Poor Mojo's Newswire

Weyrich confirms what I’ve often argued here: It’s about money. The religious right is a direct-mail fueled fundraising machine fueled by fear. It sends out millions of fundraising letters designed to create, instill, nurture and exploit fear of The Other. The particular form of that Other-ing depends on which fundraising letters get the best returns: Advocacy groups like the A.F.A. survive largely on direct-mail contributions. During the Presidency of George W. Bush, evangelicals went from outsiders to insiders, and it was a mixed blessing for them: with Republican ascendancy in Washington came grassroots complacency, slowing fund-raising. In 2003, Wildmon and a dozen or so other top Christian conservatives met to devise ways to energize the faithful. They decided to create a new organization, the Arlington Group, whose sole focus was opposing same-sex marriage. In 2004, Paul Weyrich, a leading figure of the Christian right, told the Times, “Things have not gone well in the past couple of years,” but added that opposition to gay marriage “appears to be turning things around.” Fund-raising picked up, and socially conservative voters were drawn to the polls. Bush, who had received sixty-eight per cent of the evangelical vote in 2000, got seventy-eight per cent in 2004.

Just imagine the end of cyclones in Bangladesh, droughts in Ethiopia, sweltering days in Manhattan—a planet where the forecast is always California balmy! The solution to climatic catastrophes is simple, [Iowa Slate math professor Alexander Abian, 68] asserts: Nuke the moon. “You make a big hole by deep drilling, and you put there atomic explosive,” Abian (who is of Armenian descent) says in English unpolished by 41 years in America. “And you detonate it—by remote control from Earth.” The professor claims that blasting the moon would release the gravitational tug that causes our planet to tilt and thus stabilize the earth’s temperature and wind patterns. “I am raising the petulant finger of defiance to the solar organization for the first time in 5 billion years,” the professor declares. “Those critics who say ‘Dismiss Abian’s ideas’ are very close to those who dismissed Galileo.

Roger Williams has gone extreme, and he had to. After years as a genial local car dealer, he's knee-deep in a Central Texas congressional runoff that amounts to an Obama-hating contest against a Tea Party leader aligned with the John Birch Society and Constitution Party. That's why Williams' newest campaign e-mail Tuesday included a shadowy monochrome photo of President Barack Obama labeled: "SOCIALIST!" The e-mail also complains about the Austin newspaper: "Will you help me fight back against the liberal media?" Newspapers aren't Williams' problem. Wes Riddle is his problem. Riddle, a retired Army officer from Gatesville, wants to impeach Obama for "giving away" seven Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea islands near Siberia to Russia. (Yes, even though those islands were ceded in 1991 under President George H.W. Bush.)

NASA’s unmanned Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, has become the first vessel in history to reach the edge of the solar system, NASA announced in mid-June. It’s hard to overstate the milestone: At some point in the near future — it could be days or months, possibly, but not likely even a few years — Voyager is expected to break away from the bubble of particles emitted by the Sun encasing our solar system and enter the totally new, completely unexplored region of interstellar space, the black void separating us from the other star systems in our Milky Way Galaxy. Voyager’s ability to travel through the solar system to where it is now, 11 billion miles from Earth, passing by and snapping what were then the best images of Jupiter and Saturn in the process, has been a “crowning achievement,” according to the project’s chief scientist, Ed Stone, a preeminent 76 year-old physicist at Caltech, in a telephone interview with TPM. “We were hopeful that the spacecraft would reach interstellar space,” Stone told TPM. “It’s really set some records: The longest and furthest-flying spacecraft ever designed and built.”