So, Terri’s dead, having passed right on schedule, though it sure seemed like a rather long death watch.
The extremist right wingers are not missing a beat, as CNN is reporting that Tom Delay released a statement threatening revenge on those who fought for Terri’s right to die, and his GOP cohorts are all over TV screaming about “activist” judges and the need for judicial reform.
“It is entirely possible that in her death Terri Schiavo will become a symbol for many people about a disturbing trend in American culture,” said Gary Bauer, a prominent conservative activist. Predicting a “donnybrook” over the eventual Supreme Court nominee, he said the Schiavo case “will make more acute the feeling at the grass roots that too many of the most important decisions are being made by unelected judges.”
Selfish men continue to make capital for themselves out of the cause of Terri Schiavo.
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Time to start saving your rusty old coat hangers…
Parents would have to be told when their daughters under 18 seek an abortion under one of two abortion measures approved Wednesday by legislative committees.
The other would spell out an array of regulations for abortion clinics, from rules for sterilizing equipment and training employees to requirements for having certain rooms and equipment.
Sponsors of that bill said it is aimed at making abortion clinics safe, noting they are not regulated as thoroughly as other health care facilities. But opponents said the bill singles out abortion clinics for extra regulation as a way to make it difficult for them to operate.
Both measures gained easy approval. The parental notice bill (SB 1908) must be heard in one more committee before reaching the full Senate. The measure adding regulations for abortion clinics (HB 1041) is headed to the House floor.
The Legislature is widely expected to pass a parental notice law because it voted last year for a proposed constitutional amendment to make such a law possible - and voters approved the ballot measure in November.
A 1999 parental notice law never took effect because of challenges from groups who argued it violated the privacy rights of girls.
Unlike the U.S. Constitution, the Florida Constitution specifically recognizes the privacy right of people. Citing that provision, the Florida Supreme Court threw out the 1999 law in the summer of 2003. But the change approved in November cleared the way for requiring parental notice.
While the measure won approval in the Senate Health Care Committee 7-2, a number of groups said they oppose it.
“The bill proceeds under a false premise, that the government can mandate communication within a dysfunctional family,” said Larry Spalding, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Some girls will not want their parents to know they’re getting an abortion. “For many of these women, they’re going to try self-help. Some will be critically injured for life; some will die,” Spalding said.
The other measure, which would impose burdensome rules on abortion clinics, is part of an old trend to regulate clinics out of existence with no concern for the safety of patients.
Abortion is one of the safest gynecological procedures performed on women in the United States. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, less than 1 percent of all abortion patients experience a major complication associated with the procedure. The three main factors that affect the safety of an abortion are: 1) the gestational age of the fetus; 2) the type of procedure used; and 3) the skill of the doctor. Most abortion-related deaths and complications occur as a result of the use of anesthesia and are not related to the procedure itself. Unnecessary regulations, such as mandatory ultrasound, superfluous record-keeping, and square-footage requirements, do not enhance the safety of an abortion in any way.
Abortion is a very safe procedure, yet the bill being debated by the Florida legislature starts of by stating that
abortion is an invasive surgical procedure that can lead to numerous and serious medical complications, including, but not limited to, bleeding, hemorrhage, infection, uterine perforation, blood clots, cervical tears, incomplete abortion and retained tissue, failure to actually terminate the pregnancy, free fluid in the abdomen, missed ectopic pregnancies, cardiac arrest, sepsis, respiratory arrest, reactions to anesthesia, fertility problems, emotional problems, and even death…
The bill specifically calls for state agencies to impose rules that are a legally significant burden on a woman’s freedom to end her pregnancy, and only calls for the regulations to be not unconstitutional.
The proposed “Women’s Health and Safety Act” is a classic in many ways, from the imposition of unnecessary record keeping to expensive and unneeded air circulation systems, it seems to touch all the bases, including mandatory ultrasound.
