Dominion

I know that I'm overusing the word "scary" when it comes to the Religious Right, but I just can't come up with a better word for it. Harpers Magazine sends a reporter to a Christian media convention.

What the disparate sects of this movement, known as Dominionism, share is an obsession with political power. A decades-long refusal to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over the earth itself. Dominionists preach that Jesus has called them to build the kingdom of God in the here and now, whereas previously it was thought that we would have to wait for it. America becomes, in this militant biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan.

One the other hand, maybe they're overextending themselves, says Joel Achenbach

The question the Republicans have to ask themselves is: Is this 1798, the height of Federalist power, and a prelude to total political oblivion? (Is the Patriot Act the second coming of the Alien and Sedition Acts? And so on...)

Hey, it might not be right but it makes me feel better.



Other odds & ends gathered over the long weekend:

The other war

The 20-minute tabloids

The real agenda

Great wisdom from Teresa Nielsen Hayden on the real goals of the far right:

These guys are going after mechanisms of social control. For instance, if they genuinely wanted to reduce the incidence of abortion and unwanted teen pregnancy, they’d support birth control education, which they don’t. If on the other hand you want to make women less uppity, fear of unplanned pregnancy is a great way to do it.

I really, really hate being forced to come to conclusions like this one, but I've been heading towards it for a good while. Why else do you work towards restrictions on abortion and on birth control? So you can keep the little women barefoot and pregnant. It sounds crazy on the face of it, but honestly, it's the only thing that makes sense.

More filibuster aftermath

PBS' "Now" discusses the filibuster compromise

(My god, these ultraconservative people just get scarier and scarier.)

Well, you know, the interesting thing is that the founding of our country, there were state churches. That's what it's all about, in a country where the people get to rule, and if you, you know, you're in a state you don't like then you get to move to another state.

...there shouldn't be any compromises by the party that won.

-- Jan LaRue of "Concerned Women for America"

And go Molly!

There are those of us who are Christians who believe that the politics of the right is actually un-Christian. It's not a hard position to hold.

--Molly Ivins

Expletive not deleted

Tom DeLay is an *uber*FuckWad.

-- pure_doxyk's LiveJournal
(and in case you haven't already seen it, here's the reason for the comment)

What a social security deal could look like (via TPM)

Think Hilary's not electable? Think again.

From the Christian Science Monitor, the new centrists in the Senate


The Wall St. Journal has a good (and, of course, not publicly available) piece on the difficulties of counting blogs

If you read press coverage about blogs, you might conclude that just about all Americans are reading a blog. But then you wouldn't have time to read the press coverage, because if surveys are to be believed, you're probably busy creating your own blog.

The numbers of the blogosphere range widely. Are there 10 million blogs, or 32 million?

But not all blogs are actively maintained.

The total number of active blogs -- those with a post in the past 30 days -- was 3.5 million on May 1, according to BlogPulse. That was up just 30% from last September, even as the site found that the total number of blogs increased nearly 200% over that time. That suggests there's a lot of dead air out there.

(They don't even mention people like me, who have more than one actively-maintained one!)

One more thing

I happened to be watching CNN last night, and Billy Graham's daughter was on, going on about the value of life and how embryonic cells are a potential life and all that stuff, and Anderson Cooper asked her the death penalty question. It's the first time I remember seeing anybody ask one of the right-wingers how they reconcile their "culture of life" with support for the death penalty. And she sounded sort of thrown, which may be why her answer made so little sense. "It's in the Bible," she said. Something about how god made man in his image and a murderer was sullying god's image. OK, but that still doesn't really explain how that justifies murdering the murderer. (Wouldn't the executioner then be sullying god's image as well, or does he get a free pass?) I guess "it's in the bible" is supposed to negate the need for your explanation to make any sense.

More bits & pieces

From Erica Jong (yeah, I know, but read it anyway): a little piece about Bush and embryonic cells

AI takes on Guantanamo

From the Houston Chronicle: Owen happy to be out of limbo


And:
On the origins of "meh"

Bird flu

More (well-justified) doom and gloom:

World Is Unprepared For an Avian-Flu Pandemic

World experts in influenza, writing in the journal Nature, warn that despite stepped-up disease monitoring and research, the world is far from prepared to cope with a possible pandemic of avian flu that is mutating in Southeast Asia.

Experts worry that avian flu, which is highly lethal to humans but usually requires contact with sick birds, could mutate to a form easily transmitted from person to person.

