DEATHS from cervical cancer could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries. This could be prevented by soon-to-be-approved vaccines against the virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer - but there are signs that opposition to the vaccines might lead to many preventable deaths.

The trouble is that the human papilloma virus (HPV) is sexually transmitted. So to prevent infection, girls will have to be vaccinated before they become sexually active, which could be a problem in many countries.

In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.

"Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex," Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.

. . . .

HPV is extremely common. Half of all sexually active women between 18 and 22 in the US are infected. Most cases clear up, but sometimes infection persists and can cause cancer decades later.

Deaths in the west have plummeted thanks to widespread screening to detect cancers early. But such screening is not widely available in developing countries. In many, populations are ageing: in India the number of women over 60 is projected to rise from 40 million now to 168 million in 2050. The International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, calculates that by then deaths from cervical cancer will reach a million a year in poor countries if rates of infection, and of cancer detection and treatment, do not improve.

While vaccination could slash infection rates, its cancer-preventing benefits will not be evident for decades, as it will take that long for vaccinated girls to reach an age when they might otherwise have developed cancer. Meanwhile, millions of women who are already infected must be screened and treated. If there is widespread resistance to vaccination, it will take even longer for its benefits to become clear.

Vaccines are producing good results in clinical trials, and the first could be licensed as early as next year. GlaxoSmithKline announced in November 2004 that its vaccine, which contains two strains of HPV thought to cause 70 per cent of cervical cancers, had prevented 90 per cent of new infections and all persistent infections. The US-based firm Merck announced similar results last week with its vaccine, which contains the same two cancer-causing HPV strains plus two strains that cause genital warts.

Science marches on. Tragically, stupidity does, too. By the way, how many members of the Junior Anti-Sex League do you suppose never had sex before they were married? By all accounts, our Jesus-sent president bedded a number of women before he married Laura.

"Trust me when I tell you things are so much better in Iraq," said one US military official to me on my recent visit to that war-ravaged country. I didn't know whether to scream or pull the remaining two strands of hair out of my head. I was in Iraq as part of a delegation of eight members of Congress, led by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Everything we have been told about Iraq by the Bush Administration has either been an outright lie or overwhelmingly false. There were no weapons of mass destruction; we have not been greeted as liberators; and the cost in terms of blood and treasure has outpaced even their worst-case scenarios. Trust is something I cannot give to this Administration.

If things in Iraq are so much better, why are we not decreasing the number of US forces there? Why is the insurgency showing no signs of waning? Why are we being told that in a few months the Administration will again ask Congress for billions of dollars more to fight the war? Why, according to the World Food Program, is hunger among the Iraqi people getting worse? It's time for some candor, but candor is hard to come by in Iraq.

We were in Iraq for one day--for security reasons, it is US policy that Congressional delegations are not allowed to spend the night. We spent most of our time in the heavily fortified Green Zone, which serves as coalition headquarters. It's the most heavily guarded encampment I've ever seen--and it still gets attacked. I even had armed guards accompany me to the bathroom. The briefings we received from US military and diplomatic officials were, to say the least, unsatisfying. . . .

. . . .

I asked both General Petraeus and our embassy about US plans to build military bases in Iraq, which in my view would indicate a prolonged US presence. I was told--emphatically--that there are no plans to construct military bases. Yet Congress recently passed a huge supplemental wartime appropriations bill that includes, at the request of the Bush Administration, $500 million for military base construction. In Iraq.

Shortly before we traveled to Iraq we visited Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who lamented the mistakes the United States has made post-invasion, including the total dissolution of all the Iraqi security forces. He said, "The army you disbanded is now the army you're fighting." But I couldn't get a single US official to acknowledge any mistakes. The standard line remains, "We're moving in the right direction."

It's hard to believe that after a two-year occupation the average Iraqi isn't getting tired of the overwhelming US presence. We met with several Iraqi women leaders, including members of the National Assembly, who told us that there was more electricity available in Iraq before the invasion than afterward. It's also certain that the insurgency uses our presence as an organizing tool to recruit members and weapons. . . .

. . . .

What worries me almost as much as our misguided policy in Iraq is that so many of my colleagues and so many citizens have become resigned to the fact that the war will go on. Congress is not being inundated with letters and phone calls and faxes and e-mails and street protests demanding an end to our presence in Iraq. President Bush's re-election seems to have taken much of the energy out of the antiwar movement. My recent visit to Iraq only strengthened my belief that this war is wrong. And only renewed, passionate dissent by the American people can end it.

