Stan Taylor

If you think Heather Armstrong’s dog Chuck is gross, check this out: back when we used to leave Tippie free in the house while we weren’t home, sometimes we would come home to find the bathroom trash can tipped over and Tippie running around with a string hanging from her mouth or bits of adhesive backed absorbent material stuck to her snout. She quickly gained the nickname ‘Kotex.’ For obvious reasons, we now put Tippie in a crate (let’s be real, it’s a cage) when we’re away from home.

In light of the news that the administration has been spying on Americans, John Scalzi posts his thoughts on if and when a president should be impeached. As usual with John, it’s a well written blog post (hell, it should be well written; he’s a professional writer!).
But I take issue with John on a couple of points. He writes:

Now, let’s posit that the president knew his actions were illegal, but didn’t care. Would that merit impeachment? In my opinion, no — if the president could prove that his actions saved Americans from imminent harm that following the law could not have prevented.

In reference to an even more extreme possible circumstance, John writes:

If we granted that the president both knew what he was doing was illegal and that it was determined that such evasion of law was entirely unnecessary, now are we talking impeachment? This is the point where I go “gaaaaaaaaah” and raise a point that will be entirely unpersuasive to many, which is that I genuinely believe that Bush wants to protect Americans, and that matters to a non-trivial extent. I’d be loathe to impeach a president for that, and I would find it difficult to support people who would. There, I’ve said it: I don’t think you get impeached for trying to protect Americans.

That may work with captains of fictional star ships named Enterprise, but I don’t buy it in real life. As some commenters to the post remark, this is the top of one long slippery slope. The law doesn’t account for good intentions (ok, ill intent is a critical part of many laws, but generally, you’re still breaking some law whether you do it with good or ill intent; it’s just that ill intent gets you a harsher punishment).
I’m not sure this is completely relevant, but John’s blog post reminded me of a common parenting situation:

• Child #1 is doing something stupid that could result in harm to child #2.
• Parent tells child #1 to stop because it could harm child #2.
• Child #1 ignores parent
• Child #1’s action results in anticipated harm to child #2
• Parent turns his/her attention to child #1, and even before the parent can open his/her mouth, child #1 is screaming, “But I didn’t mean to harm child #2
• Parent responds: “Well, I’m assuming you weren’t doing this reckless action in order to harm child #2. But the fact remains that you ignored the possible consequences and an order to stop it lest you harm child #2. You’re still just as guilty.

President Bush: go to your room without your dinner. No TV, no telephone!

From the American Civil Liberties Union web site:

When the angry phone calls and emails started arriving at the office, I knew the holiday season was upon us. A typical message shouted that we at the American Civil Liberties Union are “horrible” and “we should be ashamed of ourselves,” and then concluded with an incongruous and agitated “Merry Christmas.”
We get this type of correspondence a lot, mostly in reaction to a well-organized attempt by extremist groups to demonize the ACLU, crush religious diversity, and make a few bucks in the process. Sadly, this self-interested effort is being promoted in the guise of defending Christmas.
…
In truth, it is these website Christians who are taking the Christ out of the season. Nowhere in the Sermon on the Mount did Jesus Christ ask that we celebrate His birth with narrow-mindedness and intolerance, especially for those who are already marginalized and persecuted. Instead, the New Testament—like the Torah and the Koran and countless other sacred texts—commands us to love our neighbor, and to comfort the sick and the imprisoned.
That’s what the ACLU does. We live in a country filled with people who are sick and disabled, people who are imprisoned, and people who hunger and thirst for justice. Those people come to our Indiana offices for help, at a rate of several hundred a week, usually because they have nowhere else to turn. The least of our brothers and sisters sure aren’t getting any help from the Alliance Defense Fund or WorldNet Daily. So, as often as we can, ACLU secures justice for those folks who Jesus worried for the most.
As part of our justice mission, we work hard to protect the rights of free religious expression for all people, including Christians. For example, we recently defended the First Amendment rights of a Baptist minister to preach his message on public streets in southern Indiana. The ACLU intervened on behalf of a Christian valedictorian in a Michigan high school, which agreed to stop censoring religious yearbook entries, and supported the rights of Iowa students to distribute Christian literature at their school.

Happy Holidays to all!

A U.S. District Judge ruled today that the Dover, Pennsylvania school board can’t force the teaching of intelligent design. That is welcome news in and of itself, but as an extra bonus, the judge’s finding is very strongly worded (emphasis added):

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.
Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.
To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions. The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.
Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

You go, Judge Jones!
UPDATE: It appears that Judge Jones was appointed by George W. Bush. Clearly one of those pesky liberal activist judges. Awesome.

Matt Haughey writes that he bought a house this year without the help of a realtor and feels confident that he could also sell a house without a realtor:

We sold our first house and bought a new one this year and in the process learned that we really could do without a realtor, just as the authors described. We staged our old house ourselves, and pushed our realtor to get us on the weekly home tour. I took photos for our listing and helped write it, keeping in mind the lessons from the book and removed every empty phrase like “fabulous” and “wonderful” and replaced them with descriptive terms like “open” and “large”. We did all of our new home shopping online and by canvassing the city and calling builders with works in progress. We found and bought our new house without any realtors involved at all. It was surprisingly easy — whenever I was wondering what we were supposed to do at a stage in the financing/offer/escrow process, I could just punch up google and get all the info I needed. Google searches lead me to offer letter templates, legal ramifications for each document we signed, and how to find the best financing. While I like my realtor and consider her a personal friend, if we ever sell our new home, we’ll do it ourselves and save a few grand next time around.

