President Bush is a bundle of paradoxes. He thinks the scope of the federal government should be limited but the powers of the president should not. He wants judges to interpret the Constitution as the framers did, but doesn't think he should be constrained by their intentions.

If that's not enough to embarrass the president, the opinion was written by conservative darling J. Michael Luttig--who just a couple of months ago was on Bush's short list for the Supreme Court. For Luttig to question Bush's use of executive power is like Bill O'Reilly announcing that there's too much Christ in Christmas.

But the theory boils down to a consistent and self-serving formula: What's good for George W. Bush is good for America, and anything that weakens his power weakens the nation. To call this an imperial presidency is unfair to emperors

What we have now is not a robust executive but a reckless one. At times like this, it's apparent that Cheney and Bush want more power not because they need it to protect the nation, but because they want more power. Another paradox: In their conduct of the war on terror, they expect our trust, but they can't be bothered to earn it.

Cheney and Bush want more power not because they need it to protect the nation, but because they want more power... they expect our trust, but they can't be bothered to earn it.

There was an analysis at Angry bear, I think, that showed domestic spending mostly level.

“What else don’t we know?� What other information, gathered by professional reporters and editors, has been kept from the American public.

Getz’s article is a perfect example of the workings of the leftist mind. By casting everyone whose thoughts and deeds they find disagreeable as devils, leftists level the playing field. On their field, the Bushs and Blairs are as despicable as the Hitlers, the Saddams, and, thanks to Getz, the Bothas. If you make this field your home, moral clarity disappears and is replaced by moral equivalence.

The rules of the game are pretty simple, if the Preznit can connect you to Osama bin Laden in no more than six (6) steps they have enough evidence to "reasonably" connect you to terrorism and can legally be spied upon/"monitored" without a warrant. This game was set up because the laws under FISA require the government to supply evidence to obtain a warrant within 72 hours after starting to spy on Americans domestically.

Posted by edger at September 3, 2005 01:04 PM �..might consider, though, that the real villian is a MSM and the Far Left...� This may get me kicked off this site, and I'll probably regret saying this later, but here goes... Jim... you know how to use a gun? Bullets are cheap, and plentiful, you can get lots of 'em almost anywhere if you are out of 'em... You only need one, though...

9-11 represented the first collapse of ANY steel-framed building, allegedly from fire. BUT – there were three such occurrences; not just one. The third building, Seven World Trade Center (7-WTC), was not hit by an aircraft loaded with jet fuel. Its collapse wasn't accompanied by a fireball, representing the alleged tank of diesel fuel burning or exploding - (which it didn't). That’s asking too much from ‘coincidence,’ just by virtue of two separate architectural styles; within an eight-hour period of time. Most spectacularly, no ‘official’ questions were asked.

It is time for honest Christians who decide to enter politics for the purpose of serving their society to insure that the ideals of the Constitution and democracy continue to illuminate mankind. It is time for politicians of the Christian faith to reflect on some messages taught by Jesus himself:

Have mercy for all and be of pure heart; become a peacemaker; and hunger and thirst for what is right. Meet that new and higher standard that is outlined in Matthew 5:20-26,33-48; 6:24; 7:1-5, 15-20.

Jesus did not come to heal the well or make the rich more wealthy. He came to serve the downtrodden and needy, to heal the sick, to give to the poor, to pray for the imprisoned, and to spread peace, not domination. He was the model of tolerance, which is what our nation can once again embrace with the proper leadership. Do not go into politics to establish a theocracy, but rather to insure that all people of this land may worship freely that which is their own choice. We are not a theocracy and never have been.

If Christians wish to be an influence in this nation, they must do so by example that is consistent with their holy Bible, without imposing their Bible on those who follow other codes. Follow the Beatitudes, the teachings of Christ, while also respecting the secular nature of our nation. Give to the poor. Heal the sick. Comfort the grieving. Spread peace. Those are the ideals that need to be at the center of a Christian's political agenda, not an insistence on making this nation a theocracy. This nation was founded to escape that kind of tyranny.