Why mandatory ultrasound? Proposed federal regulations offer a clue:
More inventive is the “Informed Choice Act,” introduced by Representative Cliff Stearns, Republican of Florida. It would allow the Department of Health and Human Services to give grants for ultrasound equipment to nonprofit community-based pregnancy help medical clinics. In exchange for receiving the grant, the clinic would have to show “the visual image of the fetus” to the pregnant woman and provide her with “information on abortion and alternatives to abortion such as childbirth and adoption and information concerning public and private agencies that will assist in those alternatives.”
It’s all about harassment and pushing women to make ill advised emotional choices that are not in their best interest.
If Bush and Brownback and the anti-abortion movement have their way, it will be, even though the majority of Americans support choice.
But the views of the public are not dominating the debate in Washington and in statehouses around the country. The views of the anti-abortion zealots are.
Even as many pro-choice people have been worrying about the potential calamity that awaits in the Supreme Court, the anti-abortion forces have been busy gaining ground elsewhere. The Bush Administration has promoted anti-abortion policies both internationally and domestically. Congress has more fanatical members than ever, none more so than newly elected Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who advocates the death penalty for doctors who provide abortions. And the action in the states is overwhelmingly hostile.
As a result, a woman in America today has far less freedom to have an abortion than a woman in America the day after Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973. And for poor women, who are disproportionately of color, that freedom is hanging by a thread.
Despite the fact that abortion is legal and safe extremists have ensured that
• 87% of U.S. counties had no abortion provider in 2000. In
nonmetropolitan areas, 97% of counties had no provider. As a result,
many women must travel substantial distances to access the service.
• About 1 in 4 women who have an abortion travel 50 miles or more for
the procedure, a significant distance and a documented barrier to timely
care (Henshaw and Finer, 2003).
• The proportion of unserved counties has increased steadily since
1978.
• The proportion of women in counties without a facility that provides
even one abortion a year has also increased and reached 34% in 2000.
In Florida, long, costly trips, which lead to lost time at work, travel expenses, and other burdens, are the norm, making abortion a choice that many women lack the financial means to make.
The bills working their way through the Florida Legislature seek to erect ever increasing barriers to a woman’s right to elect to have a safe, common, and perfectly legal medical procedure.
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Steve Gilliard’s News Blog
Reality left the room long, long ago. The idea that Terri Schiavo can speak is so bizarre as to be funny, if there weren’t people charging the doors of the hospice. When does the gun nut who won’t stick up a gun store, just walk in and buy weapons instead show up. I’m surprised that someone hasn’t said Jesus told them to shoot the cops and rescue Terri, because things are just that crazy. You can’t keep screaming murder and then expect everyone to go “oh well, she’s gonna be murdered”, like she was a nigger on death row. Someone is going to act. These sick fuckers are even calling in bomb threats.
And when they do, I hope someone tries to sue the Schindler’s back in time. They did this, they created this circus, robbed their daughter of dignity, robbed the other dying of dignity, tortured the innocent, placed Michael Schiavo kids in mortal danger, and didn’t thank anyone for anything. Hell, they sold the begging list to all comers. They allied with people who consort with terrorists. Remember Paul Hill? Walked right up to a doctor and shotgunned him to death. Guess who he ran with? Terry and Mahoney. In just a little digging, we found out one protestor was a convicted rapist and another was an admitted torturer and anti-muslim bigot. If you did a background check, you’d have more people who had been in the system than a Liberty City street corner.
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Some Florida cities are offering free or subsidized traditional and wireless broadband Internet access to their citizens. This is a good thing.
Yet bills backed by Gov. Bush would let cities and municipal-owned utilities provide wireless service, broadband over power lines or other technologies only if cable and telephone companies don’t offer it first. Even if cable and telephone operators didn’t offer a proposal, the cities could proceed only after doing a feasibility study and then asking residents to vote on the project at least once - twice if bonds would be used to finance it. That could take up to four years. The bills also would bar cities that are offering the service as of May 1 from adding customers.
