stcynic
Posts by this author
April 29, 2005
Sandefur is making a list of songs with a libertarian bent. So far he has listed It's My Life by Billy Joel, My Way by Frank Sinatra and I Hear My Train Coming by Jimi Hendrix (which I haven't heard), and readers have suggested three songs: Welcome to the United States by Frank Zappa and The Boys…
April 29, 2005
I found out last night that the Michigan State Police are investigating a local VFW hall for having poker games on the weekends. I've played in said game a few times and know many of the players. It's a group of mostly Vietnam and even Korean war vets who sit in the back room a couple nights a week…
April 29, 2005
Jon Rowe has written a retraction of his charge that Herb Titus, former head of the Regent University law school, is a Christian reconstructionist. Titus took the time to write him directly and dispute that those are his views. The post caught my eye because I had conversations with Perry Willis, a…
April 28, 2005
Ten points to the first person who can guess who said the following thing in 1995:
"The time has come that the American people know exactly what their Representatives are doing here in Washington. Are they feeding at the public trough, taking lobbyist-paid vacations, getting wined and dined by…
April 28, 2005
I've been working on the new website for Michigan Citizens for Science. Skip Evans was kind enough to make a logo for us and install it on the page. He's a real pro at the Postnuke content management system. I think I've finally got the page where I want it in terms of look and function. We'll roll…
April 27, 2005
The great charm of democracy, HL Mencken famously wrote, is that it's the only truly amusing form of government ever invented. That amusement grows exponentially when one isn't a political partisan. Folks like me who think that the two major parties are, for all practical purposes, equally corrupt…
April 27, 2005
A new Washington Post/ABC poll shows that most Americans oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier to confirm judicial nominees, and it's not even close. 66% are opposed to it, while 26% are for it. According to The Hill's Alexander Bolton, the Republicans' internal polling is showing the same…
April 26, 2005
I can't be the only one who is sick and tired of hearing the right blather on about the "unprecedented" filibusters over a handful of Bush's judicial nominees. Bill Frist claims that the Democrats "radically broke with tradition and precedent and launched the first-ever filibuster of a judicial…
April 26, 2005
Timothy Sandefur has a post at the Panda's Thumb about the Gull Lake situation and the Thomas More Law Center's citing of Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No 26 et al v. Pico in its letter to the Gull Lake school board. As he points out, Pico does not support their case…
April 26, 2005
As we come to the end of the month of April, it is once again time to award the Robert O'Brien Trophy (formerly known as the Idiot of the Month award) to a worthy recipient. This month's winner is Les Kinsolving, the Worldnutdaily's intrepid White House correspondent, for this screed about gays and…
April 26, 2005
Timothy Sandefur has published a review of Randy Barnett's book Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty. The review is called The Normality of Freedom, and that is a good title. While he has some criticisms of what the book lacks, I think he captures the essence of the…
April 25, 2005
It's nice to see some of the more decent and consistent conservatives going after Tom DeLay, James Dobson and the rest of the folks going after judges with a meat cleaver. The latest to do so are Ted Olson and Charles Krauthammer. Olson represented President Bush before the Supreme Court in the…
April 25, 2005
The attorneys on both sides of the Gull Lake issue seem to be playing hard and fast with the facts on the "internal committee" that was formed to decide whether to allow the teachers to teach creationism in science classes. When we first became involved in the situation, the school board treated it…
April 25, 2005
If the Gull Lake teachers do file a lawsuit claiming that it is a violation of their rights if they are not allowed to teach creationist or other anti-evolution material in their science classes, there are three primary legal precedents for such a suit. All of them have found against the teacher's…
April 24, 2005
I have returned from a day and a half away, involving a freak late-April snowstorm and a huge pileup on the highway (I was not involved in it except that it backed up traffic for what seemed like about 20 miles) and some fun as well. I return to find that, irony of ironies, I was mentioned in the…
