stcynic
Posts by this author
July 4, 2006
Rafe Furst of the legendary Tiltboys won his first bracelet at the World Series of Poker in the $1500 buy-in Pot Limit Hold Em event. He joins Phil Gordon (formerly the host of Celebrity Poker Showdown) and Perry Friedman as Tiltboys with bracelets. Making it even more impressive is the field he…
July 4, 2006
Jon Rowe has a fascinating post at Positive Liberty about John Witherspoon, one of our more neglected founding fathers. As Jon notes, Witherspoon is interesting because he was a very orthodox Christian but also an outspoken proponent of the Enlightenment philosophy that undergirds our liberal…
July 4, 2006
Email? Yeah, I get email. Some of it is even as funny as this one from someone named Ken Mayfield:
Creationist nonsense? You find it easier to believe that the perfect order around you is a culmination of chance, amoeba, and some ethereal intelligence called evolution.
Unbelievable
I think we may…
July 4, 2006
I received the following e-mail from Larry Fafarman:
Ed,
It is easy for you and your pals to take cowardly potshots at me from the safety of your blog, where I am banned. So I am challenging you to either unban me on your blog or debate me on my blog.
Larry Fafarman
What is it about right wingers…
July 4, 2006
I remember a poll from several years ago that showed that a staggering percentage of the American public had no idea what event the 4th of July was meant to celebrate. That event, of course, was the signing of the Declaration of Independence, easily among the most important documents in the history…
July 4, 2006
Agape Press has an article about gay straight alliance groups in public schools, of which there are now some 2000 or so around the country. There's a controversy going on in Michigan in the Forest Hills School District, where religious right groups are trying to get the school district to disband…
July 4, 2006
Josh Claybourn of In The Agora has written a law review article on state laws against gay adoptions. Jason Kuznicki and I provided some constructive criticism of that article while he was working on it, for which he thanked us in the article. Sadly, the journal it was to be published in has gone…
July 3, 2006
I thought I was done pummeling DaveScot's immeasurable ignorance on this issue, but then I saw this comment where he interjects his thoughts in bold. It's just astonishing how someone can be so wrong about virtually everything and be totally unaware of it. It's like the perfect storm of stupidity.…
July 3, 2006
Sandefur took a short break from his travels to briefly reply to DaveScot's terminal cluelessness in a post titled "Why DaveScot Should Stop Playing Lawyer". I'll just quote the first paragraph:
DaveScot is an especially belligerent idiot who was happily adopted as a co-blogger by the credibility-…
July 3, 2006
Well, it's not the case that's ridiculous (though they may well not win it in court), but the action that led to it. Here's one of those situations that just feeds into the paranoia that says people are out to destroy any religious expression in public at all. It's not true, of course, this is just…
July 2, 2006
If DaveScot didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Who could give up the constant amusement of watching him take brave leaps in the dark and land with a resounding thud? Here's his latest, where he entirely misreads a post by Sandefur at the Panda's Thumb and still doesn't get the…
July 2, 2006
Dave and Larry don't always perform together, of course. Larry has his own act, which can be seen at his blog pretty much every day. And he's continued to peddle nonsense on this issue over there.
