties being defended by the Tea Party?  Where are my pearls--wait a minute.  More likely the Maryland group will be kicked out of the Tea Party.  Watch.
• Bradley Manning has passed one thousand days in stir without trial.  (The Guardian via Raw Story)  That's two and three quarters years.

  The least Manning deserves is stringent fairness in his prosecution, and stringent fairness cannot exist in the absence of openness and transparency.

• USA Today reports on another possible reason for the Pope's abdication.

  The three-man panel, according to La Repubblica, discovered an underground gay network whose members organized sexual meetings in several locations, including a villa outside Rome, a sauna in Rome's Cuarto Miligo distirct and even in a beauty salon inside the Vatican.
  
  The gatherings, in turn, left them open to blackmail from people outside the Vatican, the report said, according to the newspaper.
  
  La Repubblica quoted an unidentified man described as ''very close'' to the authors of the dossier as saying it contained information about violations of the sixth and seventh commandments, which forbid adultery and stealing.

  This may be La Repubblica's article. It's in Italian.  See also AlterNet's reprint of Salon's article.
  
• Also from Salon via AlterNet:  Why right-wingers are wacky about wombs.
• Five things no one tells you about being poor.  From Cracked, not normally a political site.
• Bias toward men in the Oscars (which I will not be watching tonight again unless I'm feeling particularly insomniac).