Over 800 people in Baghdad were killed today in what can best be described as a terrorist attack.

At least 841 people were killed and 323 others injured in a stampede on a Baghdad bridge after a massive Shiite religious commemoration erupted into panic Wednesday.

Most of those killed were women and children, police sources said. Authorities expect the death toll to reach 1,000, Health Ministry official Jased Latif Ali said.

Witnesses said the stampede started after someone screamed that a suicide bomber was in the crowd of pilgrims heading to the Kadhimiya mosque in northern Baghdad.

A railing on the bridge then collapsed under the crush of people, and hundreds fell to their deaths in the Tigris River about 30 meters (yards) below, CNN’s Jennifer Eccleston reported.

Even if the person who yelled ’suicide bomber’ was just making a joke, I’ve no doubt that this scenario will be repeated by real terrorists in the future. After all, why go through the effort of making bombs when you can cause greater devastation and panic by the mere threat of one?

My heart goes out to the people who were killed by this attack.

(link via Outside the Beltway)

Glenn Reynolds has put up an excellent set of links for the various charities helping out hurricane and flood victims. Go check it out and help somebody out!

“A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.”
– Robert Heinlein

“There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nutcases want to be president.”
– Kurt Vonnegut

“The fact of human inequality and the subtle and complex differences between various manifestations of being human - gay, straight, male, female, black, Asian - is a subject worth exploring, period. Liberalism’s commitment to political and moral equality for all citizens and human beings is not and should not be threatened by empirical research into human difference and varied inequality. And the fact that so many liberals are determined instead to prevent and stigmatize free research and debate on this subject is evidence … well, that they have ceased to be liberals in the classic sense.”
– Andrew Sullivan

“If you’ve read the definition of gross income in the Internal Revenue Code, and you aren’t convinced that the Code was written by a complete idiot, you aren’t a real lawyer yet. For starters, you have ‘Except as otherwise provided in this subtitle’. So there are exceptions to the definition of ‘income’ in other places. How useless!”

The Massachusetts General Court (the official name of the Bay State’s Legislative Body) Has set a date for its debate and possibly a vote on the Constitutional Amendment replacing gay marriages with civil unions.

Since the last time this issue went before a Constitutional Convention, public opinion in Massachusetts has changed rather dramatically. Andrew Sullivan has done a rather remarkable job of tracing the shift in public opinion since the Supreme Judicial Court decision forcing the state to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

The religious conservatives trying to block state recognition of any gay rights vis a vis marriage know this, and it’s evident in their strategy shift. As I’ve discussed earlier (but not by name), The Massachusetts Family Initiative sent a message to its e-mail list months ago telling its members not to support the current Amendment before the Convention and to wait for the new Amendment to make its way through the system. The political weakness of this strategy is obvious: it let’s the pro-marriage movement frame the debate in terms of civil unions. And the MFI withdrawing their support for the compromise amendment that they supported in 2004 only adds fuel to that fire.

On the other hand, between the theocon support of the amendment not returning and public opinion becoming more accepting of gay marriage by the week, the amendment that will be debated on 9/14 (which was passed 52%-48% at its narrowest margain) has almost no chance of passing. Combining that with the problems this new MFI-sponsored amendment will have, it’s starting to look like all the pro-gay-marriage camp has to do to succeed is keep the pressure where it is. Certainly good news for the thousands of people who’ve entered into gay marriages.

“Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”
– Ayn Rand

John McCain, the “maverick Republican” shows that he’s learned his lesson from 2000 and now plans on pandering to the Religious Right to insure his nomination in 2008.

On Tuesday, though, he sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement.

McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes “all points of view” should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.

At this point, my default vote in 2008 is likely to be Democrat, unless some Republican actually shows the cojones to actually stand up to the Religious Right.

“To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.”
– Ayn Rand