Rhetorical Outbursts

Someone alerted me an AP article on the .xxx controversy. It has some more details on the arguments that conservatives are making against it:

Skeptics argue, however, that porn sites are likely to keep their existing “.com” storefronts, even as they set up shop in the new “.xxx” domain name. And that will reduce […]

So the Washington Post and the rest of this town are all in a tizzy because twenty years ago Supreme Court nominee John Roberts dared to suggest that homemaker might be a more noble profession than attorney:

His remark on whether homemakers should become lawyers came in 1985 in reply to a suggestion from […]

Why are conservatives groups and the Bush administration opposing the proposal for a new top-level domain (.xxx)? It makes no sense! An Internet red-light district could help keep indecent material segregated and away from children. The L.A. Times reports:

Five years after a separate space was first proposed to deal with the huge amount […]

Boy, I sure am glad we didn’t go down to get one! We seriously considered it after hearing about the $50 laptops a few weeks ago on TWIT (Episode 15). Now Drudge links to this story from a Richmond television station:

The school district had only 1,000 of these surplus computers to sell, and […]

Folks at The Corner on NRO have had some interesting exchanges about intelligent design (”ID”) theory. I love John Derbyshire. He often writes exactly what I’m thinking better than I could have myself, but here he is way off. In this particularly silly post, he perpetuates the false dichotomy between God and science, which is […]

Here’s more proof that the editorial page is sometimes a great source for news, especially good news. Look at these amazing statistics reported by David Brooks:

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of family violence in this country has dropped by more than half since 1993. Violent crime over all is down by 55 […]

Following up on Hotel Rwanda v. The Passion: Blame America First, here is more from Brian McLaren. You’ve got to wonder about the good Rev. McLaren when he approvingly quotes Karl Marx on the subject of religion. Still, at least he a bit clearer this time about what he wants to see happen here as […]

This is encouraging. It’s good to see Muslim voices speaking sensibly. I’m pretty sure Youssef Ibrahim and I wouldn’t agree on much, but I like his editorial in the Middle East Times, by way of Junkyard Blog:

The world of Islam is on fire. Indeed, the Muslim mind is on fire. Above all, the […]

Christopher Hitchens was discussing his new book about Thomas Jefferson recently on the Dennis Prager Show. They had an interesting disagreement over the meaning of the word “secular.” For Hitchens, secular describes anyone who accepted Jefferson’s belief in the separation of church and state. For Prager, however, secular means the near opposite of religious. […]

Speaking of breathtaking moral confusion, the leftist mayor of London has written a ridiculous piece in The Guardian. Just weeks after innocent citizens in his city were murdered by Muslim fanatics, Ken Livingstone is advocating for the right of a “moderate” Muslim cleric to visit Britain, even though the cleric, Yusuf al Qaradawi, advocates suicide […]