• Bill Frist, pandering even more massively to religious wackos in preparation for a 2008 presidential run, says that Senate Democrats are using the filibuster to keep people of faith off the courts (didn't know that Bush had only appointed atheist and agnostic judges so far, did you?), and will participate in a televised Jesus-a-thon on Sunday to publicize this. Check out the flyer for the program, showing an anguished youth holding a gavel and a Bible and trying to choose between "public service" and "faith in Christ." (The reality is essentially the opposite. As Michael Newdow observed when he orally argued the Pledge of Allegiance case before the Supreme Court, no admitted atheist or agnostic dares run for public office.)

• The House voted to repeal the estate tax (established in 1916) permanently. The House rejected a Democratic compromise that would have exempted estates not exceeding $3.5 million (i.e., about 99.7% of all estates) from the tax. Tell your senators to vote against the Paris Hilton Benefit Act. See Brad DeLong (via Suburban Guerrilla) and Fafblog for commentary and Oliver Willis' Paris Hilton cheesecake ad.

Josh Marshall eloquently observes:

The point is simple, the logic unassailable. Republicans say they care about Social Security but claim there won't be enough money to make good on the money (your payroll taxes) borrowed from the Social Security Administration.

Today, however, House Republicans voted overwhelmingly to abolish the inheritance tax, a tax that, by definition, only impacts people who inherit money from extremely wealthy forebearers. If passed by the senate this new legislation, which would come into effect in 2012, will cost the Treasury $745 billion dollars during its first ten years. Figure in associated interest on the added debt and the number comes closer to a trillion dollars.

That is about a trillion fewer dollars in the US Treasury over the course of the same decade in which the Social Security Trustees say the SSA will begin (2017) to start drawing on the Treasury notes in the Trust fund to cover scheduled benefits (2020, if you go by CBO estimates.)

There's no hidden complexity here. It's a zero-sum game. They say Social Security is in trouble because we don't have enough dollars to make good on the Trust Fund (which today holds roughly $1.7 trillion in Treasury notes). And here they are voting to take a trillion more dollars off the table.

In other words, they could not care less about Social Security and everything they say on the subject is a joke.

If someone tells you that at least the Republicans have a plan and the Democrats don't, laugh in their faces. The Republican agenda (the actual bills they are passing right now) is to keep weakening Social Security at every opportunity, just like they're doing today. The most constructive thing anyone can do under present circumstances to protect Social Security, the only 'plan' that isn't a joke, is to oppose the Republican agenda in Congress, to stand up and say "do no more harm."

• Tom DeLay decries judicial review (established by those wild-eyed judicial activists on the Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison in 1803) and the right to privacy (established by Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965):

Mr. DeLay: . . . I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them. [via Atrios]

• The State Department has decided to stop publishing "Patterns of Global Terrorism," an annual report it has issued since 1985, after its last two reports showed record numbers of incidents of terrorism. I am not making this up:

Several U.S. officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.

Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism."

But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global Terrorism" eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

"Instead of dealing with the facts and dealing with them in an intelligent fashion, they try to hide their facts from the American public," charged Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department terrorism expert who first disclosed the decision to eliminate the report in The Counterterrorism Blog, an online journal.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who was among the leading critics of last year's mix-up, reacted angrily to the decision.

"This is the definitive report on the incidence of terrorism around the world. It should be unthinkable that there would be an effort to withhold it - or any of the key data - from the public. The Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report."

A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, confirmed that the publication was being eliminated, but said the allegation that it was being done for political reasons was "categorically untrue."

According to Johnson and U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the issue, statistics that the National Counterterrorism Center provided to the State Department reported 625 "significant" terrorist attacks in 2004.

That compared with 175 such incidents in 2003, the highest number in two decades.

The statistics didn't include attacks on American troops in Iraq, which President Bush as recently as Tuesday called "a central front in the war on terror."