(1) The attorney fee awards that defendants must pay in establishment clause cases are often…
July 2, 2006
DaveScot and Larry Fafarman really should take their act on the road, I think. I'd pay money to see these keystone cops try and explain legal concepts to each other and argue about it, wouldn't you? Dave's post on jury nullification continues to provide much amusement. As Dan said in a comment,…
July 2, 2006
So here's how I spent almost 2 hours of my time last night. Something was wrong with the Movable Type installation on my old blog at stcynic.com. I couldn't access any of the cgi files to do anything with it, so I called tech support for the web hosting service. I am informed that the wait will be…
July 1, 2006
Okay, this is just hilarious. A reader left a link to this and I had to move it up here. It's John Lofton on the Daily Show, being interviewed by Stephen Colbert about a children's book written by Lynne Cheney. I love the distinction he makes between "ultraconservatives" (like Lynne Cheney) and "oh…
July 1, 2006
Did anyone see their report on flag burning? Jon Stewart called those pushing for an amendment to ban flag burning "flag hags" and accused them of "flaming flaggotry". I about spit up my iced tea. I couldn't find a clip for that one on youtube, but I did find this one, a compendium of their "War on…
July 1, 2006
If even 10% of the allegations in this case are correct, it's one of the most outrageous cases I've ever seen. The Indian River School District in Delaware is accused by a Jewish family of pushing Christianity so agressively and viciously that the family has moved to Wilmington because they feared…
July 1, 2006
The three Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - have been fighting each other, killing each other and oppressing each other for centuries, a fact that many lament. Which is why it's so heartwarming to see all three religions unite together, joined by their hatred of gays:
Jewish…
June 30, 2006
Reading and understanding court rulings can sometimes be difficult. When that ruling is 185 pages long and has multiple concurrences and dissents, it can be downright confusing. Sandefur has done us all a favor and posted a series of essays explaining what the ruling means over at Positive Liberty…
June 30, 2006
A new article in the York Daily Record about Judge Jones and how he's handled the aftermath of the Dover decision (okay, it's a few days old, but I just found out about it from Burt Humburg, and yes I've informed him that he really should be more on the ball and get me this information sooner). I…
June 30, 2006
And out come the wingnuts. Here's the email I just received from someone named James Albright:
Dear Ed,
Noah's ark was discovered by Ron Wyatt, whose ministry is named Wyatt Archeological Research. The news media is only taking attention away from the real ark through your ministry. Please stop…
June 30, 2006
This is classic. Thanks to Jon Rowe and 386sx for pointing out this video of John Lofton debating Frank Zappa on Crossfire in 1986. Lofton calls for government censorship of rock music. His arguments are ridiculous. He claims that it's okay to censor music because "words mean something" and "have…
June 30, 2006
This is a hilarious clip of Keith Olbermann hammering Bill O'Reilly on his ever lowering ratings. I love Olbermann.
June 30, 2006
The Arkansas Supreme Court has handed us another major victory for gay adoptions, ruling that the state's child welfare board cannot prohibit gays from being foster parents.
"There is no correlation between the health, welfare and safety of foster children and the blanket exclusion of any…
June 29, 2006
The Oklahoma judge on trial for using a penis pump under his desk during trials was convicted of indecent exposure by a jury today. Several thoughts come to mind.
A. This gives a whole new meaning to "penal code".
B. I can't wait for the release of "Judges Gone Wild", taped at Mardi Gras.
C. If…
June 29, 2006
Good ol' DaveScot is back (with a brand new dance) and this time he's blathering about jury nullification. The problem is that he doesn't seem to have a clue what jury nullfication is. What makes it even funnier is that he actually quotes the definition of jury nullification and then still doesn't…
June 29, 2006
HR 2679 is not the only attempt by the religious right to rig the rules of the game because they keep losing. HR 2389, the "Pledge Protection Act of 2005", is another bill to do the same thing in a different way, by limiting the jurisdiction of Federal courts to hear any case involving the pledge…
June 29, 2006
The Supreme Court today handed Bush a major defeat on the question of how to handle the detainees at Gitmo. In the case of Hamdan v Rumsfeld, the Court ruled 5-4 that the President did not have the authority to try those detainees by military tribunals. The ruling was 5-3, with Chief Justice…
June 29, 2006
In one of the craziest drafts I've ever seen, the craziest move of the night belonged to - who else? - Isiah Thomas. I've given the numbers before to demonstrate Thomas' world class incompetence as an executive, but let's recap: 3 years ago he took over a 35 win team that was $40 million over the…
June 29, 2006
I've been having an amusing exchange with John Lofton, the theocrat who owns The American View. You'll recall that he left a comment at Positive Liberty with his phone number and asked me to call him. I politely said no, but that he is welcome to leave a comment objecting to anything I've said that…