None So Blind As He Who Will Not See

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The dramatic declines in teenage pregnancy rates noted in the United States between 1995 and 2002 were largely due to improved contraceptive use, not to abstinence, a new study shows.

"The current emphasis of U.S. domestic and global policies, which stress abstinence-only sex education to the exclusion of accurate information on contraception, is misguided," warn doctors in a report just released online by the American Journal of Public Health.

Dr. John S. Santelli from Columbia University, New York, and colleagues examined the relative contribution of declining sexual activity and improved contraceptive use to the recent decline in pregnancy rates among U.S. women between the ages of 15 to 19 years. The data were derived from interviews with nearly 1400 women in 1995 and 1150 in 2002.

The investigators estimate that the likelihood of pregnancy in this age group declined 34 percent between 1995 and 2002, and that 86 percent of the decline in pregnancy risk was attributable to improved use of contraception. Reduced sexual activity explained only 14 percent of the decline in teen pregnancy.

So Many Gods, So Little Thought

From Sam Harris.

“Atheist” is a term that should not even exist. We do not, after all, have a name for a person who does not believe in Zeus or Thor. In fact, we are all “atheists” with respect to Zeus and Thor and the thousands of other dead gods that now lie upon the scrapheap of mythology. A politician who seriously invokes Poseidon in a campaign speech will have thereby announced the end of his political career. Why is this so? Did someone around the time of Constantine discover that the pagan gods do not actually exist, while the biblical God does? Of course not. There are thousands of gods that were once worshipped with absolute conviction by men and women like ourselves, and yet we all now agree that they are rightly dead. An “atheist” is simply someone who thinks that the God of Abraham should be buried with the rest of these imaginary friends. I am quite sure that we need only use words like “reason,” “common sense,” “evidence,” and “intellectual honesty” to do the job. So many gods have passed into oblivion, and yet the sky-god of Abraham demands fresh sacrifices. Wars are still waged, crimes committed, and science undone out of deference to an invisible being who is believed to have created the entire cosmos, fine-tuned the constants of nature, blanketed the earth with 20,000 distinct species of grasshopper, and yet still remains so provincial a creature as to concern himself with what consenting adults do for pleasure in the privacy of their bedrooms. Incompatible beliefs about this God long ago shattered our world into separate moral communities—Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc.—and these divisions remain a continuous source of human violence. And yet, while the religious divisions in our world are self-evident, many people still imagine that religious conflict is always caused by a lack of education, by poverty, or by politics. Yet the September 11th hijackers were college-educated, middle-class, and had no discernible experience of political oppression. They did, however, spend a remarkable amount of time at their local mosques talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise. How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not merely a matter of education, poverty, or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is that in the year 2006 a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise. Western secularists, liberals, and moderates have been very slow to understand this. The cause of their confusion is simple: They don’t know what it is like to really believe in God. The United States now stands alone in the developed world as a country that conducts its national discourse under the shadow of religious literalism. Eighty-three percent of the U.S. population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead; 53% believe that the universe is 6,000 years old. This is embarrassing. Add to this comedy of false certainties the fact that 44% of Americans are confident that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years and you will glimpse the terrible liability of this sort of thinking. Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe. Some of them can actually get Karl Rove on the phone whenever they want. While Muslim extremists now fly planes into our buildings, saw the heads off journalists and aid-workers, and riot by the tens of thousands over cartoons, several recent polls reveal that atheists are now the most reviled minority in the United States. A majority of Americans say they would refuse to vote for an atheist even if he were a “well-qualified candidate” from their own political party. Atheism, therefore, is a perfect impediment to holding elected office in this country (while being a woman, black, Muslim, Jewish, or gay is not). Most Americans also say that of all the unsavory alternatives on offer, they would be least likely to allow their child to marry an atheist. These declarations of prejudice might be enough to make some atheists angry. But they are not what makes me angry. As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population. The plain truth is this: There is no good reason to believe in a personal God; there is no good reason to believe that the Bible, the Koran, or any other book was dictated by an omniscient being; we do not, in any important sense, get our morality from religion; the Bible and the Koran are not, even remotely, the best sources of guidance we have for living in the 21st century; and the belief in God and in the divine provenance of scripture is getting a lot of people killed unnecessarily. Against these plain truths religious people have erected a grotesque edifice of myths, obfuscations, half-truths, and wishful thinking.

