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News & Politics

For rants and ravings about things going on in the world.

  1. Glenn Beck and the Department of Irony

    Glenn Beck compared Bill Nye's criticism of creationists with the Catholic Church's treatment of Galileo, concluding that Nye was on the "wrong side of history."



    I know Beck long ago reached the level of self-parodying, but at this point I think he's in league with the manufacturers of irony meters, because he keeps making mine explode.
  2. Lori Kilchermann is a yellow journalist

    In a 2012 story on a meth bust, the Ionia Sentinel-Standard, based in Michigan, decided to run a picture of the bust site farmhouse from 2 years earlier, when a political candidate had held a fundraiser. This led to accusations of the Sentinel-Standard and its editor, Lori Kilchermann, engaging in "yellow journalism," or distorting irrelevant details of a story for purposes of sensationalism or partisanship. These detractors also publicly encouraged others to cancel their Sentinel-Standard ...
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  3. That pesky Fourth Amendment

    My public defender’s office handles a lot of interesting cases. One of the most notable to come out of my office in recent years was Maryland v. King, which involved a challenge to a state law that permits the police to obtain a DNA sample of all people arrested for a crime, before any conviction and without the need for any belief that the DNA was relevant to the crime the arrestee was detained for. DNA sampling was thus just another routine booking procedure like fingerprinting, but DNA tests ...

    Updated 06-04-2013 at 04:35 AM by Raistlin

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  4. Information is the enemy

    [I wanted to rant on this issue, but I figured EoEO might be tired of my anti-Obama speeches. Though it is his fault for continuing to give me so much material. ]

    To the government, information is the enemy. That is why the US government has demonized Wikileaks, because it threatens to shame governments for their misconduct. So-called issues of “national security” may have merit on certain, specific occasions, but the broad way the label is used makes it clear that that is not the ...

    Updated 06-05-2013 at 03:30 AM by Raistlin

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  5. Cop Science is Junk Science

    Last week, I almost had my first trial. And it was going to be one of the most complicated cases to appear in Maryland District Court (which covers non-jury misdemeanor cases): a challenge to so-called Drug Recognition Experts.

    Take this hypothetical scenario: a woman is pulled over for driving over a dividing line (“erratic driving”). The cop talks to her, asks if she’s been drinking. She denies it, but seems a little out of it. He asks if she’ll take a preliminary breath test, ...

    Updated 03-18-2013 at 06:18 AM by Raistlin

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  6. A federal case about cock suckers

    Yesterday, a federal Court of Appeals decided the fate of a trademark on “cock suckers,” which are rooster-shaped lollipops produced by a woman named Marsha Fox in support of the University of South Carolina Gamecocks. The trademark examiner denied her trademark on the grounds that it was “scandalous,” and the federal court affirmed.

    In support of this ruling, the court cited a law originally passed in 1905 that prohibited the issuance of trademarks if it “consists of or compromises ...
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  7. The New York Times Editorial Board Are Shameless Liars

    I made this a blog post because it's kinda long and I didn't think a lot of people in EoEO would care. I just wanted to rant about an issue that often bugs me.

    It’s easy to get caught up in sports team politics, where you root for your side because of certain labels, not for any ideological reasons. This is apparent with the lack of liberal protest for many of Obama’s policies, despite him being by many measures even worse than Bush on civil liberties and other “liberal” issues. ...
  8. Goddamn women ruin everything

    I learned so many new things today.

    Did you know that the battle of the sexes is intensifying? To women, settling down and getting married is of utmost importance, but men don't want any of that anymore. Men don't want to deal with modern women. And do you know why?

    smurfing feminists.

    That's right, feminists have ruined everything. They've caused women to stop being women (assuming "woman" is defined as "subservient cook and baby-maker"). ...
    Tags: sexism Add / Edit Tags
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  9. From the "no duh" department

    Sex makes people happiest, per new study

    In other news: rain is wet, Iceglow doesn't understand paragraphs, and Tifa's Boobs has boobs. Shocking, I know.
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  10. "You can't yell fire in a crowded theater"

    Well no trout, Sherlock.

    The fact that you can't yell fire in a crowded theater is a point brought up in almost every debate about free speech in the US. And it has annoyed the hell out of me for years. It's always used as a justification for free speech being absolute, which is a position no one ever argues to begin with, during debates over whether a certain form of censorship is good or not. But unless the censorship at issue involves yelling fire in theaters, the point makes ...
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