March 2008 Archives

From the Savannah News-Press:

Sam Nunn for vice president?

It sounds far-fetched.

For one thing, the former U.S. senator from Georgia has said he's not interested.

For another, there is no indication that Barack Obama, apparently close to clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, wants him on the ticket.

And Nunn hasn't ruled out the possibility of going for the top spot as an independent. If he did, he has said, he wouldn't do so until both major parties had chosen their nominees.

But, at least in the Peach State, the idea of Nunn in the Democrats' veep slot won't go away.

"Everywhere you turn, you hear it," said Savannah businessman Ed Feiler, a longtime backer of Nunn who served 24 years in the Senate.

Recently, the idea has been floated nationally by columnists including Morton Kondracke and George Will.

The article goes on to point out that with Nunn's foreign policy credientials and credibility in the South, Obama could strengthen his big weakness and bring many more states into play. Could an African-American tsumani and Nunn enthusiasm and nostalgia bring Georgia into play? Possibly, but it would still be hard. Clinton won the state in 1992 by 11,000 votes, but Kerry lost by 550,000.

The article ends:

Despite Feiler's enthusiasm for Nunn, he conceded months ago that there's a problem.

"He's the kind of guy," Feiler explained, "who doesn't believe in vice of any kind."

We'll see about that - if and when it gets to that point.

Three years ago this week, my wife and I were counting down the days of her bedrest until she hit 36 weeks. We had been told that this was the gold standard for twin pregnancies. Thirty-six weeks was considered term, would be the comfort spot for developmental milestones, and would even mean that our daughters' lungs would have time to grow. I was busily planning all sorts of 36-week celebrations, but when I snuck out on the actual morning to pick up a peanut butter and chocolate cake we had recently tasted at a friend's birthday, my wife got upset. (I was also picking up a secret gift I had ordered for the eventual birth-day itself, having insisted it be ready by 36 weeks.) But that night, she got over it, when I presented the cake and we threw ourselves a party. The girls would not come for another two weeks.

Once again we have twins on the brain at this time of year (and last night at 4:30 a twin in our bed, as they've learned to vault out of their cribs at night) as we plan a birthday party. But this year also brings some odd twin news.

First comes word that identical twins don't have the same DNA after all. Scientists studied identical twins in which one shows signs of Parkinson's or dementia and the other does not.

It has long been known that identical twins develop differences that result from environment. And in recent years, it has also been shown that some of their differences can spring from unique changes in what are known as epigenetic factors, the chemical markers that attach to genes and affect how they are expressed -- in some cases by slowing or shutting the genes off, and in others by increasing their output.

These epigenetic changes -- which accumulate over a lifetime and can arise from things like diet and tobacco smoke-- have been implicated in the development of cancer and behavioral traits like fearfulness and confidence, among other things. Epigenetic markers vary widely from one person to another, but identical twins were still considered genetically identical because epigenetics influence only the expression of a gene and not the underlying sequence of the gene itself.

"When we started this study, people were expecting that only epigenetics would differ greatly between twins," said Jan Dumanski, a professor of genetics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an author of the study. "But what we found are changes on the genetic level, the DNA sequence itself."

The specific changes that Dr. Dumanski and his colleagues identified are known as copy number variations, in which a gene exists in multiple copies, or a set of coding letters in DNA is missing. Not known, however, is whether these changes in identical twins occur at the embryonic level, as the twins age or both.

"Copy number variations were discovered only a few years ago, but they are immensely important," said Dr. Carl Bruder, another author of the study at the university. Certain copy variations have been shown in humans to confer protection against diseases like AIDS, while others are believed to contribute to autism, lupus and other conditions. By studying pairs of identical twins in which one sibling has a disease and the other does not, scientists should be able to identify more easily the genes involved in disease.

Perhaps less fascinating -- but MUCH more alarming -- is that Jennifer Lopez is putting her twins at risk. Hold your breath: Here come the nursery police. Here's how one blogger characterized the nursery for her new twins:

All this after Parents Mag piggybacked on the photos to set themselves up as the country's Chief Nanny.

We all fight for first dibs on the office's People subscription, and this week everyone was dying to see the "world exclusive" pics of your newborn twins. Max and Emme are darling, natch, and you look as glam as ever—but Parents staffers were kinda shocked at the photo of the babies' ornate, Versailles-like nursery, which is filled with safety hazards. We want those sweet twins to stay out of harm's way, so we're begging you....please babyproof!

• Take the pillows, stuffed animals and blankets out of the cribs—they're suffocation hazards.
• Get rid of the dramatic draped canopies hanging over the cribs, which can cause strangulation.
• Those cute bows tied onto the crib slats? Choking hazards as soon as the babies are big enough to get their hands on them.
• Throw a window guard on that open window!

He's an athiest, despite the rumors.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made clear this past weekend that he is an atheist after European news agencies last week claimed that he had confirmed his Christian faith during a visit to the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi in Italy.

Gorbachev, the last communist leader of the Soviet Union, confronted speculations that he had been a closeted Christian during an interview with the Russian news agency Interfax.

"Over the last few days some media have been disseminating fantasies – I can't use any other word – about my secret Catholicism, citing my visit to the Sacro Convento friary, where the remains of St. Francis of Assisi lie," Gorbachev said, according to an Interfax article posted Friday.

"To sum up and avoid any misunderstandings, let me say that I have been and remain an atheist,” he stated.

Rumors for decades had circulated that Gorbachev was a Christian after he moved to loosen restrictions on religious worship and expressed to a party congress a year before the communist state dissolved that “spiritual rebirth is as essential to society as oxygen,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

As a result, media agencies had jumped to conclusions when Gorbachev visited St. Francis’ tomb last Wednesday and was seen kneeling for half an hour in silence at the tomb.

