Busy News Day

There's too much happening this week to cover all of it in much depth, so here are some more quick news stories.

• An city bus ad run by Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers got pulled by DART. This is a clear-cut case of religious discrimination and unconstitutional an illegal censorship. The existence of atheists and atheists groups is offensive? Get a hold of yourself, Iowa governor Chet Culver.
• Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed to the Supreme Court after a noticeable period of relative quiet from the Republicans on this issue. Apparently after the confirmation hearings were over they decided they had ridden that horse as far as it would take them, but that didn't stop them from taking a few parting shots at her as she sailed through the Senate.
• Teabaggers think that the proposed health care reform plan really really is single-payer even though it's not. If they believe that this really is single-payer, so we're having to fight for it as if it were, why wasn't single-payer put on the table to begin with? I'm sick of Democrats pre-compromising things, it doesn't help.
  
• Right-wing protesters at health care town hall meetings are being supported aggressively by health industry companies and incited towards violence by the right-wing media. Once again we hear accusations of tyrrany and comparisons to Nazis but very little policy discussion. The teabaggers have a lot of anger, and little else.
• Over two hundred freethinkers led by PZ Myers and the Secular Student Alliance will gather to tour Ken Ham's creationist theme park tomorrow morning. I wish I could be there, I'm looking forward to seeing the pictures and reading the blog posts about it.
• George Sodini is a terrible human being who walked into a Pennsylvania gym and murdered three women and wounded ten more before ridding the world of his disgusting existence Wednesday. This is a clear case of violence motivated by mysoginy. Sodini targeted women specifically, blogging about his hatred for women before the attack. Pandagon writes,

  George Sodini was angry at the entire world of "desirable" women for not up and volunteering to have sex with him, and every day anonymous men around the country and world beat, rape, and even kill women because said women were also considered insufficiently compliant, often to unstated demands that women were supposed to just anticipate and fill without complaint.

• Unscientific America is on the bookshelves now, and serious scientists are ripping it apart.