Judge Ann Aiken of the US District Court for the District of Oregon issued a ruling on Sept. 25 that “struck down two provisions of the Patriot Act dealing with searches and intelligence gathering, saying they violate the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures with regard to criminal prosecutions,” according to CNN. These provisions were set up to allow the US government to bypass the need for probable cause in conducting warrantless wiretaps, searches, and so on. In her decision, Aiken wrote (quoting from the CNN article):

“It is critical that we, as a democratic nation, pay close attention to traditional Fourth Amendment principles,” wrote Judge Ann Aiken of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon in her 44-page decision. “The Fourth Amendment has served this nation well for 220 years, through many other perils.”

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, set up to review wiretap applications in intelligence cases under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, “holds that the Constitution need not control the conduct of criminal surveillance in the United States,” Aiken wrote.

“In place of the Fourth Amendment, the people are expected to defer to the executive branch and its representation that it will authorize such surveillance only when appropriate.”

The government “is asking this court to, in essence, amend the Bill of Rights, by giving it an interpretation that would deprive it of any real meaning. The court declines to do so,” Aiken said.

Good for her. I won’t be surprised if the Justice Department appeals.

But Mitt Romney’s lame attempt at humor almost makes me want to. According to a CNN report,

And Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney poked fun at Thompson’s delayed entry into the presidential race.

“[The] only question I have: Why the hurry, why not take some more time off? … Maybe January or February might be a better time to make a decision about getting into this race.”

Is Romney really that clueless? Does he really think that the average Joe and Jane American want an eighteen-month presidential campaign season? Caucuses and primaries are getting pushed earlier and earlier, as states scramble to leapfrog over one another to hold the first one. Time was when a presidential candidate that threw his hat into the ring in early September a year before the election could be seen as jumping the gun. We’re all going to be so sick of the “front-runners” by next November that, who knows, Ron Paul could actually win with write-in votes. (I threw that out there for Jim, so he won’t feel that his vote is wasted.)

Well, the Democratic candidates’ CNN debate where they respond to questions from YouTube users has now come and gone. I thought it was interesting and illuminating—particularly illuminating how each candidate would squirrel out of answering the question posed in favor of his or her own talking points.

Best sound bite (paraphrased—I don’t have a transcript, of course): “If you’re considering not voting for Sen. Obama because he’s black, if you’re considering not voting for Sen. Clinton because she’s a woman, I don’t want your vote.”

I hope the whole thing is archived on CNN.com somewhere. If you’re interested in the US 2008 presidential election, watch this debate, and try to catch the Republican candidates’ debate on September 17.

I really, really hope that Andrew Sullivan is incorrect when he characterizes James Dobson as “[t]he most influential man in the Republican base.” If he’s right, then it’s really, really scary that Dobson is helping Joel Rosenberg promote his book Epicenter, and it’s really, really scary to think that “people at the Pentagon, people at the CIA, people at the White House” (to quote from Rosenberg himself in an interview with Dobson) are seriously considering the “foreign policy implications” of Ezekiel 38. I really, really hope that Rosenberg is just over-indulging in braggadocio.

The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) organization issued a press release on December 28 claiming that

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

These are the first two sentences of the press release, and you’ll notice that they don’t actually have much to do with one another. The bulk of the press release is about a flap over a creationist book called Grand Canyon: A Different View, which apparently went on sale in the Grand Canyon National Park bookstore in 2003. According to the PEER press release,

In August 2003, Park Superintendent Joe Alston attempted to block the sale at park bookstores of Grand Canyon: A Different View by Tom Vail, a book claiming the Canyon developed on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. NPS Headquarters, however, intervened and overruled Alston. To quiet the resulting furor, NPS Chief of Communications David Barna told reporters and members of Congress that there would be a high-level policy review of the issue.

According to a recent NPS response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by PEER, no such review was ever requested, let alone conducted or completed.

