By the way, if you’ve been trying to keep track of the amazingly evil (and amazingly uncommented-on) doings of the Bush Restoration, check out

The Wage Slave Scorecard of Evil

One stop shopping for pointers to the execrable, the egregious, and the utterly outrageous.

AIDS Panel Choice Wrote of a ‘Gay Plague’

The Bush administration has chosen Jerry Thacker, a Pennsylvania marketing consultant who has characterized AIDS as the “gay plague,” to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS.

Next week, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson is scheduled to swear in several new commission members. They include Thacker, a former Bob Jones University employee, who says he contracted the AIDS virus after his wife was infected through a blood transfusion.

The 35-member commission, which makes recommendations to the White House on AIDS prevention, is the latest incarnation of a panel that has existed since the Reagan administration. Earlier commissions issued reports strongly critical of the national response to AIDS, and helped to nudge the government and the pharmaceutical industry toward greater action.

In his speeches and writings on his Web site and elsewhere, Thacker has described homosexuality as a “deathstyle” rather than a lifestyle and asserted that “Christ can rescue the homosexual.” After word of his selection spread among gays in recent days, some material disappeared from the Web site. Earlier versions located by The Washington Post that referred to the “gay plague,” for instance, were changed as of yesterday to “plague.”

Update: I see that Atrios and Oliver Willis wasted no time pointing to this story either.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about intellectual property law, the concepts behind intellectual property, and public domain of late. I think I have a better handle on it.

One of the arguments against allowing work to enter the public domain is that the creators of a work should be able to profit from it as long as they are able to. Well, okay…except the vast majority of works out there are no longer making anyone a dime. There isn’t a huge clamor out in our multiplexes for moviegoers to see the Great Movies of 1928. (1928 was, until Eldred, pretty much the current date for works to leave copyright protection.) There isn’t a rush on at Barnes and Noble to read the Bestsellers of 1928.

So basically the copyright extension was extended another twenty years to benefit a very few. It’s not called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act for nothing. There are very few beneficiaries of the copyright extension. And I’ve come to believe that society is definitely the loser.
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