Is He Gone Yet?

Judge strikes down Bush on terror groups.
A federal judge struck down President Bush's authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying his post-Sept. 11 executive order was unconstitutionally vague, according to a ruling released Tuesday.

Do you think all the knee-jerk conservatives are waiting for a day when we are struck by another terrorist attack so they can carry-on in their pathological attraction to such a President who continues in his attempts to dismantle our civil rights? Let's hear it for checks and balances.

There He Goes Again

Only the myopic President Bush could still contend that Iraq is not in civil war. Either he is that obtuse or as usual he is unable to tell the truth.

Reflection on Religion

From the notable Nobel laureate in physics Dr. Stephen Weinberg. "Religion is like a crazy old aunt. She tells lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on, and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was beautiful once. When she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Here We Go Again

White House brushes off CIA draft on Iran: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House dismissed a classified CIA draft assessment that found no conclusive evidence of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program, The New Yorker magazine reported. The article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said the CIA's analysis was based on technical intelligence collected by satellites and on other evidence like measurements of the radioactivity of water samples.

"The CIA found no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program running parallel to the civilian operations that Iran has declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency according to the article. "A current senior intelligence official confirmed the existence of the CIA analysis, and told me that the White House had been hostile to it," it said.
The United States has accused Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons under the guise of a civilian energy program.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino did not respond directly to Hersh's assertions, but said the article was another "error-filled piece" in a "series of inaccuracy-riddled articles about the Bush administration." "The White House is not going to dignify the work of an author who has viciously degraded our troops, and whose articles consistently rely on outright falsehoods to justify his own radical views," she said on Monday.

The article, in the current issue of the magazine, discussed how Vice President
Dick Cheney believed the Bush administration would deal with Iran if the Republicans lost control of Congress -- as they did in the November 7 election. "If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran," Hersh wrote, citing an unidentified source familiar with the discussion.
________________________________________________________________

Who are these people in the White House? I believe even a cursory reading of Ms. Perino's response from the White House reveals a level of paranoia usually seen in mental hospitals.

Republican Civil War

Forget the civil war in Iraq, we have our own civil war going on in the Republican party. In the last couple of days the Republicans have been able to do to themselves what the Democrats have been trying to do since 1994. This was predicted before the election. Not the midterm elections of 2006 but that of the Presidential election of 2004. Below is an excerpt from a New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind. I hope you have time to read the entire article.

Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush
By RON SUSKIND Published: October 17, 2004

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''

Kissinger: Iraq Military Win Impossible

The man who once allegedly contemplated dropping nuclear bombs on Vietnam even sees the writing on the wall. When will President Bush?

By TARIQ PANJA, Associated Press Writer

Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday. Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq's regional neighbors — including Iran if progress is to be made in the region. "If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible," he told the British Broadcasting Corp.

But Kissinger, an architect of the Vietnam war who has advised President Bush about Iraq, warned against a rapid withdrawal of coalition troops, saying it could destabilize Iraq's neighbors and cause a long-lasting conflict. "A dramatic collapse of Iraq — whatever we think about how the situation was created — would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region," he said.
Kissinger, whose views have been sought by the Iraqi Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker III, called for an international conference bringing together the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Iraq's neighbors — including Iran — and regional powers like India and Pakistan to work out a way forward for the region.

"I think we have to redefine the course, but I don't think that the alternative is between military victory, as defined previously, or total withdrawal," he said.

Only in Bush's Christian America

Government censured on family planning policies


By Maggie Fox

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A congressional report has criticized the Bush administration for failing to check if federally funded abstinence-only programs actually work to curb teen sex.

Advocacy groups joined the criticism, and also attacked the appointment of a top family planning official who they say opposes any use of contraceptives. The advocates said both developments showed the government of President George W. Bush was determined to impose a deeply conservative Christian agenda onto federal programs.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said the Health and Human Services Department was funding controversial abstinence-only programs without checking to see whether they reduced teen pregnancy rates. The GAO report focused on three abstinence programs that received $158 million in federal funding last year. "Efforts by HHS and states to assess the scientific accuracy of materials used in abstinence-until-marriage education programs have been limited," the GAO report reads.

