According to a new Zogby poll involving 1,213 people across the U.S., three fourths of Americans "can correctly identify two of Show White's seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court Justices." Asked what planet Superman was from, 60 percent named the fictional planet Krypton, while only…
In the September, 2006 Harper's "Notebook," Lewis H. Lapham begins with this quote by Rainer Werner Fassbinder: In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism. Is there money to be made in Iraq? Lapham, who has wielded a sharp…
Billy Graham, now 87, recently gave an extended interview to Newsweek reporter Jon Meacham. The interview contained a few surprises that brightened my day. First, Graham indicated that Christians need not be Bible literalists: The new interviews with NEWSWEEK, however, reveal a more intriguing figure than either his followers or his critics…
I’d like to do another riff on the science and religion thing, so bear with me. I largely don’t bother going on about this issue anymore, except in those instances where there may be an audience of undecideds.
One of the things about Americans in small groups is that by and large we will listen and we will weigh what we hear before making up our minds. It comes down to the slickness of the rhetoric or the overwhelming honesty of an argument. That’s on us, we who bother to make such arguments. It helps to remember that we do this for those who haven’t made up their minds yet.
Evolution vs Creation Science. The arguments are settled, the science is in, there’s no real dispute except on the Culture War Front. Evangelicals simply don’t like the program. When the truth destroys a cherished myth, print the myth. An old newspaper adage from the 19th Century.
We’ve been having this crap now for a couple of decades at least, in Kansas back in the 90s, and the issue is well-enough known and the stakes thoroughly understood by enough folks on both sides that anyone moving to circumvent the Supreme Court decision (Edwards vs Aguillard, 1987) is doing so with the knowledge that they are being duplicitous. They have decided that, as they cannot win their case on the basis of fact and reason, and since they believe they are right and everyone who disagrees with them is wrong, any tactic …
President Bush and Republican leaders in Washington have failed America by not stopping importation of heroin from Afghanistan which has become a “narco-state” in the aftermath of the toppling of the Taliban regime which had supported Osama bin Laden and global terror through sales of drugs. A resurgent Taliban uses drug sales as an instrument of terror and finances international terrorism. The warlords which grow and process the drugs are supported by the US in our continuing efforts to prop up the post-Taliban government of Hamid Karzi. The flow of more potent Afghan drugs into the US has caused carnage among users, some as young as 11.
In 2001, the Taliban had banned opium production in Afghanistan to increase the price of its stocks which it apparently used to supply funds to Osama bin Laden and other terrorists for their attacks upon the United States and others. Opium production in Afghanistan fell to just 74 metric tons. After the overthrow of the Taliban, opium production capacity skyrocketed to 1,278 metric tons in 2002, according to DEA statistics. Production more than doubled in 2003, and then nearly doubled again in the next year according to James Risen, in his book “State of War.” Risen also writes that “by 2004, Afghanistan was producing 87 percent of the world’s opium supply. In late 2004, the CIA estimated that 206,000 hectares were under poppy cultivation and that the new crop would generate $7 billion worth of heroin.”
Congress and the Bush administration were aware …