There have been a number of bloggers that have made the connection between fundamentalism of the US right wing and the fundamentalism of the jihais. Abu Ardvaark does so in, Originalism and Islamic Law:

Kevin Drum writes:

Of all the pillars of modern conservatism, the one that has long struck me as the most obviously absurd is the doctrine of orginalism. Think about it. Are we really supposed to take seriously the idea that the Supreme Court of 2005 […] is supposed to make its judgments based on divining the intent of a small group of men who lived in a simple agrarian community 200 years ago? Presented baldly, it’s an idea that wouldn’t pass muster with a bright 10 year old.

Constitutional law is outside my area of expertise, so take all that follows with several big grains of salt. That said, Originalism - or the “original intent” approach to Constitutional jurisprudence - sounds very, very familiar to these Middle East expert ears. Basically, it sounds like Islamic fundamentalist (salafi) jurisprudence.

Islamic jurisprudence after the passing of Mohammed revolved around establishing procedures for interpreting the Quranic message. […] The Islamic reformers - the original salafis - in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - called to sweep away these centuries of accumulated traditions and return directly to the text of the Quran and authentic hadith.

From what I can tell, that’s pretty much exactly what Originalist scholars do. Brush aside centuries of accretion to return directly to the text of the founding document. Prioritize this original text over all later interpretations, even if the conditions of modern life dramatically differ from those prevailing at the time of its drafting.

It does sound absurd, doesn’t it? Too bad its no laughing matter. The Republican right wing is intent on turning back the clock and undoing a century of social progress in the US while blurring the lines between church and state. It may not be as medieval as the salafis, but the underlying world view is damned similar.

The family watched Ray last night. Beth and I were watching for the second time. It was Hanna’s first viewing. I love everything about that movie. I love Ray Charles’ music. (Thank you, mom, for having it in our house growing up.) I love Jamie Foxx’s performance.

After the movie, Hanna asks how Ray went blind. I remember hearing that it was glaucoma, but I decided to google it just to be sure. Most links confirmed the glaucoma story. But then I found this blog link: The blinding cause of this… that includes a comment that suggests that, a) childhood glaucoma is very rare, and b) the movie depicts symptoms that are more consistent with trachoma. Since the movie was done with Ray Charles’ blessing, I’m inclined to think the trachoma diagnosis is more likely. Ray Charles would remember his symptoms well. The sharecropper living conditions were bound to be conducive to that kind of infection.

How cool that a few disparate individuals can make these connections via movies, the web, blogs,… I love it.

Must be the end of summer vacation. For some reason, my favorite blogs were chock full of good posts. Better than they have been in a while. I guess we’re all getting over vacation and getting down to business. Here are some excerpts from a really long and powerful post by Digby on his hullabaloo blog, Expecting Different Results:

I believe that there is a less than zero possibility that George W. Bush is going to implement any sane plan to withdraw from Iraq, much less one set forth by a Democratic presidential aspirant. And I say this with the greatest assurance that I’m right for the simple reason that George W. Bush has failed on every level, at every moment, from the very beginning to do anything right on Iraq. Why in God’s name would we think that he will suddenly become sane and do something different today?

He makes an important point, that its not up to the Democrats to come up with a realistic or likely policy alternative to Bush. Nothing they do or say will influence policy until they win some elections. So the task right now is to differentiate a Democratic vision, highlight what Democrats would do differently, and lay the ground for future elections

Why are people so unwilling to admit what they are seeing before their eyes, even today? The Republican party is corrupt, incompetent and drunk with power. And no matter what their intentions, they are incapable of setting things right. We have seen this over and over again.

So we need to get ready to exploit their ineptness and corruption.

Fafnir gets of Dr. Strangelove-y on us with this post Will No One Stop The Northward March Of Red Petrol?:

Oh sure, so Chavez wants to sell you gas now. But what he won’t tell you is that it’s commie gas. Infiltrating your engine, redistributing wealth in your carburetor, nationalizing your internal combustion engine, assasinating czars in your windshield wiper fluid! Oh, he has plans. Dark red Marxist plans - and they’re headed right for your gas tank! You were warned, America - you were warned!”

I was visiting Fafblog to read this hilarious post, Fafblog Interviews: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. There’s no way to do it justice with a small excerpt. You’ll just have to go read it yourself.

Whiskey Bar is on a roll again. Bilmon and Digby are the most entertaining political writers I’ve found. This post about Pat Robertson’s Huga Chavez fatwa is excellent, Bring Me the Head of Hugo Chavez:

I mean, the fact that Pat Robertson babbled something completely insane (and dangerous) to his TV cult followers has a definite dog-bites-man quality to it. When Robertson says something sane, that will be big news. But I wouldn’t keep a hole waiting on page one for that story.[…]

Maybe Pat thought he could shake something loose with a little fascist hatemongering — or at least draw attention to the fact that America’s fourth-largest supplier of oil is run by a charismatic, enormously popular leader who (gasp!) builds health clinics for the poor and (horror!) distributes land to tenant farmers, even as he (shudder) promotes workers’ cooperatives, and (outrage!) squeezes taxes out of giant oil companies.

Is there any doubt that Chavez would be ousted if not for his hand on the spigot.

