The constitution itself already prohibits it, even without passing any such law.
But that is the de facto effect: if child A believes in a creationist story, be it adam & steve or the cosmic turtle and the teacher starts out in grade 3 by saying "the world was not created, here's what really happened" then you have a much more egregious violation of church and state than the aforementioned sticker.
The First Amendment.. the Right of Religious Freedom and the prohibition against establishments respecting religion... the Separation of Church and State... it meens Freedom against the force of government being weilded against us to to promote or suppress and religious or religious belief or religious practice.
And you don't consider a court order to openly declare - and requiring the children to regurgitate under threat of failing the class, screwing up a GPA and being denied entry to college - religious beliefs assertively false an act that suppresses religious belief?
A teacher acting in an official capacity as an agent of the government itself cannot abuse their government powers to promote or supress any religion.
Then a teacher shouldn't be allowed (ne, required) to say "the earth was not created," which has the clear, direct and unmistakable effect of declaring any believes that the world was created false. I'd say that's pretty much an official declaration on the part of the government that several religions are blowing smoke and are wrong.
The ACLU website has a standing invitation for students to seek the ACLU's assistance if their right to pray in school is suppressed. The reason the ACLU has been winning these court cases is because every single case has targeted a school offical acting in an official capacity and abusing his governmental powers for the purpose of promoting or suppressing prayer by the students.
The ACLU tried to get the supreme court to ban a moment of silence: that 95% of the boys were using that moment of silence to lust after the 23 year old just hired teacher and/or the cheerleading squad wearing game dress and 95% of the girls were thinking about how they were fat next to all of those cute cheerleaders, the ACLU wanted to ban silent, unled, private, personal prayer. The teachers didn't even have to say "time to pray", just "let's have a moment of silence".
Excuse me if I don't put much stock in the ACLU's ability to reason.
The selection process in evolution is just as directed... it is directed towards whatever increases survivability and offspring. That is a very complex slection rule, and it produces very a sophisticated and complex sort of information.
I dare you to introduce this concept in San Francisco.
You're in science class.
You're there to learn science.
It doesn't matter what you believe.
Then teach proven science. If it is a theory then say "this is a theory". The opening line simply shouldn't be "your parents and priest/pastor/reverend/shaman lied to you, man evolved from apes".
A key difference is that in every physics class I have ever taken the clearly and openly expressed sentiment was along the lines of "general relativity is as close as we can get to understanding the way things work - for now". General relativity was always presented "as a theory". Evolution is usually presented as iron-clad, hard-core absolute fact, from the random creation of proteins and amino acids through a completely random generation of Barbara Streisand. I have never seen any public school curriculum that had anything even close to the same "this seems to fit so let's work with this until we find something better" attitude that accompanies general relativity.
THIS is that to which I object.
Natural selection should be taught. It can be demonstrated. It can be replicated. It is easily understood. Survival of the fittest should be taught. It can be demonstrated. It can be replicated. It is easily understood. These are the basic principles that can and should be taught to kids of any age.
However, that is as far as it goes. In my elementary school classes the first concept presented was "man evolved from the apes". This concept was presented long before the white moths in england that changed their color. This was presented long before the concept of random mutations and environmental pressures. The first concept of evolution was - and commonly is - that man descended from ape-esque critters. (As as aside, this is as much a violation of the separation of church and state as a sticker that says nothing more than "evolution is a theory and may be replaced with something else someday".)
The basic problem with ID is that we don't seem to have come up with a way to test it. It doesn't make predictions, which is the usual basis of tests.
You can't test ID any more than you can test architecture or civil engineering. You either build the dam or it falls down or go boom. The WTC withstands the impact of an airliners or it doesn't. ID is a question of engineering and not one of theory. Macroevolution isn't that much better at making predictions: since evolution studies are always looking backwards it is at best a special application of forensics. True, they can make predictions along the lines of "50,000,000 years ago all wombats were 500kg, 30,000,000 years ago they were 300kg and 20,000,000 years ago they were 200kg so I won't be stunned if I find 400kg wombat remains that date to 40,000,000 years ago" but that's about it.
