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Rowe on Jaffa and Bork

Jon Rowe has a post that links to a fascinating exchange between Harry Jaffa, arguing for natural rights theory as the prism through which one must view Constitutional originalism, and Robert Bork and Lino Graglia, arguing the opposite. There is a big split among conservative legal theorists that the general public, including most people who identify themselves as conservatives, is generally unaware of. It can be viewed in various ways, such as libertarian-minded conservatives vs authoritarian-minded conservatives, but the lynchpin of the argument is the question of the role of the…

Partisan Hypocrisy and the "Nuclear Option"

One of the things that is endlessly amusing to me is watching the two parties do their dance of feigned outrage at the tactics of the other party when they have engaged in the same tactics when the tables were previously turned. The latest example is the frantic hand-wringing of the Republicans about Democrats in the Senate blocking 10 Bush judicial nominations in his first term. They're shocked, I tell you, absolutely shocked that the Democrats would dare to impede the nominations of so many judges and they are considering changing the Senate rules to rule out the use of the filibuster so…

Religious Right Goals for Abstinence-Only Sex Ed?

Several commenters here have said that in examining the practical effects of abstinence-only sex ed, I am missing the point that the religious right isn't really interested in decreasing teen pregnancy or STDs. Wesley Elsberry sent me this perfect example of that from the ARN message boards. When asked by another person whether he prefers abstinence-only sex ed because it works or because it suits his ideology, Douglas Bender replied: Both. But even if it only reflected my ideology, and didn't seem to "work" in preventing sexual activity and sexual disease, that would only matter if…

Kristof on Abstinence-Only Sex Ed

Nicholas Kristof has a column about the Bush administration's focus on abstinence-only sex education that says the same things I've been saying for months: For that reason, almost all sex-ed classes in America already encourage abstinence. But abstinence-only education isn't primarily about promoting abstinence - it's about blindly refusing to teach contraception. To get federal funds, for example, abstinence-only programs are typically barred by law from discussing condoms or other forms of contraception - except to describe how they can fail. So kids in these programs go all through high…

Parents Disowning Gay Children

Maya Keyes has finally been disowned by her father, the uber-right Alan Keyes. According to Maya, not only have they thrown her out of the house and refused to pay for her tuition at Brown University, they've also stopped speaking to her. She'll be able to stay with friends, and the Point Foundation, a charity that helps pay tuition for gay students, has stepped up to help with the cost of college. But how do you replace contact with your parents? What they are doing isn't love, it's sick and twisted and destructive. Maya has it right: "They say most parents would be thrilled to have a child…

Judge Rules Evolution Disclaimers Unconstitutional

Judge Clarence Cooper has ruled against the Cobb County school district regarding the evolution disclaimers: "Rather, the distinction of evolution as a theory rather than a fact is the distinction that religiously motivated individuals have specifically asked school boards to make in the most recent anti-evolution movement, and that was exactly what parents in Cobb County did in this case," he wrote. "By adopting this specific language, even if at the direction of counsel, the Cobb County School Board appears to have sided with these religiously motivated individuals." The sticker, he said,…

Does Dean Esmay Understand Evolution?

Dean Esmay never replied to my post explaining why ID should not be taught in science classrooms, but in checking back at his blog for a response I'm beginning to think that the real problem is that he just doesn't understand evolution well at all. For instance, notice this post, where he says: Scientists thing they have found a way that mutation can drive rapid evolutionary change. That flies in the face of most evolutionary theory, which tends to hold that mutation is not the primary way by which creatures evolve. But from studying dogs, they think they may have identified how it might…

Pennock, Sports and Brainiacs

Mike Argento, a columnist for the York Daily Record, the local newspaper in Dover, Pennsylvania, had some amusing thoughts on the testimony of Rob Pennock: Wednesday morning, as day three of the Dover Panda Trial meandered into discussions of stoner logic and street cred, one of the lawyers for the school district, Patrick Gillen, asked Robert Pennock, a philosopher of science from Michigan State University and a serious, serious brainiac, whether the idea of "intelligent design" was a Big Ten theory. Pennock -- who, I can't stress this enough, is an incredible brainiac -- looked puzzled. It…

Panda's Thumb Updates

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 this blog passed a quarter million hits around the same time). There is much news to report as well on the ID front. Larry Caldwell's nuisance suit against Genie Scott and the NCSE, it turns out, was dropped back in July but he didn't bother to tell anyone that. Now that Genie is no longer under a…

Gay Marriage Kills Black People!

