stcynic
Posts by this author
May 29, 2006
Who's Paul Gleason, you ask? He's a "That Guy", one of those actors you instantly recognize but whose name you don't know. He frequently played the same kind of character - the authority figure who blusters and poses but doesn't really know what he's doing. He was Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T.…
May 29, 2006
Akhil Amar, one of the very best constitutional scholars in the nation, has an essay at Slate about the controversy over the FBI's search of the office of a congressman in a criminal investigation. He says pretty much exactly what I've been saying since the day it happened, that the only problem…
May 28, 2006
There is a long history of creationist misrepresentation of the views of scientists, going back to the time of Darwin himself. As the creationist movement has grown and gone through its various phases over the last century, such misrepresentations have been a powerful weapon in their arsenal. In…
May 28, 2006
Memorial Day weekend is a perfect time to report again on this story. Wiccans have been trying for years to get the Veterans Administration to allow soldiers buried in military cemetaries to have Wiccan symbols on their headstone. The latest such case involves Sgt. Patrick Stewart, a soldier who…
May 27, 2006
I have returned home from a day of baking in the hot sun to watch my best friend's kids play baseball and softball. It was blisteringly hot and I just scrubbed off the shell of sunscreen and sweat that had accumulated on my during the course of the day. But a good time was had by all. I also got to…
May 26, 2006
So I posted the other day about the Federal judge striking down Oklahoma's law that prohibited them from recognizing adoptions by gays performed in other states. You had to know the religious right was going to react by throwing a blizzard of empty catchphrases around, right? Here's the little…
May 26, 2006
The Discovery Institute has responded to the Cobb County ruling with their usual empty rhetoric.
"A final ruling in this case will be at least as important, if not more important, than the Dover school district case last year," added Luskin, a co-author of "Traipsing Into Evolution Intelligent…
May 26, 2006
In a new post, DaveScot criticizes the ACLU for suing the state of Kentucky over a new law banning protests at military funerals. As usual, he gets the facts wrong and misses the point. The mistakes begin with the title of his post: "ACLU Supports Vile Protesters at Military Funerals." Nonsense.…
May 26, 2006
AmericaBlog has a post about a CNN story on therapists trying to convert gays to being ex-gay. I can't get the video to work, but the description is hilarious:
1. Where the gay guy in "therapy" says that the reason he turned gay is that he had "emotional incest" with his mom. Uh huh.
2. The wacky "…
May 26, 2006
I'm leaving town this morning and won't be back until Saturday evening. I'm going to visit my parents and watch my niece and nephew play softball and baseball, respectively. But I've not forgotten you all. I've got a few posts written that I've scheduled to post this morning every so often so you…
May 25, 2006
According to Fox News:
It's now possible to replace a defective, damaged, or diseased penis with a penis grown in a laboratory -- in rabbits.
But the finding promises an amazing new treatment for infants, boys, and men who suffer penis disfigurement. The replacement organ would be grown on a penis-…
May 25, 2006
Well folks, the mystery has been solved once and for all. And - surprise, surprise - Larry is lying through his teeth. Here's what he had to say on his blog when someone told him that I had traced the IP addresses and found that the 2nd Dave came from his IP address:
I don't know if Ed Brayton said…
May 25, 2006
The appeals court decision in Selman v Cobb County School District, the evolution textbook sticker case, is in. I've uploaded a PDF of the ruling here. I haven't really had time to read it yet, but basically the court declared a "do over", remanding the case back to the district court:
Whether we…
May 25, 2006
So I was playing poker online, a little .25/.50 no limit game, and this hand comes up. New player had just sat down and he was under the gun. He raised to $1.50. I'm on the button with pocket queens, so I reraise to $5. New player calls. Flop comes 2-5-7 rainbow; he checks, I raise, he goes all in…
May 25, 2006
Jack Balkin pretty much nails the hypocrisy of Hastert and Pelosi and the other Congressmen throwing a fit about the raid on Jefferson's office:
The Bush Administration has, over the past six years, detained American citizens without any of the protections of the Bill of Rights, engaged in cruel,…
