stcynic
Posts by this author
July 14, 2006
From the Pensacola newspaper:
A Pensacola evangelist was arrested Thursday and indicted in federal court on 58 charges that include income tax evasion, making threats against investigators and filing false complaints against Internal Revenue Service agents.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Miles Davis handed…
July 14, 2006
This could get interesting. Valerie Plame has filed a civil lawsuit against Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove for revealing her identity as a CIA agent. The actual complaint can be found here.
July 13, 2006
The STACLU folks are up in arms about Bush allegedly "caving in" and agreeing to FISA court oversight of the NSA's domestic spying programs. Arlen Specter announced that the White House has agreed to submit those programs to the FISA court for review of their constitutionality. STACLU's trenchant…
July 13, 2006
Radley Balko links to, and rightly lampoons, this silly article by Fortune writer Marc Gunther. Gunther claims that we have too many choices now, with 300 TV channels focused on particular niches. It's reduced the power of the 3 networks to present the news to a bulk of the population, it's reduced…
July 13, 2006
From last night's show. This is hilarious. Thanks to BigDumbChimp for the link.
July 13, 2006
This is a post about the World Series of Poker, but there are no spoilers in it
Today began one of the most interesting events at the World Series of Poker, the HORSE event. One of the complaints about the growth of the WSOP over the last few years is that the main event, with so many players…
July 13, 2006
Came across this amusing suggestion from Frank Beckwith at Southern Appeal:
The JW's are having a convention not too far from my home. I was thinking that a bunch of locals should knock on the hotel room doors of all the JWs on Saturday morning, ask to visit with them, and then leave a bunch of…
July 13, 2006
Tuesday's vote in the House on HR 4411, the bill that bans internet gambling nationwide, was supported, to no one's surprise, by those denizens of moral rectitude on the religious right. Agape Press reports on the strong support that "family" (read: anti-fun) organizations had for the bill,…
July 12, 2006
I'd never seen this court ruling from a Federal district judge in Texas until seeing it quoted in this post at Volokh. You think Scalia is blunt and pointed in his dissents? Wait till you see some of this ruling. He accuses the attorneys on both sides of having written their briefs "entirely in…
July 12, 2006
For those experiencing problems commenting, please be patient. I'm trying to figure out how to turn off typekey authentication, but even with all the settings saying it's not required, it still says it's required and reroutes everyone to typekey. It's becoming very frustrating.
Update: Okay, the…
July 12, 2006
Think Progress has this list of the strangest White House jobs. Did you know that there was actually a White House Director of Lessons Learned? I didn't either. His name is Stuart Baker. And he makes $106,000 a year. Talk about your easy jobs.
July 12, 2006
Nick Matzke has an excellent post at the Panda's Thumb poking a rather sizable hole in the latest ID strategy and the rhetoric used to defend it. The seeds of this strategy were sown in Ohio in 2002, where the Discovery Institute was pushing for inclusion of intelligent design in public school…
July 12, 2006
One of the tried and true tactics of creationists of all stripes has long been to equate evolution with atheism, and thus those who accept evolution become atheists. In a society where surveys show that atheists are, for some bizarre reason, among the most distrusted people, this is good political…
July 12, 2006
Christopher Patti, an attorney with the University of California, emailed me to correct my brief post on yesterday's ruling in CLS v Southern Illinois. Here I am, the guy who always tells people not to rely on media reports about court rulings because they so often get them wrong, and what do I do…
July 12, 2006
Once again, the ban on internet gambling in Washington state has a pernicious effect. After seeing the state issue cease and desist letters to publications that even mention online gambling, at least two magazines have been forced to pull all subscriptions to that state. Happy 4th of July, eh?
July 12, 2006
Dale Carpenter has had a series of interesting posts at Volokh about last week's ruling from the NY Court of Appeals (which is their state supreme court) that said that gay marriage was not required by the state constitution of New York. Carpenter is a law professor who advocates gay marriage but…
July 11, 2006
The ACLU committee that proposed rules against board members speaking out against the organization's positions has been withdrawn from consideration and will now go away. This is very good news. Bravo, ACLU.
July 11, 2006
I want to thank Tim and the interns at Seed for doing all the hard work in moving over all of the old posts from stcynic.com over to here. We're talking some 3000 posts, so this was not a minor project. It took the better part of 3 days to complete, so they really deserve some credit. But now…
July 11, 2006
From the Financial Times:
The White House confirmed on Tuesday that the Pentagon had decided, in a major policy shift, that all detainees held in US military custody around the world are entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions.
The FT learned that Gordon England, deputy defence…
July 11, 2006
In another case of a university refusing to recognize a Christian student group, CLS v Southern Illinois University, an appeals court has ruled that in favor of the Christian Legal Society. This is similar to the North Carolina case and several others around the country. This reverses a lower court…
July 11, 2006
I am happy to report that John Gorenfeld has revived his blog, I Approve This Messiah, which focuses on the activities of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. If you want to see something absolutely stunning, watch this video of Moon being crowned in a ceremony at the Senate office building in Washington DC.…
July 11, 2006
The House is set to vote today on a bill to ban online gambling in the United States. And you've gotta love the sober, logical analysis of those who support such legislation:
John Kindt, a business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has studied the issue, calls the…
July 11, 2006
I came across this post at Howard Friedman's religion law blog and it got me to thinking. The post is about Pakistan amending their state law to allow for women convicted of premarital sex to be "rehabilitated" rather than put to death, as their law previously demanded. I was repulsed by the notion…
July 11, 2006
Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chair of the House intelligence committee, went on Fox News on Sunday and accused the Bush administration of not informing Congress of ongoing intelligence gathering programs that they are bound by law to consult with Congress about:
"But in this case there was at least one…
July 11, 2006
Karl Rove says he's warming up his veto pen, for the first time in his presidency. And guess what the issue is that finally gets the President to consider using it? Stem-cell research.
President Bush will likely cast the first veto of his presidency if the Senate, as expected, passes legislation…
July 10, 2006
Someone told me once that I looked like Todd Brunson, professional poker player and son of the legendary Doyle Brunson. They were right. This could be my twin:
Now if only I had his money. Paul Phillips casually mentioned once that he saw Todd get up from the table at the Bellagio with 4 racks of…
July 10, 2006
Okay, how much of a right wing looney do you have to be to think that Tom Monaghan and the Thomas More Law Center are too liberal?
July 10, 2006
STACLU seems to be taking on new contributors. Unfortunately, the new ones don't seem to be any brighter or capable of rational thought than the old ones. Witness this post by Oak Leaf, which begins with this breathtakingly stupid statement:
Today, the ACLU attacked the Department of Defense and by…
July 10, 2006
As I said at the time, the search of William Jefferson's office on Capitol Hill was entirely constitutional. A Federal Judge has now confirmed that, rejecting arguments from lawmakers that the FBI violated the constitution's speech and debate clause when they searched his office with a legal…
July 10, 2006
Eugene Volokh has written an excellent series of posts about the use of the One True Purpose fallacy by opponents of gay marriage. The argument takes one of two forms, one against gay marriage and one against homosexuality itself, but both have the same flawed premise: the notion that either…