Or so Star Parker would have us believe. In an incredibly ridiculous column at - where else? - the Worldnutdaily, Parker actually implies that stopping gay marriage is the key to the very survival of the black community in America. I assume she's not kidding and managed to type this nonsense with a straight face: Blacks have polled consistently higher than national averages in opposition to the sanctioning of gay marriage. Why do we care so much and why do we feel an increasing sense of being abandoned? Why, I sometimes hear, is a community with such clear and immediate problems with…

Tierney on the Schiavo Autopsy

Predictably, the Worldnutdaily has trotted out "experts" - including the uber-fraud Dr. Hammesfahr - to claim that the autopsy didn't show that she was in PVS. I was going to fisk the articles they've had on it myself, but instead I asked Adam Tierney, one of my fellow In the Agora contributors, to do so. You can find his response here. Adam is a grad student in cognitive neuroscience at UCSD, so this really is his field of study. He does an excellent job of cutting through the nonsense, writing in part: Finally, Hammesfahr claimed that "the relay areas from the frontal and front temporal…

Feddie Says Rehnquist Stepping Down

Steve "Feddie" Dillard, Grand Poobah of Southern Appeal, has revealed that a reliable source has told him that Chief Justice Rehnquist will be stepping down in the next 4 weeks. Feddie is pretty well connected in those circles, so I have no reason to doubt it. Besides that, it's what everyone is expected anyway. He is predicting that Michael McConnell will be the choice to replace him, which is the same person I've been predicting for the last few months. McConnell is solidly conservative, but not in a partisan manner. He's an intellectual conservative, not a political conservative and that…

A Behind-The-Scenes Look At Building The Greatest Space Telescope Of All (Synopsis)

"One way or another the first stars must have influenced our own history, beginning with stirring up everything and producing the other chemical elements besides hydrogen and helium. So if we really want to know where our atoms came from, and how the little planet Earth came to be capable of supporting life, we need to measure what happened at the beginning." -John Mather Launching in October of 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope will revolutionize our conception of the Universe. The biggest scientific find that we know it can uncover is how the Universe came to be the way it is today. How…

Ask Ethan: What's so 'spooky' about quantum entanglement? (Synopsis)

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” -Albert Einstein If you create an entangled pair of particles, and stretch them apart as far as you want, the entanglement remains. If you make a measurement of one particle’s quantum state, you immediately -- and this is truly instantaneous -- learn the quantum state of the other. This is true whether the other particle is meters, kilometers, astronomical units or light years away. Schematic of the third Aspect experiment testing quantum non-locality.…

How does the CMB tell us what's in the Universe? (Synopsis)

"Cosmology is the study of the origin, evolution, and fate of objects in the observable universe. [...] The key to the birth and evolution of such objects lies in the primordial ripples observed through light shining through from the early universe." -Wayne Hu The Big Bang’s leftover glow -- the cosmic microwave background (CMB) -- is the great cosmic gift that keeps on giving. When it was first discovered in 1965, it validated the Big Bang and taught us that our Universe as-we-know-it had a birthday. When we measured that the CMB looked hotter in one direction and cooler in the opposite, we…

Dark matter faces its biggest challenge of all (Synopsis)

"Nothing in the standard cosmological model predicts this, and it is almost impossible to imagine how that model could be modified to explain it, without discarding the dark matter hypothesis completely." -David Merritt Dark matter is a hugely successful theory for explaining a whole slew of observations about the Universe. Just by adding this one ingredient to the mix, we can successfully simulate and reproduce the large-scale structure, CMB fluctuations, galaxy clustering and cluster collision properties observed in our Universe. Without dark matter, there's no other way known to make the…

Is cold fusion feasible? Or is it a fraud? (Synopsis)

“Between cold fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. …because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here.” –David Goodstein The dream of free, unlimited, clean energy depends only on our ability to find a…