Pandemic flu could trigger an economic crisis, according to Michael Osterholm, head of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Dr. Osterholm noted that the 2003 outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, snarled air traffic, paralyzed cities and cost billions -- even though its toll, 8,000 sick and 800 dead, was relatively light.

Pandemic flu could "change the world overnight...reducing or even ending foreign travel and trade," he said.

Frozen trade and travel could worsen shortages of vaccines, antiviral drugs, antibiotics for secondary bacterial infections, ventilators, and vital basics like food and water. Temporary hospitals, contingency staffing and allocation plans for scarce supplies are needed to survive 12 to 36 months of a pandemic.

Writers in Nature tried to estimate how many people would be sickened or killed by a powerful, pandemic avian virus. Albert Osterhaus at the National Influenza Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, warned that it could make 20% of the world's 6.5 billion people ill, putting 30 million in the hospital and killing 7.5 million.

Dr. Osterholm put the potential toll even higher, arguing that a pandemic could rival the 1918 flu, which he says killed at least 50 million people. A boom in people and poultry living in together in Asia has given the virus room to grow, he said. When a milder pandemic struck in 1968, China had 790 million people and 12.3 million poultry. Today, it has 1.3 billion and 13 billion respectively.

In a normal year, garden-variety flu and complications such as pneumonia kill an estimated 1.5 million people world-wide.

Dr. Osterholm said a vaccine against a pandemic strain won't be available for six months after its outbreak because flu vaccines use an old production technology based on incubation in eggs. And once a vaccine was ready, it would still reach only 14% of the world, due to inadequate manufacturing capacity. He urged acceleration of new cell-based technology that can lead to quicker production of vaccines.

Although an experimental avian flu vaccine by Sanofi-Aventis Group is now in safety tests, Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned, "Unless we improve our capacity to produce such countermeasures, we may experience again the devastation of past pandemics."

The World Health Organization last week reported that avian flu strains circulating in Vietnam show signs of evolving toward greater transmissibility from human to human. More human clusters are growing in northern Vietnam and lasting longer, suggesting possible human spread. The virus is also attacking people ranging more widely in age, and is showing signs of resistance to the best available antiviral drug against it, Roche Group PLC's Tamiflu (oseltamivir).

Robert Webster of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis blasted failures to control avian flu at its source in poultry and wild birds -- failures that some fear have let the virus become entrenched.

Dr. Osterhaus said a lack of international harmony in detection and control programs has concealed the true death rate. So far, calculating from hospitalized cases, scientists estimate a mortality rate of roughly 60%. But since the total number cases -- including milder ones -- isn't known, the real death rate remains uncertain.

Dr. Osterhaus also called for a global task force to set research, policy and control strategies. He puts the cost at $1.5 million a year -- a sum dwarfed by the $1.35 billion cost so far of the animal outbreaks alone in the Netherlands, Thailand, and Vietnam, and even more so by the potential toll of a human pandemic.

Miscellany

The GOP's judicial agenda.

No evolution disclaimers required in Cobb County. Via Wonkette.

Jeff Jarvis on media's (possible) new role.

Guantanamo Bay

We knew bad things were going on at Guantanamo. There hasn't been much - if any - doubt about that. But it hasn't been in the media all that much up until the whole Newsweek fiasco, and I wonder what the average American thinks about it - if they actually know anything about it at all. If a person didn't know anything about it until they saw the riots on the news last week, and then they saw the retraction, would that settle it in their minds?

But the fact that Newsweek retracted its story doesn't mean there haven't been incidents involving the Koran.

Linkage

The $1.5M bus stop

Why Frist doesn't want a compromise

From NYT, no less: Just how gay is the right?

Things that amuse me

A "reign of terror" in Massachusetts. (Warning: gratuitous religion.)

The difference between Newsweek and the President.



Things that don't amuse me so much:

It's all the workers' fault, says BP. (I don't know, maybe it is, but that feels awfully much like the easy answer to me.)

I don't know what to think about the whole Real ID controversy. I don't have too much objection to a "national ID card" in theory. (We basically have them already, anyway, they're called Social Security cards and they're certainly not very secure as is.) I definitely don't like the way they're going about getting it passed, though.

Here's a good piece on why Americans don't want the filibuster tinkered with.

Sponsor some schoolchildren!

In case you haven't seen this already, in lieu of her annual book drive, Pamie is raising money to equip schoolchildren in India who lost everything in the tsunami. It costs $4.61 to buy a child a uniform and backpack and so forth - ridiculously cheap.

Oh, and in another "in case you missed it" item, Firefox has a security fix out and you can download it here. (And if you're still using Internet Explorer, for god's sake download it too!)

