Earle the "attack dog"

I just saw a commercial likening Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle - the guy who indicted Tom DeLay - to an attack dog. In any other situation, don't you think Republicans, in particular, would think that that's exactly the right attitude for a district attorney to have? "It's not a crime to be a conservative," is the tag line. (My response was, "No, it's a crime to be a crook," which made my husband snort.)

Intelligent?

I have been watching CNN, and they are talking about so-called "intelligent design". Intelligent design is sort of a nothing theory as far as I'm concerned - ok, so you think somebody may have created the universe, but that's no longer science, that's religion. As near as I can figure out, what's going on is that the creationists realized that they were losing the battle to get their "theory" (also sort of a non-theory, in my opinion) taught in schools, so they have latched on to this idea of Intelligent Design as a more scientific-sounding way of challenging evolution.

The thing I don't understand is why people get so freaked out by evolution, anyway. Why does the fact (and it really is an established fact, except that we weren't there to see it) that we evolved mean that there is no god? I don't get it. Couldn't God have set evolution in motion? I was brought up Baptist, but my dad was a science teacher and he never thought there was a conflict, so I have never quite gotten the problem. I think the only thing that evolution might challenge is a literal interpretation of the bible. And actually my dad did not believe that either - he thought that the problem was a mistranslation or misinterpretation of what the original said; that is, that "day" in Genesis was not meant to be taken literally. The bible does not actually say that the earth is only 6000 years old, anyway, although that seems to be what many fundamentalists believe.

New lows

Good god. Can it really be true that they're crucifying people in Iraq?