Several studies have suggested that abstinence-only education does not reduce teen pregnancy rates. And the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds high rates of teen sex even after several years of government-funded abstinence education programs. "In 2005, 46.8 percent of high school students reported that they have ever had sexual intercourse, with 14.3 percent of students reporting that they had had sexual intercourse with four or more persons," the GAO report reads.

HHS said it does review whether its programs work.

WOW

99.5 Percent Like a Neanderthal

New York Times Editorial

Scientists are tantalizingly close to learning just what genetic changes distinguish modern humans from Neanderthals, who went extinct some 30,000 years ago. The issue is important to experts who want to understand evolution, but also to people who deem themselves a cut above these early cousins, whose name we have turned into an insult.

Two research teams announced this week that they have assembled parts of a Neanderthal man’s genetic code from a fossil bone and teased out some preliminary information. Two experts called it the most significant advance in the field since the first Neanderthal fossils were discovered 150 years ago.

As it turns out, the genome of this particular Neanderthal — who lived some 38,000 years ago — is more than 99.5 percent identical to the genome of modern humans. The great similarity is yet more proof that Charles Darwin had it right when he viewed all life as descended from common ancestry whose genes, we now know, were passed down and modified through the ages. The new studies deduce that modern humans and Neanderthals were descended from a common forebear but parted on separate evolutionary paths at least 450,000 years ago.

Think Tank Will Promote Thinking

Advocates Want Science, Not Faith, at Core of Public Policy

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff WriterWednesday, November 15, 2006

Concerned that the voice of science and secularism is growing ever fainter in the White House, on Capitol Hill and in culture, a group of prominent scientists and advocates of strict church-state separation yesterday announced formation of a Washington think tank designed to promote "rationalism" as the basis of public policy.
The brainchild of Paul Kurtz, founder of the Center for Inquiry-Transnational, the small public policy office will lobby and sometimes litigate on behalf of science-based decision making and against religion in government affairs.
"This disdain for science is aggravated by the excessive influence of religious doctrine on our public policies," the declaration says. "We cannot hope to convince those in other countries of the dangers of religious fundamentalism when religious fundamentalists influence our policies at home."
While the speakers at the National Press Club unveiling were highly critical of Bush administration policies regarding stem cell research, global warming, abstinence-only sex education and the teaching of "intelligent design," they said that their group was nonpartisan and that many Democrats were hostile to keeping religion out of public policy.
"Unfortunately, not only do too many well-meaning people base their conceptions of the universe on ancient books -- such as the Bible and the Koran -- rather than scientific inquiry, but politicians of all parties encourage and abet this scientific ignorance," reads the declaration, which was signed by, among others, three Nobel Prize winners.

Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) Chosen as New Head of RNC

It was Martinez's office that sent around the hideous memo about Terri Schiavo in which they bragged what a great opportunity Schiavo's near-death status was for the Republican party.

But even more interesting is that a top staffer on Martinez's Senate campaign, Kirk Fordham, was also the former chief of staff to child sex predator ex-congressman Mark Foley.

The Press Toe The Line On The Iraq War

I know this is out of Great Britain but it does address the unsustainable myth of "The Right" that the press is biased against them.

Vicky Frost Monday November 13, 2006 The Guardian

New research disputes the government's claim that media reports on the conflict in Iraq are unfairly biased against the coalition.

And I Thought Republicans Were the Fiscally Responsible Ones

President Bush's approval reaches a new low

President Bush’s job approval rating has fallen to just 31 percent, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll. Bill Clinton’s lowest rating during his presidency was 36 percent. Just 24 approve of outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s job performance; and 31 percent approve of Vice President Dick Cheney’s. Worst of all, most Americans are writing off the rest of Bush’s presidency; two-thirds (66 percent) believe he will be unable to get much done.

What People are Saying About President Bush

Richard Perle: “In the administration that I served [Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among disputatious departments: ‘The president makes the decision.’ [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] as part of the family.”

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: “Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.”

Kenneth Adelman: “The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There’s no seriousness here, these are not serious people."

