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Ron Paul: The Internet's favorite candidate By Declan McCullagh Story last modified Mon Aug 06 06:16:00 PDT 2007 ARLINGTON, Va.--Ron Paul is a Republican congressman and U.S. presidential hopeful who, in the usual shorthand of political journalists, is known as a "long shot" for the White House. Paul's poll numbers award him less than 2 percent of the vote among Republican candidates, and he was unceremoniously excluded from an Iowa debate in June organized by a tax watchdog group that happens to share his political views. Even otherwise flattering articles consign his candidacy to "the realm of dreams, not practical...

M.C. Rove gettin' down with his bad self during the Radio and Television Correspondents' dinner in Washington, D.C.

Evolution Is Practically Useless, Admits Darwinist    08/30/2006   Supporters of evolution often tout its many benefits.  They claim it helps research in agriculture, conservation and medicine (e.g., 01/13/2003, 06/25/2003).  A new book by David Mindell, The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life (Harvard, 2006) emphasizes these practical benefits in hopes of making evolution more palatable to a skeptical society.  Jerry Coyne, a staunch evolutionist and anti-creationist, enjoyed the book in his review in Nature,1 but thought that Mindell went overboard on “Selling Darwin” with appeals to pragmatics: To some extent these excesses are not Mindell’s fault, for, if...

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Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students. The omission is inadvertent, said Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants. “There is no explanation for it being left off the list,” Ms. McLane said. “It has always been an eligible major.” Another spokeswoman, Samara Yudof, said evolutionary biology would be restored to the list, but as of last night it was still missing. If a major is not on the list, students in that major cannot get grants unless...

What’s the Matter with Kansas? Dishonest Darwinists -- coming to a state near you. By David Klinghoffer ----------------------------------- State school-board elections don’t normally receive much national media attention. Yet the school-board primary race in Kansas on Tuesday, representing a key front in the Darwin wars, was an exception. Will Darwinism be taught as unquestionable dogma? That’s the question that voters decided. In Kansas, it seems it will. Kansas has been one of five states with biology curricula that include instruction about the evidence both for and against neo-Darwinism, requiring that students learn about the “critical analysis” of evolutionary theory. Darwin...

A Seattle-based research group that advocates intelligent design said today it will campaign to educate Kansans that the science standards approved by the State Board of Education are sound. “Kansas citizens need to have accurate information about what the science standards do,” said John West, associate director of the Center for Science & Culture for Discovery Institute. West said the group will start an information campaign over the Internet immediately and possibly start a radio campaign. He declined to say how much the center would spend. The decision puts the Discovery Institute in the center of hotly-contested State Board of...

Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, the first witness called Monday by lawyers suing the Dover Area School District for exposing its students to the controversial theory, sprinkled his testimony with references to DNA, red blood cells and viruses, and he occasionally referred to complex charts on a projection screen.Even U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III was a little overwhelmed."I guess I should say, 'Class dismissed,'" Jones mused before recessing for lunch.Dover is believed to be the nation's first school system to mandate students be exposed to the intelligent design concept. Its policy requires school administrators to read a brief...

Dover Area School District's federal trial began yesterday in Harrisburg with talk ranging from divine intervention and the Boston Red Sox to aliens and bacterial flagellum. After about 10 months of waiting, the court case against the district and its board opened in Middle District Judge John E. Jones III's courtroom with statements from lawyers and several hours of expert testimony from biologist and Brown University professor Kenneth Miller. On one side of the aisle, several plaintiffs packed themselves in wooden benches behind a row of attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union, Pepper Hamilton LLC and Americans United for...

Theory's largest national supporter won't back district The Dover Area School District and its board will likely walk into a First Amendment court battle next week without the backing of the nation's largest supporter of intelligent design. The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based nonprofit that describes itself as a "nonpartisan policy and research organization," recently issued a policy position against Dover in its upcoming court case. John West, associate director of Discovery's Center for Science & Culture, calls the Dover policy "misguided" and "likely to be politically divisive and hinder a fair and open discussion of the merits of intelligent design."...

Editor's Note: This article is the first in a special LiveScience series about the theory of evolution and a competing idea called intelligent design. TODAY: An overview of the increasingly heated exchange between scientists and the proponents of intelligent design. COMING FRIDAY : Proponents argue that intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory, but a close look at their arguments shows that it doesn't pass scientific muster. Science can sometimes be a devil's bargain: a discovery is made, some new aspect of nature is revealed, but the knowledge gained can cause mental anguish if it contradicts a deeply cherished belief...