Tom parties down

The Huffington Post has an amusing account of that dinner they had for Tom DeLay. (As far as the Huffington Post itself, I'm reserving judgment. There's some interesting stuff in there, but it's kind of a big mess right now. Part of the problem is that there's just too many people blogging, I think. But it's the first week, and eventually it's bound to settle down.)

Telemarketers & comments

My, my. The things telemarketers will do, even when they call themselves Christians. Wonkette reports on some faith-based telemarketing.


Also, as I did in my quilt weblog, I've changed my settings to allow anonymous comments. (It took a while for it to occur to me that not everybody is registered with Blogger, or wants to be.) So talk, already!

Baseball, Christians, etc.

Here's something interesting: the Christian Science Monitor looks at how well private retirement accounts have worked in Galveston. (The answer: not as well as Bush made it sound, unsurprisingly.)


And I haven't linked to Mark Morford in a while, and that's partly because I was behind on reading his columns, but here is a good one: Where are the good Christians?

They are the decent Christians. They are the calm, morally progressive, compassionate, open-hearted Jesus-loving folk who don't really give a damn for archaic church dogma or pious noise or sanctimonious candlelight vigils, for repressing women or bashing gays or slamming Islam and, in fact, turned to Christianity precisely because they believe these things are abhorrent and wrong and, well, anti-Christian.

And why do we not hear more from these people?

It's because they are not organized. They are not a club. They do not have a unified attack agenda. They do not have pamphlets or advertising budgets or congressional lobbyists or the complaint line of every TV network and program except Fox News and "The 700 Club" on speed dial.

In baseball news, my secret boyfriend Jeff Bagwell finally went on the disabled list - the same day, coincidentally, that Roger Clemens became the winningest living pitcher in baseball.

The 12-19 Houston Astros have an old roster, and two of the clubs' veterans are heading in very different directions.

In his 15th season, Jeff Bagwell's body appears to be breaking down. The first baseman has played his entire career in Houston and hit 449 home runs, but his on-base-plus-slugging percentage (OPS, in the geekspeak we love) has declined each year since 1999. Now he's missed six straight games because of debilitating shoulder pain. "He's forced to confront the possibility that this is the beginning of the end," Richard Justice writes in the Houston Chronicle, adding, "His arthritic right shoulder is dying a day at a time. He hasn't been able to throw for three years. Now he's having trouble swinging a bat. There's no indication it's going to get significantly better."

Then there's Mr. Bagwell's 42-year-old teammate, Roger Clemens. Mr. Clemens became the winningest living pitcher last night with his 330th win, passing the retired Steve Carlton, and is now 2-1 with a microscopic 1.10 ERA in seven starts this season. South Florida Sun-Sentinel columnist Mike Berardino calls Mr. Clemens a "true living legend" and points out that his win total may never be passed in his lifetime.

(From the Wall Street Journal's "Daily Fix")

It's Bagwell's first trip to the DL in over 5 years, I believe. I just hope it's not his last.

Those meddling kids

Some DeLay comedy today - courtesy of Topfive.com. (And I was going to just link to this but I can't find it online, so you get the whole thing.)

The Top 7 People Tom Delay Has Yet to Blame

7> Newt Gingrich: It was his sanctimonious, holier-than-thou
attitude that got these ethics wars going in the first place.

6> University philosophy departments: They're teaching classes in
ethics that fail to recognize the recent advances made in
Congress.

5> Terri Schiavo: Obviously an insufficient distraction.

4> Will Rogers: Never met me.

3> James Madison: For drafting the Constitution with an
independent judiciary.

2> Machiavelli: That damn book made it seem so easy.

and the Number 1 Person Tom Delay Has Yet to Blame...

1> Scooby Doo: Meddling kids....

(This comes from their weekly political list, which you can subscribe to here.)


Huh. Gay men's brains respond differently from those of heterosexual males when exposed to a sexual stimulus.

...the findings clearly show a biological involvement in sexual orientation.

Those people who say that you can change your sexual orientation if you just try hard enough aren't going to like that.


Apparently this is not a new article, but I hadn't seen it: Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair on voting irregularities.

Monday again

Will Bolton's nomination make it out of committee? Lugar says it will.

Would you take your children to see Ann Coulter? I sure wouldn't. (Well, you know, if I had any.)

And coastal residents are not prepared for hurricanes, a poll finds. I know that I don't do much to prepare for hurricanes, but that's because I have no illusions of being safe during one, not where I live. I do stock up on tuna fish and water and so forth, just in case, but if one really came anywhere near us? We're outta here. Anyway, I certainly didn't know that other people were so complacent about it.