Greenhouse emissions grow more rapidly

By Fiona Harvey in London
Published: November 10 2006, Financial Times

Greenhouse gas emissions have been increasing four times as fast as in the 1990s, giving added urgency to international talks on climate change.
Research carried out for Unesco found on Friday that the rate of increase in emissions from burning fossil fuels between 2000 and 2005 was four times that between 1990 and 2000.

The accelerated rise is a result of rapid growth in developing economies such as China, India and Brazil, as well as the failure of developed countries such as the US to mitigate their greenhouse gas output.

Iraqi Official: 150,000 Civilians Dead

The United Nations estimates about 100 Iraqis die in violence each day, while Iraq's health minister on Thursday estimated up to 150,000 civilians had been killed in the war - about three times previously accepted estimates of 45,000-50,000.
AP

Top 10 Ways to Tell if You are a Christian

Stole this from OZ on Huffington Post:

10 - You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours.
9 - You feel insulted and "dehumanized" when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the biblical claim that we were created from DIRT.
8 - You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a triune god.
7 - Your face turns purple when you hear of the "atrocities" attributed to Allah, but you don't even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in "Exodus" and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in "Joshua" including women, children, and trees!
6 - You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans, and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the holy spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life and then ascended into the sky.
5 - You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (few billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old.
4 - You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs -- though excluding those in all rival sects - will spend Eternity in an infinite Hell of Suffering. And yet consider your religion the most "tolerant" and "loving."
3 - While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in "tongues" may be all the evidence you need to "prove" christianity.
2 - You define 0.01% as a "high success rate" when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of god.
1 - You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the bible, christianity, and church history - but still call yourself a christian

Bipartisanship my A_ _

White House Sends Bolton Nomination Back to Senate
Instead of quietly allowing Ambassador Bolton to slip away with the beginning of a new Congress the Bush Administration reveals its penchant for polarization. I hope this is not a preview of what we can expect next year.

Is The Nightmare Almost Over?

War...is always an evil

"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children."--Jimmy Carter

Iraq war proponents decry administration

A leading conservative proponent of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq Richard Perle, who chaired a committee of Pentagon policy advisers early in the Bush administration, said had he seen at the start of the war in 2003 where it would go, he probably would not have advocated an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan.
AP

Mrs. Betty Bowers' Words of Christian Concern for Ted Haggard's Delicious Disgrace

