ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

The Republicans and the Christian Right are leading America on a backward march into the Dark Ages --- and that is stepping on our dreams. As a culture, we have always been idealistic about progress and inspired by new discoveries to improve the lot of the human race. We're about invention and reinvention. It's one of our best qualities.

These people are telling us that those days are over. We have to depend upon brute force, superstition and ancient revelation. Science is dangerous. Art is frightening. Education must be strictly circumscribed so that children aren't exposed to ideas that might lead them astray.

It's a pinched, sour, ugly vision of America. For those who believe that their time on earth is all about waiting for The Bridegroom, perhaps that doesn't mean much. But for the rest of us, things like scientific breakthroughs or artistic achievement are inspirational, soaring emotional connections with our country and our fellow man. It makes us proud. The dark-ages conservatives want to take that away from us.

he federal government's "no sex without marriage" message isn't just for kids anymore.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it's a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.

"They've stepped over the line of common sense," said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that supports sex education. "To be preaching abstinence when 90% of people are having sex is in essence to lose touch with reality. It's an ideological campaign. It has nothing to do with public health."

Abstinence education programs, which have focused on preteens and teens, teach that abstaining from sex is the only effective or acceptable method to prevent pregnancy or disease. They give no instruction on birth control or safe sex.

The National Center for Health Statistics says well over 90% of adults ages 20-29 have had sexual intercourse.

But Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.

In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law (1). It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President's ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions.

Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122) (2), which was signed by the commander in chief on October 17th, 2006, in a private Oval Office ceremony, allows the President to declare a "public emergency" and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to "suppress public disorder."

This is totally wrong! We still have plenty of good jobs in this country. The problem is that women are taking too many of them. We just don't have enough decent jobs to go around and we probably never will. Gender relations are all about economics and most guys will always resent a highly successful women because she's obviously a women who he's not financially qualified to have a relationship with. This is why most female CEO's never marry and never have children. Better to give the job to a guy so he can support a wife and kids.

Either America voluntarily returns to Christianity and a 1950's lifestyle or else our society is sure to implode into either a wide-spread gangsta rap style anarchy or else it will be absorbed by a fundamentalist Muslim takeover.

Men will always dominate women. The $24K question is, which race of men would you ladies prefer to be dominated by?

One of George W. Bush's first acts as president—in fact, on his first day in office, signaling its importance to his evangelical supporters—was to restore a gag rule on aid to international organizations that counsel women on the subject of abortion.[29] Though abortion is legal in the US, the President was able by executive decree to proscribe its mere discussion in other countries if they are to receive money for their population problems. This was just the beginning of the imposition of moral limits on health measures abroad. Though the President was praised for devoting millions of dollars to preventing and treating AIDS in Africa, 30 percent of that money was earmarked for promoting sexual abstinence, and none of it was for condoms.[30] Religion trumped medical findings on what is effective.

Domestically, too, $170 million were lavished on promoting a policy of "abstinence-only" in the schools during the year 2005 alone. The Centers for Disease Control removed from its Web site the findings of a panel that abstinence-only programs do not work. A study of the abstinence programs being financed by the federal government showed how little medical knowledge mattered, as opposed to moral dictation. As Chris Mooney writes in The Republican War on Science:

In evaluating the curricula of these programs, the report found that the vast majority exaggerated the failure rates of condoms, spread false claims about abortion's health risks (including mental health problems) and perpetuated sexual stereotypes.... Perhaps most outrageously, one curriculum even claimed that sweat and tears could transfer the HIV virus. You might think that this would be a fringe claim even on the Right, but Senate majority leader Bill Frist, himself a physician, repeatedly refused to repudiate the notion of such transmission in an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos.[31]

The religious right had for years been spreading the unfounded claim that abortion causes breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute had correctly reported that no study has proved such a thing, but twenty-seven pro-life members of Congress pressured the NCI to remove that from its on-line fact sheet.

Another concern of the religious right was the morning-after abortion pill. Bush put one of the pill's known opponents, David Hager, on the board of the Food and Drug Administration that was to decide whether that pill could be sold without a prescription. Though Hager voted with the minority of three on the board against over-the-counter sales of the pill, as opposed to a majority of twenty-four, he raised such a clamor about the danger of teenaged girls using it, increasing the pressure from the religious right, that the FDA refused to implement the board's decision. Hager gave himself and God the credit for this, telling an audience at an evangelical college in Kentucky:

I argued it from a scientific perspective, and God took that information, and he used it through this minority report [sic] to influence the decision. You don't have to wave your Bible to have an effect as a Christian in the public arena. We serve the greatest Scientist. We serve the Creator of all life.[32]

God's war needs God's warriors, and the White House was ready to supply them. Kay Coles James had been the White House personnel scout for domestic offices. The equivalent director of personnel for the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority (headed by Catholic convert Paul Bremer) was the White House liaison to the Pentagon, James O'Beirne, a conservative Catholic married to National Revieweditor Kate O'Beirne. Those recruited to serve in the CPA were asked if they had voted for Bush, and what their views were on Roe v. Wade and capital punishment.[39] O'Beirne trolled the conservative foundations, Republican congressional staffs, and evangelical schools for his loyalist appointees. Relatives of prominent Republicans were appointed, and staffers from offices like that of Senator Rick Santorum. Right moral attitude was more important than competence.[40]