April 22, 2005
From Kathy Martin, Kansas State Board of Education who is pushing for inclusion of Intelligent Design in the state's science curriculum, making the folks at the Discovery Institute tear their hair out while she lays the smack down on their attempts to pretend that ID is just about science, not…
April 22, 2005
"You're born absolutely free except laws of nature. If you drink too much you'll get drunk, that's a law. If you get old you die, that's a law...these are the only laws you're born with and any government just fucks you out of that type of freedom...You're not free. You need a diploma in this…
April 22, 2005
I got some good news yesterday. My old friend Troy Britain, who I've known since the old days of the Compuserve religion forum (back when it had to be accessed with proprietary software dialing in to their system rather than through the internet, which I did on a 286 with 1 meg of ram!), informed…
April 21, 2005
The Thomas More Law Center, the same legal group defending the school board in Dover, PA, is threatening to file a lawsuit against the Gull Lake Public Schools for telling two junior high science teachers that they could no longer teach creationism in their classrooms. Michigan Citizens for Science…
April 21, 2005
The Connecticut House of Representatives passed a bill allowing civil unions for gay couples on an 85-63 vote and Governor Rell signed the bill less than an hour after it was passed. The final version contains language that says that "marriage" is still defined as the union of a man and a woman,…
April 21, 2005
Marci Hamilton's latest column skewers Tom DeLay and Bill Frist for their cavalier and hypocritical demonization of the courts. She writes in part:
DeLay catered to the far right when he led the charge to enact "Terri's Law," which enabled her parents to return to a federal court that had lacked…
April 20, 2005
Paul Phillips, poker and scrabble player extraordinaire and one of the smartest and funniest guys around, is now a proud papa. His lovely wife Kathleen gave birth to Ivy Simone Phillips on Monday. Pictures here. Congratulations, Paul.
April 20, 2005
Orin Kerr has a pithy comment about Tom DeLay and his silly comments about how "outrageous" it is for Justice Kennedy to use the internet for research:
What's next? I fully expect DeLay to introduce H.R. 8615, The Stop Anthony Kennedy From Using the Internet Act of 2005. Stay tuned.
Professor Kerr…
April 20, 2005
Adam Cohen has an op-ed piece in the NY Times entitled Psst ... Justice Scalia ... You Know, You're an Activist Judge, Too. He writes:
The idea that liberal judges are advocates and partisans while judges like Justice Scalia are not is being touted everywhere these days, and it is pure myth.…
April 20, 2005
Virtually everyone, me included, has assumed that Chief Justice Rehnquist would be retiring at the end of this term due to his ongoing health problems and advanced age. But is that true? One court-watching blog is reporting that Rehnquist has just hired his 3 law clerks for the October 2005 session…
April 20, 2005
Ah yes, the war on the judiciary continues, led by our old pal Tom DeLay. Here's his latest bit of stupidity:
"Absolutely. We've got Justice Kennedy writing decisions based upon international law, not the Constitution of the United States? That's just outrageous," DeLay told Fox News Radio on…
April 19, 2005
Via Randy Barnett at VC, there is a new paper at SSRN from John Yoo and Sai Prakash, entitled The Origins of Judicial Review. This was the subject of much discussion recently in posts by me and by Josh Claybourn. It began with me criticizing Tom Delay for his absurd statement that, "The reason we…
April 19, 2005
As everyone knows by now, we have a new pope. Not being Catholic, the identity of the pope has little to do with me (though I'm glad we finally have one - since John Paul II died, I've borne the burden of being the only infallible person on the planet, and I just don't need that kind of stress).…
April 19, 2005
I've written a lot about the hypocrisy coming from the right on a number of issues, particularly federalism and "judicial activism." There are signs that these issues are beginning to split conservatives as well, roughly along the line dividing those who actually believe the things they've been…
April 19, 2005
I saw this on John Coleman's blog and thought it was an interesting idea. You should be reading Coleman's work, by the way. He is on the staff of Crux, the pro-ID magazine, but he is a really bright and thought provoking writer. Anyway, the meme is this:
Behold, the Caesar's Bath meme! List five…