Fifth fundamental force: fact or fiction? (Synopsis)

"A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement." -Fritjof Capra For most living humans on the planet, the Standard Model and General Relativity, the theories that govern the four fundamental forces, have encompassed all of the known particles and their interactions for our entire lives. We know they can’t encompass all there is, but the search for the first particle beyond the…

How Science Can Learn More About 'Proxima b' And All Earth-Like Worlds (Synopsis)

"Our existence in this place, this microscopic corner of the cosmos, is fleeting. With utter disregard for our wants and needs, nature plays out its grand acts on scales of space and time that are truly hard to grasp. Perhaps all we can look to for real solace is our endless capacity to ask questions and seek answers about the place we find ourselves in." -Caleb Scharf Now that we’ve learned the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, has a rocky planet at the right distance for liquid water, it’s time to consider how we might learn the answers to our burning questions about it and all…

Silly and naive

Paul Nelson isn't happy that I explained that W. Ford Doolittle is not denying common descent when he says there was a large and diverse pool of organisms swapping genes at the base of the tree of life, and he presents a very revealing counter-argument: Before I respond to PZ’s baseless charge, let’s see what mental image the following proposition generates: All organisms on Earth have descended from a single common ancestor. I’ll bet “single common ancestor” caused you to picture a discrete cell. And if you opened a college biology textbook, to the diagram depicting Darwin’s Tree of Life,…

Who's Blaming the Troops Here?

Yesterday, President Bush addressed the growing controversy over the missing explosives at a campaign stop and he predictably pulled out the ultimate appeal to uber-patriot morons, the claim that if you attack the administration's policies, you attack the troops themselves. And the audience, naturally, booed on cue. How dare those people say our troops screwed up! Well of course, no one is saying that the troops screwed up, we're saying that the war planners themselves screwed up, especially Rumsfeld, who refused to give the generals the troops they needed to do the job right. For crying out…

Interesting Poker Article

The New York Daily News has assigned a writer, Rick Pienciak, to cover the world of poker every week. His latest column has some interesting insights in it about the high stakes poker world, including a revelation, based upon the word spreading in the Vegas poker rooms, that Annie Duke won ESPN's Tournament of Champions. That event has taken place, but won't air until next week, and the participants, 10 of the top players in the world, are sworn to secrecy. If that report is correct, it would be a big feather in Duke's cap. The article also discusses an occasional game that has gone on at…

More Fun with Alan Keyes

And the flip flops just keep on coming. It seems that our Man of Principle has discovered that there are a lot of farms in Illinois and decided to backpeddle on some of his rhetoric from an earlier presidential campaign. The AP reports: On his first campaign trip into Illinois farm country, Republican Senate candidate Alan Keyes said Thursday he no longer favors abolishing the U.S. Agriculture Department. Keyes in 1996 had called the department an "expensive top-heavy bureaucracy that was not actually contributing to the good of the farmers." But he said Thursday things had changed under…

I Think We Have June's Idiot of the Month

His name is Scott Thomas and he apparently is another right wing radio host. He wrote this obnoxious piece of falsely patriotic bullshit, which includes this statement: Patriotism in the United States is loving God and country -- in that order -- and appreciating the blessing it is to live in freedom. Patriotism is acknowledging and showing our appreciation to God for the blessing of freedom by taking care of this country, participating fully in that freedom, and wholeheartedly, without reservation, supporting those who are willing to fight and die to protect those freedoms. Let me be clear…

The next great global warming hiatus is coming! (Synopsis)

"...as a scientist I was trained you always have to show the negative data, the data that disagrees with you, and then make the case that your case is stronger." -Richard Muller Global temperatures have been on the rise not just for decades, but for as long as we've been measuring temperatures around the globe: for more than a century. Recently, however, the temperature has spiked to an unprecedented high, similar to what we saw in 1998. Image credit: Japan Meteorological Association (JMA), of the monthly average temperatures in February, going back as far as temperature records do. Via the…

Could the LHC make an Earth-killing black hole? (Synopsis)