If someone could find an effective way to test for the existence of an intelligence behind the universe, you can be quite sure that scientists would be fascinated. They'd all be applying for funding to do the tests. But no such test seems to have been defined (yet).
SETI doesn't count? The best way to establish intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is to strike up a conversation and break out the Hasbro Turing Test. There is a fair amount of funding on such things. But even if we do find intelligent life out there doesn't guarantee anything because there is always the possibility that the Intelligent Source (tm) is from a different universe, alternate reality, intersecting dimension - who knows? Who should care? (Nobody, really.)
The problem I have with the anti-IDers and the pro-macroevolutionists is that they tend to be unfair and lack the very same critical thinking that they pretend to foist on others. All too representative is the clown who mods as troll any post that dares to do anything other than fully embrace macroevolution as gospel. Teaching microevolution is good, valid and necessary. But before the teacher, school board or anonymous troglodyte with mod points declares "man came from apes, anybody who says otherwise is a religious nutjob fanatic, end of story" I'd like to see evidence that a wiener dog can spontaneously evolve into a great dane or even a hamster randomly mutating into a gerbil.
Why does this suddenly become a topic that MUST BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOL?
Because it is true? Because it is science?
What we are against is teaching ID in a classroom in a way to undermine the extremely solid theory of evolution.
If only you were speaking the truth.
ID does not undermine evolution. ID counters only the notion that everything in the universe except for buildings, glow in the dark cats and open pit copper mines are mere events of random chance.
Here's the honesty test: if this was really about separation of church and state then you shouldn't mind a federal law prohibiting any public teacher from ever declaring in a classroom that any religion that includes creationist traditions are false.
You really need to stop cutting and pasting from web pages. I strongly urge you to try reading the documents you cite.
You say: "these from 2000 and 1999".
The document says: data as of "Fall 1992".
I told you that the data was 13 years old and you respond with the publication date. What does that prove?
And your data itself is incomplete: you post the interpretation of "Four out of five full professors are males" and in the fall of 1992 this was true. HOWEVER - the significant data would include the averge time employed of those at the rank of professor. The devil's in the delta - compare the average time since bestowment of professorship of women then compare those numbers with the count of men awarded professorship during that period of time. Cross-tab with years of experience. Then we'll talk.
Intelligent design is exactly what belongs in a classroom. But it has nothing to do with religion.
There isn't a biological engineer on the planet who wouldn't love to create life from raw elements and watch them evolve into something more complex. If you want to have a real education then it should be along the lines of:
Let's say you wanted to create a world as complicated as earth - what knowledge and technology would this require?
Can an intelligence construct a world? Absolutely. Can we? No. Why not? That's what physicists and geological engineers and biologists and a whole bunch of other people are trying to answer.
The people who are rabidly against the concept of intelligent design are nothing more than arrogant freaks who declare that man may be able to build evolving life in the lab but nobody else in the universe has ever been able to do so, nor ever will
It doesn't matter if ID is real or, if it is, who did the design. It really doesn't matter. What does matter is the question of "how could it be done".
The first is that when you are talking about how people perceive an issue - you include articels like "Why I hate men" along with your hard core statistics.
Did you fail to notice that the source of YOUR statistics included those articles on the same page? Your source was biased and suspect; no reasonable person on the planet would ever consider them to be reliable.
I didn't qoute a fluff article to you.
No, you used statistics from a web site that featured such mysandric fluff.
Secondly - YOUR OWN STATISTICS PROVE MY POINT. This whole discussion was about the reason that there aren't people recruting for male professors at the college/university level like there are the other levels. Your own statistcis point out that there are more men at that level!!!!! So why should they be specifically recruited for - it isn't needed
4% is probably close to being statistically insignificant and will fluxuate +/- a point or three within every given delta t.
I love how you ignore my Deparment of Education Stats...
Go back and re-read. I didn't ignore them, I discredited them because they are 13 years out of date and no longer relevant. I then provided figures that reflect the realities of this century.
If you want to use statistics from previous centuries may I suggest any from the 14th through the 19th?
A President cannot create a new branch of the military by executive order alone.
True, but he doesn't have to. As for "clarifying or enforcing existing law alone", you know as well as I do that the government is notorious for creative interpretations - Wickard v. Filburn (1942), for example.