I was in the Grand Canyon National Park bookstore in June 2006, and I didn’t run across this particular book (but then, I was mostly looking at postcards and plush coyotes with my two boys). I’m sure I would have been disgusted if I had. Personally, I don’t think young-earth nonsense should be on sale in the Grand Canyon National Park bookstore—but it’s just one book in an entire bookstore.

In some ways, I think the misrepresentation and alarmist tone of the PEER press release may be almost as bad as having the book on sale in the park. Nothing in the controversy over the book leads to the first statment of the press release, “Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.” This statement is simply false. The Grand Canyon National Park web site includes the following “Frequently Asked Questions” and their answers:

How old is the Canyon?

That’s a tricky question. Although rocks exposed in the walls of the canyon are geologically quite old, the Canyon itself is a fairly young feature. The oldest rocks at the canyon bottom are close to 2000 million years old. The Canyon itself - an erosional feature - has formed only in the past five or six million years. Geologically speaking, Grand Canyon is very young. (top of page)

Are the oldest rocks in the world exposed at Grand Canyon?

No. Although the oldest rocks at Grand Canyon (2000 million years old) are fairly old by any standard, the oldest rocks in the world are closer to 4000 million years old. The oldest exposed rocks in North America, which are among the oldest rocks in the world, are in northern Canada. (top of page)

Clearly, the National Park Service is not trying to suppress scientific information about the age of the rocks that make up the walls of the Grand Canyon. PEER has overstated the case and engaged in a rather transparent bit of fearmongering worthy of the James D. Kennedy Institute for Anti-Evolutionism.

Links to two interesting petitions appear at the top of Richard Dawkins’s web site. One of the petitions reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Abolish all faith schools and prohibit the teaching of creationism and other religious mythology in all UK schools.

The second and more insidious petition reads:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16.

Dawkins’s name appears on the list of signatories to both petitions, but there is no way to verify whether that “signature” was added by Dawkins himself or by someone using his name. The second (as listed above) petition actually has Dawkins’s name twice on the signatory list. Whether Dawkins himself “signed” the petitions, his web site is certainly promoting the petitions.

Over at Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog, there’s a rather long discussion of both petitions. According to some of the commentators there, the first petition should be seen quite specifically against the backdrop of government-run UK schools in which all students are expected to participate in Christian prayers and worship services, religious lessons, and so on. In that light, the first petition calls for something not terribly unlike the way the US Constitution’s establishment clause has been interpreted to apply to public schools in the USA. The petition is very poorly worded, however; prohibiting “the teaching of … religious mythology in all UK schools” (or any schools, for that matter) would certainly impoverish the humanities. Goodbye, Edith Hamilton. Hello … what? Never mind the Bible. There would be no teaching of the Odyssey. No teaching of the Aenead. You couldn’t even teach about the historical figure of Augustus Caesar properly without reference to Roman religious mythology. I’m all for the prohibition of religious indoctrination in public schools, but teaching (about) “religious mythology” is something quite different, and quite important to literature, history, anthropology, and other worthy fields of study.

The second, “anti-indoctrination” petition is just too Orwellian to believe. Richard Dawkins is apparently not the originator of the petition, but the language sounds as if it had been lifted right out of The God Delusion.

Important Update: In the comments to Ed Brayton’s posts on the petitions, Richard Dawkins himself wrote:

I did sign the petition, but I hadn’t thought it through when I did so, and I now regret it. I have asked the organizer to remove my name. Unfortunately, it seems that the list has already gone off to Downing Street but the organizer, Jamie Wallis, has kindly asked their web manager to remove my name. I suspect that he himself may be having second thoughts about the wording, and I respect him for that. It isn’t always easy to get the exact wording right.

I signed it having read only the main petition: “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make it illegal to indoctrinate or define children by religion before the age of 16.” I regret to say that I did not notice the supporting statement with the heading, “More details from petition creator”: “In order to encourage free thinking, children should not be subjected to any regular religious teaching or be allowed to be defined as belonging to a particular religious group based on the views of their parents or guardians.” If I had read that, I certainly would not have signed the petition, because, as explained in The God Delusion, I am in favour of teaching the Bible as literature, and I am in favour of teaching comparative religion. In any case, like any decent liberal, I am opposed to the element of government coercion in the wording. Furthermore, the Prime Minister, thank goodness, does not have the power to ‘make’ anything ‘illegal’. Only parliament has the power to do that.

