Rehnquist served on the Supreme Court for thirty-three years and as chief justice for nineteen. Yet no opinion comes to mind which will be remembered as brilliant, innovative, or memorable. He will be remembered not for the quality of his opinions but rather for the outcomes decided by his votes, especially Bush v. Gore, in which he accepted an Equal Protection claim that was totally inconsistent with his prior views on that clause. He will also be remembered as a Chief Justice who fought for the independence and authority of the judiciary. This is his only positive contribution to an otherwise regressive career.

He's not pulling any punches. Painful.

The Blog | Alan Dershowitz: Telling the Truth About Chief Justice Rehnquist | The Huffington Post

The Senate is expected to begin his confirmation hearings as chief justice either Thursday or next Monday. The opening of Roberts' previously scheduled confirmation hearings, for the position of associate justice, initially was to be Tuesday, but that was canceled until after Rehnquist's funeral on Wednesday.

Not unexpected.

Bush Nominates Roberts for Chief Justice

As a known opponent of organized religion, it seems like a forgone conclusion that I should be opposed to intelligent design, and of course I am, but not because I think it is mixing science and religion, it is because science and religion are separate and mutually exclusive.

Science is the search for the explanation of the natural world. How do planets move in the universe, what causes earthquakes, how do you build an atomic bomb. Those are all areas for science, and exclusively science. Planets move in the universe based on (at the current understanding) gravity, earthquakes are a result of the stresses caused by plate tectonics and you build an atomic bomb by shoving too much uranium 235 or plutonium 239 into too small a space causing the atoms to fission into lighter elements.

Religion is the search for understanding beyond the natural world. What is the meaning of life? What happens to our souls after we die? For that matter, what is a soul anyway? Those are not questions science can answer because they are not things that have a demonstrable effect of the world that we can observe.

The intelligent design debate is a lie from start to finish. It says that what we see in the world is so complicated that there has to be an outside hand that has caused everything we see. That position is anti-science. Science is not about coming to a hard and fast proof, science is about the things that we have DISPROVEN.

Why do we say that the earth revolves about the sun instead of the other way around? Because everything we see with a better understanding of the universe tells us that it does. We launch satelites into space, we have sent people to the moon, and other objects off to the other planets in the solar system. All of that is based on the science that tells us the earth goes around the sun, therefore, the earth revolving around the sun is correct, because if it did not work that way, none of those other things would have worked.

Bringing this back to evolution and intelligent design, does this mean unequivically that evolution is correct? No, there are details of it that could be wrong. Traditional Darwinism thinks of evolution as a slow methodical progression from one thing to the next. Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium says that part is wrong, at least on a larger scale, yet the birds of polynesia with their varied tail lengths within populations of what appear to be the same or at least very similar species says that Darwin was also correct. All of this is about science. Why are those lengths different? What caused one version of the bird on one island to stabilize at a length of say 4 inches while one from a neighboring island to have a length of over a foot?

Where ID fails is that it doesn't ask about an explanation of this, it simply says, it is different, and God, or aliens, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster made it so. Well how do you disprove that? You can't. Now is it possib... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Phone lines were bombarded with electronically generated calls, jamming lines set up for voters seeking rides to the polls on Election Day. Two GOP operatives have pleaded guilty in the case and a third is scheduled for trial.

There are reasons I don't trust the GOP. Subverting the deomcratic process and deliberate disenfranchisement are two of the bigger ones.

Grand Jury to Reconvene in Phone Jam Case

Chronology

Events surrounding the White House's role in the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent:

This is a nice layout of events. The next question is, what else isn't in here?

A CIA Cover Blown, a White House Exposed

The Bush administration is objecting to the creation of a .xxx domain, saying it has concerns about a virtual red-light district reserved exclusively for Internet pornography.

"The Department of Commerce has received nearly 6,000 letters and e-mails from individuals expressing concern about the impact of pornography on families and children," Gallagher said in a letter that was made public on Monday.

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ICANN's vote this year represents an abrupt turnabout from the group's earlier stance. In November 2000, the ICANN staff objected to the .xxx domain and rejected ICM Registry's first application.

At the time, politicians lambasted ICANN's move. Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., demanded to know why ICANN didn't approve .xxx "as a means of protecting our kids from the awful, awful filth, which is sometimes widespread on the Internet." Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., told a federal commission that .xxx was necessary to force adult Webmasters to "abide by the same standard as the proprietor of an X-rated movie theater."

They were damned either way.

This is stupid. If they're labeled .xxx it's real easy to set email filters to block the junk or set browsers to block the domain. NOT approving this means MORE porn being sent out that DOESN'T get blocked because it's showing up under a .com or .net address. Screw "legitimizing" it, it's there, it's not going away, and doing this makes it easier to ID, meaning parents can add some measure of protection.

The people blocking this from going into effect don't give a damn about doing something useful about porn, they want to make sure it's still there to rail against and bring money in for them.

Bush administration objects to .xxx domains | CNET News.com

That game turned truly dangerous on March 21, 1996, when Richard Sacchi Jr. killed an Eastchester cop, then took his own grandmother hostage in a twelve-hour armed standoff with police. As hostage negotiators tried to coax Sacchi from the family home, Pirro appeared on the evening news, saying she would consider seeking the death penalty against him. "She got up there for a few moments of news time," says the former assistant U.S. Attorney, "risking that this guy might hear it and kill his grandmother and go out in a blaze of glory." Sacchi, it turned out, had killed his grandmother and himself long before her remarks, but Pirro didn't know that.

I generally don't like anecdotal examples too much, but the rest of the article makes clear this is not isolated. She's the one that's getting set up to snipe at Hillary in '06.

Pirro Mania

"They are narrow-minded people, don't tolerate human rights, women's rights, don't tolerate dissent," he said. "There's no such thing as rule of law as far as they're concerned — that they're cold-blooded killers."

This isn't funny, but when I look at Gitmo/Abu Gharib/Bagram, Rick Santorum's comments this Sunday on "This Week," what it took to go to a presidential appearance (the loyalty pledges), the tossing of the Geneva convention, and the current death toll in Iraq, I think of this comment as the description of the current holders of power in this country, not Al Q.

That all may also be true of them, but this is a pot calling a kettle black.

Bush Reiterates Stem Cell Study Position

"I am truly concerned that a recess appointment will only add to John Bolton's baggage and his lack of credibility with the United Nations,"

While he may be concerned with baggage and lack of credibility, I simply see it as one more case while W has decided he's more important than dealing with the Constitution. If he were honestly concerned with it, he would have simply said that the deputy ambassador is in charge until things get sorted out with the senate and left it at that.

Having someone at the UN is important. Sending a pyromaniac with gasoline and a lighter into a building you consider to be tinders is NOT the recipe for repair.

Bush Appoints Bolton As U.N. Ambassador

House Republicans, however, said they were "profoundly disappointed" in Frist's decision, saying federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research is fiscally irresponsible because it's unproven technology.

Isn't that the whole point of doing the reseach? I mean, it's not like they haven't voted money for every other pig in a poke they could find. Why NOT toss some money at something that might go somewhere?

And the idea that I might actually agree with anything done by Bill Frist just gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Frist Breaks With Bush on Stem-Cell Bill