I thought it worthwhile to re-post this quote from a time before the Tea Party even thought of being as a reminder that the current struggle between the Republican ‘Establishment’ and the Tea Party has nothing to do with the former being some remnant of the 50s-60s era of mainstream Republicans being the ‘Goo-Goo’ Party. […]
There are what I perceived as problems with the Brookings Study. Just one example: they base much of their analyses upon “lifetime earnings associated with earning a bachelor’s degree”. The average lifetimes earnings of degree holders is certainly skewed significantly upwards by the top 10% of earners (who account for over 40% of all earnings, […]
Update to the Hobby Lobby decision comes as a result of a SCOTUS injunction the day before the 4th of July 2014 The nonprofit Wheaton College filed a petition to keep it from having to a file self-certification document certifying it is a religious organization and should be exempt from having to provide contraceptives. Sotomayer […]
As we will show, Congress provided protection for people like the Hahns and Greens by employing a familiar legal fiction: It included corporations within RFRA’s definition of “persons.” But it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this fiction is to provide protection for human beings. A corporation is simply a form […]
I haven’t read the opinions, concurrence, or dissents in either Hobby Lobby or Harris v. Quinn, so these comments are based on news summaries and quick commentaries by others. But the biggest surprise in Hobby Lobby, I think, is the express approval, in the opinion and in Kennedy’s concurrence, of HHS’s on-the-fly setup devised in […]
Part 1; Cantor’s Defeat and What It Does Not Mean When House Majority leader Eric Cantor lost his seat to ultra-conservative David Brat, the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus summed up the majority view among political pundits: “The episode offers a disturbing commentary about the poisonous, polarized state of American politics.” I cannot agree. I don’t […]
In an email this morning, Bill H asked me whether I know much about a case called Harris v. Quinn, in which the Supreme Court will announce the likely 5-4 majority’s ruling tomorrow. I responded: I know LOADS about it, Bill, and wrote about it–and about a bizarre comment by Alito during the argument on the […]
The Absurd Dr. “Chaps” Gordon Klingenschmitt is the Republican nominee for State Rep in Colorado Springs HD15. What qualifies him as a candidate in the Colorado State House? “‘Chaps’ as they call him, has a long history as a disgraced former Navy Chaplain who brags about having successfully performed an exorcism on a lesbian soldier […]
I’m delighted to find that someone with the necessary statistical chops has answered a question I’ve been asking for a while: Have any of the 130+ evolution scientists who’ve savaged Wilson and Nowak’s Eusociality paper (and Wilson’s Social Conquest of Earth) gone deep into the maths of their model (laid out in their technical appendix)? I check […]
Each week I get an email from Slate telling me what the latest articles are there, this one caught my attention; Richard Posner on Roberts” For those of you who may not know, Richard Posner writes articles on the economy; but, he is also an 7th District Appeals Court Justice. The 7th District is the […]