Praktike, guest-blogging at Political Animal, adds:

I wish Landay hadn't cut Johnson short, because what he said was more nuanced than that:

This move has been prompted by the Department's discovery that the new methodology used by the recently formed National Counter Terrorism Center has produced statistics that shows an enormous jump in the number of international terrorist attacks. For example, in 2003 there were about 172 significant attacks. The numbers for 2004 have jumped to at least 655. At least 300 of those incidents occurred in India in the Kashmir region. NCTC, I'm told, is still tweaking the numbers. For Secretary of State Rice these numbers are a disaster. It is tough to argue we are winning the war on terrorism when the numbers in the official Government report will show the largest number of incidents ever recorded since the State Department started reporting on terrorist incidents. In the Secretary's defense, however, the sharp jump in numbers has more to do with a change in methodololgy of counting rather that an actual surge in Islamic extremist activity. In fact, if you take time to parse the numbers, the actual scope of terrorism by Islamic extremists in 2004 appeared to decline relative to the attacks during 2003 (except for Iraq). Rather than run from the numbers the State Department and the Intelligence Community should seize the opportunity to really get their hands around the issue and provide Congress and the American people with a clear, apolitical assessment about the reality of the terrorist threat we face.

Facts? We don't need no stinking facts! Remember, the Bush administration isn't reality-based. It creates the reality it wants.

I have to go now. My head hurts.

Arnold Schwarzenegger once told a magazine interviewer about participating in an orgy with other bodybuilders, noting that "everybody jumped on" the woman involved and "took her upstairs where we all got together."

Using the screen name RawMuscleGlutes, Sullivan posted on a site for bare backers (the heroic term for gay men who have sex without condoms). He was seeking partners for unsafe anal and oral intercourse. Sullivan revealed that he was HIV-positive and stated his preference for men who are "poz," but he also indicated an interest in "bi scenes," groups, parties, orgies, and "gang bangs."

Michael Schwartz must have thought I was just another attendee of the "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference. I approached the chief of staff of Oklahoma's GOP Senator Tom Coburn outside the conference in downtown Washington last Thursday afternoon after he spoke there. Before I could introduce myself, he turned to me and another observer with a crooked smile and exclaimed, "I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!"

For two days, on April 7 and 8, conservative activists and top GOP staffers summoned the raw rage of the Christian right following the Terri Schiavo affair, and likened judges to communists, terrorists and murderers. The remedies they suggested for what they termed "judicial tyranny" ranged from the mass impeachment of judges to their physical elimination.

The speakers included embattled House majority leader Tom DeLay, conservative matriarch Phyllis Schlafly and failed Republican senatorial candidate Alan Keyes. Like a perform­ance artist, Keyes riled the crowd up, mixing animadversions on constitutional law with sudden, stentorian salvos against judges. "Ronald Reagan said the Soviet Union was the focus of evil during the cold war. I believe that the judiciary is the focus of evil in our society today," Keyes declared, slapping the lectern for emphasis.

At a banquet the previous evening, the Constitution Party's 2004 presidential candidate, Michael Peroutka, called the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube "an act of terror in broad daylight aided and abetted by the police under the authority of the governor." Red-faced and sweating profusely, Peroutka added, "This was the very definition of state-sponsored terror." Edwin Vieira, a lawyer and author of How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary, went even further, suggesting during a panel discussion that Joseph Stalin offered the best method for reining in the Supreme Court. "He had a slogan," Vieira said, "and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty: 'No man, no problem.'"

The complete Stalin quote is, "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." [link via Atrios]

There's lots more. Go read it. I cannot emphasize how frightening, and important, this is. The federal courts, even as stacked as they are with Republican appointees, have proven to be a bulwark against some of the madness that the Republicans have sought to perpetrate (e.g., detention of "enemy combatants" (including U.S. citizens) forever without criminal charges, or access to counsel or the courts; the Schiavo case). If the Rethuglicans are permitted to stack the courts with whatever wackos they want (using "the nuclear option" to eliminate the filibuster), and to impeach all judges who refuse to toe the line, they will turn this country into a Christian theocracy. When people at a conference attended by members of Congress and their staffs are talking about murder and/or widespread impeachment of judges, it's time to stop the moratorium on comparisons to Hitler's rise in Germany. Yes, it can happen here.

Bush is objectively and without question one of the most unpopular presidents of the last 80 years: Herbert Hoover after the Depression; Truman after Korea; Richard Nixon after Watergate; Jimmy Carter after Iran. Bush is right there with them. [link via Political Animal]

Likewise, Gallup reported last month that Bush's 45% approval rating was easily the lowest of any post-World War II president during March of his second term, 11% lower than St. Ronny, the second worst. In light of all that, Tomasky wonders why the media continues to claim that Bush is a "popular president," and why you never read a sentence like, "Objectively, Bush is one of the most unpopular presidents in modern times." in the mainstream media. Good question.

