The flagrant disregard in the courtroom of elementary standards of proper conduct should not and cannot be tolerated.
—Hugo L. Black
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Wow! Just got a new toy scanner today.
The light burned out on my (very) old ScanMaker E6 a while back, so it was time to get a new one.
Technology sure has changed! No need for a stupid SCSI card and SCSI cable.
No need to open up my PSP and tell it to acquire an image from the scanner.
Once the new HP Scanjet G4050 was installed, all I had to do is hit a little button on the top of the machine and it just walks you through everything. 
James Dobson apparently finds that Fred Thompson is in his impression, not Christian.
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/03/28/...
This should be a ringing endorsement for him in the moderate and left leaning side of the party. 
Run Fred!! Run!
He being the current Pope.
First, in what may be a reversal of Catholic doctrine, he takes leave of the wishy-washy separation from his god line and reminds the sort-of-faithful and infidels of fire and brimstone.
HELL is a place where sinners really do burn in an everlasting fire, and not just a religious symbol designed to galvanise the faithful, Pope Benedict XVI has said.
Addressing a parish gathering in a northern suburb of Rome, the Pope said that in the modern world many people, including some believers, had forgotten that if they failed to “admit blame and promise to sin no more”, they risked “eternal damnation - the inferno”.
Hell “really exists and is eternal, even if nobody talks about it much any more”.
Thanks, but there’s a name for people that try to extort fire insurance. Apparently his predecessor was too intellectually rarefied:
In 1999, pope John Paul II said heaven was “neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but that fullness of communion with God, which is the goal of human life”.
Hell, by contrast, was “the ultimate consequence of sin itself. Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy”.
This just isn’t scary enough.
Then the EU had its 50th anniversary and after much moaning and gnashing of teeth, agreed on the Berlin Declaration, the text of which can be found from this page. The Pope and at least some German senior clergy took offense at the EU taking yet another opportunity to create a secular document that doesn’t bow to Christianity. One German article is found here, perhaps somebody can spot English-language commentary elsewhere.
We are striving for peace and freedom, for democracy and the rule of law, for mutual respect and shared responsibility, for prosperity and security, for tolerance and participation, for justice and solidarity.
I don’t see that this set of principles would be improved by a nod to theism and Christianity in particular. “We, who have grown tired of our proud heritage of the Crusades, witch burning, and the Inquisition, ....”
I really should invest in call display some day.
But then again, maybe not. I’d miss classic moments like tonight’s.
Phone rings. Against my better judgment, I answer.
First there’s the obligatory hello / how are you chitchat as you wait for the telemarketer to start the spiel.
Then the telemarketer thanks me for last year’s donation to the charity he’s collecting funds for.
I just did my taxes on the weekend so I know I didn’t have any tax receipt from this particular charity. So I doubt that I actually gave them anything.
The telemarketer gives me a phone number that I can call to get a copy of last year’s receipt (which I strongly doubt actually exists).
I tell him that once I phone the number and check things out I’ll decide what to do.
The telemarketer tries to get me to make a commitment to a donation before I check things out. I tell him no ... etc.
Finally, he says in a really-snarky-kind-of-threatening voice"Ma’am I will not be phoning you back.”
Does he realize that’s exactly what I want? For him NOT to call back. 
A very thoughtful and interesting series of articles is taking place this week over at VC. The guest blogger is Paul Horowitz. He is writing on the meaning and application of the Religious Test Clause of the Constitution. Go read it. http://volokh.com/posts/1174921246.shtml
Hey, if P2P networks ruin commercial pirates, so much the better, eh. Here’s a heart-warming story (fact or fiction):
P2P File-Sharing Ruins Physical Piracy Business
The full text is reproduced below the fold under the terms of the Creative Commons license
German judge under fire for using Koran to deny divorce
A German judge has come under fire for her refusal to grant a divorce to a Muslim woman beaten by her husband on the grounds that marital violence is condoned by the Koran.
The more important and most obvious question is whether marital violence is condoned by German law.
The woman, a German of Moroccan descent, was living apart from her violent husband when she sought a divorce before the end of the usual one-year legal separation period because of continued threats made by the man against her.
After the husband contested the divorce, the judge at the Frankfurt Family Court turned down the woman’s application, noting that the couple grew up with the Moroccan culture.
“In these cultural circles it is not uncommon for the husband to make use of his right of corporal punishment against his wife,” she wrote. “The German-born applicant must have realized this when she married the Moroccan-born” man.
She wrote. I think Geekmom nailed it; that judge must have been pissed off about a German woman marrying a Muslim. Again, the only question that matters is whether or not marital violence is condoned by German law.