That was proved when the first director of Iraqi health services, Dr. Frederick Burkle, was dismissed. Burkle, a distinguished physician, was a specialist in disaster relief, with experience in Kosovo, Somalia, and Kurdish Iraq. His replacement, James Haverman, had run a Christian adoption agency meant to discourage women from having abortions. Haverman placed an early emphasis on preventing Iraqis from smoking, while ruined hospitals went untended. This may suggest the policy on appointments that put Michael Brown in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but the parallel is insufficiently harsh. Chris Matthews brought it up on his television show while interviewing the Washington Post reporter who had covered the CPA in Iraq, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who said, "There were a hundred Browns in Iraq."[41] But there were Bible study groups in the Green Zone.

There, but for the grace of God... was my first thought as I read the report. If the machine deemed "James H. 'Jim' Webb" too long, I could only thank my luck that I had firmly turned down all requests to run for the Senate from Virginia this year.

I scanned the Post quickly to see if a similar fate had attended George Allen, Webb's incumbent opponent in the race. A quick tally revealed that George Allen had more letters in his name than James Webb -- and even more, if you added recently-acquired middle names like 'Macaca' and 'Stock Option'.

Actually, Allen did pretty well in what might be termed Great Ballot Massacre of 2006. The report goes on to say George Allen is one of the few whose names appear in full, although his party affiliation has been cut off. Fortune finally appears to be shining on Allen. What a godsend, in a time when according to every poll, the presence of the letter 'R' after the candidate's name is tantamount to electoral cyanide!

The ExxonMobil Corporation reported today that it earned $10.49 billion in the third quarter, the second largest quarterly profit ever posted by a publicly traded American company. The largest on record was also reported by ExxonMobil — $10.71 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005.

High oil and natural-gas prices and strong demand for energy made the quarter a robust one for the company and for much of the industry. But the search for new supplies is growing more costly as the international oil giants push into ever remoter or more politically unstable territory, leading Royal Dutch/Shell to report a sharp fall in net income today.

ExxonMobil's results in the quarter were 26 percent better than in the same period in 2005, and translated into earnings of $1.77 a share, well above the consensus Wall Street forecast of $1.59 a share.

Oil companies -- at least private oil companies in the US and Europe -- do face a big future problem. It isn't oil at $60. It is that they aren't likely to be able to replace their existing oil fields -- oil fields that generally were developed with the expectation that oil's long-term price was well below $60 -- with comparably cheap fields.

Oil fields that were meant to turn a profit if oil averaged $20 will need to be replaced by oil fields that will only turn a profit is oil is well above $20. Hey, that's life. No country with oil should be selling their oil forward at that low a price right now.

But even these women seem to be tokens. Most of the time, they haven't covered horserace electoral politics, the Iraq War, weapons proliferation, the anti-immigration fence, or any of the other hardball national political topics that op-ed pages prioritize in this time of wars and midterms.

Recognize, first, where it originates: In the twisted, sad view of humanity as innately evil and sick. In the strange mentality that perceives nature -- God's creation itself -- as sinful. In the demented, pathological view of women as lesser humans. These are all ideas we often associate now with our barbaric past, but the truth is that they live on in innumerable ways, especially embedded as they are in popular culture. Why do you think, after all, that a two-hour display of sadism such as The Passion of the Christ could be such an immense crowd-pleaser? Why would a show like 24 draw such immense ratings? Why would slasher films constitute their own moneymaking genre?

The old Catholic misogyny has devolved in our times to the proto-fascist's murderous style of misogyny. Only in the 21st century, instead of being organized, it's just routinely celebrated, as it has been lately in so many American thrillers and horror films. Sure, the psychopaths in them are all scary. But they all have a psychosexual hatred of women. The concept of women as the cause of their psychopathism is embedded in all these entertainments. But when these entertainments are played as mainstream, then the fascist pathology they are about slips into the cultural bloodstream, where it joins, echoes, and nurtures the latent fascism already there, as well as that coming from other sources. Eventually, it announces itself in a thousand atrocities, large and small.

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The irrationalism that misogyny embodies, buried deep in our systems, simply can't be dealt with gently. The kind of men -- and women -- who will fall for the new misogyny aren't going to be impressed with compromises and halfway measures. The only thing they understand is "my way or the highway." So those are the options they should be given.

Whatever background knowledge a recruit possessed about rifles was sure to lead to mistakes when learning the M-14. Unfamiliarity with rifles may have given some (like myself) an advantage in this regard. Nevertheless, any recruit from either kind of background was prone on occasion to incorrectly refer to his rifle as "a gun." Such verbal mistakes like this one were quite common and drew attention to the perpetrator. As punishment, a recruit would likely stand at attention outdoors (sometimes clad only in his undergarments or even naked) and repeat over and over "This is my rifle, this is my gun. This is for shooting, this is for fun."

