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Media reports on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s “prayer rally” made it seem completely unremarkable — just some religious folks praying, that’s all. Good clean fun for the whole Christian family!

But Right Wing Watch supplies us with a video clip that shows the true intention of this religious right crowd — they literally want to control every area of American life, including the government.

Gene Mills, president of Louisiana Family Forum (an official state affiliate of the Family Research Council) spent his entire ten-minute speech at Jindal’s prayer rally this weekend openly preaching Seven Mountains Dominionism from the stage.

Christians have been tasked to take control of “the sphere of influence around civil government,” Mills said, because all areas of culture “belong to God.” Jindal’s prayer rally, Mill’s declared, was a key component of their effort “to reclaim territory that rightfully belongs to God” because “these seven spheres of influence are under enemy occupation right now.”

After revealing that last month, he and other prayer rally organizers knelt in prayer with Jindal “asking God to break unholy alliances” over these areas of society, Mills led the gathering in a similar prayer.

“Father, we cry out for the seven mountains of influence today,” Mills said. “We pray that you will give us government, arts and entertainment, education, the church, and the family. That our ambassadors would occupy the high places. That you would bring us into a place of understanding that they need to be occupied by the body of Christ because it’s rightfully His.”

I’m thinking back to all the climate trolls who used to throw this guy in my face when arguing with them…

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Richard Muller founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project after declaring himself skeptical about climate change. He was funded in part by the Koch Brothers.
He found out what other scientists have known for decades. The Earth is warming, and we’re doing it.

Rarely will you see the inhuman heartlessness of the conservative viewpoint so well expressed as in this freakishly horrible piece by American Enterprise Institute “scholar” Michael Strain: End Obamacare, and People Could Die. That’s Okay.

It’s difficult to know where to start with a morally perverted piece like this. His point seems to be that we make moral tradeoffs all the time, not exactly an original thought. But Strain gives away his game with this paragraph:

How do policymakers decide such things? In the deepest sense, every human life is inestimably valuable. But in a fallen world where trade-offs are inevitable, public policy can’t treat each life that way.

In his position of great privilege, Strain obviously thinks of himself as a righteous “pro-life” Christian. But he’s quite literally advocating that if they get sick, people less privileged than himself should just … die.

Vimeo

Image via Shutterstock

Every once in a while I come up with a bit of code that might be useful to other programmers, and here’s one of those bits — a regular expression that extracts the ASIN product code from almost any Amazon product URL, including URLs from non-US Amazon stores. (It doesn’t handle pages of search results or other index pages, however.)

I use this at LGF to rewrite links to Amazon and add our affiliate ID to the link, so if someone clicks the link we get a small percentage of the purchase price when they buy something.

This code used to be a series of regular expressions that matched each type of URL, but I was looking at it this week and realized it might be possible to condense the whole process down to just one regex. And after extensive testing, I think I may have gotten pretty close to a universal Amazon ASIN extractor. (I searched Google, and couldn’t find anything this good online.)

In this PHP code, I used the x modifier to let me split the regex across multiple lines with comments and indenting. I also used ~ for the regular expression delimiter so all the forward slashes don’t need to be escaped. These two steps make the code much more readable, but if you use this regex with a language that doesn’t allow you to change the delimiter you’ll need to insert a backslash before each forward slash.

(Notice that I used non-capturing groups for everything except the ASIN product ID.)

<?php
$regex = '~
	(?:www\.)?				# optionally starts with www.
	ama?zo?n\.				# also allow shortened amzn.com URLs
	(?:
		com					# match all Amazon domains
		|
		ca
		|
		co\.uk
		|
		co\.jp
		|
		de
		|
		fr
	)
	/
	(?:						# here comes the stuff before the ASIN
		exec/obidos/ASIN/	# the possible components of a URL
		|
		o/
		|
		gp/product/
		|
		(?:					# the dp/ format may contain a title
			(?:[^"\'/]*)/	# anything but a slash or quote
		)?					# optional
		dp/
		|					# if short format, nothing before ASIN
	)
	(B[A-Z0-9]{9})			# capture group $1 contains the ASIN
	(?:						# everything after the ASIN
		(?:/|\?|\#)			# beginning with /, ? or #
		(?:[^"\'\s]*)		# everything up to quote or white space
	)?						# optional
~isx';
?>

Here’s a bit of code that puts this regex to work and inserts our affiliate ID into the reconstructed link:

<?php
$text = preg_replace($regex, 'www.amazon.com/dp/$1/?tag=littlegreenfo-20', $text);
?>

And here’s what this regular expression looks like when condensed down to one gnarly line:

<?php
$regex = '~(?:www\.)?ama?zo?n\.(?:com|ca|co\.uk|co\.jp|de|fr)/(?:exec/obidos/ASIN/|o/|gp/product/|(?:(?:[^"\'/]*)/)?dp/|)(B[A-Z0-9]{9})(?:(?:/|\?|\#)(?:[^"\'\s]*))?~isx';
?>

If you run this regular expression against the following URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Man-High-Castle/dp/B00RSGFRY8/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1421879835&sr=1-1&keywords=the%20man%20in%20the%20high%20castle

You end up with this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RSGFRY8/?tag=littlegreenfo-20

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Here’s a great live performance by Neil Finn, with the late Paul Hester on drums, doing one of his classic songs, “Fall At Your Feet.”

Neil Finn performing live at the Chapel in support of his One Nil release. Special appearances by Jim Moginie, Paul Hester, and Nick Seymour

Here it is, folks — the hit piece on Dana Loesch Chuck C. Johnson has been threatening to post all day; he finally worked up the guts to go through with it: BUSTED: The Real Dana Loesch: A Hypocrite and a Fraud Lying About Andrew Breitbart and Me.

Hilariously, this whole brouhaha was started when Chuck and Dana got in a pissing match over who was really the inheritor of dead Andrew Breitbart’s “legacy.”

Yes, that’s right — they’re squabbling over who’s the sleaziest bottom feeder of them all. Pardon me while I put on some more popcorn. Can they both win?

Loesch fires back at the Ginger Avenger.

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Even by Sarah Palin’s already low standards, this speech is extraordinarily incoherent and scattered. I’ve seen a lot of her speeches (do not pity me, it is my job), and I can’t remember a more garbled, deeply weird performance from Caribou Barbie.

Video

And now, ladies and gentlemen, Caribou Barbie is about to take the stage at the Iowa Freedom Freakout. Let’s give her a warm welcome, shall we?

MSNBC

Creationist Gov. Booby Jindal is hosting a prayer rally in Louisiana today, co-sponsored by the homophobic hate group known as the American Family Association. Yes, that’s loony Bryan Fischer’s gang of religious right wackos. Jindal is trying to stake out a position as the most fanatical far right Christian in the 2016 race, apparently, but he’s got a lot of competition for that slot.

This Rachel Maddow segment does a good job of showing how completely batshit nuts the AFA is.