More on pandemics

Here's the full text of the pandemic article, for anybody interested.

A couple of things

I bet the "anti-piracy" people aren't too happy about this.

George Will doesn't think too much of this "if you're not with us, you're a bad American" thing that the Religious Right's been throwing around, either.

I assume that everybody noticed that yesterday was 5-5-05? It occurred to me that next year there will be a 6-6-06, which means that the religious nuts will probably go into a frenzy of millennial proportions. (Note, incidentally, that for all my ranting about the Religious Right, I don't consider that they generally fall into the category of full-fledged nuts. I imagine that true religious nuts come in all political stripes, actually, although in my experience they do tend towards the conservative.)

Pandemiology

There's a really scary article in the New England Journal of Medicine this week about preparing for a pandemic. (You may not be able to see that link - I think I have a subscription through work. Maybe I will post the full text somewhere later - if I do I'll put up a link - but meanwhile here's some excerpts.)

An influenza pandemic has always been a great global infectious-disease threat. There have been 10 pandemics of influenza A in the past 300 years. A recent analysis showed that the pandemic of 1918 and 1919 killed 50 million to 100 million people, and although its severity is often considered anomalous, the pandemic of 1830 through 1832 was similarly severe — it simply occurred when the world's population was smaller. Today, with a world population of 6.5 billion — more than three times that in 1918 — even a relatively "mild" pandemic could kill many millions of people.

Influenza experts recognize the inevitability of another pandemic. When will it begin? Will it be caused by H5N1, the avian influenza virus strain currently circulating in Asia? Will its effect rival that of 1918 or be more muted, as was the case in the pandemics of 1957 and 1968? Nobody knows.

So how can we prepare? One key step is to rapidly ramp up research related to the production of an effective vaccine.....urgent needs include basic research on the ecology and biology of influenza viruses, studies of the epidemiologic role of various animal and bird species, and work on early interventions and risk assessment. Equally urgent is the development of cell-culture technology for production of vaccine that can replace our egg-based manufacturing process. Today, making the 300 million doses of influenza vaccine needed annually worldwide requires more than 350 million chicken eggs and six or more months; a cell-culture approach may produce much higher antigen yields and be faster. After such a process was developed, we would also need assured industrial capacity to produce sufficient vaccine for the world's population during the earliest days of an emerging pandemic.

Dead on the ground

(I was going to call this "Wednesday link-o-rama" or something like that, but now I have CSNY's "Ohio" stuck in my head, so I thought I would pass the earworm along instead.)

I didn't know today was the 35th anniversary of Kent State. (You know, it's funny, I was 10 when that happened, and we watched the news every night, but I don't even remember paying too much attention that day. It's weird how things go right over your head when you're a kid.)


Those pesky Chinese textile imports are causing problems again, even though western nations were given 10 years to prepare for the worldwide lifting of quotas.

“Why are some politicians now not recognising that fact?” [a WTO official] asked. "I can see two explanations: either their memory is too short or they know that perfectly well and pretend to be surprised, which is frankly a sign of hypocrisy."

While I hate to pass up the opportunity to call a politician a hypocrite, I'm actually guessing it's explanation #1: they forgot all about it.


I bet you won't be seeing this guy on the nightly news. (That via Hannah at TUS, who knows him.)


Divvying up the profits from Fahrenheit 9/11. (Although this link was found via Beth at TUS, which means that most of my readers have probably already seen it.) (Also, somewhere in that article is the old and not very surprising info that Moore is doing a sequel - but somehow I had missed seeing that before.)



Some interesting links from Bankrate:
--On the legalities of living together.
--When you call your boss crazy, you might be right.
--And you know those keytags where you can pay by just waving it at the gas pump? Soon you may just be able to wave your cell phone instead.


I was going to link to a piece that Col gave me the link to yesterday about a very brave sign-language interpreter, but since Col already wrote about it today, I'll just link to him instead. But if you haven't already seen it, it's worth checking out.


And finally, on life in the bunker with Hitler. Actually, I didn't know anybody came out of there alive.

Texas politics is national

Campaign finance reform is apparently dead in the Texas legislature. What a surprise.

Some good stuff from Burnt Orange Report on the Democrats AND Republicans lining up to run against DeLay in 2006. And in other DeLay-related news, out of the 20 who voted against reinstating the ethics rules? 7 of them were Texans.

I bet there's some blue-state people out there who are really, really sick of all these Texans in the news all the damn time. I could do without these particular Texans myself.