A "Christian" Natural History

Read this. It gives new meaning to the phrase "old time religion."

Bush Suicide Bombs His Own Party

Gary Kamiya analyzes the newest Pew poll, and if I were a Republican, I'd be afraid. Or maybe I'd just start another war on false pretenses and drape everything in jingoistic hyper-patriotic language and curtail civil liberties and politicize the Justice Department hoping to extend a hegemony that was founded on divisive rhetoric and a pseudo-fascist State of Perpetual Alarm against an invisible enemy. Maybe.

Just a taste of the changing American political climate:

The most explosive statistic in the survey shows a mass exodus from the GOP -- a defection that can only be blamed on Bush and the Iraq war. In 2002, the number of people who identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning was the same as those who identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning: 43 percent. But today, 50 percent of the public identify as Democrats or leaning that way, while only 35 percent identify as Republicans or Republican-leaning. In other words, in just five years Democrats have gone from being tied with the Republicans to holding a 15 percent lead.

You can (and should) read the whole article here.

Quote of the Day

"When you look beyond the wars initiated by the United States these past few years, and consider the suffering of people in Sudan, Rwanda, in Sierra Leone, in Cambodia, in Algeria, in Palestine, you find that neither our government nor the media pay much attention. Millions of people, many of them children, have died, or endured mutilation from land mines and cluster bombs. This is silent terrorism, but the United States has not declared war on that."

Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

Egyptian Blogger Gets 3 Year Prison Sentence

This is frightening. Even in George Bush's America, I remain thankful for the freedoms we do have:

An Egyptian appeals court on Monday confirmed a four-year jail sentence against a blogger convicted of insulting religion and defaming the president, his lawyer said.

The court in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria rejected the appeal by 22-year-old Abdel-Karim Suleiman who was sentenced last month, lawyer Gamal Eid told AFP.

"The verdict was not handed down on the basis of the law," said Eid, who is also the head of Arabic Network for Human Rights Information. "It is a religious verdict similar to those of the Inquisition."

Suleiman, who blogs under the name Karim Amer, was sentenced to three years in prison for insulting religion and a year for defaming President Hosni Mubarak after posting an entry on his blog lashing out at Cairo's Al-Azhar University - Sunni Islam's highest seat of learning.

"I say to Al-Azhar and its university and its professors and preachers who stand against anyone who thinks differently to them: 'You are destined for the rubbish bin of history, where you will find no one to cry for you, and your regime will end like others have," he wrote.

That's all it took for a three year sentence. You can read the whole article here.

'Liberal Media Bias' and 2008

Why is it that the fallacious narrative of liberal media bias persists to this day, even when the overwhelming evidence points to the opposite? A recent story in the Washington Post detailed the purported nastiness between the Obama and Hillary camps, focusing on Obama's vapid comment that Hillary is 'interesting" and Edwards is"kind of good-looking". This is the kind of vitriolic rhetoric that deserves an article? Meanwhile, a story that I haven't seen yet in the MSM is unearthed by Michael Scherer at Salon:

Unsigned e-mails have been sent to voters in South Carolina touting "dark
suspicions" about Mitt Romney's Mormon faith. Anonymous letters have shown up in mailboxes in the state calling Mike Huckabee a "Huckster" and Romney a "Say Anything" politician. A man-size dolphin, without a name or a face, appeared at a conservative conference in Washington, scoring inches of newsprint by mocking Romney. And at least one campaign has made a young woman cry. The tensions and the vitriol have appeared far earlier in the presidential cycle than in past elections, and have so far affected Republicans more than Democrats. The anonymous attacks peaked at last week's Spartanburg County Republican straw poll, an entirely unscientific sampling of party activists from South Carolina's textile country. The poll itself was little more than a gimmick to recruit precinct workers. But the proceedings became so chaotic and confrontational that Rick Beltram, the county's GOP chair,
is still fuming with frustration. "I actually told three campaigns that I have
lost your name on my Rolodex," Beltram said in a phone interview Tuesday. "Some
of the national campaigns took this whole straw poll operation way too
seriously."

So Democrats' politicking somehow shows itself as newsworthy, while Republicans are actually tearing each other to shreds, spreading--with particular irony for a party defined by the religiosity of its members--religious intolerance? GOP operatives in South Carolina have already tried to discredit Romney because of his Mormon background:

One e-mail, sent to party activists under the name "Martin W.," told voters
to "trust your instincts" about the Mormon faith because "Mitt Romney has a
family secret he doesn't want you to know." The secret, it turned out, was an
Associated Press story that described the polygamous relationships of Romney's
great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather.

Right. This is an issue of great import when choosing a presidential candidate? I am not surprised at the degraded level of discourse in the GOP primary. What I am livid about is how major media sources ignore stories that highlight the ignominy and bile in the Republican primary, but highlight whatever scraps of antagonism Hillary and Obama provide. Liberal media bias, indeed.