stcynic
Posts by this author
September 23, 2005
And it tells me nothing I didn't already know:
You are a Social Liberal (73% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (60% permissive) You are best described as a: Libertarian
Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating
Link
September 23, 2005
The Federal court case over teaching intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania - potentially the most important legal case in this area since 1987's Edwards decision outlawed the teaching of creationism in public school science classrooms - begins on Monday (sidenote to Dan - no continuance as of…
September 23, 2005
Damn it all, why don't I get good hate mail like Paul Phillips does? The misspellings, the poor grammar, the obvious misreading of what Paul said....it's priceless.
September 23, 2005
Wiley Bennett, pastor of Woodland Hill Baptist Church in Tyler, Texas, welcomed Katrina evacuees into his community with these words on the message sign in front of his church: "The Big Easy is the modern day Sodom and Gomorrah."
I'm sure Jesus would be proud. (link)
To be fair, one must note that…
September 23, 2005
A Christian school in California has expelled a 14 year old student because she has two lesbian parents:
Stob wrote that school policy requires that at least one parent may not engage in practices "immoral or inconsistent with a positive Christian life style, such as cohabitating without marriage…
September 23, 2005
A new curriculum for a public school bible course elective has been released by the Bible Literacy Project. Unlike the NCBCPS curriculum, this one was actually written by scholars. It's endorsed by respectable and reasonable legal analysts like Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center and Marc…
September 22, 2005
Mark Olson has responded to my reply to his post juxtaposing a "rights" position with an "ethics" position. Unfortunately, he still misunderstands the reason why I say his dichotomy is false. He concludes:
Have I answered the claim of "false dichotomy"? Clearly Rights based legal thinking exists.…
September 21, 2005
The Worldnutdaily has an article up amusingly titled America's Pro-Homosexual Giants. No, it's not about a bunch of huge men in leather leading a pride parade. It's a list of all the companies who scored 100% on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index. Of course, the WND thinks these…
September 21, 2005
If the goal of the ACLU is to destroy Christianity and drive all religion from the public square, as so many fevered demagogues on the right would have us believe, they sure are doing a lousy job of it. They're so incompetent at it that they keep defending the rights of individuals to express their…
September 21, 2005
Mark Olson of Pseudo-Polymath has a post about rights and ethics in competition that I must respond to more fully than I already have in the comments on his blog. To begin with, I must take issue with his characterization of the dispute:
The two extreme positions on such laws lie between the…
September 20, 2005
This is incredibly exciting news. One of my old and dear friends, Aaron Dworkin, founder and director of the Sphinx Organization, which provides education and opportunities to minority youth in classical music, has been awarded a Macarthur Foundation Genius Fellowship for 2005. The Detroit Free…
September 19, 2005
Just a short break from my usual subjects for a little whining. My fantasy football team is a keeper league, which means we can each keep up to 3 players from the last year's roster on our team for this year and everyone else goes back into the draft pool. I only kept one player this year and he…
September 19, 2005
I've been trying to find out what was said at that press conference called by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools - you know, the one with Chuck Norris - earlier this month. As it turns out, after savaging Mark Chancey's scathing report on the suitability of their curriculum…
September 19, 2005
Kermit Roosevelt, who teaches con law at UPenn, has an interesting article at American Prospect about the John Roberts hearings. He points out, correctly, that the arguments for why a nominee cannot be specific about a case that may come before them on the court don't withstand scrutiny:
What these…
September 18, 2005
I had lunch on Saturday with my friend Dan Ray, a frequent commenter here and a con law teacher, and we had an interesting discussion about John Roberts and the issue of the level of abstraction at which you view a given claim when it comes before the court. This was an issue during his…
September 17, 2005
Fresh off his electrifying performance on the Daily Show, the intrepid Dr. Dembski is still, it seems, attempting to do comedy. Witness the extraordinary chutzpah it took to write this post about the speaking schedule of NCSE staffers. He writes:
Have a look at http://www.ncseweb.org/meeting.asp.…
September 16, 2005
Much has been made during the hearings about whether Roberts is an "ideologue" or not, but I don't think that tells us much either way. Roberts himself said bluntly that he is not an ideologue and has no single ideology or judicial philosophy, and that he doesn't think ideologues should be on the…
September 16, 2005
The Senate Judiciary Committee completed their confirmation hearings for the Roberts nomination today. They are expected to vote in committee on the nomination next Thursday, the 22nd. That will send it to the full Senate, which will likely begin deliberations on Monday the 26th and a final vote…
September 16, 2005
One of my favorite nutballs, Don Feder, has now chimed in with his divine conspiracy theory of Katrina and he's firmly on the side of the Christian whackos and the Jewish whackos. Katrina, you see, was God's punishment for sodomy and for Israel pulling out of Gaza. He lists all of those "…
September 16, 2005
A truly astonishing statement from someone alleged to be an advocate of smaller government:
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared an "ongoing victory," and said there is simply no fat left to cut in the federal budget…
September 15, 2005
I've been remiss in keeping up with events at the Panda's Thumb, the group science blog I helped found a year and a half ago. I'm happy to say that it has become one of the blogosphere's most widely read. In fact, as Wes Elsberry noted the other day, we've just passed the one million hit mark (and…
September 15, 2005
If you ever need a good working definition of irony, look no further. This one almost reads like a parody from The Onion. The Las Vegas Weekly, by way of Walter Olson, by way of Josh Claybourn, reports that the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) has hired part time temp workers making $6 an…
September 15, 2005
Jason Kuznicki has an excellent post up at Positive Liberty about a contradiction in the military's handling of gay soldiers. On the one hand, they adamantly claim that allowing gays to serve in the military undermines morale and unit cohesion (the same exact arguments they made 60 years ago…
September 15, 2005
Google has launched a new search engine specifically for blogs. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
September 15, 2005
A Catholic school in Pennsylvania is trying to raise money for victims of the hurricane in an interesting way. They're playing Hanson's song "MMMBop" on the school's loudspeakers before and after school and in between every class and they won't stop until they've raised $3000. Man, let's hope no…
September 14, 2005
One really has to wonder why an organization as large as the Associated Press can't at least get someone with a legal background to write their reports on the confirmation hearings. It would help them avoid simple mistakes like this:
Early in his testimony on Wednesday, Roberts' second day of…
September 14, 2005
The Massachusetts legislature has, for the second year in a row, voted down a bill that would put a referendum on the state ballot to do away with gay marriages, as ordered by the state supreme court, and have civil unions instead. Interestingly, the vote was stronger this year than last, with many…
September 14, 2005
Well round 1 of round 2 has gone to Michael Newdow. Newdow is the doctor/lawyer from California who filed a case to have the words "under God" struck from the pledge of allegiance. His first suit went all the way to the Supreme Court but was dismissed there because they ruled that he lacked…
September 14, 2005
A reader sent me a link to this article about Pat Robertson blaming the hurricane on the fact that Ellen Degeneres was hired to host the Emmy Awards. Now that's not something that would be terribly shocking. Pat Robertson regularly says things that idiotic. But in this case, it's clearly a hoax.…
September 14, 2005
This story really cracks me up. It seems that the world is suddenly overflowing with gay penguins. At Central Park Zoo in New York, there are two male penguins, Roy and Silo, who appear to be in a gay relationship. They nuzzle each other and behave just like other sets of mates. They have sex with…