John Oliver: So, roughly speaking, what are the chances that the world is going to be destroyed? One-in-a-million? One-in-a-billion? Walter Wagner: Well, the best we can say right now is a one-in-two chance. John: 50-50? Walter: Yeah, 50-50… It’s a chance, it’s a 50-50 chance. John: You come back to this 50-50 thing, what is it Walter? Walter: Well, if you have something that can happen and something that won’t necessarily happen, it’s going to either happen or it’s gonna not happen. And, so, it’s kind of… best guess at this point. John: I’m… not sure that’s how probability works, Walter. –…

Natural Emissions Dwarf Humans'

This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic. Objection: According to the IPCC, 150 billion tonnes of carbon go into the atmosphere from natural processes every year. This is almost 30 times the amount of carbon humans emit. What difference will any reductions we try to do make? Answer: This is quite true that the natural fluxes in the carbon cycle are much larger than anthropogenic emissions. But in the natural process, for roughly the last 10K years until the industrial revolution, every…

Vatican and Free Speech Again

It seems the Vatican has decided to throw it's 2 cents in on the controversy over a gay pride event in Jerusalem. Naturally, their 2 cents involves destroying the liberty of others: Meanwhile, the Vatican said it asked its envoy to Israel to convey its regret over the decision to allow the parade to take place. "The Holy See has reiterated on many occasions that the right to freedom of expression... is subject to just limits, in particular when the exercise of this right would offend the religious sentiments of believers," the Vatican said. "It is clear that the gay parade scheduled to take…

Saddam's Verdict

Saddam Hussein has, of course, been found guilty of genocide by an Iraqi court and will be hanged (assuming the automatic appeals process required under Iraqi law goes as it should). I frankly don't much care about complaints about the trial procedure, or conspiracy theories about the process being rigged; the man was afforded far more protections than the thousands of people he had slaughtered while he ruled Iraq as a brutal dictator. I can muster up no sympathy for the man, nor will I try. But one of the comments I saw yesterday left me shaking my head. Someone said, "Ramsey Clark should…

The Vatican on Religious Freedom

The Vatican's observer to the UN addressed the General Assembly yesterday on the subject of religious freedom and made quite a mess of it. The occasion was the 25th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. There was plenty of hypocritical double talk. Like this: Every individual and group must be free from coercion and no one should be forced to act in a manner contrary to his or her beliefs, whether in private or public, whether alone or in association with others. It is important here to…

TMLC on the New Jersey Ruling

My first thought when the New Jersey gay marriage ruling came down was, "Oh boy. This should be fun to watch as the religious right responds." The Thomas More Law Center has responded with a News Alert (I'm on their mailing list). And it includes this delightfully ironic quote: Patrick T. Gillen, the Thomas More Law Center attorney who drafted Michigan's Marriage Amendment for the Coalition, noted another lesson to be learned from the decision. "The defense of traditional marriage was fatally compromised by the Attorney General's failure to defend the role that marriage plays in promoting the…

DonorsChoose: Cruise the Forest

We're one week into the DonorsChoose challenge for this year, and readers of this blog have already contributed over $2,000 to help school teachers and students. Those of you who have contributed, thank you very much for your generosity. We've still got $4,000 to go to reach the goal for the challenge, though, so there will be more than a few posts coming up to try to solicit new contributions. Today, I thought I would try to highlight a couple of the proposals in the challenge, to suggest some more concrete giving opportunities. We'll start close to (my) home, with "Cruise the Forest", a…

This last week in Biochemistry

It's been quite busy last week. Despite the Neurobiology class didn't meet that week, my other classes kept my hands full. I blame it on two exams and a paper due during the week of Homecoming. Since I don't have any new thoughts on Neurobiology, let's see what can be dug up from my Biochemistry class. For the lab, I wrote my paper of Desulforedoxen. Its job is reducing sulfates. You can look it up at JMol using "1DHG" as the code. I found this protein very interesting. In class, we had learned about the driving forces for tertiary structure in proteins: H-bonding, hydrophobic/Vanderwal…

The Bubble Has Popped

Before we bought our current house, coming up on five years ago, we looked at another slightly larger house that's literally just around the corner. It hadn't officially been listed yet, but our agent (who, weirdly, lives right next door) showed it to us, and we thought very hard about it. Unfortunately, it was about $20K more than the bank was willing to lend us, so we couldn't make an offer. We looked at it on a Sunday, and talked to the bank on Monday. By Friday, it had sold, and for $10K more than the original asking price. It was bought by a young couple, a professional contractor and…