But Gorbachev, who was baptized Russian Orthodox as a child, explained that his visit to the tomb was as a tourist and not a pilgrim. He acknowledged the important role religion plays in society and said he looks forward to visiting Orthodox churches in Russia, Catholic and Protestant churches in the United States and Europe, synagogues in Israel and mosques in the Arab world, according to Interfax.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.

Peggy Ornstein writes in the NYT Magazine about an underdiscussed side of Barack Obama and the unspoken reality of Interfaith America: The rising number of bi-racial, cross-cultural Americans. The term of choice: Hapa.

Mixed-race marriages were illegal in at least 16 states when Obama was born, though the taboo was historically inconsistent — white men could marry Asian women in some places, for instance, while marriages like mine, which go the other way, were forbidden. Since 1967, when those laws were declared unconstitutional, the rate of interracial marriage among all groups has skyrocketed. And those couples have children. Of the seven million Americans who identified themselves as mixed-race in the 2000 census (the first in which it was possible to do so), nearly half were under the age of 18. Almost 5 percent of Californians now identify themselves as mixed-race; by comparison, fewer than 7 percent are African-American. Hawaii, Obama’s childhood home, is the most diverse state in the Union: 21 percent of residents identified as “Hapa,” a Hawaiian word meaning “half” that has gone from being a slur against mixed-race Asians to a point of pride — and has increasingly been adopted by multiracials of all kinds on the Mainland.

But the rise of multiracialism is not all Kumbaya choruses and “postracial” identity. The N.A.A.C.P. criticized the census change, fearing that since so few in the black community are of fully African descent, mass attrition to a mixed-race option could threaten political clout and Federal financing. Mexican-Americans, a largely mixed-race group, fought to be classified as white during the first half of the 20th century; during the second half, they fought against it.

Among Asians, Japanese-Americans in Northern California have argued over “how Japanese” the contestants for the Cherry Blossom Queen must be (the answer so far: 50 percent, which is less rigid than San Francisco’s Miss Chinatown U.S.A., whose father must be Chinese, but more strict than the 25 percent Chinese required to be Miss Los Angeles Chinatown).

Hapas muddy discussions of affirmative action and the gathering of health-care statistics. When a Centers for Disease Control researcher who called to survey me about my daughter’s vaccinations asked about her race, I answered, Caucasian and Asian. There was a pause, then she asked, “Which would you mainly identify her as?”

A blogger reports from the top of Jebel Musa in the Sinai.

Found a spot and zipped ourselves up to get away from the cold. From inside the bag, we could hear the Nigerians singing. We could hear the Jewish Rabbi chanting. We could hear the Muslims praying. And we could hear the Bedouin man selling "Black rock" over and over. It was a symphony. But a strangely eery sypmphony, sung with so much soul. After a while, I peeked out and saw that the light was coming, so we jumped up and found a panoramic spot to watch the sun come up. The full moon was setting just as the sun came up. It was last friday, the vernal equinox, and good Friday, and the full moon... all at once. We stayed at the top as long as possible until our guide, Sobe, came and found us. Took the 3000 step path down. Knees were in pain, but I felt strange inside mostly.

I have since been searching the internet for other people's accounts of their trip and I found one description which describes the experience much better than I can. Bruce Feiler says, "I realized that my trip had begun to affect me some place deep in my body. It wasn't my head, or my heart. It wasn't even my feet, though there occasionally. It was someplace so new to me that I couldn't locate it at first, or give it a name. It was a feeling of gravity. A feeling that I wanted to take off all my clothes and lie face down on the soil. I recalled my grandmother's funeral and the gulping ache I felt when they tossed a handful of soil on her coffin: "From ashes to ashes, from dust to dust." Not until that car ride, staring at that soil, did I fully understand what that phrase meant. Adam had been made from dust; his name is derived from the word adama, earth. "For dust you are," God says to Adam, "and to dust you shall return." Here was the source of that soil, I realized, and at that moment I had to resist the temptation to leap out and touch it."

Ben Smith points to an article about sex and the Catholic Church by Charles O'Byrne, adviser to what the tabs in NYC are calling the "Stud Gov," David Patterson. O'Byrne is a former litigator and a Jesuit priest who married...

Pennsylvania is opening a long-shuttered prison synagogue to the public.The prison, now a tourist attraction, has not held prisoners in 35 years and the small synagogue had been largely neglected since then, seen only by a handful of historians, preservationists...

Barbara Ehrenrich reports that one reason Hillary has remained silent on Obama's Wright problem is that she's got her own church issues just waiting to burst into the open. There's a reason Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the...

In response to the YouTube clips of Jeremiah Wright, Barrack Obama has now published an essay on the Huffington Post. He begins with the inevitable "rejecting and denouncing" that has now becoming routine in this campaign for everyone except John...

David Corn points the spotlight on John McCain's newest spiritual adviser, who said America was founded to put a stop to Islam.Senator John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser an Ohio megachurch pastor who has called upon Christians to wage...

A second Muslim was elected to the U.S. House this week. Democrat Andre Carson won Tuesday's special election to succeed his grandmother, the late U.S. Rep. Julia Carson, and fill out the final 10 months of her term. Carson's win...

My alma mater gets some heat to go with its light and truth:Blair, who stepped down as prime minister last year after 10 years in power, was to lecture on faith and globalization as the Howland Distinguished Fellow, and would...

I realize I've been a little slow on blogging lately, but I'm about 140 weeks into a 142-week procees of writing a book about the influence of Moses on American history. The book, which is still wandering in the desert...

Ben Smith returns with thoughts on Clinton's branding....