Dirty Politician: The Katherine Harris campaign implosion

Apparently she had some staffers leave because she lied about whether Mitchell Wade (the briber in the Duke Cunningham scandal) had bought her a very expensive ($2,800) dinner at a fancy restaurant. She ended an interview last week when the subject came up, after saying that her campaign had "reimbursed" the restaurant (which makes no sense, since Wade paid the bill). Her spokesman called the reporter and asked that the subject not be published. The following day, her campaign released a statement saying that "I have donated to a local Florida charity $100 which will more than adequately compensate for the cost of my beverage and appetizer."

It turns out that the "local Florida charity" is Global Dominion Impact Ministries, a Charismatic Christian group run by Bishop Lewes and Pastor Sandra Jones. The group's website says:

"Pastor Sandra has an inspiring testimony of her deliverance from being sold to devils as an infant. She also shares her miraculous healing from her breast cancer as well as being raised from the dead."

Another wannabe politician with a bogus photo

What is it with people running for office using bogus photos on their websites? First Howard Kaloogian, running for Duke Cunningham's seat, used a photo from Istanbul as a stand-in for Baghdad to support his claim that things are going well in Iraq. (He also lied about endorsements he had received--and came in fourth in the primary.)

Now Kimberly Williamson Butler, running for mayor of New Orleans, has a photo of herself in front of the French Quarter at Disneyland. When Disney's attorneys objected, her response was not to replace it with a photo of herself in the real New Orleans, but to modify the photo to remove the Disneyland garbage can.

U.S. counties by percentage of religious adherents

Arizona doesn't look so bad... (from Pharyngula).

Abu Ghraib whistleblower blacklisted from military contracts

Torin Nelson, who was working as an Army interrogator when he helped document abuses at Abu Ghraib in 2004, has been blacklisted from further work in that role, for fear that he might "cause an adverse circumstance at some point in the future." (More at TPM Muckraker.)

Two noncombatants held at Guantánamo Bay for their own good

Abu Bakker Qassim and Adel Abdu al-Hakim have been held at Guantánamo Bay for nearly a year since a military panel ruled that they were noncombatants, not terrorists, and no threat to the United States. They are being held because they are members of the Uighur minority from western China, a religious and ethnic group that has been the subject of abuses by the Chinese government. If they were to be sent home, they could be abused and tortured.

But they cannot be allowed to enter the United States, either, because that would set a bad legal precedent. A U.S. federal court judge "ruled that they were being held illegally, but he said he was powerless to order their release." The Supreme Court has declined to hear the detainees' appeal, but on May 8 an appeals court panel will determine whether federal judges have any power to intervene.

So they remain imprisoned indefinitely at Guantánamo Bay.

(More detail at Sheldon Richman's Free Association blog.)

Timeline of the earth

Here's a nice Flash-animated timeline of the earth's history, with sliders you can move back and forth to see continental drift and animals appear and disappear. (Via Pharyngula.)

Cheap parking may hurt light rail--the story behind the story

Today's Arizona Republic has a story reporting that the large supply of cheap parking downtown may hurt the light rail project, as people would prefer to drive their cars than use mass transit.

The real irony here is that it was deception by the City of Phoenix that allowed it to build a massive parking garage across the street from Bank One Ballpark (now Chase Stadium). By falsely claiming that the 3,000-space parking garage was necessary for the Arizona Science Center and the Civic Plaza, the city effectively gave a $40 million gift to Arizona Diamondbacks owner Jerry Colangelo. The ballpark did not have sufficient parking for itself, but because it would require voter approval for any additional spending under Proposition 200, the city hired Kaku Associates to conduct a study to determine the need for spaces for the Arizona Science Center, and jiggered the assumptions of the study until they got the result they wanted for the ballpark. The February 1994 draft report from Kaku stated that "If the baseball stadium is not built, it would be difficult to justify a parking garage of any size within the study area in general." The City then told Kaku to change its assumptions, by disregarding existing parking spaces outside a two-block radius from the Science Center, assuming that crowds to the Civic Plaza convention center would double, and pretending that the city would also build a downtown aquarium. Adding these assumptions led to the conclusion in June 1995--in the seventh draft of the study--that there would be 1,300-1,600 space parking deficit, and therefore the city could go ahead and build a parking garage without voter approval.