I signed the main petition, because I really am passionately opposed to DEFINING children by the religion of their parents (while ‘indoctrination’ is such a loaded word, nobody could be in favour of it). I was so delighted to hear of somebody else who cared about the defining or labelling of children by the religion of their parents (how would you react if you heard a child described as a ’seclular humanist child’ or a ‘neo-conservative child’?) that I signed it without reading on and without thinking. Mea culpa.

At the present time (4:43 PST on Saturday, December 30, 2006), however, the links to the petitions remain prominently displayed at the top of Dawkins’s home page. Of course, it’s quite conceivable—even likely—that Dawkins doesn’t actually maintain his own site, but has a third-party webmaster that does it for him. Also, Dawkins’s retraction seems only to concern the second petition listed above, the “anti-indoctrination” petition, not the “anti-faith schools” petition.

No, the question is not “What would Jesus do?” but “What would Julius do?” That’s “Julius” as in “Julius Caesar.” An op-ed piece in today’s Los Angeles Times, written by British historian Adrian Goldsworthy, asks this very question.

Jack Weatherford, who teaches anthropology at Macalester College, asks similar questions about Genghis Khan. Harold Hozer, author of Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President guesses at Lincoln’s approach. A fourth piece is supposed to appear, but I don’t know which historical leader is profiled in it.

You have probably already heard that Gerald Ford, former president of the United States, died today at age 93. Ford, you’ll recall, was never actually elected to be president; rather, he became vice-president after Spiro Agnew resigned, and then became president after Richard Nixon resigned.

My family and many other people were, on the same day, about 130 miles west of Ford’s home, visiting the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. For all I know, we might have been on board the airplane that both Ford and Reagan used as Air Force One at the very moment of his death (the time of day isn’t in any of the reports I’ve read). Reagan also died at age 93; Ford lived about a month to six weeks longer than Reagan. Reagan, however, is undoubtedly remembered with greater affection.

Rick Warren, pastor of the 20,000-member Saddleback Church in Orange County, has been taking heat for inviting Democratic Senator Barack Obama to speak at an AIDS conference at Saddleback. Some of this heat has come from Jim West on his blog, as follows:

I don’t think Evangelicalism can stand much more of wretched leaders vaunting themselves into the limelight and then being exposed as tremendous hypocrites (like Haggard or Warren, who is in hot water now for inviting a pro-choice speaker to an AIDS conference and thus has shown that he really isn’t as pro-life as many had imagined).

Rick Warren has made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t agree with Barack Obama (the “pro-choice speaker” mentioned above) on the abortion issue (see this Los Angeles Times article. That disagreement shouldn’t stop the two from working together to combat the global AIDS epidemic—of which Warren only took real notice after his wife visited Mozambique, encountered real-life AIDS victims, and rightly felt convicted that her affluent white church in suburbia was doing nothing to relieve such suffering. Making common cause with Obama against the AIDS epidemic in no way suggests that Warren “really isn’t as pro-life as many had imagined.” All it shows is that Warren’s “pro” stance toward life extends beyond parturition! Evangelical “pro-life” advocates are often far too narrowly focused on abortion while virtually ignoring other threats to life. Warren is to be commended for working together with Obama, gay activists, and anyone else who is working to impede the AIDS epidemic. Warren has not in any way compromised his stance on abortion or homosexuality by doing so; if anything, he has shown that he is more pro-life, in broad terms, than he appeared before he turned his attention to AIDS.

(This post also appears as a comment on Jim’s blog.)

The government of California has an opportunity to take practical steps against the genocide in Darfur by means of economic pressure. The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial today explaining the bill that has passed both houses of the state legislature and is now waiting for Governor Schwarzenegger’s signature, and more information on the California campaign can be found at the Sudan Divestment Task Force web site.