The President may hold the key to Congress' wage increases, but Congress holds the purse strings of the government. If the President wants anything funded, Congress must agree to fund it.
IF the president follows the rules. George W Bush has already declared himself to be above the constitution and claims the divine right to violate even the most basic concepts if - in his opinion alone - he has a valid reason. Besides which, large sections of the military budget are classified, known only to the president and handful of other people. Most members of congress aren't allowed to know which programs have been enacted and they certainly aren't allowed to know how much they cost. Since GWB has declared the constitution itself to be subject to presidential whim what possibly makes you think that he wouldn't simply lie about how money is being spent?
A President who tries to abuse executive orders too blatantly will find 1) the Supreme Court blocking him, as Truman discovered
Different time, different government. The supreme court is, these days, unwilling to interfere with anything stamped "national security".
2) Congress suddenly becoming very uncooperative.
Congress gets annual raises, unlimited perks and massive budgets for aides and other staff. They aren't about to rock the boat.
The world is far too complex and rapidly changing for Congress to have to pass a law about everything.
Perhaps the government should stop seeking control over everything and limit themselves to the explicitly enumerated authorities granted by the Constitution
Rule making follows an established process, is subject to law and Congressional oversight, and review by the Courts.
Strike two. Rulemaking has recently become a process shrouded in secrecy: citizens can't challenge rules with the weight of law that they aren't allowed to read (TSA's ID requirement is a stellar example) and the courts shy away from anything rubber stamped as "national security".
There is also Presidential guidance and oversight of the rule making process.
Using the Constitution please justify the president's authority to arbitrarily declare de facto laws. The president's role is to enforce, not to legislate. While some rulemaking will be necessary, I'll go out on a limb and guess that there are probably more rules (de facto laws) covering a wider range of subject matter placed by executive mandate than there are laws actually created by congress. This is quite kingly in nature and entirely incompatible with our constitutional establishment. Please note that with all of the leeway given to the executive branch they still want more power and control: the unilateral declaration of the broadcast flag legislation is a prime example. They issued an edict explicitly to nullify decades of established and tried law. They only asked congress to change the law once the courts (in a rare display of constitutionally-friendly rational thought) scolded them.
After TWA 800 went down President Clinton issued executive order 13039, eliminating whistleblower protection from the members of the primary recovery team: the president wanted to change the law so he changed the law by decree.
Sorry, but no.
Um... before you say "Sorry, but no" I strongly urge you to read what EO 13039 means. Here... I'll spoonfeed it to you:
EO 13039 adds the Naval Special Warfare Development Group to the exemption list of EO 12171, dated 11/19/1979. You see, just because EO 13039 doesn't say anything about removing whistleblower protections doesn't mean that it doesn't - the president can't just come out and say that, so - like large chunks of legislation - you simply reference something else and say "I've changed this" and leave it up to the reader to go back and see what just happened. Something you obviously didn't do.
EO 12171 - Exclusions from the Federal Labor-Management Relations Program, issued by Jimmy Carter in 1979, eliminates the restrictions of Chapter 71 of Title 5 of the United States Code entirely from certain agencies and only for extranational activities for others. (Only one organization was listed in the extranational only section and to my understanding all other exemptions were global in scope)
Since you didn't bother to look up EO 12171 I know you never bothered to read Chapter 71 of title 5 of the US Code before you opined that I was wrong. I shouldn't have had to connect the dots for you you, but since you refused to make even a token effort to verify before declaring somebody wrong when you knew nothing of which you spoke I'll hold your hand and spoonfeed the information because I'm feeling generous this morning.
By the way, in 2002 George W Bush exempted several other organizations from 5(71):
(c) United States Attorneys' Offices.
(d) Criminal Division.
(e) INTERPOL -- U.S. National Central Bureau.
(f) National Drug Intelligence Center.
(g) Office of Intelligence Policy and Review.
This was ordered Jan 7,2002 but for some reason the EO number isn't listed.
And, noting that this trend is not universal (e.g., consider Indian women in Math/CS) its clear that this trend is a result of social bias.
