McLeroy's Folly (granted, he wasn't alone in pursuing it, but he was instrumental in making those clown shoes fashionable in the Texas State Board of Education) seems to have met a spectacular, 80's-era exploding car movie end:
Pop the champagne corks. The Texas Board of Education has unanimously come down on the side of evolution. In a 14-0 vote, the board today approved scientifically accurate high school biology textbook supplements from established mainstream publishers — and did not approve the creationist-backed supplements from International Databases, LLC.
"This is a huge victory for Texas students and teachers," said Josh Rosenau, NCSE programs and policy director, who testified at the hearings this week. In his testimony, Rosenau urged the board to approve the supplements — recommended by a review panel largely composed of scientists and science educators — without amendments, and to reject International Databases' creationist submission. The board did just that, and asked for only minimal changes to the approved supplements.
2) The Lamberth injunction ends, hurrah
I'll admit that I was worried about this, but not to the point that I couldn't see the following ruling eventually coming down:
A lawsuit that had threatened to end the Obama administration's funding of embryonic stem cell research was thrown out Wednesday, allowing the U.S. to continue supporting a search for cures to deadly diseases over protests that the work relies on destroyed human embryos.
The lawsuit claimed that research funded by the National Institutes of Health violated the 1996 Dickey-Wicker law that prohibits taxpayer financing for work that harms an embryo. But the administration policy allows research on embryos that were culled long ago through private funding.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, chief of the federal court in Washington, last year said the lawsuit was likely to succeed and ordered a stop to the research while the case continued. But responding to a swift protest from the Obama administration, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals here quickly overturned Lamberth's injunction and said the case was likely to fail.
Lamberth said in his opinion Wednesday that he is bound by the higher court's analysis and ruled in favor of the administration.
"This Court, following the D.C. Circuit's reasoning and conclusions, must find that defendants reasonably interpreted the Dickey-Wicker Amendment to permit funding for human embryonic stem cell research because such research is not 'research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed,' " Lamberth wrote.
Good things come in pairs, if by "pairs" you mean roughly five days apart. Cherry-picking or no, these are both bits of very good news, IMHO.
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