From the NYT:
"When Mr. Bush, at one point, asked prime minister [Maliki] if he wanted to continue taking questions from reporters, the prime minister swiveled his head toward the president and shot Mr. Bush an incredulous look."
At least one of them is sane.
If you were gay and young in the 1980s, the pop music was a form of emancipation and revelation. Early PSBs, Erasure and Bronski Beat captured the breakthrough. Many of us as teens lived in small towns and yearned for the big city. And no music video spoke to our lives as powerfully as "Smalltown Boy." Even now, it chokes me up. The video is a record of the beginnings of a revolution. You can feel it coming.
Why has San Francisco been so successful in bringing down HIV transmission rates? That’s a good question for public health officials. Many now believe it is because of "sero-sorting." This is a technical term for sex between people of the same sero-status. So HIV-positive men stick to their own and vice-versa. In those contexts, using condoms is not as essential to curbing the epidemic. So check out this blog-post from Michael Petrelis, and one of the slides from a recent San Francisco Department of Public Health study:
You’ll notice an alarming increase in syphilis, but relatively stable rates of HIV transmission. The syphilis is not good news, obviously. But it suggests a silver lining: a lot of sex going on without condoms, yet without any spike in HIV rates. That’s almost certainly because most of the people who get syphilis already have HIV. This isn’t good for people with HIV (but syphilis can be treated effectively if detected). But the pattern does seem to be keeping HIV within the boundaries of the existing HIV-positive population. And that’s good news for the uninfected.
NRO’s Schmittian blogger, Mark Levin, attacks Chester Finn’s article … on NRO. More fights, please. They’re a sign of health.
A reader makes an obvious point:
Yes, but … surely the combination of a fairly (at least comparatively) flaming Pope with the harsh homophobic rhetoric issued over his signature must be not just saddening, but enraging. At least women don‚Äôt have to contend with blatant self-contradiction from Rome‚ÄîRome doesn‚Äôt prop up women in positions of power from which they oppress women, while it seems that many members of the Vatican bureaucracy spend their days condemning homosexuals before heading out to enjoy the delights of the ‚Äúhomosexual culture‚Äù of the city. So, yes, the fabulous pageantry is amusing, and pretty transparent to anyone with a modicum of gay-dar, but it dresses up a vicious and deadly culture of denial in the hierarchical Church. Didn‚Äôt Jesus have something to say about those who impose impossible burdens on others but don’t lift a finger to help?
Though I will attempt to learn from your lead, and at least smile at the show.
My rage continues. But it is humanly impossible, thank God, to feel it for ever. And so I try and make the best of it.
The game’s on.
People talk about the immorality of the government not funding experimental embryonic stem cell research to cure or treat certain diseases. And yet we already have a drug that requires no elaborate production, has no bad side-effects, that actually cures serious illness and helps the sick – and the federal government doesn’t just not fund this; it bans anyone from using it, and throws sick people in jail for it. This policy is despicable; it’s immoral; and it’s a scandal that marijuana is not available for any sick person it could help. Here’s riveting, intelligent first-person testimony from a medical marijuana user for 35 years. It saved his life. He testified in Michigan yesterday. How dare the government ban this substance?
Chester Finn calls it like it is – in National Review! The times they are a-changing. Money quote:
What’s gone wrong with the GOP? Let me start by quoting a friend who is both gay and conservative (yes, I know several such): “I’m for low taxes, strong defense and limited government. Why doesn’t the Republican party want me?”
There’s a two-part answer to that question and neither half is good news. The first is that today’s GOP doesn’t really want gays — and it yearns to supervise everybody else’s bedroom and reproductive behavior as well as (implicitly, at least) their relationship to God. The second is that Republicans are no longer really in favor of limited government. Besides having their own version of a nanny state, they want to spend and spend, start program after program, ladle out the pork, make deals with influence peddlers, and spin the revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street. Yes, they still pretend to favor low taxes but that’s an illusion; they pay for limitless government via huge deficits that will mean high taxes for my granddaughter.
Equality formally arrived today.
Josh nails it:
We’re now down to the Iraq people or the American people as the primary culprits for George W. Bush’s disaster.
I thought Republican denialism could not survive the last election and the undeniable facts on the ground in Iraq. Wrong. They’re still spinning – into the worst of all worlds.
The Dish 