Interesting point I had not previously considered... what is the male/female breakdown among Indian students in math/cs?
What concerns me is the broader trend of women shying away from the analytical diciplines (math, cs, physics, etc). Not particularly because they should be entering those fields for a career but because these fields are representative of an important skill to develop that is really essential regardless of what field one eventually works in.
I disagree - within the US economy analytical disciplines aren't nearly as important as they once were. Science jobs are being outsourced like crazy: which profession is HP more likely to lay off - an engineer or an accountant? If you worked for any Bell Labs-like environment today, would you have more job security as a physicist or an IP attorney?
Physics: 100% of professors were male. English: 100% were female. Humanities: about a 50/50 mix. Psychology: about 50/50 with men tending to show up somewhat more frequently in abnormal psych and women tending to gravitate towards developmental/childhood psych. While I didn't take any of the "family science" classes, I was vaguely aware that they were close to, if not exactly 100% female.
6.2 million teachers in the US, 71% of whom are women
3.1 million elementary/middle school teachers, 79% of whom are women
98% of preschool/kindergarten teachers are women (you work on increasing the % of male preschool/kindergarten teachers above 2% and I'll start to worry about increasing the % of women undergrad college instructors above 38%)
Elementary/middle school teachers aside women enjoy majority employment in every category except for postsecondary where they claim 46% of the positions:
59% Secondary
46% Post-secondary
87% Special education
67% other
So let's see... we can accept the figures from the US Census bureau or we can go with the numbers that appear on the same page as the articles "Why I Hate Men (column on why women's studies is cool)" and "Where Boys Need Not Apply", writing about "Meredith College, one of four women's colleges in North Carolina". (By the way... could you please remind me how many male-only colleges there are in the United States?)
And what, pray tell, are 13 year old statistics supposed to prove about today's environment?
Generated from the 1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:1993), the analyses presented in this report are based on U.S. citizens with faculty status at 2- and 4-year (and above) institutions who indicated that their primary activity in the fall of 1992
The schools may have male teacher recruitment programs but the concept of male-friendly recruitment programs at the universities is still extremely foreign. (Not to be confused with minority recruitment programs which happen to include males with certain skin colors). There are all kinds of "let's get women enrolled in _______" plans - at Harvard, for example, but nary a "let's get men enrolled in _______" anywhere.
E. Freaking. Gads. Another product of the public school system no doubt.
What is the difference between a shoe company, and an airline, a burger joint, or a telecommunications company. They are entirely different industries subject to entirely different laws of economics, investment, overhead, regulations and economies of scale.
There is very little that Burger King can do that directly affects Wendy's, nor does Nike have any significant control over Adidas' supply chain.
Contrast with:
An airline, subject to mountains of red tape the likes of which you can't imagine, a finite number of terminal gates (almost always paid for with public funds through bonds or outright taxation), a finite quantity of airspace, and overhead the likes of which you can't possibly fathom.
A cable company, granted exclusive right of way for cable runs preventing any competition within the city.
A backbone-owning ISP, with said backbone having been granted exclusive right-of-way
Anybody can open a burger joint - not everybody can start an ISP, and certainly not everybody can lay their own backbone. The laws won't allow it.
Couple the declining quantity of women in CS studies and the overwhelming majority of women in college in general and a pattern begins to emerge. Anybody who can't read the numbers is seriously deficient in critical and analytical thinking and doesn't belong in CS studies in the first place.
But the bias concern is only applicable to gender stacking towards more men: women outnumber men by far in nursing, education and womens' studies yet nobody makes a peep about the inequities involved (or outright discrimination).
Not so: the president issues an executive order and his will be done, regardless of what congress says. Congress passes a law the president doesn't like, he only has to declare an exemption "necessary for national security" and his will be done. Remember, Congress gets annual raises based on the president's word alone - they get the same rais... cost of living increase which the courts rule isn't a raise... as all of the other federal workers based on executive order. If Congress ticks the president off too much they won't get an extra $3-5 grand/year.
