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Thoughts From the Interface of Science, Religion, Law and Culture
Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and the host of Declaring Independence, a one hour weekly political talk show on WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan.(static)
Ed Brayton also blogs at Positive Liberty and The Panda's Thumb
March 3, 2010
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Yes, Liz Cheney may actually more vile and appalling than her father at this point. Take a look at this incredibly slanderous and disgusting video her organization, Keep America Safe, has put out targeting DOJ attorneys who have defended detainees held at Guantanamo Bay -- many of them innocent, of course, but that doesn't matter to Cheney one bit.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 12:16 PM • 12 Comments
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Bill Kristol did not watch the healthcare summit (neither did I, by the way). He admitted that when the subject came up on one of Fox's Sunday morning talk shows:
Host Chris Wallace asked Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, "Have you been clarified?" -- leading to this candid acknowledgement from Kristol:KRISTOL: No, but I didn't watch it, so -- (laughter). I have a life. (laughter)
Posted by Ed Brayton at 12:09 PM • 7 Comments
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Scott Horton weighs in on the OPR report on the Yoo and Bybee torture memos and quotes Michael Frisch, an expert on legal ethics on the malfeasance by the OPR and Margolis. Frisch is on the DC Bar council that enforces the ethics rules:
Frisch eviscerated both the OPR report and the David Margolis memo. The key ethics inquiry, he argued, was under Rule 1.2(d)--whether Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury were actually counseling a crime. In this case, the evidence that their advice was designed to facilitate torture is clear-cut, torture is a felony, and multiple players putting a scheme in place to torture is a conspiracy to torture. Yet neither the OPR report nor David Margolis even considered this question, focusing all their energy instead on two weak and rarely enforced provisions of the ethics code dealing with the duty of candor and the duty to exercise independent professional judgment.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 12:02 PM • 3 Comments
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This story almost seems too bizarre to be true. They had to make an emergency shipment of free condoms to the athlete's village at the Vancouver Olympics. But look what they started with:
Health officials in Vancouver have already provided 100,000 free condoms to the roughly 7,000 ahtletes and officials at the Games. That's about 14 condoms per person. But as of Wednesday, those supplies started running dangerously low.So naturally, the Canadian Foundation for AIDS research decided to step and make sure there were no hitches in Olympic action.
Seriously, when did these people find time to compete? They must have been using them for balloons or something.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:30 AM • 26 Comments
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Frank Gaffney wrote an absolutely insane post at the Big Government site last week accusing the Obama administration of changing the logo for the DOD's Missile Defense Agency to look like an Islamic star and crescent. Here's that "new" logo:
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:23 AM • 15 Comments
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I'm sure this will come as a huge shock to you. Media Matters reports:
HANNITY: The Obama administration earlier today rolled out the red carpet for a coalition of atheist groups. Now, among the individuals in attendance was Michael Newdow. That's the California man who sued unsuccessfully to have the words "under God" removed from the Pledge of Allegiance. Now, religious groups, however, have not received this kind of treatment from the Obama White House. Now, last year, the President distanced himself from the National Day of Prayer, cancelling the formal service traditionally held in honor of the day and refusing to attend a Catholic prayer breakfast. So what's going on? Has the administration demonstrated a pattern of hostility towards religion, or is this merely a coincidence?
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:16 AM • 10 Comments
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From our old friend Ed Schultz:
"You're damn right, Dick Cheney's heart's a political football. We ought to rip it out and kick it around and stuff it back in him. I'm glad he didn't tip over. He is the new poster child for health care in this country."
And don't tell me it's out of context, or he was just being hyperbolic, or he didn't really mean it. You wouldn't make those excuses in a million years if Rush Limbaugh said the same thing about a liberal. At least make an attempt at being intellectually honest. Schultz is a buffoon, regardless of what his politics are.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:09 AM • 26 Comments
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Here's the best lede for a newspaper article I've seen in a while, from the Detroit Free Press:
Peggy Brown wasn't going to let this week's blast of snow stand in the way of trying to sell her St Clair Shores home.So she spent Sunday afternoon outside, burying a small statue of St. Joseph, patron saint of carpenters, in her yard.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:02 AM • 21 Comments
March 2, 2010
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Or for Playboy, anyway, which I don't really consider porn. A group at the University of Texas has started putting up signs on campus encouraging people to trade in their Bibles and Qurans for Playboy instead. And the Worldnutdaily doesn't like it one bit.
In the lobby of the University of Texas at San Antonio's humanities building, a hand-drawn poster announces, "Free porn: Just trade in your holy books (Bible, Koran, Vedas) for porn."A student group at the university called The Atheist Agenda is reviving its Bibles-for-porn program, called "Smut for Smut," for three days beginning March 1, according to a report from San Antonio's KENS-TV.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 12:16 PM • 161 Comments
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Jonathan Bernstein, guest blogging over at Andrew Sullivan's blog, writes:
Shifting from a Senate in which the minority will use supermajority rules only to obstruct rare very important issues (pre-1970), to a Senate in which the minority will use supermajority rules to obstruct every major item on the majority's agenda (beginning in 1993), to a Senate in which the minority insists that almost every single item, controversial or not, needs 60 votes to pass (the new GOP standard in 2009) has changed the game.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 12:09 PM • 30 Comments
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I find this more amusing than threatening. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has declared a jihad against the nation of Switzerland and is demanding that Muslims around the world help destroy the country.
