Prayer at school board meetings

Back in 1983, the US Supreme Court ruled in the case Marsh v. Chambers that the practice of ceremonial opening prayers of the Nebraska state legislature was constitutional. In his strong and cogently argued dissent, justice William Brennan warned that allowing any ceremonial prayer at all, whatever the constraints imposed, would result in the Supreme Court getting involved in endless disputations about what kind of prayer and settings should be allowable and what should be disallowed.
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Jordan Klepper channels Alex Jones in new comedy show

In his highly successful old show The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert adopted the persona of a right wing TV blowhard modeled on Bill O’Reilly. His departure to host a more traditional late night TV talk show has created a vacuum in that niche and now another Daily Show alum Jordan Klepper has moved to fill it, modeling himself on an even more extreme character like Alex Jones. He is going to face the challenge of being constantly compared to Colbert but Klepper has good comedy chops and should be able to withstand that scrutiny.
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Israel destroys Palestinian children’s school

August 22 was to be the first day in a new school for Palestinian children who had previously had to walk a long distance to their old school, itself an overcrowded one in a converted car garage. But the night before opening day, as part of its ongoing US-supported efforts to make life hell for the Palestinians it rules over in its apartheid state, Israeli forces destroyed the children’s school so that when the children turned up, there was nothing there.

Israeli military jeeps came barreling down towards Jubbet al-Dhib’s first and only primary school late Tuesday night, terrifying locals who had been finishing preparations for the school’s grand opening set for the next morning. Soldiers shot tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets as they cleared the way for bulldozers and flatbed trucks brought in to take the school.
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How ExxonMobil Corporation misled the public about climate science

ExxonMobil is under threat of litigation by the attorneys general of several states that they “violated, variously, racketeering, consumer protection, or investor protection statutes through their communications regarding anthropogenic global warming (AGW)”, as stated by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes in their paper Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014) that appeared in the August 23, 2017 issue of Environmental Research Letters (vol. 12 (2017) 084019). Supran and Oreskes show that the internal ExxonMobil documents and research supported and done by ExxonMobil largely supported the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change while their public stance was largely at odds with it.
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White nationalists and religion

Atheists are well aware that the religious texts are full of awful things that if anyone reads and takes seriously will discredit religion. But it seems that some white nationalists are interpreting the Bible in far more extreme terms than any secularist could possibly imagine, according to a new book Blood & Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism by Damon T. Berry.
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Signs that Trump is getting desperate

I have mentioned before that Donald Trump is like a dangerous animal that will lash out indiscriminately when cornered or frustrated and there are already signs that this is happening. There is no doubt that he is feeling increasingly frustrated that more than seven months have passed and there has been no advancement on any of his major promises, nor is the prognosis good for any of them in the future. There has been no progress on his signature issue of building a border wall. The idea that Mexico would pay for it was always utterly ridiculous and his pleading with the Mexican president to not keep saying publicly that they would not pay is a sign that he realizes that it is not going to happen. His promise to repeal Obamacare has gone nowhere and although he says that he will bring the issue back, it is still far from reality. The tax cuts he promised have not materialized either. His promise that he knew how to destroy ISIS and win the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria has so far not been borne out and in fact he is now even more firmly embedded in Afghanistam. So he is zero for four on his major promises.
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