Boynton Beach is in the middle of the fray.
The city of Boynton Beach is trying to get the downtown wireless Internet project it announced last month up and running before some lawmakers get in the way.
The Florida Legislature is considering three bills that would prohibit cities or municipal-owned utilities from offering broadband, wireless or the burgeoning technology of broadband over power lines, or BPL, without giving cable and telephone providers a crack at the job first.
The initiative, backed by Gov. Jeb Bush and the phone and cable companies, is already putting pressure on Doug Hutchinson, director of Boynton’s Community Redevelopment Agency and organizer of the city’s wireless plan.
“There’s a lot of people throwing stones,” Hutchinson said this week. “Quite frankly, we see this as something that’s due to citizens, and that’s why we’re doing a pilot program.”
Under the bills, if the phone or cable companies don’t offer a proposal, the cities can go ahead with their own, but only after doing a feasibility study and asking residents to vote on the project at least once — twice if bonds would be used to finance it.
That would take anywhere from two to four years, one group says.
“No city would look at that process and say, ‘Yeah! We’re going to go down that road,’ ” said Barry Moline, executive director of the Florida Municipal Electric Association, which represents cities that own utilities.
The proposal also would bar cities that are offering the service as of May 1 from adding any more customers. Currently, 10 cities in Florida, including Tallahassee and Gainesville, have Internet services available for their residents.
Moline and Craig Conn, a lobbyist for the Florida League of Cities, say the bill handicaps smaller, rural cities and towns, as well as poorer sections of large cities, where the major telecommunications companies don’t offer high-speed Internet service.
“If the communities were being adequately served in the first place, then there’s no impetus by the government entities to go and do this,” Conn said.
……
“No one was coming to Boynton and falling all over themselves to make presentations to do this for the community,” he said. “As soon as we go out, everybody and their brother is telling us how we should do it, or that we shouldn’t do it.”
This fight is nothing new - big phone and cable companies are fighting nationwide to keep localities from offering services that their citizens are clamoring for.
Legislative efforts to rein in cities aren’t unique to the Sunshine State. Similar bills have been introduced in nine other state legislatures this year. Last year, the battle played out in Pennsylvania, where Philadelphia announced its intentions to become a wireless city.
After a long and bitter fight, a state law was passed effectively banning city wi-fi systems without industry approval. But the ban isn’t effective until 2006. By then, Philadelphia plans to have much of its system in place.
The appeal to cities is that wi-fi provides residents with a quality-of-life amenity, creates “digital equity” among those residents and makes cities more attractive to business, said Jim Baller, senior principal with Baller Herbst Law Group, which works with cities to set up wi-fi systems.
He bristles at the thought of telecommunications giants such as Verizon or Sprint pushing legislation to limit city-run wi-fi systems.
“Who the heck are these large incumbents to tell them they can’t do that, and get legislators to pass laws to handcuff them,” Baller said.
More good old fashioned American capitalism at work.
The prospects for this bill are murky. A call to your legislators could earn you a break on your Internet bill in the future.
Find your Florida Senators
Find your Florida Representatives
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For some reason, when I stumbled upon this ad a few days ago while googling around for something else Schiavo, I wasn’t surprised. I guess the fact that vultures are greedily dining on Terri’s still breathing corpse just seems like par for the circus.
New List! First time available!
Each of these donors responded to an email during February, 2005, from Terri Schindler-Schiavo’s father on behalf of his daughter. These compassionate pro-lifers donated toward Bob Schindler’s legal battle to keep Terri’s estranged husband from removing the feeding tube from Terri.
These individuals are passionate about the way they value human life, adamantly oppose euthanasia, and are pro-life in every sense of the word!
The NYT has every wingnut with a website has opened up a Schiavo store.
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Jeb! really wants to kill the class size amendment. In 2002, Florida voters decided to cap elementary through high school class sizes with a constitutional amendment after the legislature repeatedly failed to act.