He said Muslims everywhere had a duty to act against the country, which he claimed had been destroying mosques."Any Muslim in any part of the world who works with Switzerland is an apostate, is against (the Prophet) Mohammad, and God and the Koran," he told a meeting in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 12:02 PM • 29 Comments
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I've heard the phrase "Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick" before, but in a bucket of pizza sauce? Amen, brother.
When Mary Louise Salerno saw Jesus Christ in a bucket of pizza sauce, her instinct was not to alert the media or even to tell many friends.She did not want people descending on her family's West Scranton pizzeria, and she did not want to invite critics or doubters of what she felt was a clear sign.
"To us, it was something special," Ms. Salerno, 65, of Old Forge said. "God smiled on us that day."
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:30 AM • 65 Comments
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One of the leading journals of Christian intellectual thought (no, those two things are not a contradiction no matter how zealous you may be in disagreeing with Christianity), First Things, has an article by Stephen Barr, a physics professor, eviscerating the ID movement. The very first paragraph is absolutely devastating and spot on:
It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:23 AM • 42 Comments
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A Montana state court has made what seems to me to be a bad ruling in a case brought by a school valedictorian who was not allowed to speak at a graduation ceremony because she had religious references in the speech.
A Yellowstone County District Court judge ruled this week that a former Butte High student's civil rights were not violated when school district officials wouldn't allow her to speak at a 2008 graduation ceremony because she refused to take religious references out of her speech.In a summary judgment issued Wednesday, Judge Gregory Todd said the decision of Butte School District No. 1 to prevent Renee Griffith, a valedictorian of the 2008 graduating class, from speaking at the ceremonies unless she changed references to "God" and "Christ" in her speech did not violate Montana law or the First Amendment.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:16 AM • 45 Comments
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John McCain has told so many stories now that he can't keep them all straight. Here he was earlier this week claiming that he only suspended his campaign because President Bush asked him to and he was just doing what any patriotic American would do:
McCain said Bush called him in off the campaign trail, saying a worldwide economic catastrophe was imminent and that he needed his help. "I don't know of any American, when the president of the United States calls you and tells you something like that, who wouldn't respond," McCain said. "And I came back and tried to sit down and work with Republicans and say, 'What can we do?' "
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:09 AM • 11 Comments
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Kurt Andersen has a very interesting essay in New York magazine that talks about the influence of fringe nuts and our current political malaise. I don't know that I agree with it all, and I don't really see any practical solution anywhere in it, but I find it through provoking and thought you all might have some thoughts on it. Long excerpt below the fold.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:02 AM • 24 Comments
March 1, 2010
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The religious right has reacted with a predictable freakout to the Obama administration holding a meeting with the Secular Coalition for America last week.
"It is one thing for Administration to meet with groups of varying viewpoints, but it is quite another for a senior official to sit down with activists representing some of the most hate-filled, anti-religious groups in the nation," said Council Nedd, chairman of the religious advocacy group In God We Trust.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 12:16 PM • 86 Comments
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Martin Ssempa, the Ugandan minister with close ties to Rick Warren and a big backer of the bill to put homosexuals to death in that country, is showing gay porn during church services to get people all fired up to kill the gays. A Ugandan notes in a newspaper article:
This makes Makerere Community Church the only place in Uganda where watching pornography is "legal". According to Uganda's laws, even mere possession of pornographic material is a crime. It would appear that Makerere Community Church has got a special license to show porn. Moreover, perhaps following Jesus Christ's example of welcoming children, even kids can watch porn at Makerere Community Church.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 12:09 PM • 25 Comments
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Gretchen sent me a link to this appalling story of a teacher who needs to find another line of work:
The mother of a 13-year-old Montgomery County middle school student is demanding an apology from a teacher who had school police escort the youngster from a classroom for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance.The unidentified student was mocked by other children in her class and has been too traumatized to return to Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown, according to Ajmel Quereshi, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland who is representing the family.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 12:02 PM • 93 Comments
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I always find these exchanges with Vox Day so amusing, mostly because of the weapons grade projection he engages in and the fact that he thinks merely being smug in response to an argument defeats that argument. In his latest response to my exchange with Ellis Washington, both are on full display.
Ed Brayton asked Ellis Washington a question for the apparent purposes of evading a debate with him. Calling my non-response to a question asked of Ellis Washington "a rhetorical fallacy" isn't just ridiculous, it doesn't even make sense. First, asking such a question is not an appropriate response to a debate challenge; one does not engage in the debate prior to it actually taking place.
Posted by Ed Brayton at 9:30 AM • 68 Comments
PZ Myers 03.03.2010
PZ Myers 03.02.2010
Tim Lambert 03.01.2010
Ed Brayton 03.02.2010
William M. Connolley 03.02.2010
