"Hot" off the Press: Gray facts edition

Manchester United and Liverpool fans upset about the management of their teams should take a look at what's going on in Germany, as fans there unite against the price gouging of tickets and boycott one of the biggest rivalry games in the country: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/eng_prem/8986321.stm.

Now Texas is claiming there is a pro-Islam bias in the textbooks the state uses, but apparently can do nothing about it since they already approved the world history texts to be used for the next several years: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/education/23texas.html?ref=us. I actually may agree with this since the guy's beef is with highlighting Christian brutality and not Islam's. By all means, go ahead and paint deserving religions as repressive.

The Iowa Court of Appeals has ruled the police were in violation of constitutional protections when they searched a woman's car without a warrant. Officers were looking for her insurance information after an accident and found a pipe and marijuana, which they charged her for: http://www.press-citizen.com/article/20100923/NEWS01/9230312/1079.

This is not necessarily breaking news in IC, but this article does a good job of outlining the fan displeasure of the UI's new police crackdown on tailgating at Iowa home football games: http://hawkcentral.com/2010/09/22/e-mails-detail-fans%E2%80%99-outrage-with-kinnick-tailgating-rules/. The best fan letter I read in the PDF file starts on page nine. Page 30 is an email from the organizer for the reunion tailgate of the 1985 football team, who said their tailgate was forced to end one hour after the game by law enforcement officers.

The Army is now hearing a case in which service members in Afghanistan randomly targeted and killed innocent Afghans: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/us/28soldier.html?_r=1&hp.

Top Army officials worry that the case against Specialist Morlock and four other soldiers accused in the killings of three Afghan civilians will undermine efforts to build relationships with Afghans in the war against the Taliban.

Worry? No, it will undermine those efforts. This is exactly how you create terrorists. A kid who's father was killed randomly and for fun by American soldiers is not likely to become a great admirer of Uncle Sam.

In response to this NYT article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/education/28school.html?hp) I do think smaller is better. But I think the meat of the article is misleading. Basically it says if you give students a good education (this one seems to have been taught to the test) then they are better educated. No shit.

I saw this article in the dead tree edition of the DMR a few weeks ago. "Gray facts," which the article defines as "Technically accurate but one-dimensional or skewed facts that shadow an underlying truth," are being slung around by Iowa's Republicrat gubernatorial candidates: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20100919/NEWS09/9190338/1001/NEWS/-Gray-facts-color-campaign-in-partial-truths.