Afternoon Open Thread

Your humble blogmeister will be busy with an ongoing and labor-intensive partisan political project for the rest of the day, so it's time for another open thread. Here are some possible discussion topics though, which may provide fodder for further conversation:

• The Dover Area School Board unanimously agreed Tuesday to pay $1 million in legal fees to the plaintiffs who successfully sued to end the policy of presenting "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution. In December, a federal judge ruled the previous board's decision to insert intelligent design into the science curriculum violated the constitutional separation of church and state.
  
  
• If you've been following the national news, you're well aware that President Bush has suffered a political firestorm over the last two days -- directed from both sides of the political aisle -- as a result of the administration's decision to turn over the management of six major U.S. ports to an arab-owned company. The "lefty" blogosphere is making hay with this story; and the latest news is that President Bush is now "backing away from it," saying he didn't know about it until it had been cleared by his underlings. One excellent libertarian website has a couple of good articles on this subject here and here, expressing a well-reasoned contrarian take.
  
  
• On the local front, the Ogden City Council was "firing on all cylinders" at last night's meeting, approving a zoning change for a developer who plans to build a movie theater, a health club and a bookstore on Ogden City's North Street, about three miles north of Ogden's "The Junction" project. Whereas the Boyer Company had earlier urged the council to reject this project, the Council did "the right thing," approving the zoning change by a unanimous 7-0 vote.
  
  
• Not only that, the council decided, in closed session, to immediately notify the Utah House of Representatives Rules Committee of its opposition to Senator Jenkins' Senate Bill 229. There had previously been considerable confusion and wheel-spinning within the council apparatus on this issue, and it is encouraging that the council at last decided formally to register its opposition to the bill that we've appropriately but affectionately dubbed "Godfrey's revenge."

Please feel free to chime in on any of the above topics, or whatever else suits your fancy. It's YOUR public forum gentle readers, after all. What, exactly, is on your minds today?