What voters said they wanted
(Three) years ago, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to reduce class sizes. By the 2010 school year, every classroom in the state will be limited to 18 students in kindergarten through third grade, 22 students in grades 4 through 8, and 25 students in high school. The plan is being phased in over eight years: Starting last year (2003), school districts had to reduce their district-wide class size average by two students, a standard most had little trouble meeting.
In 2006-07, it gets tougher. Compliance will be measured on a school-by-school average.
In 2008-09, the standard changes to an actual student count for every classroom rather than an average.
So, the system worked: when lawmakers did not respond to the needs of the people, citizens used the amendment process to override elected leaders and force change. But there’s a problem: Jeb! hates it when democracy works as designed.
His latest plan is to spend $18 million on a special election in September of this year just to redo the class size vote before the 2006 November general election. I guess he figures that the ultra low turnout in a single issue election will increase his odds, or, as his GOP cohort Jim King said,
voters may be confused because several other constitutional amendments are likely to appear on the ballot in 2006.
“How are going to decipher one from the other?” King asked. “How are you going to filter it?”
Why, citizens might even mistakenly vote against Jeb!’s cynical ploy to overturn their will.
Bush and his supporters say the state would save billions of dollars if voters agreed to relax standards for the popular class size constitutional amendment approved in 2002.
A bill in Bush’s sweeping education package would approve a special election Sept. 6 asking voters to freeze the caps on class sizes to districtwide averages, the current standard.
State law requires tightening the standards to a schoolwide average by the 2006-07 school year. Critics have said Bush’s less rigid proposal would allow districts to maintain overcrowded schools instead of being forced to lower class sizes at each school.
Bush has tied his proposal to a boost in teacher pay and would create a $35,000 starting salary requirement with the savings from not having to build schools or hire teachers needed for the stricter class size requirements.
……
The bill faces some major obstacles.
A three-fourths vote by both chambers is required to hold a special election. This would be difficult in the Senate, where the 30 votes needed would have to include at least four Democrats.
……
The looser standards could be a hard sell to voters, who passed the class size amendment by 52 percent. It would be especially unpopular in South Florida, where schools are the most crowded and starting teacher salaries are higher.
……
“Teachers, by and large, are very, very uncomfortable boosting their salaries on the backs of students who might need individual attention,” said Kevin Watson, a lobbyist for the Florida Education Association.
He said representatives from the association were still discussing possible alternatives with Bush that would be more palatable to teachers.
One suggestion King and other members of the Senate’s Education Committee are exploring would keep the stricter class size requirements just for students in kindergarten through third grade.
“If you have to go to the general public anyway, why not go with something that would preserve the K-3 requirements?” King said. “We can afford it. We can’t afford K-12.”
King said he is still researching the potential cost of his proposal.
No compromises. The mostly powerless Dems can actually stop this nonsense right in its, uh, Call. Write. Encourage the growth and strengthening of spine amongst state Democrats. Ask them to follow Les Miller’s lead.
”After years of Democratic calls to increase teacher pay, we’re heartened to hear that the governor has finally recognized that Florida’s teachers lag the national salary average and deserve an increase. However, we’re dismayed that he has chosen the class size amendment as the piggy bank to raid for the effort.
“Since its inception, Governor Bush has promised every calamity, every funding loss, and every dire consequence should the class size amendment become law. But by more than 2 million votes, in 2002 the people of Florida rejected his scare tactics and passed a constitutional amendment requiring smaller class sizes.
“Now, the governor is dangling the prospects of higher teacher salaries as the latest incentive to once again thwart the will of the voters. This is unconscionable.
“It’s time the governor abandoned his ‘devious plans,’ and got to work upholding his constitutional obligations.”
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1,800 sex offenders missing
One month before a registered sexual offender allegedly kidnapped, raped and murdered 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford, Florida law enforcement agencies had lost track of at least 1,800 other sexual offenders statewide, according to a review of Florida’s Sexual Offender/Predator Registry.
