South Carolina Fossils

Christopher Hitchens was right: Religion Poisons Everything.

From The Daily Beast:

When eight-year-old Olivia McConnell was perusing a menu at a restaurant that features all 50 of the official symbols of her home state of South Carolina, she noticed a glaring vacancy. South Carolina has a State American Folk Dance, a State Grass, a State Opera, even a State Lowcountry Handcraft, but—no offense to square dancing, Indian grass, Porgy and Bess, or sweet grass baskets intended—McConnell thought something was missing: a state fossil.

Let me stop right there.  Along with those official state symbols there are some others:

• Official State Reptile: the Loggerhead Sea Turtle
• Official Hospitality Beverage: South Carolina Grown Tea
• Official State Dance: The Shag

An official Hospitality Beverage?  Ok, let's get back to The Beast:

The third grader at Carolina Academy wrote a letter to her state lawmakers, Rep. Robert Ridgeway and Sen. Kevin Johnson, in a bid to give the woolly mammoth that honor. Olivia has sound reasons behind her nomination: One of the first discoveries of a fossil in North America was that of a woolly mammoth’s teeth, dug up by slaves on a South Carolina plantation in 1725; all but seven states have an official state fossil; and, most adorably, “Fossils tell us about our past.”

Sounds like Ms McConnell is an intelligent, insightful third grader.  Ridgeway and Johnson's bill passed the House 94-3 but it was stopped in the Senate and that ole time religion:

Sen. Kevin Bryant, a pharmacist and self-described born-again Christian who has compared President Obama with Osama bin Laden, voted to sustain a veto by Governor Nikki Haley of funding for a rape crisis center, and called climate change a “hoax,” proposed amending the bill to include three verses from the Book of Genesis detailing God’s creation of the Earth and its living inhabitants—including mammoths.

Of course he's a climate science denier.  Anti-science in one direction inevitably leads to anti-science in many others.  According to the Senate Journal, these are the verses from Genesis:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

That's Genesis 1:30-31, I believe.

After the bill was ruled out of order by the state's Lt Governor, another Senator objected to it.  Of course he's in not favor of teaching evolution unless you "teach the controversy" along with it From the Post and Courier:

The South Carolina Education Oversight Committee met Monday to review and approve the new set of science standards that the Department of Education will begin implementing by the fall of 2014 for students. Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, argued against teaching natural selection as fact, when he believes there are other theories students deserve to learn.

"Natural selection is a direct reference to Darwinism," Fair said after the meeting. "And the implication of Darwinism. is that it is start to finish."

Fair argued South Carolina's students are learning the philosophy of natural selection but teachers are not calling it such. He said the best way for students to learn is for the schools to teach the controversy.

"To teach that natural selection is the answer to origins is wrong," Fair said. "I don't have a problem with teaching theories. I don't think it should be taught as fact."

Oh, so he's one of those guys.

So instead of celebrating a historical fact (that one of the first fossils found in North America was in deed found in South Carolina) and a scientific one (need I elaborate on this point?), and in doing so encourage an insightful 8 year old, faith poisoned the prospect - all to defend a scientifically indefensible position (that "evolution is 'just a theory'.")

Hitchens was right.

Reality Catches Up To The Braintrust. Again

Remember this blog post?

The blog post linked to this Op-Ed in the Tribune-Review that said, in part, this:

Among the Obama administration's re-election cheerleaders, none is more duplicitous than Attorney General Eric Holder, whose sis-boom-ba on "voter rights" is sorely out of sync with factual accounts of fraud.

Last month the Justice Department blocked a South Carolina photo-identification law, insisting it makes voting more difficult for minorities. At a rally in Columbia, S.C., last week, Mr. Holder said defending that cause is "a moral imperative," The Washington Post reported.

But Holder's presumptuous intervention in South Carolina backfired. In response, that state's attorney general, Alan Wilson, did some digging and found that at least 900 dead people voted in South Carolina's 2010 election, writes Peter Hannaford for The American Spectator. Mr. Wilson is going to court to restore the law.

Turns out this (the story of the dead people voting in South Carolina) is completely untrue.

From the AP:

No one intentionally cast a ballot in South Carolina using the names of dead people in recent elections, despite allegations to the contrary, according to a State Law Enforcement Division report obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

Attorney General Alan Wilson asked the agency to investigate last year after the Department of Motor Vehicles determined in early 2012 that more than 900 people listed as deceased also had voted in recent years.

The initial story was broken by the Columbia Free Times:

A year and a half after a zombie voter fever fell over Republicans in campaign mode, a state police investigation found no indication that anyone purposefully cast a ballot using the name of a dead person in South Carolina.

Responding to an open records request, the S.C. Law Enforcement Division today released its final report to Free Times, one day before a federal holiday. SLED found no indication of voter fraud. [Emphasis added.]

So, now that we've found yet another Voter "Fraud" mistake on the pages of Richard Mellon Scaife's editorial page, will the braintrust be making any sort of correction?