Getty I,ages

SOCIAL NONSENSE: Under the direction of the great community activist and the moral compass of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and the enlightened liberal Democratic commissars, America is quickly making the internal rot and demise of the Roman Empire look like an absolute success. While the three of them bankrupt the U.S., and strip us of all of our value systems, anyone who disagrees is branded a racist. Even as they pass health care reform that will make the system demonstrably worse, venereal disease is exploding and their concern is banishing God from all of our lives. It is hard to imagine that these people actually won fair elections – perhaps the nation is finished once and for all. Nobody in the Third World or anywhere else is this stupid.

By Dennis Mullin

BAD FRIDAY: This is Easter Sunday. So what did the city of Davenport, Iowa do last week? Just before the most solemn day in the Christian year, the city removed Good Friday from its municipal calendar, setting off a storm of complaints from Christians and union members whose contracts give them that day off.

Davenport officials decided to officially axe Good Friday from its municipal calendar. Taking a recommendation by the Davenport Civil Rights Commission to change the holiday's name to something more ecumenical, City Administrator Craig Malin sent a memo to municipal employees announcing Good Friday would officially be known as "Spring Holiday." And that is in Iowa -- leftwing political correctness has triumphed across the land and soon practicing religion will become a criminal offense.

UPSET: "My phone has been ringing off the hook since Saturday," said city council alderman Bill Edmond. "People are genuinely upset because this is nothing but political correctness run amok." Edmond said the city administrator made the change unilaterally and did not bring it to the council for a vote, a requirement for a change in policy.

"The city council didn't know anything about the change. We were blind sided and now we've got to clean this mess up. How do you tell people the city renamed a 2,000 year old holiday?" said Edmond. It didn't take long for the city to resurrect the name Good Friday. Malin was overruled and the words "Spring Holiday" disappeared.

Good Friday commemorates the day Jesus was crucified and died. Christians celebrate his resurrection the following Sunday, Easter. The Civil Rights Commission said it recommended changing the name to better reflect the city's diversity and maintain a separation of church and state when it came to official municipal holidays.

"We merely made a recommendation that the name be changed to something other than Good Friday," said Tim Hart, the commission's chairman. "Our Constitution calls for separation of church and state. Davenport touts itself as a diverse city and given all the different types of religious and ethnic backgrounds we represent, we suggested the change."

CALENDAR: News of the change could not have come at more significant time in the Christian calendar. News of the name change spread through the town on Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week, becoming a topic of conversation at church services throughout Davenport. "If you deny the idea of Good Friday then you have to deny Easter," Monsignor Robert Schmidt told the local ABC affiliated WAQD.

Hart said the commission had no plans to change the name of Easter Sunday, because it fell on a weekend and government offices were already closed. The commission, he said, discussed changing the name for the Christamas holiday, but decided enough other religions celebrate Christmas too. Hart, however, could not name one.

ATTACKED: The religious right immediately attacked. Town governments throughout the country have removed public Christmas displays, calling such practices a "war on Christmas.”  City employees, beginning with local police, feared the name change would violate their union contracts with the city, which specifies Good Friday as an official municipal holiday. Employees that work city holidays are paid time and a half.

Davenport officials called the name change an "error."  "The City of Davenport will be observing "Good Friday" as a City Holiday on April 2," read a statement. "City Administrator Malin, in error, forwarded the recommendation to staff for further review and action, leading to release of a holiday notice with the holiday named 'Spring Holiday,' rather than "Good Friday," read the release.

Davenport's mayor said people were right to be angry but that Good Friday would continue to be acknowledged. "I understand why people were so upset," said Mayor Bill Guba. "My position is we have a lot more important issues. We'll fix this and move on."

PRIORITIES: A lot more important issues? Ain’t that the truth. Democrats are so busy attacking God and legalizing all manner of aberrational behavior and absurd spending that people are actually dying as a result. Reuters reports that the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea risks becoming a drug-resistant "superbug" if doctors do not devise new ways of treating it.

Leading sexual health expert Catherine Ison, a specialist on gonorrhea from Britain's Health Protection Agency said at a World Health Organization (WHO) meeting in Manila next week would be vital to efforts to try to stop the bug repeatedly adapting to and overcoming drugs. "This is a very clever bacteria. If this problem isn't addressed, there is a real possibility that gonorrhea will become a very difficult infection to treat," she said.

STD’S: Gonorrhea is a common bacterial sexually-transmitted infection and if left untreated can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility in women. Globally, the WHO estimates that there are at least 340 million new cases of curable sexually transmitted infections -- including syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia and trichomoniasis -- every year among people aged 15 to 49.

Ison said the highest incidences of gonorrhea were in south and southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, but as yet the WHO has no breakdown by individual infection type. Current treatment for gonorrhea in most countries consists of a single antibiotic dose of either cefixime or ceftriaxone. But Ison, who is due to speak on the issue at a Society for General Microbiology conference in Edinburgh on Tuesday, said strains of the Neisseria gonorrhea bacteria were starting to become resistant and could soon become impervious to all current antibiotic treatment options.

RESISTANCE: "Ceftriaxone and cefixime are still very effective but there are signs that resistance, particularly to cefixime is emerging and soon these drugs may not be a good choice," she said. Instances of gonorrhea being resistant to multiple drugs -- the definition of a "superbug" -- have started to appear in Japan, where health authorities had decided to up the dose to treat the disease, but stick with the same antibiotic, she said.

Other reports of rising gonorrhea drug resistance had also come from Hong Kong, China, Australia and parts of Asia, Ison said the best way to try to reduce the risk now -- beyond encouraging the use of condoms which halt the spread of sexually transmitted diseases -- would be to treat gonorrhea with two different antibiotics at the same time. This is a technique used in the treatment of some other diseases like tuberculosis and one that makes it more difficult for the bacteria to learn how to conquer the drugs.

"There are few new drugs available. So using more than one at the same time is probably what should happen in the first instance," said Ison. "We also need to set up good lines of communication between countries so that we can all talk to each other about what's happening in gonorrhea and make sure we change treatment strategies when we need to."

A WHO spokeswoman said its experts would discuss drug-resistant gonorrhea at a meeting in the Philippine capital Manila next week.