Government departments are run according to Law, not decree
Aside from the point that the current President don't follow the law, ie the Constitution, all executive agencies operate PRECISELY by decree. EPA? They make the rules with no review. The FAA? FCC? DoEd? DoEn? The executive branch is allowed to issue mandates that have the full weight of law, ergo they are law. In rare cases the supreme court will overturn an executive declaration or congress may make a change but for the most part all of the executive agencies issue laws by decree. The FCC's broadcast flag attempt, for example.
The president also assumes the authority to selectively apply or selectively eliminate the application of existing law without restraint or oversight. After TWA 800 went down President Clinton issued executive order 13039, eliminating whistleblower protection from the members of the primary recovery team: the president wanted to change the law so he changed the law by decree.
This is where the Republican Party has been headed since 1980: divine right of kings.
You are sorely mistaken if you think the abuses are limited to the GOP.
Politicians are always forced to do more: the days when anybody could be reelected just by maintaining the status quo are long gone. People demand action, safety and security: there is a right way and a wrong way to achieve these things, and the politicians started down the wrong way a long time ago and, unfortunately, there probably isn't any way back. The only way to correct the problem is to vote every last one of them out of office, but that ain't gonna happen because in the eyes of 97.3% (if I'm gonna make up high numbers to illustrate a point I'm not going to use the cliche) voters the logic goes as follows:
IF party.electee = party.mine THEN reelect ELSE blame_electee
It's been explained to me that the US never ended the declaration of war from the first Iraqi conflict in the late 90s.
There was no declaration of war. The last formal declaration of was was made on June 5, 1942 against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.
The current administration is working on faith that the War Powers Act - the constitutionality of which has never been formally challenged and therefore never tested - is valid.
Most chilling of this administration is the repeated declaration that "precedent" allows this president to act the way he does. Unfortunately the NSA has just released documents establishing that the nation's intelligence communities have established precedent in the area of intentionally misleading government officials and/or the public to the end of causing a long-term engagement in hostilities.
The Vietnam conflict was largely justified by an attack on August 4, 1964 that never happened. Gulf War II is largely justified by claims of WMDs that were never discovered. In both cases the intelligence community - which has everything to gain in terms of power, authority, budget and the ability to ignore rules and laws - dropped the ball, either through negligence or through intent. In both cases a war hungry president couldn't flex somebody else's muscles fast enough.
Slashdot Mirror
See my response to http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171832&cid=143 11702
See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171832&cid=143 11702 for my response
48169
But that is the de facto effect: if child A believes in a creationist story, be it adam & steve or the cosmic turtle and the teacher starts out in grade 3 by saying "the world was not created, here's what really happened" then you have a much more egregious violation of church and state than the aforementioned sticker.
And you don't consider a court order to openly declare - and requiring the children to regurgitate under threat of failing the class, screwing up a GPA and being denied entry to college - religious beliefs assertively false an act that suppresses religious belief?
Then a teacher shouldn't be allowed (ne, required) to say "the earth was not created," which has the clear, direct and unmistakable effect of declaring any believes that the world was created false. I'd say that's pretty much an official declaration on the part of the government that several religions are blowing smoke and are wrong.
The ACLU tried to get the supreme court to ban a moment of silence: that 95% of the boys were using that moment of silence to lust after the 23 year old just hired teacher and/or the cheerleading squad wearing game dress and 95% of the girls were thinking about how they were fat next to all of those cute cheerleaders, the ACLU wanted to ban silent, unled, private, personal prayer. The teachers didn't even have to say "time to pray", just "let's have a moment of silence".
Excuse me if I don't put much stock in the ACLU's ability to reason.
I dare you to introduce this concept in San Francisco.
Then teach proven science. If it is a theory then say "this is a theory". The opening line simply shouldn't be "your parents and priest/pastor/reverend/shaman lied to you, man evolved from apes".
THIS is that to which I object.
Natural selection should be taught. It can be demonstrated. It can be replicated. It is easily understood. Survival of the fittest should be taught. It can be demonstrated. It can be replicated. It is easily understood. These are the basic principles that can and should be taught to kids of any age.
However, that is as far as it goes. In my elementary school classes the first concept presented was "man evolved from the apes". This concept was presented long before the white moths in england that changed their color. This was presented long before the concept of random mutations and environmental pressures. The first concept of evolution was - and commonly is - that man descended from ape-esque critters. (As as aside, this is as much a violation of the separation of church and state as a sticker that says nothing more than "evolution is a theory and may be replaced with something else someday".)