“The ruling sends a terrible signal to Muslim women,” said Kristina Koehler, an expert on Islam and a member of parliament for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat-Christian Social Union alliance.
Calling it “unacceptable and abhorrent” for women to be told by a German court of an Islamic right to corporal punishment, she said the judge should have followed German civil law and not Islamic teaching.
“It is unbelievable that a German judge should give such a ruling, said Turkish-born German sociologist Necla Kelek. “The law should be applied the same way to everyone, regardless of whether they are Muslim or Christian.”
That much seems obvious to everybody but the judge and probably the wife beater.
Green Party politician Hans-Christian Stroebele said a judge in Germany was obliged to follow German laws and legal rulings. “Violence and threatening behaviour against another person is a criminal offence in Germany, and rightly so,” Stroebele said.
Of course a judge in Germany is obliged to follow German laws and legal rulings.
Following disclosure of the judge’s remarks, she was removed from the case and it was taken over by another judge.
I’m inclined to have her removed from the bench. I suppose every country has it’s share of judges that should be in a different line of work…
I CAN’T TELL YOU HOW BAD I FEEL FOR ELIZABETH AND JOHN EDWARDS. I’m familiar with the body-blow of a sudden diagnosis that turns your world upside down. It’s incredible – you walk into a doctor’s office and within a span of minutes you find out your life will never be the same. In the back of your mind you nourish the hopes of miracle cures or that you might be like that guy in Dubuque who got the same diagnosis but oddly enough lived forever, but the reality of the situation sits there in your mind. You can’t shake it – it just won’t leave.
But you try to carry on. I think I may know some of what the Edwards are feeling. They’ve been running for the White House for seven years now. And make no mistake – as Hugh points out in his book, running for president is a family affair. It’s more than a dream and an ambition for them. It’s a big part of what defines their lives.
So they walked out of that doctor’s office refusing to let her disease take their lives away. Some people are calling their decision courageous; others find it puzzling. Having been in a situation analogous to theirs, I think I have some understanding and I know I have some sympathy. They’re working through all of this. Their first instinct is not to surrender. That’s good, and it’s what you would have expected. People who seek the presidency aren’t the types who give up or even compromise easily.
THROUGH THE YEARS, I’VE COME TO VIEW SERIOUS and progressive illness as an ever constricting circle with oneself at the center. The interior of the circle represents the contents of one’s life. As the circle gets smaller, things that were inside get forced out. Some of these things are dearly missed; other items that were once thought precious get forced to the exterior and turn out to go surprisingly unlamented.
At the innermost point of the circle are the things that really matter: Family, faith, love. These things stay with you until the day that you die. At the very end, because the circle has shrunk down to its center, they’re all you have left.
Apparently something called E8 was mapped. I’m still trying to figure out what the hell E8 is. If anybody here can translate this into layspeak I would be appreciative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%E2%82%88_%28mathematics%29
Catholic church collects money for mosque
When the Rev. Franz Meurer stands at the altar this Sunday in his priestly vestments, he’ll say to the congregation: “Today’s collection is for the construction of the big new mosque in Ehrenfeld.”
Meurer, 55, is not expecting protests. Both the board of Cologne’s St. Theodore Catholic Church and the parish council have unanimously approved the action.
“It’s only natural that we’re helping them,” he said of the Muslims living in a city that is one of the main centres of Catholicism in Germany.
Ecumenism at its weirdest.
After the special collection was announced last Sunday, several parishioners asked if it was really necessary - considering, for instance, that four young Turks beat a family man into a coma on the Thursday before Ash Wednesday.
“I said, ‘Hey, people, think about it, will you? We’ll be supporting the sensible ones’,” Meurer recalled. “That’s not so dumb.”
I’m curious—- how does he know that the sensible ones attend that mosque?
St. Theodore’s parish council came up with the unusual idea. Its chairman reminded the group that their new church was completed five years ago, and that the Protestant parish in the neighbourhood had given a nice gift.
“Now we, in turn, should give someone a gift too,” Meurer said. “That’s how we hit upon the mosque; it’s being designed by the same architect that did our church.”
The mosque, at the headquarters of the Turkish-Islamic Union for the Institution of Religion (DITIB) in the Cologne district of Ehrenfeld, will be one of Germany’s biggest. Plans call for two 55-metre-high minarets, a dome, and room for more than 3,000 worshippers.
The same question again—how close is the DITIB to Islamists?
A right-wing populist party called ProCologne has been gathering signatures for a public petition against the structure. Ehrenfeld residents who want nothing to do with the petition have reservations about the size of the mosque, however.
The noise of the damned church bells is already enough.
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