Americans for a Better Justice started airing ads today calling for the withdrawal of Harriet Miers.

Not a day goes by without a prominent conservative or well known group coming out against Harriet Miers. Today, Concerned Women of America, the nation’s largest public policy women’s organization, is calling for Harriet Miers withdrawal. As their press release states:

We believe that far better qualified candidates were overlooked and that Miss Miers’ record fails to answer our questions about her qualifications and constitutional philosophy,” said Jan LaRue, CWA’s chief counsel. “In fact, we find several aspects troubling, particularly her views on abortion and a woman’s ’self-determination,’ quotas, feminism and the role of judges as social activists. We do not believe that our concerns will be satisfied during her hearing.”

Hopefully Feddie is right and this nightmare will soon end.

Inside Higher Ed has more reaction from the IDEA club at Cornell:

Proponents of intelligent design at Cornell attacked Rawlings. A statement released by Intelligent Design Evolution Awareness, a student group, called the president’s speech “unscrupulous” and “unknowledgeable.”

Rachel Staver, vice president of the group and a nutrition major at Cornell, said that the organization has about 50 students on its mailing list and that 10 students participate in weekly discussions. “It’s very hard to get new ideas introduced into science because of the strength of scientific dogma and orthodoxy,” she said. Staver called Rawlings’s criticism of intelligent design censorship, adding that if science professors “were really confident of evolution,” they would accept the teaching of intelligent design as an alternate theory.

The Cornell student group is one of 23 that have been created recently at colleges and universities in the United States.

Yes, NZ Bear, we oppose the Miers nomination.

See here and here for the latest on the Miers. Here a continually updated list of the blogs for and against the Miers nomination.

Here is IDEA at Cornell’s recent press release. It concerns President Rawlings’ state of the University address where he blasts Intelligent Design:

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, October 22 — The Intelligent Design Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Club at Cornell is deeply concerned with President Hunter Rawlings’ blatant disregard for the facts concerning Intelligent Design in Friday’s State of the University Address. In a speech usually reserved for current university business, he spent over two thirds of his time blasting the emerging Intelligent Design theory as anti-scientific and religious in an unscrupulous, unknowledgeable manner.

Intelligent Design (ID) is a scientific theory which holds that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and are not the result of an undirected, chance-based process such as Darwinian evolution. It follows the principles of the scientific method, scorns the biases of either religion or naturalism, and attempts to follow all the available evidence to a valid conclusion. ID is testable and falsifiable, and so far its predictions have repeatedly been shown accurate.

The IDEA Club at Cornell holds that the problems with Neo-Darwinian evolution can no longer be ignored, and it is time for true research and debate about the issues surrounding the beginnings of life to take place at universities across the country.

Attacking ID as a non-scientist and without addressing its scientific claims, Rawlings states that it is religion masquerading as science and is a religious belief at its core. This gross misstatement is adisservice to unbiased discourse, besides being an insult to people of faith throughout America.Ad hominem attacks and confusing people’s religious beliefs with their scientific research is not befitting a university president. We would hope Rawlings will instead follow Cornell’s often lauded commitment to a free and open exchange of ideas.