Uh, here’s one, anyway…
As protests outside the hospice housing Terri Schiavo in her final days mounted last week, numerous newspaper reports, many based on an Associated Press account, mentioned or quoted 10-year-old Joshua Heldreth and/or his father, Scott Heldreth. Josh was one of several youngsters arrested for crossing police lines in Pinellas Park, Fla., in an effort to take water to Schiavo.
None of the stories revealed that Scott Heldreth, a religious activist and anti-abortion crusader, is a registered sex offender in Florida– until The Charlotte Observer mentioned it on Sunday.
A widely published AP story on Sunday by Allen G. Breen had painted a warmer picture of the Heldreths, noting that it was young Josh who insisted that his father take him to the protests from their home in North Carolina, not the other way around. “God’s with me,” Josh said.
The article continued: “Scott Heldreth, a veteran of the Operation Rescue and Operation Save America campaigns against abortion, didn’t intend to join this fight, until his son asked to be brought to Pinellas Park.”My wife and I, we felt like if God really put it on his heart, we should come down, to allow him to live out what God had put on his heart,” says Heldreth, a carpenter.”
The story said some of the children at the protest carried signs accusing Terry Schiavo’s husband of murdering her and urging that he be sent to jail.
The Charlotte Observer story, however, revealed that Heldreth had pleaded guilty to sexual battery, was in jail for parts of 1992 and 1993, according to court records, and served time on probation.
Just a father passing along some hard earned knowledge of his trade to his son. See, handcuffs and paddy wagons tend to make a certain type of Christian girl like totally hot and horny:
Josh Heldreth was charged with trespassing after he tried to deliver the water to Schiavo, who has gone without food or water since March 18, when her feeding tube was removed by court order.
He walked up to sheriff’s deputies, carrying a plastic cup and ignored two requests to turn around. Deputies cuffed his hands behind his back and loaded him into a van with 14- year-old twin girls. At the courthouse, the three youngsters were photographed, fingerprinted and released.
“God’s with me,'’ Josh Heldreth said.
“Thank you, God!”
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Schiavo’s parents beg Gov. Bush for action
Terri Schiavo is still refusing to die, even as she approaches her eleventh day without food and water, a spokesman for her parents said Monday morning.
On Sunday night, she was visited by her father and a friend she used to go dancing with, when “something extraordinary happened,” said Paul O’Donnell, a Franciscan Friar acting as a spiritual advisor to Bob and Mary Schindler.
“Terri Schiavo raised her hands up and was moving and started making guttural sounds like she does when she talks to her mother,” O’Donnell said. “Everyone is willing to write this woman’s obituary except one person, and that’s Terri Schiavo herself.”
Schiavo used to be a “vivacious dancer,” O’Donnell said.
Orcinus
Science and fundamentalism are natural enemies, because they represent diametrically opposite models for understanding the world.
Fundamentalism begins with articles of faith, gleaned from Scripture, for which it then goes in search of evidence as support — ignoring, along the way, all contravening evidence.
Science begins with the gathering of evidence and data, which are then assembled into an explanatory model through a combintation of hypothesis and further testing. This model must take into account all available facts, including contradictory evidence.
They are, in other words, 180 degrees removed from each other in how they affect our understanding of the world. One is based in logic, the other in faith. As methodologies go, they are simply irreconcilable.
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Right wing extremist David Horowitz has been making lots of noise lately about “academic freedom.” His definition of “freedom: includes the right to challenge one’s professors on such “controversial” subjects as evolution and the holocaust.
See, according to Horowitz, teaching a scientific theory that is universally accepted and backed by hundreds of years of research and millions of years of fossil records without also teaching the “there’s an invisible man in the sky and he’s really awesome and the world is only a few thousand years old and dinosaurs were man’s best friend before god invented dogs” version of events somehow infringes on the rights of students.
Which leads to this.
College students could demand their views be discussed in classrooms without fear of academic retribution, a controversial bill being considered by the Legislature provides.