The laws of physics are an interesting case. Occasionally it is suggested that the most fundamental laws of physics, such as "force equals mass times acceleration" (F=ma), are not falsifiable because they are definitions of basic physical concepts (in the example, of "force"). More usually, they are treated as falsifiable laws, but it is a matter of considerable controversy in the philosophy of science what to regard as evidence for or against the most fundamental laws of physics. Isaac Newton's laws of motion in their original form were falsified by experiments in the twentieth century (eg, the anomaly of the motion of Mercury, the behavior of light passing sufficiently close to a star, the behavior of particle being accelerated in a cyclotron, etc), and replaced by a theory which predicted those phenomena, General Relativity, though Newton's account of motion is still a good enough approximation for most human needs. In the case of less fundamental laws, their falsifiability is much easier to understand. If, for example, a biologist hypothesizes that, as a matter of scientific law (though practising scientists will rarely actually state it as such), only one certain gland produces a certain hormone, when someone discovers an individual without the gland but with the hormone occurring naturally in their body, the hypothesis is falsified.

However, arguments relating to alleged actions, rather than the existence, of God may be falsifiable. See nontheism for further information.

The conceptual soundness of Dembski's specified complexity/CSI argument is strongly disputed within the scientific community.[14] Specified complexity has yet to be shown to have wide applications in other fields as Dembski claims. John Wilkins and Wesley Elsberry characterize Dembski's "explanatory filter" as eliminative, because it eliminates explanations sequentially: first regularity, then chance, finally defaulting to design. They argue that this procedure is flawed as a model for scientific inference because the asymmetric way it treats the different possible explanations renders it prone to making false conclusions of design.[15]

Dembski. 1999. Intelligent Design; the Bridge Between Science and Theology. "Christ is indispensible to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners don't have a clue about him. The pragmatics of a scientific theory can, to be sure, be pursued without recourse to Christ. But the conceptual soundness of the theory can in the end only be located in Christ." p. 210

Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work. -- James Randi on The Scientific Method

Fear is in. Fear is the new black. Spritz it on your face and neck, walk around the world all quivering and tremulous, waiting to be crushed by some dark massive throbbing wall of evil at any moment. Fear is a tactic. It is a calculated force, a strategic maneuver, a carefully constructed PR methodology. It is a poison in the air, a cancer in the national bloodstream, a media pastime and a cultural narcotic. And here's the biggest secret of all: Fear is a learned trait, a practiced habit. It is something you cling to and allow to fester. They are counting on it.

Posted by edger at December 4, 2005 08:12 AM "Insurgents don't use car bombs to kill civilians or give booby trapped dolls to children. That is terrorist work, edgey." (quoted from my previous comment) "That is not "terrorist work" in the way you try to twist it to mean, at all. It is the work of the Iraqi people - the very people BushCo thought would throw flowers - fighting to kick the US out of Iraq" (posted by you.)

As Forest said: "Stupid is as stupid does."

Lumping Rush Limbaugh together as an "entertainer"

The theory of the evolution of species through natural selection has two important implications for discussions of species -- consequences that fundamentally challenge the assumptions behind Linnaeus' taxonomy. First, it suggests that species are not just similar, they may actually be related. Some students of Darwin argue that all species are descended from a common ancestor. Second, it supposes that "species" are not homogeneous, fixed, permanent things; members of a species are all different, and over time species change. This suggests that species do not have any clear boundaries but are rather momentary statistical effects of constantly changing gene-frequencies. One may still use Linnaeus' taxonomy to identify individual plants and animals, but one can no longer think of species as independent and immutable.

Richard Dawkins defines two organisms as conspecific if and only if they have the same number of chromosomes and, for each chromosome, both organisms have the same number of nucleotides (The Blind Watchmaker, p. 118). However, most if not all taxonomists would strongly disagree. For example, in many amphibians, most notably in New Zealand's Leiopelma frogs, the genome consists of "core" chromosomes which are mostly invariable and accessory chromosomes, of which exist a number of possible combinations. Even though the chromosome numbers are highly variable between populations, these can interbreed successfully and form a single evolutionary unit. In plants, polyploidy is extremely commonplace with few restrictions on interbreeding; as individuals with an odd number of chromosome sets are usually sterile, depending on the actual number of chromosome sets present, this results in the odd situation where some individuals of the same evolutionary unit can interbreed with certain others and some cannot, with all populations being eventually linked as to form a common gene pool.

