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Last spring the University of Illinois fired Kenneth Howell, an adjunct professor of religion at the school’s Urbana-Champaign campus, after he told students during a class discussion of the Catholic ban on homosexual sex that he agreed with the church’s position. According to the Associated Press, “A friend of an unidentified student complained in a May 13 e-mail to Robert McKim, head of the religion department, that Howell’s stance amounted to ‘hate speech,’” which “led to Howell’s firing.” Now the university’s president, Michael Hogan, is asking the Faculty Senate to consider the matter: We want to be able to reassure ourselves there was no infringement on academic freedom here

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Catholic Professor Fired for Being Too Catholic

Terrific and timely op-ed from Jeb Bush and Robert Putnam debunking the myth that there’s something uniquely threatening to American culture from Hispanic immigrants. On language: Proponents and opponents of immigration agree on one thing: Learning English is crucial to success and assimilation… Most recent immigrants recognize that they need to learn English, and about 90 percent of the second generation speak English, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

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Immigration, Then and Now

The greater Cincinnati area is in the shitter. It’s had a weak economy for decades and it’s in a state and part of the country that isn’t lighting the world on fire. And the local big-wigs have piled on by spending over a billion dollars in recent memory on stadiums for the Reds and Bengals that have done nothing to help the local economy (though the stadiums did soak up huge amounts of finance money and acres of prime river-adjacent real estate)

Excerpt from:
If You Wonder Why Your Local Government is Dead Broke, Check Out This Story About Publicly Funded Stadiums

Today the Supreme Court upheld the federal ban on providing “material support” to groups identified as “foreign terrorist organizations” by the secretary of state.

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Supreme Court Upholds ‘Material Support’ Ban

Last week, an Illinois judge rejected Chicago artist Christopher Drew’s motion to dismiss the Class I felony charge against him.

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Illinois: Where Recording On-Duty Cops Is Treated Like Sexual Assault

The Nation calls for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to come clean about her legal views: The truth is, on the fundamental issues of executive power and civil liberties, we simply do not know enough about Kagan’s views; because she was never a judge and has a relatively slim paper trail as a scholar and a litigator (in which her role was constrained), we are left parsing these few statements for larger meaning. The same is true on matters of corporate power and other vital issues. When Kagan argued the administration’s case in Citizens United v

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The Nation: “Elena Kagan should be borked.”

Teachers unions have long operated on the “the last shall be first” principle when it comes to layoffs: Last hired, first fired, almost no questions asked.

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Starving Beast Snacks On Teacher Tenure Protections?

A federal judge has upheld St. Louis officials’ demands that eminent domain opponent Jim Roos remove the mural pictured here, even though it was put up on on a building Roos owns

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Federal Judge: Mural Protesting Government Policies Isn’t Protected Political Speech

A former Prince George’s County police officer and Crofton, Maryland, police chief wrote a letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun in response to the paper’s articles about the first batch of statistics produced by the state’s SWAT team transparency bill (the subject of my column earlier this week). Over at The Agitator, I’ve responded to the letter point by point

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Ex-Cop Chides Raided Mayor for Criticizing the SWAT Team That Nearly Killed Him