Interesting Posts and Articles #23

1. "Nearly 900 EPA scientists reported political interference in their scientific work. That's 900 too many. Distorting science to accommodate a narrow political agenda threatens our environment, our health, and our democracy itself," she said.
   
   Shouldn't that be "That's nearly 900 too many?"


2. "A federal judge has ruled [PDF text] that a school district in Louisiana must stop allowing the distribution of Bibles in schools, saying that the distribution is "a religious activity without a secular purpose" in violation of the First Amendment."
   
   The first Amendment reads: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
   
   While a federal judge is not Congress, surely a federal judge prohibiting the free exercise of religion by disallowing distribution of Bibles by religious groups is a greater violation of the First Amendment.


3. The War On Terror Is Not A Crime
   
   

   "Lynching lawyers, as Shakespeare once suggested, has never appealed much to the legal profession itself – literally or figuratively. But an exception apparently will be made for a group of attorneys who advised President Bush and his national security staff in the aftermath of 9/11. They've been subject to an increasingly determined campaign of public obloquy by law professors, activist lawyers and pundits.

   Their legal competence and ethics have been questioned. Suggestions have even been made that they can and should be held criminally responsible for "war crimes," because their legal advice supposedly led to detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere."

4. Bitter Women at the Pesach Seder (an illustrated running joke); and a reversed Eruv Tavshilin at LionOfZion
5. Nancy Pelosi makes use of a verse in Yeshaya (Isaiah) that does not exist. "To minister to the needs of God's creation is an act of worship, to ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us."