stcynic
Posts by this author
April 7, 2005
Senator Jon Cornyn is doing the foot-in-mouth two step, backing away from his comments the other day about violence against judges while, of course, claiming he didn't really say what he is now making clear he didn't mean. So let's take a look at what he said on Monday, with the transcript from his…
April 7, 2005
It appears that Connecticut is on the verge of passing a bill that allows civil unions for gay couples in that state. It would be the first state to do so without any judicial order requiring it. The AP reports that the state Senate took up the bill today and Democratic leaders say they have the…
April 6, 2005
Jim Babka, the host of the radio show I was on a few days ago, has posted a report to his blog on how the show went. It seems he thought it went pretty much the way I thought it went:
Brayton, who argued that the outcome of Terri's case was correct, was well-prepared and forensically strong. I…
April 6, 2005
The right's war on the courts continues to heat up. In addition to the various court-stripping bills in front of Congress and Sen. Cornyn warning them about serial rapists killing them for failing to do what Congress wants, we now have this threat from Rep. Steve King of Iowa on NPR last week:
Rep…
April 5, 2005
Joseph Farah, the blowhard owner of the Worldnutdaily, is once again demonstrating that one need not let little things like ignorance of the subject stand in the way of pontificating about that subject. In this case, the subject is evolution and his ignorance of that subject is on display for all…
April 5, 2005
I neglected to award a Robert O'Brien trophy for the month of March, so let me do so belatedly now. March's winner, for comments made in April, is Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. On the floor of the Senate yesterday, Cornyn delivered a ridiculous speech to an almost empty chamber in which he blamed the…
April 5, 2005
I suppose being a big fan of both Duke and MSU should make me upset that North Carolina won the NCAA championship last night, but it doesn't bother me at all. More than anything, I am a college basketball fan and I thought the Tar Heels were the best team all year and picked them to win it. And I'…
April 4, 2005
I find this highly amusing. Lyle Denniston of the SCOTUSblog is reporting:
The Supreme Court on Monday gave two Kentucky counties permission to make a new attempt to rescue their courthouse displays of the Ten Commandments from being struck down as a move motivated by religious objectives. The…
April 4, 2005
Tom Delay was right up front in the battle over Terri Schiavo, and having lost that battle he is now out to punish those impudent judges who dared not to agree with his position. "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior," he said. Delay has long been at the…
April 4, 2005
I just found out from Jim Babka that things were not properly set up to archive the internet stream from yesterday's show, so there is no mp3 of the show available. A couple of people said they were going to try and record it off the web, but one of them couldn't get it set up in time. The other I…
April 4, 2005
From Salon.com (you have to view a commercial to get free access to the whole article:
New Rule: Abstinence pledges make you horny. A new eight-year study just released reveals that American teenagers who take "virginity" pledges of the sort so favored by the Bush administration wind up with just…
April 4, 2005
I was just looking at my sitemeter stats and found this rather interesting. I seem to have quite a few readers in government jobs because in the last hour I've had hits from the state government domains for Maryland, Virginia and Texas as well as a hit from the National Institutes of Health. I also…
April 4, 2005
A commenter left this on a thread below and it deserves its own thread. Media Matters has an amusing report on Pat Robertson's appearance on Fox News a few days ago talking about Terri Schiavo. He says:
You know, on my program today, I read in detail the finding of a noted Nobel Prize-winning…
April 3, 2005
I don't know how many of you got to listen to my appearance on the Jim Babka show tonight, but here's my take on how things went. First, I was absolutely stunned by how bad Larry Klayman was. I mean awful, stink-up-the-joint horrible. Totally unprepared, ignorant of the facts of the case, thin-…
April 2, 2005
I don't know how to make heads or tails out of the blog rankings. According to the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem, I'm the 482nd most read blog with just over 700 hits per day. But according to their link rankings, I'm #2055 with 74 inbound unique links. But according to Technorati up until the last few…