You can't test ID any more than you can test architecture or civil engineering. You either build the dam or it falls down or go boom. The WTC withstands the impact of an airliners or it doesn't. ID is a question of engineering and not one of theory. Macroevolution isn't that much better at making predictions: since evolution studies are always looking backwards it is at best a special application of forensics. True, they can make predictions along the lines of "50,000,000 years ago all wombats were 500kg, 30,000,000 years ago they were 300kg and 20,000,000 years ago they were 200kg so I won't be stunned if I find 400kg wombat remains that date to 40,000,000 years ago" but that's about it.
SETI doesn't count? The best way to establish intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is to strike up a conversation and break out the Hasbro Turing Test. There is a fair amount of funding on such things. But even if we do find intelligent life out there doesn't guarantee anything because there is always the possibility that the Intelligent Source (tm) is from a different universe, alternate reality, intersecting dimension - who knows? Who should care? (Nobody, really.)
The problem I have with the anti-IDers and the pro-macroevolutionists is that they tend to be unfair and lack the very same critical thinking that they pretend to foist on others. All too representative is the clown who mods as troll any post that dares to do anything other than fully embrace macroevolution as gospel. Teaching microevolution is good, valid and necessary. But before the teacher, school board or anonymous troglodyte with mod points declares "man came from apes, anybody who says otherwise is a religious nutjob fanatic, end of story" I'd like to see evidence that a wiener dog can spontaneously evolve into a great dane or even a hamster randomly mutating into a gerbil.
Because it is true? Because it is science?
If only you were speaking the truth.
ID does not undermine evolution. ID counters only the notion that everything in the universe except for buildings, glow in the dark cats and open pit copper mines are mere events of random chance.
Here's the honesty test: if this was really about separation of church and state then you shouldn't mind a federal law prohibiting any public teacher from ever declaring in a classroom that any religion that includes creationist traditions are false.
You say: "these from 2000 and 1999".
The document says: data as of "Fall 1992".
I told you that the data was 13 years old and you respond with the publication date. What does that prove?
And your data itself is incomplete: you post the interpretation of "Four out of five full professors are males" and in the fall of 1992 this was true. HOWEVER - the significant data would include the averge time employed of those at the rank of professor. The devil's in the delta - compare the average time since bestowment of professorship of women then compare those numbers with the count of men awarded professorship during that period of time. Cross-tab with years of experience. Then we'll talk.
Intelligent design is exactly what belongs in a classroom. But it has nothing to do with religion.
There isn't a biological engineer on the planet who wouldn't love to create life from raw elements and watch them evolve into something more complex. If you want to have a real education then it should be along the lines of:
Can an intelligence construct a world? Absolutely. Can we? No. Why not? That's what physicists and geological engineers and biologists and a whole bunch of other people are trying to answer.
The people who are rabidly against the concept of intelligent design are nothing more than arrogant freaks who declare that man may be able to build evolving life in the lab but nobody else in the universe has ever been able to do so, nor ever will
It doesn't matter if ID is real or, if it is, who did the design. It really doesn't matter. What does matter is the question of "how could it be done".
Did you fail to notice that the source of YOUR statistics included those articles on the same page? Your source was biased and suspect; no reasonable person on the planet would ever consider them to be reliable.
No, you used statistics from a web site that featured such mysandric fluff.
4% is probably close to being statistically insignificant and will fluxuate +/- a point or three within every given delta t.
Go back and re-read. I didn't ignore them, I discredited them because they are 13 years out of date and no longer relevant. I then provided figures that reflect the realities of this century.
If you want to use statistics from previous centuries may I suggest any from the 14th through the 19th?
True, but he doesn't have to. As for "clarifying or enforcing existing law alone", you know as well as I do that the government is notorious for creative interpretations - Wickard v. Filburn (1942), for example.