May 25, 2006
Like many others around the blogosphere, I'm finding it quite amusing that the Congressional leadership has finally found an exercise of executive law enforcement authority frightening enough to get upset about - unfortunately, it took a raid on a Congressman's office to do it. The FBI raid on Rep…
May 25, 2006
This is interesting. Yesterday, someone claiming to be Larry Fafarman's brother, Dave, left a comment here. Larry is claiming that it's not really his brother. But then another Dave Fafarman shows up and says he's the real one and demanding the removal of the first one. Now, as you might imagine, I…
May 25, 2006
Now this is really funny. There's a new documentary out, The Big Buy: Tom DeLay's Stolen Congress, by Robert Greenwald. It apparently is an expose on DeLay's corruption, and the DeLay folks are busy trying to spin the claims in it. They sent out a mass email about it that included a one-page fact…
May 25, 2006
The third circuit handed down a shocking ruling today in the case of Petruska v. Gannon University. The case involves what is known as the ministerial exception, a legal doctrine well established by court precedent that says that anti-discrimination law cannot be applied to churches. As today's…
May 24, 2006
A newspaper in Alabama has this report on followers of Roy Moore running for the state Supreme Court in Alabama and loudly advocating his position that the states should be able to ignore any Federal court ruling that they disagree with:
The theme was sounded in an op-ed piece Parker wrote in The…
May 24, 2006
I've written many a post skewering the claims of ID advocates over the years, but I have to bow down and genuflect before this treatment by Nick Matzke of young earth creationist/IDist Nancy Pearcey at the Panda's Thumb. There are good fiskings, there are verbal beatdowns, and then there are first…
May 24, 2006
That's the question that we hear constantly from anti-ACLU types. Whenever they perceive an injustice, particularly against a conservative, they cry, "Where's the ACLU? Why aren't they defending this person?" The point of the accusation, of course, is to give the impression of inconsistency on the…
May 24, 2006
Krauze at Telic Thoughts has a post about the recent disagreement between Sandefur and I that was posted partially here and partially at Positive Liberty. First was my post objecting to Daniel Dennett's suggestion that Genie Scott is being less than sincere in arguing that evolution and religion…
May 24, 2006
I was busy yesterday with other things, so I sent this post to Jon Rowe to give it the good fisking it deserves. He obliged. In short, Dembski attempted, weakly. to answer Judge Jones' statements about the founding fathers making reason the arbiter of religious claims. His answer didn't really…
May 24, 2006
This post by Radley Balko is a must read about drug war. Not only is it a massive failure, it's costing us untold billions of dollars and destroying countless lives. The numbers are staggering. 55% of all Federal prison inmates are there on drug charges, their number quadrupling between 1986 and…
May 24, 2006
So I'm flipping channels and I come across Rod Parsley's Breakthrough program. I've talked about Parsley before and some of the astonishingly stupid things he's said. But this one may take the cake. He was - naturally - begging for money and making outlandish promises of what would happen if his…
May 23, 2006
Several people emailed me about what happened over the weekend at Russell County High School in Kentucky. There was apparently a tradition there for the students to elect a "graduation chaplain" to hold a Christian prayer at the graduation ceremony, with the full cooperation of the school. But this…
May 23, 2006
Via Radley Balko, here's an amusing tidbit about Pat Robertson, God's own personal carnival barker, from his own CBN webpage:
Did you know that Pat Robertson can leg-press 2000 pounds! How does he do it?
Where does Pat find the time and energy to host a daily, national TV show, head a world-wide…
May 23, 2006
Jon Rowe and I have made something of an avocation out of criticizing David Barton, the pseudo-scholar darling of the religious right who has peddled lie after lie about the founding fathers. But after reading this column by Barton, I now see that his historical ignorance is matched by his legal…
May 23, 2006
A major legal victory yesterday for gay adoptions came down in the case of Finstuen v. Edmondson. The case, brought by the Lambda Legal Fund on behalf of three sets of gay parents with adopted children, challenged an Oklahoma law that forbid the state from recognizing gay adoptions from other…