"Pope Francis, The People’s Pope" is Time's Person of the Year.

"He took the name of a humble saint and then called for a church of healing. The first non-European pope in 1,200 years is poised to transform a place that measures change by the century."

Here's the post where I analyzed Time's 10 finalist and concluded that the person would be Edith Windsor. My runner-up was Edward Snowden.

But my rejection of the Pope had an "unless" clause: "Popes have won, but I think it's a bit early to go with another Pope yet, unless the Time folk are itching to play Obama's recently attempted income inequality theme. I think that would be shabby, so I say no."

A number of commenters here thought the Pope would win, and I want to single out Pat:

I think it goes to the Pope and not because he's said some "leftist" things. In a very short term, he has sparked new life into a very large religion. I am a crotchety grumpy conservative, and I love everything about the guy.

I haven't read the whole article yet and probably never will. Here's a key passage that connects to American political themes:

[B]ehind his self-effacing facade, he is a very canny operator. He makes masterly use of 21st century tools to perform his 1st century office. He is photographed washing the feet of female convicts, posing for selfies with young visitors to the Vatican, embracing a man with a deformed face. He is quoted saying of women who consider abortion because of poverty or rape, “Who can remain unmoved before such painful situations?” Of gay people: “If a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.” To divorced and remarried Catholics who are, by rule, forbidden from taking Communion, he says that this crucial rite “is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.”

And:

He can barely contain his outrage when he writes, “How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” Elsewhere in his exhortation, he goes directly after capitalism and globalization: “Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This ­opinion … has never been confirmed by the facts.” He says the church must work “to eliminate the structural causes of poverty” and adds that while “the Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike … he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor.”

ADDED: Is that last sentence miswritten or does the Pope talk about himself in the third person like that? I looked it up. The answer is the latter, or really neither. It's more of an opinion about the role of whoever occupies the position of Pope.

"An LDS Bishop went undercover as a homeless man in his congregation last Sunday."

"He wanted to use his disguise as a tool to teach on compassion this Thanksgiving." (Video at the link.)

Ward member Jaimi Larsen also didn't recognize the homeless man as [David] Musselman... "He was dirty. He was crippled. He was old. He was mumbling to himself"....

Larsen says she watched from the chapel as Musselman walked to the pulpit - his disguise so real, she had no idea that he was about to reveal himself as their bishop. "He quoted the song 'Have I Done Any Good in the World Today?'," said Larsen.

That story made me think of this passage in the New Testament:

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Hipster/homeless ambiguity could be very dangerous.

"Not to offend anyone directly, but this photo could quite possibly be of a homeless man, a street person, or whatever term you wish to use. It could also just as easily be an affluent hipster wearing a highly dysfunctional piece of high-fashion. I think the ambiguity of that is very dangerous."

Comment on a photograph at The Sartorialist.

Follow-on comment: "The ‘danger’ here is somehow thinking that this is in the territory of Zoolander’s “Derelicte” Collection. I don’t know if it’s a ‘trap’ … but when reading some of these comments, I’m thinking Brüno and Zoolander :-)"

"So why is it important that we have a multitude of desperate law school graduates and many more politically ambitious rich than 30 years ago?"

"Past waves of political instability, such as the civil wars of the late Roman Republic, the French Wars of Religion and the American Civil War, had many interlinking causes and circumstances unique to their age. But a common thread in the eras we studied was elite overproduction."

Excerpt from an article at Bloomberg.com (by Peter Turchin, vice president of the Evolution Institute and professor of biology and anthropology at the University of Connecticut) titled "Blame Rich, Overeducated Elites as Our Society Frays."

Worth clicking for the illustration, a diagram of how this terrifying process, depicting "Unemployed Lawyers" as a crucial link in a chain between "Wealth Glut" and Elite Fratricide."

But the chain can be broken — "catastrophe isn’t preordained" — and you can probably guess how. But first, you gotta believe the catastrophe is coming, so soften up and get scared.

"In the mid-1970s, the tiny Canadian town of Dauphin... acted as guinea pig for a grand experiment in social policy called 'Mincome.'"

"For a short period of time, all the residents of the town received a guaranteed minimum income. About 1,000 poor families got monthly checks to supplement their earnings."

Evelyn Forget, a health economist at the University of Manitoba, has done some of the best research on the results. Some of her findings were obvious: Poverty disappeared. But others were more surprising: High-school completion rates went up; hospitalization rates went down. “If you have a social program like this, community values themselves start to change,” Forget said.

Evelyn Forget is such a great name that I almost want to believe what she's selling. But I'm one of those people who fear the lost incentive to work. I remember a professor here at UW some years ago propounding a guaranteed minimum income of $20,000. He just assumed most people would work so they could have more than that. What if you were just starting out in life and knew you could go work-free if you were willing to live on $20,000?

I'm sure if that deal were offered to me when I was 20, I'd have taken it. I'd have worked at living on that $20,000. Oh, yes, eventually I might have wanted to write a book called "How to Live Well on $20,000 a Year" — because it would have amused me and I wouldn't have minded some extra spending money.

But who knows what the psychology of it all would be? It's one thing to experiment on a tiny town in Manitoba, but what happens when it gets bigger... and less Canadian?

The good liberals of Madison struggling with the "good" homeless and the "bad" homeless.

On Tuesday, the city council anguished over one block of our Capitol Square:

"(P)eople are scared to death to go there," said Maria Milsted, who runs a property management company with her husband at 106 W. Mifflin St. "We are frightened to go into our own place of work."

