1. Dr. Thomas Coates of the David Geffen School of Medicine and the UCLA AIDS Center (woohoo gay philanthropy!) has written an extremely important op-ed in the Baltimore Sun on Bush's domestic HIV/AIDS policy, an overlooked deadly Bush lie (full text is available without a login at Jimberly's blog):
Imagine that you have been diagnosed with brain cancer. Your neurosurgeon recommends several strategies. Because you have confidence in a doctor, you go forward, but your cancer gets worse. And then you discover that your surgeon treated you using techniques not backed by scientific evidence.
Worse, you learn that the scientific evidence for the interventions the doctor implemented have been proved ineffective or even harmful.
Public health malpractice is what the U.S. government is practicing. Public health requires the same adherence to scientific evidence as does clinical medicine.
The Bush administration proposes that $270 million, nearly one-third of its domestic HIV/AIDS prevention funding, focus on abstinence. Draft regulations published in the June 16 issue of the Federal Register require the censoring of any government-funded content that is even vaguely "sexually suggestive" and require that all materials include information on the lack of effectiveness of condoms.
Relatedly,
here's me at the RNC, with my sign about Bush's abstinence-only sex ed rules.
Posted by Hello)
2. Read this encouraging, if not entirely believable, propaganda just received from MoveOnPAC:
Though you'd never know it from the TV news, a close look at the polls shows that the Republican convention was actually a bust for the President. According to the Gallup polling agency, Bush's bounce was "one of the smallest registered in Gallup polling history, along with Hubert Humphrey's two-point bounce following the 1968 Democratic convention [and] George McGovern's zero-point bounce following the 1972 Democratic convention . . . Bush's bounce is the smallest an incumbent president has received."[1] Bush's speech received slightly worse ratings from voters than John Kerry's, and according to the same Gallup poll, a remarkable 38% of voters said the convention made them less likely to vote for Bush.[2]
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/login.aspx?ci=12922
[2] http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=183679
3. Bob Herbert in today's Times:
...A lot of other Republicans have similar views about the vote in areas with large African-American populations. Most blacks vote Democratic. If those votes can be suppressed, Republicans benefit. And there is increasing evidence that a big effort to suppress the vote among blacks and some other heavily Democratic voting groups is under way, which is why it is important to keep the following phone number handy:
1-866-OUR VOTE.
5. If you can, please contribute to No on 36, the group working to defeat Oregon's antigay constitutional amendment this November. Read here about why gay donors nationwide are choosing to focus their energies on Oregon.
6. I was blogging in numbered-lists before Julie Russo was!
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