In a report on how recent campaigns advertisements are "getting ugly," ABC News, unable to point to a single instance of "nasty" attacks from Democratic candidates or their supporters, suggested it is only a matter of time before "the left" begins to "unleash its garbage as well." ABC News offered no evidence to back up its allegation that Democrats might soon resort to distasteful, negative advertising.

KLEIN: You know, I just can't get over Rush Limbaugh. Boy—you know, people who live in glass pillboxes shouldn't throw spitballs, right? I mean, this is the guy—the guy least in the country who should be criticizing an ad like this, given his own history of addiction.

And I got to say that, you know, for the vice president of the United States to legitimize a guy like Rush Limbaugh is every bit as bad as all those Democrats who went out to Las Vegas to kiss the ring of the Daily Kos and the left-wing bloggers. I mean, can't we—can't we just stop this crap?

Sheik Alhilali's comments were delivered in a Ramadan sermon to 500 worshippers in Sydney last month, a newspaper report said.

He blamed women who "sway suggestively" and who wore makeup and no hijab (Islamic scarf) for sexual attacks.

"If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat," he said.

"The uncovered meat is the problem.

"If she was in her room, in her home, in her hajib[sic?], no problem would have occurred."

Sheik Alhilali's comments have drawn strong criticism from some federal politicians and the federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward, who said he should be sacked and deported.

"It is incitement to a crime. Young Muslim men who now rape women can cite this in court, can quote this man ... their leader in court," she told the Nine Network.
"It's time we stopped just saying he should apologise. It is time the Islamic community did more then say they were horrified. I think it is time he left."

Gail Collins stepped down earlier this month as editor of the New York Times opinion pages. If you're concerned about the lack of women in American political discourse, this seems like bad news: Women are losing their representative in what is, arguably, the most powerful post in opinion journalism. What's more, Collins' successor is the consummate male insider, current deputy editor Andrew Rosenthal, son of late Times executive editor A.M. Rosenthal. The generally sorry state of women in the realm of elite opining is evidenced by the fact that when Collins returns to her old columnist's post after a six-month book leave, it will be the first time since her 2001 promotion that the nation's pre-eminent op-ed page will have more than one regular female contributor.

Across the board, women continue to account for only one-quarter of syndicated columnists. Editors say up to 80 percent of submissions to newspaper op-ed pages are penned by men, and the gender disparity worsens when the topic is politics. At four major liberal political magazines (The American Prospect, The Nation, The New Republic, and the Washington Monthly), a cursory survey of mastheads shows that only about one in every five editorial staffers are women, and just a single top editor, The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel.

So although Collins' tenure has been eulogized in the pages of her own newspaper and elsewhere as a feminist watershed, when it comes to increasing the gender diversity in serious American political journalism, Collins' ascension up the masthead amounted to mere symbolism. The two empty columnist spots that opened up during her five year tenure were filled by men, David Brooks and John Tierney. To be sure, it's worth lauding Collins' fine work in arraying a stable of truly diverse and interesting Times Select contributors, from the graphic artist Maira Kalman to the contrarian scholar Stanley Fish -- in fact, it was through the guest columns and blogs behind the Times Select subscription wall that Collins truly did bring more women into the fold, including Slate legal expert Dalia Lithwick; the class-conscious Barabara Ehrenreich; Perfect Madness author Judith Warner; and Pulitzer Prize winning biographer Stacy Schiff. But even these women seem to be tokens. Most of the time, they haven't covered horserace electoral politics, the Iraq War, weapons proliferation, the anti-immigration fence, or any of the other hardball national political topics that op-ed pages prioritize in this time of wars and midterms. (Lithwick is an important exception. Someone offer that woman a higher profile job, pronto.)

Most of the time, they haven't covered horserace electoral politics, the Iraq War, weapons proliferation, the anti-immigration fence, or any of the other hardball national political topics that op-ed pages prioritize in this time of wars and midterms.

But then how can we account for Collins' failure to recruit more serious female political writers? Here was a female editor with all the necessary power and the inclination to do so. But as she explained to Sullivan, her hands were tied because she received so few op-ed submissions from women. "The pool is weighted toward men. … Within that, the number of people who are capable of writing 700 words twice a week and making it sound fresh and interesting … that's a very tiny pool."

Some poor countries, such as Mauritania and Haiti, improved their record in a global press freedom index this year, while France, the United States and Japan slipped further down the scale of 168 countries rated, the group Reporters Without Borders said yesterday.

The news media advocacy organization said the most repressive countries in terms of journalistic freedom -- such as North Korea, Cuba, Burma and China -- made no advances at all.

The organization's fifth annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index tracks actions against news media through the end of September. The group noted its concern over the declining rankings of some Western democracies as well as the persistence of other countries in imposing harsh punishments on media that criticize political leaders.

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Although it ranked 17th on the first list, published in 2002, the United States now stands at 53, having fallen nine places since last year.

"Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of 'national security' to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his 'war on terrorism,' " the group said.

"The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 U.S. states, refuse to recognize the media's right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism," the group said.

Lucie Morillon, the organization's Washington representative, said the index is based on responses to 50 questions about press freedom asked of journalists, free press organizations, researchers, human rights activists and others.