stcynic
Posts by this author
August 18, 2006
Here's Jack Balkin's analysis of Judge Taylor's ruling in the NSA warrantless wiretapping lawsuit. He likes the outcome, doesn't like the rationale and isn't sure it will survive an appeal. I tend to agree with him.
August 17, 2006
Anna Diggs Taylor, come on down. You're the next contestant on Name That Activist Judge. Taylor, a Federal judge in Michigan's eastern district, has granted the plaintiffs' request for an injunction against the NSA's warrantless surveillance programs. That, of course, will mean she will immediately…
August 17, 2006
Here's the latest episode in Katherine Harris' months-long campaign to seize the title of America's most batshit crazy politician. Several members of the US House of Representatives were listed on her campaign website as having endorsed her candidacy for the Senate. The problem? None of them had…
August 17, 2006
I've written before about Vinx, an absolutely amazing musician and singer I've been fortunate enough to meet and interact with over the years. From the front page of his webpage comes another testimony to the magic of his live show:
What Vinx Did for Me
By Shawnn K. Shears
July 22, 2006
I saw Vinx…
August 17, 2006
The White House says that Bush read Camus' The Stranger on his summer vacation, and Tony Snow says he even discussed it with some of his aides. Slate has a hard time believing it. So does the Carpetbagger Report. I'm not sure I buy it either. I think I'd have an easier time believing that Miss…
August 17, 2006
The school board in Harrison County, West Virginia has decided to fight a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Americans United over a large portrait of Jesus that hangs in the hallway of the high school there. They had vowed not to use public money to fight the suit, but a fund raising campaign raised…
August 17, 2006
This is kind of interesting. I wrote a couple weeks ago about the lawsuit filed against the World Poker Tour by 7 of the top poker players in the world, and about Daniel Negreanu's negative reaction to that lawsuit. I had no idea it had turned into a major war of words between Negreanu and Greg…
August 17, 2006
The 6th circuit Court of Appeals yesterday upheld a lower court ruling that dismissed a lawsuit filed by Cooley Law School (the largest law school in the nation, located in Lansing, Michigan) against the American Bar Association. The school filed suit when the ABA refused to accredit two satellite…
August 16, 2006
Thanks to flatlander for sending me a link to this article about Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars and his latest attempt to seize the title of America's looniest state legislator away from Alabama's Gerald Allen. Buttars is back with two new bills. The first would take a stab at "defining the…
August 16, 2006
One of the arguments I frequently make when the religious right defends some instance where the government is providing tax funds to support a Christian religious exercise or giving Christians exclusive access to government property is that if you changed the religion being supported to Islam…
August 16, 2006
Iran has opened a display of cartoons making fun of the holocaust at a museum in Tehran. This is being done in response to the Danish cartoon controversy, and according to the Telegraph:
Organisers of the exhibition say they are testing the West's commitment to freedom of speech.
But what exactly…
August 16, 2006
Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and astronomer from Case Western Reserve University, has an excellent essay in the New York Times yesterday about attempts to weaken science education by school boards with absolutely no understanding of science. He points to Kansas and the fact that the members of the…
August 16, 2006
Susan Jacoby has a pretty good essay at TomPaine.com about anti-judicial rhetoric and how it is damaging our system of law. Part of the essay focuses on Judge Jones and quotes a particularly wise statement from him:
"But I submit to you that as citizens, we do not want and cannot possibly have a…
August 15, 2006
My thanks to Timothy Sandefur for sending me an advance copy of his new book Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st-Century America. It's apparently not available in stores yet. Amazon says they'll have it the end of October. The book is about eminent domain laws around the country and the…
August 15, 2006
David Mazel emailed me a link to this column by Robert Novak, which discusses Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and the fact that a lot of evangelical Christians won't vote for him because he's a Mormon. Novak writes:
Romney is well aware that an unconstitutional religious test is being applied to…
August 15, 2006
Interesting article in the Kansan about the change in the Kansas school board with comments that confirm what our side has been saying all along, that weakening the teaching of evolution in that state would hurt the state's educational system and ability to recruit educated teachers and scientists…
August 15, 2006
Ever since the arrest of a bunch of suspects in the UK and elsewhere in a plot to bomb several airplanes, the White House and their apologists have been united in their talking points: A) that this proves the need for warrantless surveillance and B) that those who oppose warrantless surveillance…
August 15, 2006
Good ol' Kender is up in arms about the ACLU protesting the city of Orlando's proposed ban on feeding the homeless in parks in Orlando, Florida. He says the ACLU is supporting the "terrorization" of Orlando residents (gotta love the ridiculously inflated and emotion laden rhetoric there) and you'll…
August 15, 2006
Much has been written and said over the last few days after President Bush's comments about the terrorist arrests in England and here the other day. Bush said that it was part of the "war with Islamic fascists" and a lot of people thought that was an inaccurate and insensitive thing to say. I don't…
August 14, 2006
Via Radley Balko I find a link to this blog post by Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey, and I realized that this woman has actually left a comment on my blog before. I remember her doing so because she was at the time dating Terrence Chan, a poker player I used to interact with in the poker newsgroup…
August 14, 2006
According to this AP article, the incidence of religion-related fraud is on the increase.
Billions of dollars has been stolen in religion-related fraud in recent years, according to the North American Securities Administrators Association, a group of state officials who work to protect investors.…
August 14, 2006
I could not agree with this post by Jack Balkin more:
I don't know whether NSA domestic surveillance programs were important in providing needed intelligence to stop the bomber's plot. I will assume that they were. What lesson should we draw from that fact? The right lesson is that these programs…
August 14, 2006
Good ol' Gribbit repeats this one ridiculous argument that is par for the course among the STACLU crowd: the notion that the ACLU intentionally files cases in "ACLU friendly districts":
They often times take "establishment clause" cases in districts where activist federal court judges are more…
August 14, 2006
In BarryA's continued discussion of Behe and literature bluffing in the Dover trial, a very important point has come to the surface: that ID advocates demand a level of proof that is absolutely impossible to meet, not only by evolution but by any historical claim. One of the reasons for presenting…
August 14, 2006
Bartholomew has a lot more detail on Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, the head of the Pentecostal church in Kenya trying to get all the hominid fossils found there hidden from view in the national museum. As expected, he has a long history of nuttiness including claiming that golf might lead to demon…
August 13, 2006
Radley Balko has done a great job of documenting the dozens and dozens of cases around the nation where SWAT teams have been used where they should not be used - serving routine warrants, for example - and the result was tragic. Here's his latest post on such an incident. The Maricopa County…
August 13, 2006
The Worldnutdaily, for some strange reason, has made Pat Boone - yes, that Pat Boone - a weekly columnist; I guess Perry Como was busy. Most of his columns are just plain embarrassing, of course, but this one about the ACLU was even worse than usual. Let's see if we can count how many lies,…
August 13, 2006
Folks, this may be a sign of impending armageddon. A Worldnutdaily columnist, Len Kinsolving, has actually written a reasonable, moderate, sensible essay on something. Kinsolving is usually one of their nuttier columnists, even relative to their normal nuttiness, but this column is astonishingly…
August 12, 2006
This will cause you to become rather angry, if you have any sense:
Powerful evangelical churches are pressing Kenya's national museum to sideline its world-famous collection of hominid bones pointing to man's evolution from ape to human.
Leaders of the country's six-million-strong Pentecostal…
August 12, 2006
In the wake of a terrorist cell being taken down in England, the STACLU are frantically pushing their anti-ACLU spin on the situation. In particular, they're claiming that the ACLU would have prevented our government from acting so effectively because they're intentionally trying to make us less…