Signposts to Sanity

An occasional feature where your lovin' Granny points you at somebody else's really good stuff



Today it would be a good idea to visit Radical Christian Right Preaches Liberal Evil for a look at the goals and causes of the End of Days preachers.

Members of the radical Christian End Times movement are being taught to believe that America is ruled by evil, clandestine organizations disguised as liberal groups. As a result, the fearful are hoping for the end.***The plagues of alcoholism, divorce, drug abuse, poverty and domestic violence make the internal life here as depressing as the external one. And those gathering today in this church wait for the final, welcome relief of the purgative of violence, the vast, bloody cleansing that will lift them up into the heavens and leave the world they despise -- the one that was devastated by corporatism -- to be racked by plagues and flood and fire until it and all those whom they blame for the debacle of their lives are consumed and destroyed by God. It is a theology of despair. And for many, it can't happen soon enough.

And for a look into the misogyny of some members of the press, go to Strong Women Are Scaring the Pants Off the Right

Why Carlson looks at the junior senator from New York and immediately fears for the safety of his testicles might be something he and his therapist should explore, but he's hardly alone***John Kerry won women's votes by 3 points (51 to 48), while George Bush won men's votes by 11 points (55 to 44). But it is the fact that the latter margin is so much larger than the former that is worth noting. It is men, and white men in particular, who are so easily persuaded by campaigns like the one Bush ran, which can be boiled down to, "I'm a manly man, and my opponent is a sissy." Bush beat Kerry among white men by an astounding 25 points.***One can't avoid noticing that as a group, conservative media figures are not exactly secure in their masculinity. Forever promoting war when they avoided military service themselves and doubling over to protect their tender parts every time a strong woman appears on their television screens, it's no wonder they are so impressed by politicians who may not be real men but know how to present a convincing facsimile of manliness.

Once again, go visit Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science for an excellent article on the purported link between the "fat hormone" and colon cancer.

Wow, so there must be a lot of research confirming that obesity increases the risk for colon cancer.

Not so fast....it was the same study reported again! *** It would have taken a mere minute to confirm the National Cancer Institute’s statistics on cancer rates. With incidences of obesity rising, if obesity caused the development of colorectal cancer, then we should see correspondingly rising rates of colorectal cancer.***the incidences of colon and rectal cancers (even despite increased surveillance) have been dropping among both men and women. That alone suggests the opposite of what these recent stories have been trying to convince us of!

A simple search of the medical literature reveals that cancer registries in the United States have continued to find that “obesity is associated with lower incidence rates of colorectal cancer,” as researchers at the Kansas Cancer Registry reported in the journal

For a look at the power of the lie, go to Sweet Little Lies by Paul Krugman of the New York Times, over at Truthout.org

Four years into a war fought to eliminate a nonexistent threat, we all have renewed appreciation for the power of the Big Lie: people tend to believe false official claims about big issues, because they can't picture their leaders being dishonest about such things.

But there's another political lesson I don't think has sunk in: the power of the Little Lie - the small accusation invented out of thin air, followed by another, and another, and another. Little Lies aren't meant to have staying power. Instead, they create a sort of background hum, a sense that the person facing all these accusations must have done something wrong.*** The Clinton years were a parade of fake scandals: Whitewater, Troopergate, Travelgate, Filegate, Christmas-card-gate. At the end, there were false claims that Clinton staff members trashed the White House on their way out.*** There's a lot of talk now about a case in Wisconsin, where the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney prosecuted the state's purchasing supervisor over charges that a court recently dismissed after just 26 minutes of oral testimony, with one judge calling the evidence "beyond thin." But by then the accusations had done their job: the unjustly accused official had served almost four months in prison, and the case figured prominently in attack ads alleging corruption in the Democratic governor's administration.

This is the context in which you need to see the wild swings Republicans have been taking at Nancy Pelosi.

First, there were claims that the speaker of the House had demanded a lavish plane for her trips back to California. One Republican leader denounced her "arrogance of extravagance" - then, when it became clear that the whole story was bogus, admitted that he had never had any evidence.

Now there's Ms. Pelosi's fact-finding trip to Syria, which Dick Cheney denounced as "bad behavior" - unlike the visit to Syria by three Republican congressmen a few days earlier, or Newt Gingrich's trip to China when he was speaker.