Stop it

Its a condom. Not a nuclear missile. Its a fucking condom.

NYT (emphasis mine):

September 11, 2007, 3:40 pm



Rise Seen in H.I.V. Infections Among Young Men


By Sewell Chan



H.I.V. infection rates have risen substantially among young New York
City men who have sex with men, indicating a shift in the population
most vulnerable now to contracting AIDS, city health officials said
today.

Over a five-year period, the number of new H.I.V. diagnoses in men
under the age of 30 who have sex with other men increased by 33
percent, to 499 in 2006 from 374 in 2001. During the same period, the
infection rate for men over 30 decreased by 22 percent.

The group with the fastest-growing rates of H.I.V. infection was
made up of men between the ages of 13 and 19, for whom H.I.V. diagnoses
doubled during between 2001 and 2006, according to preliminary data
from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, offered a blunt assessment of the data.

“We’re headed in the wrong direction,” he said in a statement.
“Unless young men reduce the number of partners they have, and protect
themselves and their partners by using condoms more consistently, we
will face another wave of suffering and death from H.I.V. and AIDS.”

Dr. Frieden’s statement included statements of support from leaders of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, Gay Men of African Descent and the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center.

The data revealed significant racial and ethnic disparities in H.I.V. infection rates.

In 2006, among all men who had sex with men, blacks received twice
as many H.I.V. diagnoses as whites (232 versus 101), and Hispanics
reported 55 percent more than whites (157 versus 101). The disparity
was even more striking among adolescents; more than 90 percent of the
men under age 20 who had sex with men under and were diagnosed with
H.I.V. in 2006 were black or Hispanic (81 out of 87).

Every borough except Staten Island saw, between 2001 and 2006, an
H.I.V. increase among men under 30 who have sex with other men. The
largest increases occurred in Queens (49 percent) and Manhattan (57
percent). The increase in Manhattan was concentrated in East and
Central Harlem (up 115 percent, from 26 to 56 cases), and in the
Chelsea and Clinton areas (up 56 percent, from 25 to 39 cases).

Good lord. This is just not acceptable. This vector could be stopped or at least greatly slowed if there was just a bit more responsibility and a bit less dumbassery.

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I know I know

A top adviser to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney appears to be behind the launch of a new Web site attacking GOP presidential rival Fred D. Thompson during his first week on the trail.The
site, PhoneyFred.org, painted an unflattering picture of Thompson,
dubbing the former TV star and senator Fancy Fred, Five O'clock Fred,
Flip-Flop Fred, McCain Fred, Moron Fred, Playboy Fred, Pro-Choice Fred,
Son-of-a-Fred and Trial Lawyer Fred. Shortly after a Washington Post reporter made inquiries about the site to the Romney campaign, it was taken down.Before
it vanished, the front page of the Web site featured a picture of
Thompson depicted in a frilly outfit more befitting a Gilbert and
Sullivan production than a presidential candidate.Under the
heading "Playboy Fred," the site asked the provocative question: "Once
a Pro-Choice Skirt Chaser, Now Standard Bearer of the Religious Right?"Nowhere
on the site was any indication of who was responsible for it. But a
series of inquiries led to "Under the Power Lines," the Web site of the
political consulting firm of J. Warren Tompkins, Romney's lead
consultant in South Carolina. Tompkins did not return phone calls seeking comment.Late yesterday afternoon, a spokesman for Thompson called on Romney to fire Tompkins."There
is no room in our party for this kind of smut. As the top executive of
his own campaign, Governor Romney should take full responsibility for
this type of high-tech gutter politics and issue an immediate apology,"
said spokesman Todd Harris. "If this is true, Governor Romney should
exercise some of his much-touted executive acumen and immediately
terminate anyone related to this outrage."A spokesman for
Romney's campaign said he will look into questions about the
anti-Thompson site. "Our campaign is focused on the issues and ideas
that are of paramount concern to voters," said Kevin Madden. "The Web site we are focused on is MittRomney.com."The Web site was hosted by a company called BlueHost, based in Orem, Utah.
Until late yesterday afternoon, a search at that company's site for
PhoneyFred.org returned the following message: "Domain phoneyfred.org
is still attached to your politicalnetroots.com account as Addon." The
address http://www.politicalnetroots.com
brings up the home page for Under the Power Lines, which lists Tompkins
as "partner, consultant," along with Terry Sullivan and Wesley Donehue.The PhoneyFred site, Tompkins's own Web site and many of his other clients' sites are all hosted on the same BlueHost server.In 2000, it was in South Carolina that Sen. John McCain
(R-Ariz.) ran into an organized effort to sully his character and
spread rumors, including that he had once fathered an illegitimate
black child. At the time, candidate George W. Bush was desperate to stop a surging McCain, who was coming off a stunning upset in the New Hampshire
primary. Tompkins was the chief strategist for Bush in South Carolina
at the time, though Bush campaign officials have always denied that the
campaign was responsible for the attacks.Staff writer Rob Pegararo contributed to this report.