IF the president follows the rules. George W Bush has already declared himself to be above the constitution and claims the divine right to violate even the most basic concepts if - in his opinion alone - he has a valid reason. Besides which, large sections of the military budget are classified, known only to the president and handful of other people. Most members of congress aren't allowed to know which programs have been enacted and they certainly aren't allowed to know how much they cost. Since GWB has declared the constitution itself to be subject to presidential whim what possibly makes you think that he wouldn't simply lie about how money is being spent?
Different time, different government. The supreme court is, these days, unwilling to interfere with anything stamped "national security".
Congress gets annual raises, unlimited perks and massive budgets for aides and other staff. They aren't about to rock the boat.
Perhaps the government should stop seeking control over everything and limit themselves to the explicitly enumerated authorities granted by the Constitution
Strike two. Rulemaking has recently become a process shrouded in secrecy: citizens can't challenge rules with the weight of law that they aren't allowed to read (TSA's ID requirement is a stellar example) and the courts shy away from anything rubber stamped as "national security".
Using the Constitution please justify the president's authority to arbitrarily declare de facto laws. The president's role is to enforce, not to legislate. While some rulemaking will be necessary, I'll go out on a limb and guess that there are probably more rules (de facto laws) covering a wider range of subject matter placed by executive mandate than there are laws actually created by congress. This is quite kingly in nature and entirely incompatible with our constitutional establishment. Please note that with all of the leeway given to the executive branch they still want more power and control: the unilateral declaration of the broadcast flag legislation is a prime example. They issued an edict explicitly to nullify decades of established and tried law. They only asked congress to change the law once the courts (in a rare display of constitutionally-friendly rational thought) scolded them.
Um... before you say "Sorry, but no" I strongly urge you to read what EO 13039 means. Here... I'll spoonfeed it to you:
EO 13039 adds the Naval Special Warfare Development Group to the exemption list of EO 12171, dated 11/19/1979. You see, just because EO 13039 doesn't say anything about removing whistleblower protections doesn't mean that it doesn't - the president can't just come out and say that, so - like large chunks of legislation - you simply reference something else and say "I've changed this" and leave it up to the reader to go back and see what just happened. Something you obviously didn't do.
EO 12171 - Exclusions from the Federal Labor-Management Relations Program, issued by Jimmy Carter in 1979, eliminates the restrictions of Chapter 71 of Title 5 of the United States Code entirely from certain agencies and only for extranational activities for others. (Only one organization was listed in the extranational only section and to my understanding all other exemptions were global in scope)
Since you didn't bother to look up EO 12171 I know you never bothered to read Chapter 71 of title 5 of the US Code before you opined that I was wrong. I shouldn't have had to connect the dots for you you, but since you refused to make even a token effort to verify before declaring somebody wrong when you knew nothing of which you spoke I'll hold your hand and spoonfeed the information because I'm feeling generous this morning.
By the way, in 2002 George W Bush exempted several other organizations from 5(71):
- (c) United States Attorneys' Offices.
- (d) Criminal Division.
- (e) INTERPOL -- U.S. National Central Bureau.
- (f) National Drug Intelligence Center.
- (g) Office of Intelligence Policy and Review.
This was ordered Jan 7,2002 but for some reason the EO number isn't listed.Interesting point I had not previously considered... what is the male/female breakdown among Indian students in math/cs?
I disagree - within the US economy analytical disciplines aren't nearly as important as they once were. Science jobs are being outsourced like crazy: which profession is HP more likely to lay off - an engineer or an accountant? If you worked for any Bell Labs-like environment today, would you have more job security as a physicist or an IP attorney?
Physics: 100% of professors were male. English: 100% were female. Humanities: about a 50/50 mix. Psychology: about 50/50 with men tending to show up somewhat more frequently in abnormal psych and women tending to gravitate towards developmental/childhood psych. While I didn't take any of the "family science" classes, I was vaguely aware that they were close to, if not exactly 100% female.