Dubbed the “academic freedom'’ bill, House Bill 837 and its companion in the Senate, SB 2126, would develop a statewide “bill of rights'’ for faculty to follow in the interest of delivering a “fair and balanced'’ curriculum, according to sponsor Rep. Dennis Baxley, R-Ocala.
“I believe there are spots in the universities - I call them totalitarian niches - where, in the cover of the classroom dictator, professors are completely in charge of what is taught,'’ Baxley said.
“If you disagree with their political view or world view, you will feel it in the grade book or in graduate referrals. … It’s the big pink elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about.'’
The House bill sailed through the House Education and Innovation Committee on Tuesday, passing 6-2.
Under the bill, instructors teaching evolution also would have to teach creationism if a student requested it. A course on the Holocaust also would have to include a section on the belief held by some that there was never a Holocaust.
If that did not happen, students who sued the institution would have the support of a state law. The state Education Department warns of the fiscal effects in a bill analysis, stating Florida should be prepared to shell out at least $4.2 million a year to retain an attorney and pay anticipated legal costs if the bill passes.
Opponents say such a law flies in the face of free speech.
“It’s silly, empirically inaccurate and unconstitutional in about 60 different ways,'’ said Steven Gey, a law professor at Florida State University.
The proposal is a product of an “Academic Bill of Rights'’ written by David Horowitz, founder of the conservative think tank Students for Academic Freedom.
Nearly a dozen other state legislatures - including California’s, Pennsylvania’s and Georgia’s - are considering various versions.
Horowitz says the legislation is necessary to beat back liberal-leaning faculty at colleges and universities.
“Too many professors indoctrinate students while university administrators are intimidated from enforcing their own guidelines,'’ Horowitz wrote in an opinion piece in Thursday’s USA Today.
“It is because of this that Legislatures are the last resort for providing a remedy and setting universities back on their intended course: educating our kids, not brainwashing them,'’ he wrote.
Educators who oppose the legislation say that not only would it set standards for the state’s university system that could threaten schools’ academic accreditation, but it also would cost millions in lawsuits.
“This will immediately draw a lawsuit where it’s already a foregone conclusion that the state will lose and have to pay millions in the ACLU’s [American Civil Liberties Union], or whoever takes this case, attorneys’ fees,'’ Gey said.
Gey and other educators said the matter harkened back to the McCarthy era, when professors and other faculty were forced to sign loyalty oaths.
“We’ve been here before, and for 50 years the Supreme Court has told legislatures they can’t do this,'’ Gey said.
More here.
The bill sets a statewide standard that students cannot be punished for professing beliefs with which their professors disagree. Professors would also be advised to teach alternative “serious academic theories” that may disagree with their personal views.
According to a legislative staff analysis of the bill, the law would give students who think their beliefs are not being respected legal standing to sue professors and universities.
Students who believe their professor is singling them out for “public ridicule” - for instance, when professors use the Socratic method to force students to explain their theories in class - would also be given the right to sue.
“Some professors say, ‘Evolution is a fact. I don’t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don’t like it, there’s the door,’” Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue.
Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, warned of lawsuits from students enrolled in Holocaust history courses who believe the Holocaust never happened.
Similar suits could be filed by students who don’t believe astronauts landed on the moon, who believe teaching birth control is a sin or even by Shands medical students who refuse to perform blood transfusions and believe prayer is the only way to heal the body, Gelber added.
“This is a horrible step,” he said. “Universities will have to hire lawyers so our curricula can be decided by judges in courtrooms. Professors might have to pay court costs - even if they win - from their own pockets. This is not an innocent piece of legislation.”
The staff analysis also warned the bill may shift responsibility for determining whether a student’s freedom has been infringed from the faculty to the courts.
But Baxley brushed off Gelber’s concerns. “Freedom is a dangerous thing, and you might be exposed to things you don’t want to hear,” he said. “Being a businessman, I found out you can be sued for anything. Besides, if students are being persecuted and ridiculed for their beliefs, I think they should be given standing to sue.”