Why do the Republicans get away with this crap every fucking cycle? Because they generally do it to OTHER REPUBLICANS, who end up losing and having to take it or, if they do have political clout like McCain did at the time and after the 2000 election, shut up for the good of the party. I would hope Thompson is aware of how little he has to lose in this election and how much he has to gain. He should slam Romney at the next debate. He should slam him constantly until the Romney campaign says sorry and fires Tompkins. Ratfucking indeed.

You have to keep up on someone, publicly, until he fixes his mistakes and apologizes. American politics today is all about waiting until something goes away because a news cycle eats it up. As much as I want to blame the journalists, or rather the bullshit newsreaders at 24-hour cable channels, the politicians totally take the easy route with this stuff. Thompson should harp on until he gets results. You can even spin it as what he will do in Washington: fight until he gets results. How's that for combating the "lazy" image he's been stuck with?

Oh, and a very late note: Alberto Gonzalez's resignation. My theory is that is was timed to coincide with the Daily Show's hiatus week.

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Religious Freedom Vs. Terrorism

Ever since it happened, I've gone back in my mind to a debate round I had a couple years back. It included me explaining to my opponents and my judge that the reason for the separation of church and state in the First Amendment was not just to protect the government from religion. It was also to protect religion from the government. Roger Williams founded Rhode Island as a colony of complete religious freedom. Church of England, Catholic, whatever deviant Puritanism the next guy wanted was allowed in that tiny speck of land. (Pardon the lack of citation past "AP US History class, 11th grade".) Whenever this section of the BoR comes up, I remember the round. The opponents refused to believe me. They were wrong.

So now the NYTimes tells us that books on faith are being removed from prisons, because of fears of terrorism.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

Let's ignore the blatant and horribly bigoted conflation of Islam and terrorism. Its so audacious that these two sentences are enough to explicitly condemn that level of hatred and b.s.

Instead, lets enjoy a Bush administration that spent its first term so keen on faith based initiatives, an administration that then failed to give any money to any non-Christian groups in its first years, is now removing religion from prisons. Taking away faith and all its positive attributes from men and women who need those beliefs more than most is like claiming that those faith based programs could work too well. If its all or nothing in prisons, I think it should be all or nothing with other programs.

Please also note that our prisons already have safe guards:

The effort is unnecessary, the chaplain said, because chaplains routinely reject any materials that incite violence or disparage, and donated materials already had to be approved by prison officials. Prisoners can buy religious books, he added, but few have much money to spend.

This is more filtering than where our public money goes when the Faith Based Initiative people decide how to allocate cash to churches.

And for a last note, lets enjoy the politics influencing the religious options of people. The lists in question are the permitted books:

The lists have not been made public by the bureau, but were made available to The Times by a critic of the bureau’s project. In some cases, the lists belie their authors’ preferences. For example, more than 80 of the 120 titles on the list for Judaism are from the same Orthodox publishing house. A Catholic scholar and an evangelical Christian scholar who looked over some of the lists were baffled at the selections.

Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, an evangelical school, looked over lists for “Other Christian” and “General Spirituality.”

“There are some well-chosen things in here,” Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.” The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.

The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame (who edited “The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism,” which did make the list), said the Catholic list had some glaring omissions, few spiritual classics and many authors he had never heard of.

“I would be completely sympathetic with Catholic chaplains in federal prisons if they’re complaining that this list is inhibiting,” he said, “because I know they have useful books that are not on this list.”

Heaven forfend some prisoner, fighting addiction to alcohol or a drug or something else, tries to learn more about where the serenity prayer comes from. Niebuhr: most likely theologian to inspire violence ever.

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