A college student who was attacked and then arrested by Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents because she and two friends had purchased a case of sparkling water is now suing Virginia and those seven agents for $40 million.

Hurrah! A college student who was attacked and then arrested by Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents because she and two friends had purchased a case of sparkling water is now suing Virginia and those seven agents for $40 million.

The key here is that she is not only suing the state, she is suing the agents themselves. They screwed up, but instead of apologizing to her immediately they arrested her and put her in jail for the night in order to intimidate her. I am glad she is not intimidated.

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DARPA picks Boeing to build a test design of an air-launched satellite launcher.

The competition heats up: DARPA has chosen Boeing to build a test design of an air-launched satellite launcher.

This engineering research is in parallel with the airborne launcher research of Scaled Composites (on SpaceShipTwo) and Stratolauncher. When you add SpaceX’s effort to make its first stage reusable, you get a real sense where the future of rocket design is heading: rockets in which the first stage is entirely reusable, returning safely to Earth either by a horizontal or vertical landing.

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Will the American Physical Society be the first major scientific institution to reject the global warming “consensus”?

Will the American Physical Society be the first major scientific institution to reject the global warming “consensus”?

The essentials: The APS has appointed three of the world’s most well known climate skeptics to its public affairs panel, almost guaranteeing that the organization will change its position from supporting the consensus to a more skeptical approach. Note also that this is the same organization that had one important scientist and a Nobel prize winner resign in disgust three years ago because of its insistence that the evidence of human-caused global warming was “incontrovertible.”

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The Michigan union contract that required a school district to discriminiate against Christians and whites as now been amended so that it won’t discriminate against Christians.

Partial victory: The Michigan union contract that required a school district to discriminiate against Christians and whites as now been amended so that it won’t discriminate against Christians.

I am not for favoring whites. I am against anything that considers ethnicity or religion as a factor for employment.

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This is how the tea party ends.

This is how the tea party ends.

The Tea Party’s success is not gauged by primaries alone. It’s gauged by how much the Tea Party’s priorities become the Republican Party’s priorities.

The Tea Party’s impact in primaries is largely about putting fear into establishment candidates, whether they knock them off or not. It took them two cycles, but the traditional Republican establishment took the right lessons from the Bennett and Lugar losses. Orrin Hatch spent 2011-12 voting lockstep with Mike Lee. Primary threats made Mike Enzi part of the organizing group for the defund push. Pat Roberts is doing his best to don the winger apparel. Lindsey Graham is trying like mad to re-establish his conservative credentials. Thad Cochran is the exception that proves the rule: it’s no accident that a traditional Washington appropriator who hasn’t modified his ways is the most vulnerable GOP Senator this cycle. So if establishment Republicans understand that they are vulnerable in primaries, and have to pretend to be Tea Partiers when they’re in cycle, is that a sign that the Tea Party is dead – or a sign that it’s had a significant political impact?

The tea party movement has won because it is now driving the political debate, in both parties. Republicans want to look like tea partiers, and even Democrats are shaping their election campaigns with tea party issues in mind.

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A dishonest “Cosmos”.

A dishonest “Cosmos”.

A educated religious scholar looks at one piece from the Tyson television series and discovers that its portrayal of religion is wrong and no better than blatant propaganda.

This morning, I watched the cartoon in question and took some notes. Let’s walk through what it gets right and what it gets wrong.

I’m actually not going to draw from any exotic sources for this post. I’m going to try confine what I include here only to things that can be found on the first page of a Google search for Giordano Bruno. This will illustrate more clearly the rank intellectual dishonesty involved in this segment. The truth of the story was never more than five minutes away from host Neil DeGrasse Tyson and his writers, producers, and animators. They opted to tell half-truths and outright lies instead. [emphasis mine]

I am not surprised. I said that we should expect this. Tyson’s job is to be front man for the modern shibboleths of the leftwing academic society, and this series is going to pound them home, regardless of the facts.

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Why conservatives should have no regrets dumping Mitch McConnell as the Republican leader in the Senate.

Why conservatives should have no regrets dumping Mitch McConnell as the Republican leader in the Senate.

I have had very mixed feelings about McConnell, and was unsure about whether the campaign to get rid of him made sense, until I read this article. The author is devastating, very effectively noting that even though McConnell has generally been very conservative in his votes as a senator, as a leader he has routinely supported the election of RINOs over conservatives.

As the man who helps steer lobbyist dollars to get candidates elected, you all think McConnell is a solid conservative. [Then] why is he steering dollars and support to men like Charlie Crist, Arlen Specter, Trey Grayson, David Dewhurst, and Bob Bennett? McConnell may be voting the way you all want on the votes that matter to you, but he is clearly and indisputably working to get other men elected whose votes you’d despise in states where more conservative challengers could easily win and have won.

Fortunately, all of McConnell’s candidates above eventually lost, and we got instead Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee, names that have very effectively changed the political landscape by tilting it in a conservative direction. In other cases, however, McConnell’s candidates won, and thus we have guys like Jeff Flake, a Republican in name only, producing a profound lack of unity in the Republican party.

Getting rid of McConnell would tilt that landscape even more so in a conservative direction, and might finally give the Republicans the balls to really fight this fight instead of squabbling among themselves.

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