1. New species have arisen in historical times. For example: * A new species of mosquito, the molestus form isolated in London's Underground, has speciated from Culex pipiens (Byrne and Nichols 1999; Nuttall 1998). * Helacyton gartleri is the HeLa cell culture, which evolved from a human cervical carcinoma in 1951. The culture grows indefinitely and has become widespread (Van Valen and Maiorana 1991). * Several new species of plants have arisen via polyploidy (when the chromosome count multiplies by two or more) (de Wet 1971). One example is Primula kewensis (Newton and Pellew 1929).

4. Evidence of speciation occurs in the form of organisms that exist only in environments that did not exist a few hundreds or thousands of years ago. For example: * In several Canadian lakes, which originated in the last 10,000 years following the last ice age, stickleback fish have diversified into separate species for shallow and deep water (Schilthuizen 2001, 146-151). * Cichlids in Lake Malawi and Lake Victoria have diversified into hundreds of species. Parts of Lake Malawi which originated in the nineteenth century have species indigenous to those parts (Schilthuizen 2001, 166-176). * A Mimulus species adapted for soils high in copper exists only on the tailings of a copper mine that did not exist before 1859 (Macnair 1989).

"Most models of speciation require gradual change over a very long period of time, and geographic or ecological isolation for a new species to arise," says University of Houston biologist Michael Travisano. "Our study suggests that mating two separate species to produce hybrids can result in a new species readily and relatively quickly, at least in yeast, but possibly in other organisms as well."

I used to be a Democrat before the party was seized by the Left.

Yes, Hodo. I will continue to state facts.

And the proof they didn’t exist someplace and before is? Rivers change, you know.

But, as I noted, no free passes, as long as you initiate the contact I will respond.

A glacial lake is a lake with origins in a melted glacier.

A retreating glacier often leaves sections of ice behind, in hollows between drumlins or hills. As the ice age ends these will melt to create lakes. These lakes are often found surrounded by drumlins, along with other evidence of the glacier, such as moraines, eskers and erosional features such striations and chatter marks.

And finally, since I noted that neither evolution or ID worked well for me, what is your point except to try and pick, pick, pick?

As I have said so often in the past on this site invective does not replace honest debate.

Afterall there is nothing funnier than lefty bush-monkeys from above 49th trying to be too clever by half.

Uh, you first demonstrate a staggering like of knowledge about US culture changes and politics, and for proof you offer me something written by a foreign writer that is between 45 and 35 years old.

Principally, I study the ecology of recent adaptive radiations. My earliest work was carried out on Darwin's famous finches in the Galápagos Islands. More recently I have been working on a mini-explosion of new species of threespine sticklebacks in lakes of coastal British Columbia, Canada. The species are among the youngest on earth and occur in lakes that are less than 12,000 years old. No more than two species occur in any one lake, but pairs of species in different lakes seem to have evolved completely independently of other pairs. They have all kinds of great properties that allow us to address very basic questions concerning the roles of resources, species interactions, phenotypic plasticity, sexual selection and other factors in the evolution of diversity. They produce viable and fertile hybrids, making it possible to investigate the genetic basis of species differences using hybrids. Our research on sticklebacks presently has three main directions. The first concerns the role of interactions (competition and predation) in the evolution of differences between species. Our work in this area includes experiments in ponds in which we measure how natural selection on a species is changed when another species (e.g., a competitor) is added to its environment. The second area concerns the origin and persistence of species themselves, especially the role of ecological selection and reinforcement in the buildup of mating incompatibilities between populations exploiting different environments, and their persistence in the face of gene flow. The third area, in collaboration with David Kingsley at Stanford University and Katie Peichel at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, investigates the genetic basis of species differences. The question of species persistence has lately taken on a new urgency, with the rapid rate at which the stickleback species pairs are becoming extinct. Part of our work is dedicated to understanding why this is occurring, why now, and what can be done to forestall the doom of the species pairs that remain.

And since I have merely stated that I don't agree with either, I see no need to defend either. And your demand that I do so, or provide a new theory is ridiculous.

Nice try, shmendrik. I don't have to be a fookin' brain surgeon

My point was that the claim was that they have been isolated 10,000 years and thus magically/happenstance became new species is highly suspect. No one can state with any degree of certainty that they were NOT there originally as discrete species.

I would also note that you must have arrived in '77, years after the Vietnam War, the radicalization it brought and the take over of the Demo party by the Far Left, or better yet, by the anti-war Left in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s.