My friend Nouri Karim has just published his translation of The God Delusion into Kurdish. He published a translation of Does God Hate Women? in 2012.

He sent me some photos on the occasion.

Grattis, Karim!… Read the rest

In a surprise move, Obama said at a press conference today that he intended to do his job as the Constitution spelled it out. Pundits who had expected him to say “Ok then let’s just wait until next year” were left wondering what signs they had missed.

President Obama on Tuesday challenged Republicans to offer any plausible rationale for refusing to consider a Supreme Court candidate to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last weekend, and he pledged to nominate someone with an “outstanding legal mind” who cares about democracy and the rule of law.

That’s just shockingly irresponsible and inflammatory.

“The Constitution is pretty clear about what is supposed to happen now,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference

Bill Cosby gets a nope.

Bill Cosby’s criminal sexual-assault case appears to be headed toward an evidence hearing after a judge denied his latest effort to throw the charges out.

In a ruling Tuesday, the judge who refused to dismiss the case earlier this month denied Cosby’s appeal of that decision.

The 78-year-old TV star is accused of drugging and violating an ex-Temple University employee at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004 and could get 10 years in prison if convicted. The defense insists Cosby had a promise from a previous district attorney that he would never be charged over the 2004 encounter.

Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill, though, found the evidence of such an agreement lacking after hearing

Good.

Oregon Public Broadcasting:

A federal judge in Portland denied Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy bail at a hearing Tuesday.

Not very surprising, is it. The guy doesn’t even recognize the jurisdiction, so how could he possibly not be a flight risk? He’s a fella who considers himself entitled to resist law enforcement with guns, so how could it be safe to let him out on bail?

Magistrate Judge Janice Stewart agreed with prosecutors that Bundy posed a flight risk and a danger to the community, and should be held in jail while awaiting trial.

If he’s not, nobody is.

Before Bundy’s Tuesday hearing, a family member said he isn’t dangerous or a criminal and should have been released from

California Lawyer published an interview with Scalia in January 2011.

In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don’t think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we’ve gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?
Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. … But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that’s fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society. Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It

MSNBC offers a predicted candidate for Scalia’s seat:

A leading Supreme Court analyst thinks Attorney General Loretta Lynch is the “most likely candidate” to replace the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

Tom Goldstein, who runs the influential SCOTUSblog, had earlier predicted Ninth Circuit Judge Paul Watford would make the top of President Obama’s short list. But in a revised blog post, Goldstein said he now believes Lynch is the leading contender.

Here’s the thing: she’s a career prosecutor, so the Republicans will look silly claiming she’s too squishy-liberal.

Lynch would be the first black woman ever nominated to the nation’s highest court — and the GOP would have a political problem during an election year if the

It’s everywhere. Stephen Fry has quit Twitter because he’s fed up with the rage-storms.

Bafta show host Stephen Fry has confirmed he has left Twitter declaring “the fun is over”.

He faced criticism online after comparing costume designer Jenny Beavan to a “bag lady” when she picked up her Bafta for Mad Max: Fury Road.

The Beeb includes the clip in which Jenny Beavan accepted the award and the one in which Fry made his joke. It would be mean if they were strangers and if he weren’t there to make jokes like that about everyone – but they’re not and he was. They’re friends, and he was there to tease all the people.

Fry has been presenting the Bafta

This sample of the New York Times reporting on the Supreme Court vacancy is quite bizarre.

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. — The death of Justice Antonin Scalia on Saturday set off an immediate partisan battle over a vacancy that could reshape the Supreme Court for years to come, as President Obama vowed to nominate a successor and Senate Republicans called on him to let the next president fill the seat.

Why say Obama “vowed”? Why couldn’t he just have said? Of course he’s going to nominate a successor; the remarkable thing would be if he’d said he’s not going to. It’s his job, and he’s going to do his job. Why is that in any way remarkable? Why is his saying … Read the rest

I haven’t said anything here about the stroke Richard Dawkins suffered last weekend, because I figured any sympathy I expressed would sound fake. The reality is that I never wished illness or disability on him, and I’m sorry that it’s happened to him. It’s much the same with Scalia – I was and am ecstatic that he’s not on the court any more, but I would have been fine with retirement as opposed to death. I would have been ecstatic if Dawkins had decided to stop jeering at feminism and Muslim schoolboys on Twitter, and to be a better person instead. I would much have preferred that. But that’s not what happened.

Matthew Facciani at Patheos quotes from a recording … Read the rest

John Cassidy at the New Yorker:

Around 4:30 P.M. Eastern time on Saturday, the San Antonio Express-News broke the news of the death of Antonin Scalia, the conservative Supreme Court Justice. Within a few hours, the Republican Party had placed itself on a trajectory that, if isn’t reversed, could throw the Presidential election to the Democrats.

In apparent contravention of precedent and the U.S. Constitution, the leader of the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, said that President Obama shouldn’t be allowed to name a replacement for Scalia. “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell said in a statement posted on his Facebook page. “Therefore, this vacancy

A United Nations Population Fund report finds that more than half of teenage girls in Pakistan think men get to beat up women if they’re married to them. The Independent reports:

Refusing sex was just one of the reasons girls aged between 15 and 19 believed a husband would be justified in beating his wife, while more than 30 per cent of girls of the same age had already experienced physical or sexual violence in Pakistan.

The web of beliefs that must underlie that one is so depressing – that men own women, that marriage is the ownership of a woman (or women) by a man, that women are passive objects meant to be owned by men, that women … Read the rest

The Republicans have been stonewalling lower court judges. Politico last July:

The GOP-controlled Senate is on track this year to confirm the fewest judges since 1969, a dramatic escalation of the long-running partisan feud over the ideological makeup of federal courts.

The standoff, if it continues through the 2016 elections as expected, could diminish the stamp that President Barack Obama leaves on the judiciary — a less conspicuous but critical part of his legacy. Practically, the makeup of lower-level courts could directly affect a number of Obama’s policies expected to face legal challenges from conservatives.

They’ve been breaking the government, in short.

Republicans appear willing to absorb criticism that they’re interfering with the prerogative of a president to pick

Already.

Republicans Vow to Block Obama Replacing Scalia on High Court

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to block President Barack Obama in his remaining months in office from replacing Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, a direct challenge to the White House that is certain to roil the 2016 presidential campaign.

“The American people‎ should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said in a statement shortly after Scalia’s death was made public. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

That’s a ludicrous thing to say. We don’t have a direct voice, we have the indirect voice of voting for a presidential candidate. … Read the rest