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Supreme Court Justice Anthony] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ " Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush’s judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly. [emphasis added]

These are not just some random wackos. They're very prominent wackos:

Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" decided that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.

. . . .

A judge in Atlanta and the husband and mother of a judge in Chicago were murdered in recent weeks. After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to "engage in violence."

"The people who have been speaking out on this, like Tom DeLay and Senator Cornyn, need to be backed up," Schlafly said to applause yesterday. One worker at the event wore a sticker declaring "Hooray for DeLay."

The conference was organized during the height of the Schiavo controversy by a new group, the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. This was no collection of fringe characters. The two-day program listed two House members; aides to two senators; representatives from the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; conservative activists Alan Keyes and Morton C. Blackwell; the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's parents; Alabama's "Ten Commandments" judge, Roy Moore; and DeLay, who canceled to attend the pope's funeral.

This is scarier than hell. These right-wing religious maniacs are dictating policy for Bush and the Republican majority in both houses of Congress (see Terri Schiavo; Federal Marriage Amendment). Can we please wake up before it's too late?

One morning twenty years ago this month, I opened the front section of the Washington Post and read that my friend Stephen Peter Morin had been executed by the state of Texas for capital murder.

There are two reasons that that sentence, while accurate, felt awkward to write.

First reason: it has been a long time since I thought of Morin as a friend. He was a twisted, manipulative and malevolent person, and if I hate anyone in the world or out of it I hate him.

Second reason: I knew him as Ray Constantine.

But Morin was his real name, and for a number of months in 1981 I spent just about every day with him, generally enjoying his company.

Go read the rest. The comments to it are also very interesting, including some by Clarke's mother Rita (then Morin's girlfriend) and his brother Craig. There's also a lot of discussion between religious commenters, many of whom were apparently sent by James "Focus on the Family" Dobson (gag), and more secular readers, debating the significance of Morin's alleged embrace of Christianity at the end of his life. I loved this, by a commenter named Valentine Michael Smith (April 7, 2005 7:01 p.m.), responding to the Godsters:

By their lights, if this person actually did receive Christ into his life, and any of his victims had not, then he is in Heaven while they lie screaming (along with my father, most of your ancestors, and the vast majority of everyone who's ever lived). Sick. Doomed to eternal torture for screwing up in a fixed game with no credible, published, rule-book.

Heh. Indeed.

The Guardian reports:

Stone-age figurines depicting what could be the oldest pornographic scene in the world have been unearthed in Germany.

Archaeologists have discovered what they believe to be the 7,200-year-old remnants of a man having intercourse with a woman.

The extraordinary find, at an archaeological dig in Saxony, shatters the belief that sex was a taboo subject in that era.

Until now, the oldest representations of sexual scenes were frescos from about 2,000 years ago.

Under John Paul II (and his predecessors), the Roman Catholic church presided over the rape and molestation of thousands of children and teenagers. Under John Paul II, the church at first did all it could to protect its own and to impugn and threaten the victims of this abuse. Rome never acknowledged, let alone take responsibility for, the scale of the moral betrayal. I was staggered to see Cardinal Bernard Law holding press conferences in Rome this week, and appearing on television next to the man who announced the Pope's death. But that was the central reaction of the late Pope to this scandal: he sided with the perpetrators, because they were integral to his maintenance of power. When you hear about this Pope's compassion, his concern for the victims of society, his love of children, it's important to recall that when it came to walking the walk in his own life and with his own responsibility, he walked away. He all but ignored his church's violation of the most basic morality - that you don't use the prestige of the church to rape innocent children. Here was a man who lectured American married couples that they could not take the pill, who told committed gay couples that they were part of an "ideology of evil," but acquiesced and covered up the rape of minors. When truth met power, John Paul II chose truth. When truth met his power, John Paul II defended his own prerogatives at the expense of the innocent. Many have forgotten. That's not an option for the victims of this clerical criminality.