If Matt feels comfortable handling a real estate transaction himself, good for him, but I think that finding a buyer for your home-for-sale and/or finding a home for you to buy are the least important tasks that a realtor does (or should do). Monitoring the legal aspects of the transactions is the most important role. I would feel very uncomfortable not having an experienced expert monitoring the process and advising me in the legal transactions.
When we sold and bought houses three years ago, we ended up finding the new house ourselves–which is pretty easy these days with everything online. But we needed to close on both houses on the same day, so we were super sensitive to a delay in either deal. Our realtor was in constant contact with the seller’s and buyer’s realtors for each deal, both title companies, and our mortgage lender to make sure everything went smoothly. He knew exactly what should be happening with each transaction at every point and he was hard-assed when necessary with the other parties to make sure they did their tasks competently and in a timely fashion. His diligence and expertise were well worth the fees we paid him (since we used him for both transactions, he waived one of our fees to him, which reduced our total realtor costs a bit).

You know, I fully embrace the principle of doing HTML layout via CSS vs. the old fashion table layouts, but the browser implementations of CSS still differ so much that it’s been a huge pain every time I’ve tried to implement more than rudimentary CSS layouts. As you have surely noticed if you visit here regularly, I recently converted this blog to one the newer MovableType templates, and then have been tweaking it to my liking. But the stylesheet for this template is over 1000 lines long, and every time I’ve tweaked it, I’ve encountered different behavior in Mozilla and Internet Explorer. Frustrating.

This is awesome (if a little vulgar for my tastes). An excerpt:

Can we back up just a couple steps here? At what point did a basic understanding of the separation of church and state become a f*cking war on religion? And how did we get to the point where you can call an organization set up to defend our civil liberties “Terrorists” on national television and no one fires your *ss? Enough. F*ck all of you lying little sh*theads who wish the world was out to get you so you could play the poor oppressed victims. Wake up *ssholes — you’re the cowboys, not the f*cking Indians.

(Sorry about the censorship; I don’t really want my blog to get blacklisted by nanny programs)

So far, our new dog Penny is known in our household by these alternate appellations: Pen-Pen, Wenny the Poo, the Tootsie Roll factory, Chi-Hua-Hua (pronounce each vowel), Terriwawa, Puppy Doodle.

A law professor has evaluated the federal tax code on the basis of Judeo-Christian ethics, and found it immoral. The abstract of the paper:

This article severely criticizes the Bush Administration’s tax policies under the moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics. I first document that Judeo-Christian ethics is the most relevant moral analysis for tax policy because almost eighty percent of Americans and well over ninety percent of the Congress, including President Bush, claim to adhere to the Christian or Jewish faiths. I also show that evaluating federal tax policy under Judeo-Christian principles not only passes constitutional muster but is also appropriate under the norms of a democracy. I then provide a complete theological framework that can be applied to any tax policy structure. Using sources that include leading Evangelical and other Protestant scholars, Papal Encyclicals and Jewish scholars, I prove that tax policy structures meeting the moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics must raise adequate revenues that not only cover the needs of the minimum state but also ensure that all citizens have a reasonable opportunity to reach their potential. Among other things, reasonable opportunity requires adequate education, healthcare, job training and housing. Using these theological sources, I also establish that flat and consumption tax regimes which shift a large part of the burden to the middle classes are immoral. Consequently, Judeo-Christian based tax policy requires the tax burden to be allocated under a moderately progressive regime. I discuss the difficulties of defining that precisely and also conclude that confiscatory tax policy approaching a socialistic framework is also immoral. I then apply this Judeo-Christian ethical analysis to the first term Bush Administration’s tax cuts and find those policies to be morally problematic. Using a wealth of sources, I then establish that the moral values driving the Bush Administration’s tax policy decisions reflect objectivist ethics, a form of atheism that exalts individual property rights over all other moral considerations. Given the overwhelming adherence to Christianity and Judaism, I conclude that President Bush, many members of Congress and many Americans are not meeting the moral obligations of their faiths, and, I argue that tax policy must start reflecting genuine Judeo-Christian values if the country is to survive in the long run.

Oopsie.

Katie really likes to listen to music when she drives, especially when she’s alone in the car. Last summer, we got her a new(er) van, but it doesn’t have a CD player like our old one. Katie has been asking ever since if we could get a CD player installed. I told her that it’s obsolete technology: she should just get an iPod that she can use in the car and elsewhere.
But, because she didn’t really understand why an iPod was better, we haven’t done anything about music in the car for her. Well, about three weeks ago, my brother-in-law bought me an iPod Nano, and this morning, Katie took it with her to work for the first time. As soon as she got to her office, Katie called me and said: “I want to marry your iPod!” I asked her if she now understood what I’d been telling her for months, and she agreed that she did indeed. I’d better start figuring out how to get her an iPod; she was threatening to kill me so she could inherit mine.