Amateur Hour

Between the concert last night and an afternoon cookout at the house of one of Kate's co-workers, we were out of the house for most of the day yesterday. This means light blogging today, as I struggle to deal with the stuff I really should've done yesterday. I do want to note, though, the New York Times Magazine article on amateur inventors competing for NASA prizes: When Peter K. Homer, an out-of-work director of a local community center in Maine, first heard that NASA was turning to America's backyard inventors to brainstorm new technologies for a possible return to the moon, he had an idea…

Emmy, Red in Tooth and Claw

This picture is from yesterday, but the scene was more or less the same this morning: A rabbit had hopped into our yard, to eat the spilled seed under the bird feeder (or something over there-- it's like a Disney movie sometimes, with all manner of happy little woodland creatures), so we let the dog out. She spotted the bunny, and sloooooowly crept across the patio toward it, moving very quietly so as not to disturb her prey. Eventualy, some invisible-to-humans line was crossed, and the rabbit took off for the back part of the yard, with Her Majesty in hot pursuit. There are a number of gaps…

The Band Is On the Field!

One of the requirements of the Nobel Prize is that the laureates give a public lecture at some point, and as a result, there is generally a seminar scheduled a little bit before the actual prize ceremony, at which the laureats give lectures about the work for which they're being honored. These frequently involve props and demonstrations, but George Smoot takes it to a new level, using the Cal marching band to demonstrate the Big Bang: "Professor Smoot came up to the band and asked if later that week, when we practiced at Memorial Stadium, we could do a formation like the universe forming. He…

Family Friendly Competition

No, I'm not talking about the sort of thing where teams play cooperative, non-competetive games, and everybody gets a trophy at the end. I'm talking about academia, here, and specifically the recent flurry of colleges and universities offering child care support: In the last week, both Stanford and Yale Universities have announced significant expansions of the help that they provide to new parents -- with Stanford unveiling a plan for junior faculty members and Yale one for graduate students. Those moves follow this month’s announcement by Princeton University of substantially increased…

Miscellany

Various and sundry items that don't quite rate a post of their own. I was astonished to learn on Pardon the Interruption that today is Gene Hackman's birthday. Not so much that it's his birthday, as that it's his 77th birthday. He doesn't seem like he should be that old. Then again, he's looked about sixty for the last twenty years, so I guess that's about right... Elsewhere, the Little Professor dabbles in Live-Action Role-Playing. I need to get me one of those grimoires.... And, via Eurekalert a book I'm sure we'll hear more about: In God: The Failed Hypothesis, physicist Victor Stenger…

Weekend Miscellany

I haven't done a straight-up links dump in a while, but it's that kind of weekend, so here's some stuff: What Would Brian Boitano Do?: Iain Jackson at Grim Amusements, who ought to get more press than he does, watches South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, and finds contemporary political relevance: We've pretty much actually turned into the version of the US shown in "South Park", or a reasonably facsimile thereof. (Perhaps an unreasonable facsimile thereof would be a better way to put it.) OK, we're not randomly imprisoning Canadians and exeduting them because they've made all our children…

Depressing stuff from my university

UMM recently hosted the University of Minnesota board of regents, and we got a look at the status of the whole U of M system. It's not a happy story. We have an administration with ambitious goals (that's good), but they seem to be a bit divorced from reality — they want to turn us into one of the top three public research universities in the world. That sounds like a great 50 year plan, but I'd rather see an ambitious and feasible 5-year goal, myself. One of my colleagues at the Twin Cities branch campus has analyzed some of the statistics. The most telling one to me is that, despite our…

Fixing Education Is Expensive

Edward Glaeser has an op-ed in the Boston Globe arguing for more education funding: The clearest result from decades of education research is the importance of teacher quality. My colleague Tom Kane finds that students who are lucky enough to get a teacher in the top quarter of the teacher-quality distribution jump 10 percentile points in the student achievement distribution relative to children who end up with less able teachers. Improving teacher quality has about twice the impact on student outcomes as radically reducing class size. [...]Attracting better teachers will also require much…

