New Christian fascism and hate

We’re seeing an ugly form of intolerance creeping into the western states, carried with slavic evangelicals who hate homosexuals.

A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has “made an injection” of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. “In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin,” Kusakin said.

That’s a mild example of their rhetoric. Under the cloak of their odious religious beliefs, these holy thugs are on a hate-crusade against gays, and they’ve already killed at least one person, Satender Singh, for the ‘crime’ of not being heterosexual enough.

The Box Turtle Bulletin and Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion have more on these rather nasty immigrants … and their American enablers.

Not another one!

Another Republican has been caught playing footsie in a bathroom stall. And he’s got such a perfect Republican name — Joey DiFatta — and such a perfect Republican look — pale and plump — that I hate to see him go.

There’s only one thing we can do. We have to make toe-tapping illegal. It’s obviously the root cause of a lot of vice and criminal activity.

I don’t even want to think about the horrible things Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire must have done. And Shirley Temple…!

She’s slowly moving up in my estimation

Hillary Clinton, that is. She’s made some concrete statements about what she’d do for science as president: take steps to depoliticize science agencies, lift limits on stem cell research, invest in alternative energy and global warming research, subordinate manned space missions to earth science research (not entirely happy news there, but at least she’s being realisitic), and she’s pro-evolution! (That last is utterly shocking, I know.) She’s also going to push to have congress restore the Office of Technology Assessment.

Of course, she also threw in a sop to the deluded: “I believe that our founders had faith in reason and they also had faith in God, and one of our gifts from God is the ability to reason.” I will excuse her useless pieties as long as they don’t interfere with her practical efforts to support good science. I’ll also rub the noses of the trolls in that every time they whine about coupling evolution and godlessness, since our politicians seem to have no qualms about coupling evolution and superstition, so it will be rhetorically useful for my purposes.

Now, let’s see the other Democratic candidates follow suit and be as forthright in stating their support for science. That doesn’t mean they should compete with her to outdo the stupid god and faith part of her statement — I could well imagine that some might — but that they should outline their specific science proposals and state without reservation their support for basic science. And now that the media has broken the ice with Clinton, let’s see all of the other candidates probed on these same issues.

It’s a safe bet that I won’t be voting for McCain

Just watch the little suck-up grovel for the Religious Right. It isn’t pretty.

McCain: I think the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is, ‘Will this person carry on in the Judeo Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?’

Whenever I see these pious testimonies to “Judeo-Christian values”, I always wonder…how many Jewish founding fathers were there? How many Jewish presidents have we had? I have no objection to electing a Jewish president, but it always seems to me that these claims that toss in the word “Judeo” are made solely to put up a pretense of inclusiveness — they really mean “conservative Christian,” and they include an invisible, unnamed token Jew to hide their real narrowness.

Truly gagworthy

Young America’s Foundation is giving away a poster of the ‘heroes’ of the Conservative Movement — the usual roster of dunderheads shipped in to the photo shoot by way of the short bus — for nothing but the cost of shipping and handling. I guess they were having a tough time finding anyone who wanted to hang a picture of Dinesh, Michelle, Novakula, Ann, etc. anywhere in their home. But in case you want one for a dart board or something, just follow the link.

Myself, I don’t need one. I already have many copies of pictures of my conservative heroes. They’re all blank, white, and hanging from a roll in my bathroom.

Countrywide? I’ve heard of them…

Alright, I want you people to school me real quick. I’ve been reading these stories about the Countrywide mortgage company getting mean and nasty with foreclosures, and the Countrywide CEO leeching huge personal profits from the company — Krugman even compares Countrywide to Enron.

Now normally, financial news just flies by my bleary eyes and is ignored, but the name in this case perked me up: the mortgage on my house is through Countrywide. Do I have to worry?

I wouldn’t think so. We got our mortgage at a good, low fixed rate some years ago, we haven’t had any problems keeping up on the payments (the cost of living in Morris is wonderfully low), and we don’t foresee any reason to trouble a lender in the future. But I have noticed an annoying uptick in dunning phone calls from Countrywide “offering” to renegotiate the mortgage (we neither need nor want to), and now all this chatter has me losing confidence in them.

I know there are economics wizards and smart legal minds among the readers here. Reassure me.

Larry Craig’s real crime

I wrote of my fondness for salmon the other day, and now I learn of a strange and rather satisfying coincidence: Larry Craig was an enemy of the salmon.

The surprising fall of Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, removes a longtime obstacle to efforts by Democrats and environmentalists to promote salmon recovery on Northwest rivers.

Craig, who was removed from leadership posts on the Senate Appropriations and Energy committees after a sex scandal, is known as one the most powerful voices in Congress on behalf of the timber and power industries. Environmentalists have fought him for years on issues from endangered salmon to public land grazing.

I don’t think he should have resigned over stupid sexual behavior, but that he was one of those rats who fought to destroy the environment…that ought to be a hanging offense. It’s not an entirely happy story, though. I find myself a bit peeved that in this country you can lose your job for waving your hand under a toilet stall divider, but accepting money from industry to allow them to poison the land and circumvent reasonable ecological restrictions…pish. That’s nothin’.

Where could we possibly find $4 million?

Hmmm. Estimates of the cost of the war in Iraq range from $4.4 to 7.1 billion per month. If I assume about $5 billion, it looks like we’re throwing away about $7 million per hour in that effort; so it looks like a little bit more than a half-hours worth of bloody war costs us $4 million. So let’s just stop for about 40 minutes, OK?

What was the point of that calculation? The government is threatening to shut down the Arecibo Observatory unless they can cough up $4 million dollars for its operating budget for the next three years. Wow.

The National Science Foundation, which has long funded the dish, has told the Cornell University-operated facility that it will have to close if it cannot find outside sources for half of its already reduced $8 million budget in the next three years — an ultimatum that has sent ripples of despair through the scientific community.

Shall we trade three years of science for less than an hour’s worth of war? That sounds like a no-brainer to me. The observatory doesn’t even kill anybody in normal operation. Or is that considered a strike against it?