The times, they are a changing… Green Car Congress reports on another study confirming major climate and ecosystem changes due to global warming: Seasonally Ice-Free Arctic Appears Locked and Loaded:

Current warming trends in the Arctic will shove the Arctic system into a seasonally ice-free state not seen for more than one million years, according to a new report.

While this is not the first forecast of the melting of Arctic sea ice due to global warming, the authors indicate that not only is melting accelerating, but that they were unable to identify any natural processes that might slow the de-icing of the Arctic, land and sea.

Over at WorldChanging there’s been a lot of talk about the need for “terraforming” projects to help counter changes like this by helping the earth become more earth-like again. Yipes.

Steve Clemons, subbing for Josh Marshall at TPM, has been out in front of the breaking news of Bolton’s first big move at the UN: The Bolton Civil Wars

For those who followed the Bolton battle from early March through August, one of the real issues with John Bolton is that he was constantly attempting to undermine Colin Powell, Richard Armitage and others but did so with Dick Cheney’s blessing.

There is evidence bubbling to the surface—not altogether clear—but pointing to the possibility that Bolton has already stepped out of his holding pen and is undermining Condi Rice and Bob Zoellick—again with Dick Cheney’s blessing.

Just when it looked like the grown-ups were back in charge…

Sitting by a lake in the woods near Yosemite, far from the nearest hotspot, might seem like and odd place to read a book extolling the merits of wired media and pop culture. But for a blog obsessed on-line junkie, it was the perfect setting. No web to distract me. No blogs to read or write. And my knee was killing me, so my usual routine of hiking, biking, and sports was out of the question. There was no choice but to settle down on the lawn at Camp Mather and dive in.

Steven Johnson has some very interesting things to say about Gaming, TV, and pop culture. He takes a very novel approach to challenging the commonly held assumption that pop culture is vapid, and TV and gaming are bad for you. Au contraire! He’ll have us believe that the demands of modern high tech culture are making us smarter-that we are enriched and challenged by our media and our hobbies more than every before. As he postulates near the beginning of the book,

“The most debased forms of mass diversion - video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms - turn out to be nutritional after all. For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path towards lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the “masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But in fact, the opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less.”

Another great voice heard from. Body and Soul: Withdrawal:

I’m not a wonk. I’m not a military expert. But neither are most Americans. The important thing is that right now, for whatever reason, most Americans finally recognize that this war is a nightmare they want to wake up from. They are more than ready to listen to plans for getting out. And in all honesty, whether they hear my call to get out now, Kevin’s call for a ‘gradual timed withdrawal’ (and 51 percent of them are echoing Kevin) or Russ Feingold’s plan to get everybody home in time to ring in 2007, is less important to me than making sure the national conversation is about getting out, not digging in.

Pardon me while I echo loudly. This idea is in the air. Breath it in! How can Bush put this genie back in the bottle? He can’t.

Thank you, Cindy Sheehan.

I love it. A tiny organism — the smallest free-living cell known — that was not even observed until 1990 — may be the most prosperous life form on earth? Microbe Has Huge Role in Ocean Life, Carbon Cycle:

In a publication today in the journal Science, scientists outlined the growing knowledge about SAR11, a group of bacteria so dominant that their combined weight exceeds that of all the fish in the world’s oceans. In a marine environment that’s low in nutrients and other resources, they are able to survive and replicate in extraordinary numbers—a milliliter of sea water off the Oregon coast might contain 500,000 of these cells.

How beautiful, for the world to be revealing itself, for our advancing knowledge, and for the utter mystery and miracle of it all.

And while I have you here… Check out the NASA Earth Observatory site, and especially their new image gallery. They have an RSS feed that I use that combines a lot of interesting news and images. Very cool stuff.

The Religious Policeman is “The diary of a Saudi man, currently living in the United Kingdom, where the Religious Police no longer trouble him for the moment.” He is a brave soul who bears witness to many outrageous things in the Saudi Kingdom. For a while his blog went silent—which was worisome for a blogger like him—and now he has returned ith lots to say. Check him out. And check out this entry, Punishing Disobedient Wives:

"Dear Alhamedi
My wife won’t do what I tell her. What should I do?
Inadequate
Dammam"

Dear "Inadequate from Dammam". The answer is all in the Quran. As it says there
1. Tell her to behave.
…if that doesn’t work…
2. Go and sleep by yourself
…and if that doesn’t work…
3. Beat her
…because that works every time
Yours
Alhamedi

No, this isn’t black humor, along the lines of Humphrey Bogart’s ghost’s advice to Woody Allen in “Play it again Sam”
“Dames are simple. I never met one that didn’t understand a slap in the mouth or a slug from a forty-five.”

Instead it’s real life advice, written by Ghada Al-Hori and published in the “Al Watan” newspaper, in 2005 (and that’s CE, not BC)

Punishing Disobedient Wives

Really, the title says it all, but sadly, there’s far more. It’s what you get when you take:

• a book written 1400 years ago
• and an absolutely literal, fundamentalist interpretation
• by someone with no sense of reality or balance
• who was ‘educated’ at the worst Theological College in the world, the Imam University in Riyadh.

The result is the religion as practiced in Saudi Arabia, and many other parts of the world if the fundamentalists get their way.

Here’s an idea—Let’s christen “The Global War on Fundamentalists” and unify all the world in the fight for liberation.