Oh, but there was one more catch--the land where they wanted to build the garage was the site of the Greyhound bus terminal, on land owned by the Dial (now Viad) Corporation. The city condemned the Greyhound site and passed a zoning change to prevent Greyhound from relocating to another site downtown. In Greyhound's legal response, they pointed out the obvious fact that the city was cheating in its argument for the parking garage, stating "The city's arrogance in proceeding to do whatever it damn well pleases by pretending that the garage is for the Civic Plaza and not the baseball stadium ought to offend the sensibilities of any honest thinking individual." They further pointed out that the city's action was a violation of Proposition 200 whether the parking garage was for the ballpark or for the convention center--to which the city responded that the Civic Plaza and Convention Center is not actually a convention center, because only 5.8% of attendance at Civic Plaza events between 1988 and 1995 was related to conventions.

In the end, the city offered Greyhound a settlement that it accepted, and got its parking garage on the site, which loses an average of $283,000 a month, paid for by the city (and indirectly by its residents).

The city has continued to engage in deals which largely supply private benefits directly to Jerry Colangelo, most recently with a similar deal for the city to spend millions to build a hotel downtown--even though similar projects in other cities have lost money.

Phoenix City Manager Frank Fairbanks and former Deputy City Manager Sheryl Scully (now City Manager of San Antonio, Texas) are two of the main people to thank for these boondoggles.

(Most of the above is derived from the excellent reporting of John Dougherty of Phoenix's New Times weekly newspaper. For some reason, the Arizona Republic can almost never be counted on to dig up and provide such information.)

The library of airplanes

A proposal to build a library out of the discarded fuselages of Boeing 727 and 737s in Guadalajara, via BLDGBLOG.

A story about eggs suitable for Easter

Alonzo Fyfe has a parable on "The Meaning of Life" at the Atheist Ethicist. (Via the Carnival of the Godless #38.)

Virus DNA as evidence for common ancestry

Carl Zimmer writes about how retroviruses have inserted themselves into the human genome:

Scientists can identify viruses lurking in our genome (known as endogenous retroviruses) by their distinctive DNA. A fully-functioning retrovirus sequence contains three genes--one for copying DNA, one for a shell, and one for escaping and invading cells. These genes are flanked by a series of repeating DNA, which allow viruses to be inserted or snipped out of their host's genome. The human genome carries full-fledged retroviruses, as well as viruses in various state of decay. Scientists have identified 98,000 of these viruses, along with about 150,000 fragments of defunct viruses. All told, they make up 8 percent of the human genome. In many cases, the virus genes have disappeared altogether, leaving behind flanking repeats, which have been duplicated to millions of copies that take up about 40 percent of the genome. As a point of comparison, our "own" genes--in other words, those that encode proteins that make up our bodies and allow our bodies live--make up only about one percent of the genome.

Some of these endogenous retroviruses are only found in some people and not others. They must have invaded someone's genome and then spread to his or her descendants, but have not yet spread throug our entire species. Others appear to be ubiquitous--meaning that they are ancient passengers that had already spread throughout an ancestral population.

The viruses themselves can change over time, leading to different variants in different individuals that can be compared to reconstruct the lineage of the virus, and reconstruct the older versions of the virus (as was done with the 1918 influenza virus).

Unfortunately for creationists, this also works across species--and human beings share retroviruses in their genome with chimpanzees, macaques, and other primates. Zimmer again:

It turns out that most of the viruses we carry can also be found in these other species. Our retroviruses can be grouped into families. They carry the same families. Our retroviruses usually appear in the same position in the genome, no matter whose genome you look at. Many of theirs are in the same place. These are all the sorts of evidence you'd expect if retroviruses had been carried down from distant primate ancestors. A particular retrovirus is not identical from one host primate to the next, but you wouldn't expect that. Once each host lineage branched off, the viruses could acquire mutations. But the different versions of these retroviruses are still similar enough that scientists can reconstruct the DNA of original virus that infected some long-gone primate.

I recommend reading Zimmer's entire article, "The Sixty-Million-Year Virus," as well as Doug Theobald's "29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: the Scientific Case for Common Descent" FAQ at the talkorigins.org website (the evidence of endogenous retroviruses is item #5 in Part 4 of the FAQ).

Anybody who denies common ancestry of life on this planet does so only by disregarding the evidence.