During the committee hearing, Baxley cast opposition to his bill as “leftists” struggling against “mainstream society.”
“The critics ridicule me for daring to stand up for students and faculty,” he said, adding that he was called a McCarthyist.
Baxley later said he had a list of students who were discriminated against by professors, but refused to reveal names because he felt they would be persecuted.
Make no mistake: this bill is part of a much larger national push to force a particular Christian sect’s beliefs into the mainstream.
Young-Earth Creationism (YEC) is the position that most of the politically active “creationists” hold. Young-Earth Creationists demand a literal reading of Genesis. They insist that Earth is less than ten thousand years old; that it and all life were created in just six twenty-four-hour days; and that the entire fossil record is a result of Noah’s Flood. They claim to have “scientific evidence” for this, but in fact their “evidence” consists partly of mistakes, partly of misinterpretations, partly of old stories now known to be wrong, and partly of outright lies. YECs routinely lie about the scientific evidence, both that for evolution and that against YECism, and don’t even see anything wrong with their blatant dishonesty.
I used to think that young-Earth creationism was the most dangerous form of creationism. Unfortunately, in the last couple of years an even more dangerous form has appeared: the so-called Intelligent Design (ID) type of creationism. ID is dangerous not because it has any real facts on its side — it doesn’t — but because its advocates have learned how to use rhetoric far more effectively than earlier creationist movements did. ID creationism cloaks itself in reasonable-sounding claims of “weaknesses” in evolutionary theory, and asks why students should be denied the chance to learn the evidence against evolutionary theory. When explained by one of its adherents, ID sounds like a variant on theistic evolution. But it isn’t. In fact, “Intelligent Design theory” is just a trick: the latest in a series of disguises used by religious fundamentalists to conceal the same old anti-evolution, anti-science agenda that has driven them for over a hundred years. The “evidence against evolution” that IDers claim is simply recycled young-earthist nonsense. Their true goal is to defeat modern, naturalistic science and put religion (their religion, of course) into a dominant role in public schools and public life.
More:
People For the American Way - Evolution and Creationism in Public Education
Anti-evolution teachings gain foothold in U.S. schools / Evangelicals see flaws in Darwinism
Wired 12.10: The Crusade Against Evolution
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More details are emerging about the almost showdown between FDLE and local police in the Schiavo case. First discussed here and here, Jeb! was attempting to use FDLE agents to seize Terri Schiavo from her hospice bed and have her feeding tube reinserted.
Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo was not to be removed from her hospice, a team of state agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted — but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge’s order, The Herald has learned.
Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, on Thursday that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding.
For a brief period, local police, who have officers at the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called “a showdown.'’
In the end, the squad from the FDLE and the Department of Children & Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice.
‘’We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in,'’ said a source with the local police.
‘’The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene,'’ said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. “When the sheriff’s department and our department told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off.'’
The incident,known only to a few and related to The Herald by three different sources involved in Thursday’s events, underscores the intense emotion and murky legal terrain that the Schiavo case has created. It also shows that agencies answering directly to Gov. Jeb Bush had planned to use a wrinkle in Florida law that would have allowed them to legally get around the judge’s order. The exception in the law allows public agencies to freeze a judge’s order whenever an agency appeals it.
CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
Participants in the high-stakes test of wills, who spoke with The Herald on the condition of anonymity, said they believed the standoff could ultimately have led to a constitutional crisis and a confrontation between dueling lawmen.
‘’There were two sets of law enforcement officers facing off, waiting for the other to blink,'’ said one official with knowledge of Thursday morning’s activities.
In jest, one official said local police discussed “whether we had enough officers to hold off the National Guard.'’
‘’It was kind of a showdown on the part of the locals and the state police,'’ the official said. “It it was not too long after that Jeb Bush was on TV saying that, evidently, he doesn’t have as much authority as people think.'’
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