According to the US Census bureau (2004 numbers) found at http://makeashorterlink.com/?J3881275C:
Elementary/middle school teachers aside women enjoy majority employment in every category except for postsecondary where they claim 46% of the positions:
So let's see... we can accept the figures from the US Census bureau or we can go with the numbers that appear on the same page as the articles "Why I Hate Men (column on why women's studies is cool)" and "Where Boys Need Not Apply", writing about "Meredith College, one of four women's colleges in North Carolina". (By the way... could you please remind me how many male-only colleges there are in the United States?)The schools may have male teacher recruitment programs but the concept of male-friendly recruitment programs at the universities is still extremely foreign. (Not to be confused with minority recruitment programs which happen to include males with certain skin colors). There are all kinds of "let's get women enrolled in _______" plans - at Harvard, for example, but nary a "let's get men enrolled in _______" anywhere.
What is the difference between a shoe company, and an airline, a burger joint, or a telecommunications company. They are entirely different industries subject to entirely different laws of economics, investment, overhead, regulations and economies of scale.
There is very little that Burger King can do that directly affects Wendy's, nor does Nike have any significant control over Adidas' supply chain.
Contrast with:
- An airline, subject to mountains of red tape the likes of which you can't imagine, a finite number of terminal gates (almost always paid for with public funds through bonds or outright taxation), a finite quantity of airspace, and overhead the likes of which you can't possibly fathom.
- A cable company, granted exclusive right of way for cable runs preventing any competition within the city.
- A backbone-owning ISP, with said backbone having been granted exclusive right-of-way
Anybody can open a burger joint - not everybody can start an ISP, and certainly not everybody can lay their own backbone. The laws won't allow it.But the bias concern is only applicable to gender stacking towards more men: women outnumber men by far in nursing, education and womens' studies yet nobody makes a peep about the inequities involved (or outright discrimination).
Not so: the president issues an executive order and his will be done, regardless of what congress says. Congress passes a law the president doesn't like, he only has to declare an exemption "necessary for national security" and his will be done. Remember, Congress gets annual raises based on the president's word alone - they get the same rais... cost of living increase which the courts rule isn't a raise... as all of the other federal workers based on executive order. If Congress ticks the president off too much they won't get an extra $3-5 grand/year.
Aside from the point that the current President don't follow the law, ie the Constitution, all executive agencies operate PRECISELY by decree. EPA? They make the rules with no review. The FAA? FCC? DoEd? DoEn? The executive branch is allowed to issue mandates that have the full weight of law, ergo they are law. In rare cases the supreme court will overturn an executive declaration or congress may make a change but for the most part all of the executive agencies issue laws by decree. The FCC's broadcast flag attempt, for example.
The president also assumes the authority to selectively apply or selectively eliminate the application of existing law without restraint or oversight. After TWA 800 went down President Clinton issued executive order 13039, eliminating whistleblower protection from the members of the primary recovery team: the president wanted to change the law so he changed the law by decree.
The system isn't supposed to work this way.
You are sorely mistaken if you think the abuses are limited to the GOP.
Politicians are always forced to do more: the days when anybody could be reelected just by maintaining the status quo are long gone. People demand action, safety and security: there is a right way and a wrong way to achieve these things, and the politicians started down the wrong way a long time ago and, unfortunately, there probably isn't any way back. The only way to correct the problem is to vote every last one of them out of office, but that ain't gonna happen because in the eyes of 97.3% (if I'm gonna make up high numbers to illustrate a point I'm not going to use the cliche) voters the logic goes as follows:
IF party.electee = party.mine THEN reelect ELSE blame_electee
There was no declaration of war. The last formal declaration of was was made on June 5, 1942 against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.
The current administration is working on faith that the War Powers Act - the constitutionality of which has never been formally challenged and therefore never tested - is valid.
Most chilling of this administration is the repeated declaration that "precedent" allows this president to act the way he does. Unfortunately the NSA has just released documents establishing that the nation's intelligence communities have established precedent in the area of intentionally misleading government officials and/or the public to the end of causing a long-term engagement in hostilities.
The Vietnam conflict was largely justified by an attack on August 4, 1964 that never happened. Gulf War II is largely justified by claims of WMDs that were never discovered. In both cases the intelligence community - which has everything to gain in terms of power, authority, budget and the ability to ignore rules and laws - dropped the ball, either through negligence or through intent. In both cases a war hungry president couldn't flex somebody else's muscles fast enough.
George II is already openly ignoring an amendment to the constitution - what prevents him from ignoring the body proper?