Categories
Politics

My Bill of Rights

Maybe you’re like me, tired of a government that does not seem to respect one of the founding documents of our nation, namely the Bill of Rights. Maybe you’re tired of Christian fundamentalists who do not see the placement of monuments containing the Ten Commandments on government property as a government endorsement of a specific […]

Categories
Politics Science

No Child Left Behind: Unintended consequences

How depressing. Right there on the front page of the New York Times this morning: SACRAMENTO — Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some […]

Categories
Politics

Is this what we’re fighting for? (Part II)

A few days ago, I wrote about Abdul Rahman, an Afghan man who converted to Christianity and was being prosecuted under Islamic Sharia law as an apostate, the penalty for which can be death. Indeed, the prosecutor was seeking the death penalty. It looks like someone finally came to their senses: KABUL, Afghanistan – An […]

Categories
Politics Skepticism/critical thinking

Oops, he did it again

Just yesterday, I commented about an article that analyzed President Bush’s penchant for using rather artless straw man fallacies when answering his critics. By an almost amazing coincidence, that very day he was busily engaged in doing more of the same in a press conference. For example, when asked about the terrorist surveillance program in […]

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Medicine Politics

Good news

evolgen reports that that Specter-Harken amendment to restore some of the cuts to the NIH budget and provide a modest increase necessary to prevent the our biomedical research effort from slowly eroding. Support was broad, and it was bipartisan. (No doubt it doesn’t hurt that this is an election year.) However, this is just the […]