April 1, 2005
I just got off the phone with Jim Babka, a radio talk show host and founder of DownsizeDC.org. He has invited me to come on his show on Sunday evening to debate the Terri Schiavo situation with Larry Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch and tireless filer of lawsuits. The entire show is one hour long…
April 1, 2005
A North Carolina woman has filed suit to overturn a state law against couples living together. Last year she was forced to quit her job as a dispatcher by the county sheriff when he found out that she was living with her boyfriend and was not married to him. And according to press reports, this isn…
April 1, 2005
I'm pleased to announce that Timothy Sandefur has returned to the blogging world after a few weeks away. Having moved in to a new home with his lovely fiance Erin, he is now free to ignore her and turn his attention to the far more important task of writing entertaining and enlightening posts for…
March 31, 2005
This is a banner week to be a Michigan State University alum. The men's basketball team is in the final four. The women's basketball team is in the final four. And, obviously with far more importance than either of those, the MSU debate team just finished in the top eight at the National Debate…
March 31, 2005
Glenn Reynolds, the infamous Instapundit, has a Salon piece taking the Republicans to task for their ill-fated and ill-advised intervention in the Schiavo case, just as Judge Birch and many other conservatives have. Reynolds tends to the libertarian side of conservatism, being pro-gay rights and…
March 31, 2005
And no, not Terri Schiavo's. For all practical purposes, she has been dead for 15 years. But I just received an email from a reader who works at Comedy Central that Mitch Hedberg has died of an apparent heroin overdose. I knew Mitch only vaguely, from running into him on the road a couple times, so…
March 31, 2005
CBS legal analyst Andrew Cohen lauds the example of Judge Birch and his brave stand for consistency yesterday. The more I think about it, the more remarkable it is. Judge Birch was essentially ending any possibility of being nominated to the Supreme Court (you don't win nominations by accusing both…
March 31, 2005
Judge Birch's bold upbraiding of the President and the Congress over the unconstitutional "Terri's Law", which attempted to tell the courts what sort of decision rules they should apply in a case, has attracted some interesting responses. Stephen Henderson's article on the opinion in the Knight-…
March 30, 2005
We hear constantly from conservatives about "activist judges" and how horrible they are. One of the grand ironies of the Schiavo case is hearing conservatives complaining that judges aren't being activist enough while still simultaneously complaining about activist judges. It's absolute proof that…
March 30, 2005
One of the more amusing displays in this whole circus sideshow has been watching the right suddenly embracing Jesse Jackson, a man they've savaged for years. NewsMax, one of the Worldnutdaily's primary imitators, suddenly calls him "the man regarded by many as the Democratic Party's conscience."…
March 30, 2005
This is very interesting. John Danforth, the conservative former Senator from Missouri, outgoing Ambassador to the United Nations, and Episcopal minister, has written an op-ed piece in the New York Times decrying the growing influence of the religious right in the Republican party:
BY a series of…
March 30, 2005
Nat Hentoff has long been one of my favorite writers. He is a consistent civil libertarian with a love for and long history with jazz, so there is much to admire. But on the Terri Schiavo case, he has swallowed the nonsense coming from the right hook, line and sinker. In his latest column, he…
March 30, 2005
Timothy Sandefur sent me a link to this essay by Cathy Young about the appalling rhetoric being thrown around in the Terri Schiavo case. She writes:
No doubt, some people trying to keep Schiavo, or her body, alive are driven by sincere humanitarian passion. But, mostly, this spectacle has been a…
March 30, 2005
One of my readers left a comment on my post about Alan Keyes with links to two articles on Keyes' Renew America website. Holy cow, you gotta see these. The first is from David Quackenbush about the Schiavo case and the second is an interview with Alan Keyes, wherein we see that the religious right…
March 29, 2005
The national director of programs for the Boy Scouts of America has been charged with receiving and distributing child pornography, the U.S. Attorney's office here told NBC News on Tuesday.
Douglas S. Smith Jr. was charged with one felony count of having photos that show "minors engaging in…