Pimp Me Video Editing Software

So, I've recorded a bunch of video for the dance-like-a-monkey thing. I want to edit several of these clips together in order to form a longer clip. I did this once before with video recorded using Kate's camera, to make the Hoops With Moss video, using the Movie Maker program that came with Vista on the tablet PC. Of course, because computers hate me, the webcam I used to record the monkey-dancing clips records in some DIVX format (video uses the DIVX 5.0 codec, audio is PCM audio, if that matters), and while downloading and installing the DIVX codec got Windows Media Player to recognize the…

Big-Picture Debate Commentary

As I said last night, I wound up watching all of the presidential debate. I turned it on expecting to get disgusted and flip away in half an hour or so, but it was remarkably better than the last two elections' worth of debates. Almost as if both participants were qualified to be President. I'm not going to attempt blow-by-blow commentary, or to assess trivialities about whose digs were sharper, whose smarmy anecdotes were more effective, or whose demeanor was more Presidential. If you want that stuff, turn you tv on and choose a news channel at random-- it's all basically the same. The only…

Science Bailout Needed

In email this morning from the American Physical Society, a call for a financial bailout: Congress has not passed any FY 2009 appropriations bills and is now finalizing a Continuing Resolution (CR) that will keep the government operating when the new fiscal year begins on October 1, 2008. The House is expected to consider the bill on Thursday or Friday of this week. The CR, according to the latest information, will remain in effect until March 6, 2009 and would keep all federal programs operating at FY 2008 levels, except those granted waivers. At this time, science is not on the waiver…

Email Passeth All Understanding

The other day, the Dean Dad remarked on one of the quirks of academic technology: Last week I saw another iteration of something I still don't really understand. People who are perfectly civil in person are often capable of firing off incredibly nasty and hateful emails. Sometimes they'll do that with cc's all the way up the chain, as a way of spreading the manure over the most ground with the least effort. Yet, when confronted, they're surprised that anybody would take offense, and they revert to their perfectly civil selves. It is, indeed, mystifying, and seems to be more common in…

Dorky Poll: Three Beeeeellion Dollars

Regular commenter Johan Larson writes with a suggested blog topic: The Human Genome Project (yes, you have to pronounce those capitals) cost about $3 billion. If $3 billion were yours to spend on scientific research, how would you spend the money? That's a great question, and a great topic for a Dorky Poll. I'll narrow my response a little, because if I had to choose from all areas of science, it's a no-brainer to throw all the money at public health-- eradication of malaria, cures for major diseases, etc. For the sake of variety, let's restrict it to your own particular subfield, so, for…

Lua muses on...

Adult neurogenesis The creation of new neurons, known as neurogenesis, is an important process. It is by this process that the brain forms, and most of it occurs during pre-natal development. An early theory proposed by neuroanatomists that has recently been refuted by experimental evidence is that adult neurogenesis does not occur. In adult neurogenesis, it has been observed that most of the new neurons die shortly after their formation, while only a few become integrated into the functioning structure of the brain. So what is the significance of adult neurogenesis? While the functioning of…

links for 2008-02-08

birds are gross - rosemary mosco The awesome turkey vulture. (tags: comics biology science silly) nanoscale views: Combined single-molecule electronics and optics "The two-sentence summary: we can do simultaneous electronic and optical measurements on single molecules (!) by using our electrodes as optical antennas. This opens up lots of science to be done as well as some very intriguing technological possibilities (tags: physics science articles materials experiment) Friends' school achievement influences high school girls' interest in math "Girls in high school take as many math…

Iowa and Kenya

One of the many annoying things about the Iowa caucus coverage is that what's really a faintly absurd and kind of trivial process gets magnified into this huge and all-consuming Event that bumps other, much more important, stories down the queue. Kevin Drum highlights what might be the perfect illustration: On CNN, Bill Bennett just celebrated the Iowa caucuses because there's been "no violence, no killing." That's way better than Kenya! Anderson Cooper agrees, telling us that Iowans have invited strangers into their very own homes and.....haven't killed them, I guess. The recent…