• In The Nation, Sasha Abramsky argues that Democrats should leave the issue of gun control to the states (as you'll recall, that's Howard Dean's position) if they want to win Western states like Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico (all of which Kerry narrowly lost) in national elections. It pains me to say it, but she may be right.
• The author of the notorious talking points memo that urged Republicans to exploit the Terri Schiavo case for political gain has been revealed:  it's Florida Senator Mel Martinez' Chief Legal Counsel Brian Darling. This is particularly amusing since the wingnuts have been screaming ever since this memo was revealed that it's a fraud manufactured by Democrats and/or their co-conspirators in the "liberal media." Here's the pathetic response to this news by Power Line, one of the leading screamers and (absurdly enough) Time Magazine's reigning "Blog of the Year."
• The Tom DeLay scandals are coming fast and furious. See here, here, here, and here. One gets the distinct impression that Karl Rove has sent out the word:  DeLay is dead meat, so let's throw him overboard now, instead of having him drag the GOP down with him in the 2006 elections. Hang on, Tom!
• More thoughts on the pope from Billmon and Michael of Reading A1. Jeanne d'Arc of Body and Soul has gone on a veritable Pope-a-thon. At the American Street, Julia says that, contrary to what Dubya wants Catholics to believe, JPII was not a big fan of his. The pope, to his credit, thought that being "pro-life" included opposing aggressive war and capital punishment -- two of Dubya's favorite things in the whole world.

See you late next week (I hope).

UPDATE:  AMERICAblog has compiled quotes from assorted Republican hacks in Congress, the media, and the blogosphere claiming that the Schiavo memo was obviously a fraud cooked up by the evil Democrats. Hilarious. Particularly amusing is this analysis by John "Hindrocket" Hinderaker at "Blog of the Year" Power Line:

We have written extensively about the fake "talking points memo" on the Schaivo case that ABC News and the Washington Post publicized, beginning on March 18. We have pointed out, most comprehensively in the Weekly Standard, that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the memo originated with the Republicans, and considerable reason to think it may be a Democratic dirty trick....

There is a story here, if our media wanted to pursue it. The memo in question is a pathetic piece of work. Any competent person could look at it and see that it is not a product of the Republican leadership. It is on a blank piece of paper; no letterhead, no signature, no identification. Anyone in the world could have typed it. It is incompetently produced: it gets the Senate bill number wrong, misspells Terri Schiavo's name, and is full of typographical errors. The only people reported to have distributed it (by the New York Times) were Democratic staffers. And--most fundamentally--it is absurd to think that the Republican leadership would produce a "talking points" memo discussing what great politics the Schiavo case was for Republicans. Those aren't talking points; not for Republicans, anyway. The memo benefited the only party that it could possibly have benefited: the Democrats.

If there were investigative reporters working for the Washington Post, ABC, the New York Times, or any other major news organization, they might want to try to find out where the memo came from. Circumstantially, it seems extremely likely that it was produced by Democrats as a political dirty trick. But such investigation seems to be beyond the capability--more important, beyond the ambition--of our mainstream press. Only bloggers look critically at documents that cast disrepute on Republicans. Mainstream reporters accept them uncritically, at face value, no matter how inept they may be. Why is this?

The most comprehensive survey ever into the state of the planet concludes that human activities threaten the Earth's ability to sustain future generations.

The report says the way society obtains its resources has caused irreversible changes that are degrading the natural processes that support life on Earth.

This will compromise efforts to address hunger, poverty and improve healthcare.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) was drawn up by 1,300 researchers from 95 nations over four years.

It reports that humans have changed most ecosystems beyond recognition in a dramatically short space of time.

The way society has sourced its food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel over the past 50 years has seriously degraded the environment, the assessment concludes.

. . . .

"This report is essentially an audit of nature's economy, and the audit shows we've driven most of the accounts into the red," commented Jonathan Lash, the president of the World Resources Institute.

Billmon has more.

Meanwhile, a Goldman Sachs analyst predicts that oil prices may hit $105 a barrel (almost twice the price today) by 2007 because of increasing global demand, including unexpectedly high demand from the United States (!) and China. We just keep buying those SUV's. (link via Political Animal)

Is it possible that we should be worrying about something besides Kobe Bryant-Scott Peterson-Robert Blake-Terri Schiavo-the Pope-Michael Jackson? And maybe the "culture of life" concept ought to include making sure that there is a planet left for future generations?

AAAARRGGGHHHH!!!! I can't stand it any more. If any modern CEO had overseen a corporation that systematically protected child molesters and provided a haven for them for decades, in addition to obstructing all legal inquiries into the situation, even our lazy, shiftless MSM would've been all over them like flies on shit and hounded them relentlessly. We all saw how well the Sgt. Schultz "I knew nothing" defense worked for Bernie Ebbers.

Indeed. If any secular business did anything remotely resembling what the Catholic Church has done, the responsible corporate officers would be tried, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms, and the business would lose all its customers and go bankrupt. But since the Church is morally superior to the rest of us and has the Lord on its side, it's OK.