Month: January 2006

An atheist reader defends fundamentalist pharmacists:

"I do think if my fellow atheists would back off a little bit and let the fundies have a few meaningless symbols ("merry christmas", 10 commandments posted, creche in the town square) they would go back to sleep and give us the Republican party back since most of them are cheating, aborting, brokeback mountaining, drugging and generally sinning as fast as the rest of us and they can just go back to it.

Now my point: In "Pharmacists and Fundamentalists" you say "we once allowed…".  Note that during this "once" none of those drugs actually existed. I actually have some sympathy for the fundies on this one, since so many of the new miracle and lifestyle drugs that science comes up with now focus on things that are considered sins, but just weren’t an issue on the radar in the past. It has to be overwhelming and confusing for them and again, I think just demonstrates all the trends are against them. You get kind of desparate and loud when you are flailing about trying to stop the tide."

"Hamas’s victory may be the best thing that has happened to Israel in years," – Richard Posner, on his blog.

Another hack gets caught with his fingers in the corporate cookie jar. How can Fox News retain a writer who opines about smoking and public health and gets paid $92,500 by Philip Morris for consulting fees, without that payment being disclosed? Just don’t expect a segment on the O’Reilly show. Milloy’s own website is here. Ask him yourself.

There’s the spin, and there’s the reality.

A new phase in the fundamentalist war on science may be about to begin. I can see the point about not forcing doctors or pharmacists to violate their consciences. It’s a good one. But simply prescribing
pills does not seem to me to be moral complicity with what someone might do with them. And the principle could be very far-reaching. Could Opus Dei members refuse to prescribe contraceptive pills? Could scientologists refuse to prescribe anti-depression medications? Could a fundamentalist refuse Viagra to a gay man or a single woman? And so on. There was a time when religious faith was not so extreme that it could not allow for a separate sphere for professional life – for dealing with people outside a particular tradition or faith. We once allowed for strong religious faith but also for a neutral but respectful public square. What fundamentalism does is demand the complete submission of all parts of life – professional, civic, political – to the demands of dogma. This is just the latest repercussion. It won’t be the last.

Here’s a National Review passage that brought me up short:

"Despite the pathetic weakness of the Church of England and the supposedly Christian state, strong, instinctive religious feeling still survives in England. The candle that Latimer and Ridley lit is still burning."

Latimer and Ridley lit the candle of "instinctive religious feeling" in England? So the previous 1500 years of Christianity – brutally attacked by the Protestant Wahhabists of their day – counts for nothing? Religious faith, as historians now largely concur, was thriving in England before the Reformation – and took a long time to recover.

Signing statements – and Bush’s innovative use of them – are important, as I insisted a while back. Dahlia Lithwick gives an excellent summary of the issues here. She also writes one of the cleanest paragraphs on how Bush’s interpretation of unchecked executive power led to the endorsement of torture. Bush’s signing statements are instructions to his own employees on how to obey or disobey a law. By telling the armed services that the McCain Amendment is optional, Bush is repeating the mistakes that led to such widespread torture and abuse in the first place:

Such mixed messages about torture allowed young, untrained guards to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Where the rules for treatment of detainees had once been clear, the efforts of Jay Bybee and Alberto Gonzales and others in the White House telegraphed that some agencies could now follow different rules for torture; that not all torture really is torture; that sometimes the president may actually want you to torture; and that all this is largely for you to sort out on the ground. The McCain anti-torture amendment was an effort to create an absolutely clean distinction once more. Bush’s signing statement obliterates that distinction and opens the door to yet more ambiguity and abuse.

And the future victims of such Bush-endorsed torture? They won’t have a day in court, under President Bush’s view of the law. Which means that‚Äîlike all the mushrooming executive war powers‚Äîthis ambiguous new torture regime will be secret and may never be tested in a courtroom at all.

This is how tyranny gets a foothold: in secret, and because we don’t care enough to nip it in the bud.

The movement got a huge boost in the U.S. from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, according to Simon Winchester’s new account of the disaster. Pat Robertson, Ray Nagin, Franklin Graham: they have predecessors. Lots of ’em.

Some good news, for a change, from Iraq. Money quote:

Locals say that the combination of stability, reconstruction and investment has led to better education, health care and general quality of life. "Najaf shows a degree of revitalisation never seen before," said Bassam Darwish, a local shopkeeper whose shop, destroyed during the fighting in 2004, was rebuilt by the US military. "We have power, clean water and good health services, which were suppressed during the Saddam years."

Until recently, certain districts of Najaf received less than three hours of electricity daily. Today, however, most homes enjoy more than 20 hours of power every day.

Interestingly, the place is largely free of U.S. troops, who are only allowed in the city for reconstruction projects. Couldn’t we direct more reconstruction funds to areas which are doing better?

More about the item below. Here’s a Josh Marshall 2004 item with the following quote:

RUSSERT: Were you favor of the war in Vietnam?
BUSH: I supported my government. I did. And would have gone had my unit been called up, by the way.
RUSSERT: But you didn’t volunteer or enlist to go.
BUSH: No, I didn’t. You’re right.

The paper-work shows that Bush checked off the box that says "do not volunteer" when he signed up for the National Guard. Maybe he changed his mind. Ask Fred.