We have created a welfare state where everyone feels that they are granted food, tv, ect... I am, and so are you, paying for this. We have been supporting the majority of the evac's in NO (who can work) for year's and now we get hit again because of a Katrina. These people who love for NO and need to go to work and fix it, it's not FED it's local--state responsibiliy. The majority of the refugee's you see on TV have been on FED assistance for there whole life, this is the welfare state hard at work...It needs to...

WASHINGTON - Americans are divided over whether humans and other living things evolved over time or have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, according to a new poll. People on both sides of that argument think students should hear about various theories, however. Nearly two-thirds of those in a Pew Research Center poll, 64 percent, say they believe "creationism" should be taught alongside "evolution" - a finding likely to spark more controversy about what is taught in the schools. That controversy could be related to the difficulty of measuring public sentiment about teaching evolution, creationism or...

A major three-part series in The New York Times, running August 21-23, 2005, was devoted to the ongoing evolution/creationism struggle in the political, the scientific, and the religious sphere. Accompanying the series in addition were a William Safire "On Language" column investigating the etymology of "intelligent design" and "neo-creo" and a marvelous editorial column by Verlyn Klinkenborg on deep time and evolution. (In a further acknowledgement of the importance of the issue, the Times's website now has a special section devoted to its evolution coverage.) Overall, despite a number of minor errors, the series succeeded in portraying "intelligent design" as...

Catching up on back news this past few days — I was out of the country for the first two weeks of August — I caught President Bush's endorsement of teaching Intelligent Design in public school science classes. "Both sides ought to be properly taught," President Bush told a reporter August 2, "so people can understand what the debate is all about." This is Bush at his muddle-headed worst, conferring all the authority of the presidency on the teaching of pseudoscience in science classes. Why stop with Intelligent Design (the theory that life on earth has developed by a series...

Paleoanthropology: Start Over?   08/22/2005     The September issue of National Geographic, featuring the African continent, has arrived in homes.  On page 1, Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post wrote about the quest for early man, asking, “Are we looking for bones in all the right places?”  The bulk of the article describes the “messy” story of human origins.  It used to be clean-cut, he said, but no longer: Scientists are good at finding logical patterns and turning data into a coherent narrative.  But the study of human origins is tricky: The bones tell a complicated story.  The cast of...

Intelligent design - coming to a school near you   David Jensen says the evolutionists' perspective relies on unproven scientific facts and theories. Picture / Greg Bowker   27.08.05   By Chris Barton   Science teachers say it has no place in the classroom. Christian educators say children shouldn't be denied alternative views. Science teachers retaliate that it's not science, it's religion behind a mask and they don't want a bar of it. Christian educators argue they can teach it alongside traditional science, so what are science teachers so afraid of? Science teachers' blood begins to boil. "It's not...

Can You Believe in God and Evolution? Four experts with very different views weigh in on the underlying question. By COMPILED BY DAVID VAN BIEMA >FRANCIS COLLINS Director, National Human Genome Research Institute I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature. Like St. Augustine in A.D. 400, I do not find the wording of Genesis 1 and 2 to suggest a scientific textbook but a powerful and poetic description of God's intentions in creating the universe. The mechanism of creation is left unspecified. If God, who is all powerful...

My mother says she is a Darwinist. I’m not sure of all the things that could or should imply. I take it to mean the she does not believe that the Cosmos and all that it contains is the result of the will of a Supreme Being. Nature just exists and that is all there is to it. Asking what is the purpose of human existence is a nonsense question. It has no meaning. As we have no conscious origin, we have no conscious destination. Hence no purpose. This idea is quite troubling to many humans as we are quite...

We've seen the little symbols on the backs of cars: The "Jesus fish" and the "Darwin fish." The Jesus fish eating the Darwin fish. The Darwin fish eating the Jesus fish. It makes for entertainment while commuting, but this front of the culture wars won't be won or lost on the freeway. The creationists realized that they were not getting enough traction in their bumper- sticker campaign against the theory of evolution. So biblical literalists have come up with a new strategy: leave the word "God" out of the public argument, and come up with one that sounds more scientific....