In her speech, Milsted distinguished between the "good homeless," — those who are seeking jobs and a place to live — and "the takers" who she believes are seeking handouts and have no intention of behaving civilly....

The mayor, Paul Soglin, the longtime Madison lefty and former UW student radical blamed the world beyond Madison for dumping its undesirables here:

"Statements that some of us have made about Madison being a drop-off point (of homeless people) for other units of government is now getting fairly well-documented," Soglin said.

He also alleged that other cities are driving homeless people into the city of Madison, and vowed that Madison would "drive them right back!"

So xenophobic. Whatever happened to empathy and compassion? We're ready now to see the downtrodden as "takers" and reprobates... when they congregate in a prime residential area and freak out the real estate folk?

You know, one of the nicest condo buildings I've ever seen is on that block. It's terrible if the bad homeless people are hurting real estate values. But if you're not freaked out by a few street people, it might be a good time to put in an offer on one of the places currently on the market. Like that 2-bedroom penthouse, priced at $2,200,000, now down to $1,995,000.

"Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell's Trial Should Be a Front-Page Story."

"The dead babies. The exploited women. The racism. The numerous governmental failures. It is thoroughly newsworthy."

"Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that," [says the grand jury report]. "But we think this was something more. We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion."...

Is it even conceivable that an optometrist who attended to his white patients in a clean office while an intern took care of the black patients in a filthy room wouldn't make national headlines?

But it isn't even solely a story of a rogue clinic that's awful in all sorts of sensational ways either. Multiple local and state agencies are implicated in an oversight failure that is epic in proportions! If I were a city editor for any Philadelphia newspaper the grand jury report would suggest a dozen major investigative projects I could undertake if I had the staff to support them....

That's Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, challenging the news media to explain their noncoverage.

"When the church is self-referential... inadvertently, she believes she has her own light..."

"...he ceases to be the mysterium lunae and gives way to that very serious evil, spiritual worldliness," said Cardinal Bergoglio in the 4-minute speech addressing the Cardinals and — as the WSJ reports — leading them to pick him as the new Pope.

The new pope "must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the church to go out to the existential peripheries, that helps her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from the sweet and comforting joy of evangelizing."

The word he used, periferia in Italian, literally translates into "the periphery" or "the edge." But to Italian ears, periferia is also a term loaded with heavy socioeconomic connotations. It is on the periphery of Italian cities, and most European ones, that the working-class poor live, many of them immigrants. The core mission of the church wasn't self-examination, the cardinal said. It was getting in touch with the everyday problems of a global flock, most of whom were battling poverty and the indignities of socioeconomic injustice....

"He's not relating this to ideology, to let's say, rich against poor," Cardinal Cipriani Thorne said. "No, no, nothing like that. He's saying that Jesus himself brought us to this world to be poor — to not have this excessive consumerism, this great difference between rich and poor."

"A young filmmaker is believed to have frozen to death after spending a night sleeping rough..."

"... for a Channel 4 application in which he intended to explore what it was like to be homeless."

Lee Halpin, 26, had planned to spend a week living on the streets in his home city of Newcastle and eventually make a documentary about it.

There's video of this healthy-looking man saying:

"I hope you think this is a fearless approach to a story, it certainly feels like a brave thing to me, and has certainly caused a huge amount of trepidation amongst my family and friends who think it's a brave thing to do. ...."

There's an update at the link suggesting that the death may have been not from freezing but drugs.

("Sleeping rough" is British slang, referring to sleeping on the street.)

"The 100 richest people in the world earned enough last year to end extreme poverty suffered by the poorest on the planet four times over..."

"Extreme wealth was 'economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive,' the report said."

"Study says homeless facilities may increase the value of nearby property."

May... meaning it probably increases the value of the property over there where we'd like to site the facility but not over here where I live.

The study, released in 2008, compared home sale prices before and after the development of Project H.O.M.E. housing facilities and controlled for many other factors that could affect home values, said [Kevin] Gillen, an economist and senior research consultant at the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania....

"These properties were overwhelmingly in distressed neighborhoods. If you were to do the same thing in affluent neighborhoods, it may not bring the same result. But given the choice living next door to a well-maintained homeless facility and a vacant abandoned building, you’ll take the homeless facility," he said.

"We have done everything possible to make the presidency less venerated."

Says José Mujica, the president of Uruguay, who lives "a run-down house on Montevideo’s outskirts with no servants at all... never wears a tie and donates about 90 percent of his salary, largely to a program for expanding housing for the poor." That leaves him with $800 a moth.

Quoting the Roman court-philosopher Seneca, Mr. Mujica said, “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.”...

Before Mr. Mujica became a gardener of chrysanthemums, he was a leader of the Tupamaros, the urban guerrilla group that drew inspiration from the Cuban revolution, carrying out armed bank robberies and kidnappings on Montevideo’s streets....

He spent 14 years in prison, including more than a decade in solitary confinement, often in a hole in the ground. During that time, he would go more than a year without bathing, and his companions, he said, were a tiny frog and rats with whom he shared crumbs of bread....

Mr. Mujica rarely speaks about his time in prison. Seated at a table in his garden, sipping his mate, he said it gave him time to reflect. “I learned that one can always start again,” he said.

"I want to become a doctor... because I want to save people."

"And when I do, I won't take any money from them."