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Delighted Snickers:
I suspect that this will be a rather uncomfortable weekend at the Ted Haggard tax-free mansion. You see, Reverend Haggard is a vociferous spokesperson against gay marriage and, until yesterday, his wife probably had no idea she was actually in one.
Oh, I can hear some of you gals used to being around florists and Governors of New Jersey -- and Texas -- cackling. You think I'm selling the woman's intuition for pushily obvious queenery short. But if Haggard's unblinking congregation could sit and listen to such a liturgical Liberace week after week and not realize they were in the presence of someone who makes Barry Manilow in a full-length mink look butch, they really need to recalibrate their ability to detect prescription-strength doses of flamboyance. Because if you can't tell that Haggard is not just gay, but marabou mules wearing gay, you must have bought your refurbished Gaydar at the same kiosk Tom Cruise got his E-meter.
But before everyone piles on with protestations of shock and awe, allow me to pause for praise where it is due for this man Harper’s claimed to hold more sway over the political direction of evangelicalism than any pastor in America. It is quite clear that Ted Haggard is a man with admirable devotion to the Christian/GOP cause. After all, it must take enormous willpower for a meth-crazed sodomite to remove a penis from his mouth long enough to denounce homosexuality.
Haggard famously claimed that "the only difference between me and George Bush is that Bush drives a Ford and I drive a Chevy." And from what I can tell, this may be the only honest thing the man has said. Let's compare, shall we?
Against gay marriage?
Check.
Fondness for sniffing illegal white powder?
Check.
Association with gay male prostitutes?
Jeff Gannon meet Mike Jones.
But I guess it is no more difficult to be a homosexual who purports to dislike homosexuality than it is to be a strike-first warmonger who purports to follow the Prince of Peace. Indeed, if only lying were a car, instead of a way of approaching the world, maybe one of them would have finally traded it in for something else by now.
But Mr. Haggard shows no more knack for honesty than he does for picking discrete prostitutes. As an evangelical preacher, he is clearly too used to getting up in front of people who believe anything he says to lie convincingly to those still fettered by thought. Indeed, his lying skills are so uproariously amateurish that, frankly, I think he needs some lessons from a pro like Dick Cheney, a man who can say, "I'm not currently saying this" and mean it.
For example, Haggard claims he visited the man he previously had never met simply to get a "massage." The chaste, innocent purpose of this endeavor must explain why he used a pseudonym. (As Marge Davis asked, "Well what is it that they are massaging is what I want to know!").
Haggard is also claiming that he purchased a "first time customers only" introductory sample of crystal meth (meth dealers are notorious for their promotions). But threw it away. This must be our GOP version of the implausibility of "not inhaling," but, in typical Republican fashion, seems rather more blatantly wasteful. Did he not think of the consequences of this lie? Why, poor Nicole Richie is probably combing the side of every road out of Denver for that tiny baggie as I type this. But the talent-free waif searches in vain. Anyone who listens to Haggard's insistent voice messages can tell that this was someone jonesing for a fix, not a mildly curious man given to impromptu middle-age hard-drug experimentation like another 50 year-old might finally try a Mojito. Listen to the recordings: we're talking "Lindsay Lohan down to her last kilo" desperate here.
It's become almost an axiom of American unctuousness that the more preening the public scold, the more inevitable the public scald. A public paradigm usually has a private paramour. Once pompous glutton William Bennett set himself up as an arbitrator of our virtues, it was only a matter of time before the arbitrariness of his own virtues was laid out like a losing twosome in blackjack.
While this type of cynical scorn of one's own words might strike the naïve as galling, there has always been a disconnect between private men and their public protestations. But for the miracle of vote tampering and activist Supreme Court judges, evangelicals would have been as essential to Mr. Bush's election as they like to assume. And every pandering appearance near a cross or coded reference to scripture stuck like a clumsy, phosphorescent Post-It into a State of the Union address reminds us that the President is keenly aware of this perceived debt. But David Kuo, in his book Tempting Fate, tells us that such overt supplication is done with patronizing perfunctoriness. Evangelicals are actually mocked behind their backs at the White House.
The White House might have found this revelation embarrassing if people like Haggard didn't routinely prove that Evangelicals don't take anything they say seriously either. Jim Bakker got caught with his secretary while she still had her own breasts. Jimmy Swaggart got caught in a motel on a urine-stained mattress littered with unsavory streetwalkers. And Paul Crouch had to pay off his gay lover. (Mr. Crouch, appears to have been forgiven, if only because even those most strongly against homosexuality understand the urge to look for sexual outlets that don't involve Jan Crouch being naked.)
Mark Foley campaigned against legalizing gay marriage. Almost inevitably, we then find out that this was probably only because he would never tie the knot with someone old enough to legally marry. Haggard, perhaps in response to how Foley's crude, after-the-fact attempts to link his unacceptable homosexual indiscretion to a perfectly acceptable addiction, was rather smart to have a sex scandal prepackaged with an even better addiction. Well played!
Not to be outdone, Republican candidate for Florida Governor, Attorney General Charlie Crist, much like Ted Haggard, has not allowed his actual participation in homosexuality to get in the way of speaking out against the idea of homosexuality. And, frankly, I'm not sure what more readily impugns his boyfriend Bruce Carlton Jordan's character: being a convicted thief or working for that crazy sex kitten Katherine Harris. But what can you expect from the state that gave us not only the odious Miss Harris but also aquamarine appliances?
While Jesus was appallingly lax in neglecting to mention His disgust with homosexuality, He did take Republicans (for some reason, called Pharisees back then) to task for being hypocrites. As any modern Republican can tell you, Jesus, of course, had it all backwards. Homosexuality is to be despised. And lying (even about despising homosexuality) it just a quirk, something you tell people to get their money or vote. Ask Ted Haggard's best buddy James Dobson.

Tsk, Tsk

The leader of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals, a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage, resigned Thursday after being accused of paying for sex with a man in monthly trysts over the past three years. The Rev. Ted Haggard, a married father of five who has been called one of the most influential evangelical Christians in the nation, denied the allegations. His accuser refused to share voice mails that he said backed up his claim.