Mickey

That is certainly a valid viewpoint but if we are to ever try and counter what they see on Al Jazeera, we have to start somewhere. Why wouldn't Hamas see that the US is renewing its attempts to cultivate moderates among the Palestinian leadership, or potential leaders anyway which would, if successful, leave them out in the cold? It is a crazy place. Up is down, down is up and sideways is crossways. No course of action would be much better than slightly more advantageous than another. Thanks for the rational discussion by the way.

I know we see him as an "avowed terrorist" but the people we are trying to make headway with sees him as a moderate, a guy who actually tried to sincerely work with us and Israel. Sending someone like Powell won't signal to them that there are good terrorists because to them he is not a terrorist. Besides, given our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I don't think we are in danger any time soon of terrorists thinking we are okay with it. I don't agree with their view of him as a patriot and a moderate, not even close but the reality is that is what they see him as and we aren't going to ever, ever change their minds on that. Problem is, we have to have some credibility with them if we are to be an effective mediator. Fine line, I know but there aren't many perfect answers or solutions without drawbacks in that area of the world. Anyway, glad it isn't my decision.

What are you talking about? Did I say he was misunderstood? Did I say he brought the world together? Did I say he stopped radicals? Did I say he was wonderful? Did I even suggest that our rep should make a speech of any kind? The answer to all that is: no. What I did say was that what happens tommorow is more important than anyone's opinion of the now dead Arafat. It is a question of diplomacy that is all. I clearly pointed out that it was a difficult question and made no claim to owning all the wisdom on the issue. In response, I get this hysterical rant from you. Why do you bother? Seriously, what do you get out of this kind of response? There is no information being exchanged here, there is nothing being learned. You might as well be flashing old ladies in the park. Other than whatever preverse enjoyment you get out of it, there really is no point.

Arabs across the region will be watching the funeral, they won't be watching a diplomatic meeting next tuesday. Arafat is what passed for a moderate among his people. Send a flunky to the funeral will send the message that we simply don't care about Palestinians, never have and never will. We will confirm the worst lies told about us by the worst terrorists among them. Sending Powell won't alienate Israel but may buy us some credibility where we currently have less than none.

If you have something to say besides name calling, do check in again. If you had ever read any of my posts regarding the President over the last year you would know that I never claimed to "hate" Bush nor have I ever attacked him, just disagreed with many, though not all, of his policies. I know that might not fit your stereotype of "lefties" but if your mind requires that type of shorthand thinking to get through the day, I won't bother taxing you with the labors of genuine thought. Bush is the President of the United States, not a mere film maker. Pretty difficult to ignore the President in discussions on a political discussion board don't you think? Do you really think it is valid to compare the attention given to the President to that given to a film maker's plan to make another film? Moore gets under your skin and the more you squeal about it, the more coverage he gets and the more people hear his message and see his films.

No offense but every time we do that the right labels them a huge, radical left wing liberal and so we then have to go out and find an even more conservative democrat and start the whole cycle over again. Democrats are never going to outflank the republicans by moving to the right. They will simply move a little more to the right themselves. Given party loyalties, I don't think there is a point where they will move too far to the right so that moderates will be alienated. I keep thinking that will happen and it doesn't. I remember the Republican primary in 1988. Dole was the candidate of the conservative wing of the party and Bush was the moderate. That is why Reagan put him on the ticket, to assuage the moderate wing of the party. Flash forward to 1996 and Dole was selected as a moderate candidate, one able to appeal to the middle of the road voter. Four years from now and we will probably be calling Ashcroft a moderate. Look at republican writings and leaders. Do you see anyone ringing an alarm bell that maybe they are approaching the line where they are getting too conservative? Not hardly. Instead there are green lights being flashed everywhere that they can now afford to lurch even further to the right. The democrats, in my opinion, may very well have to make a big change but not the one I keep hearing about trying to appeal to red staters with talk about morality. The voters who traditionally vote democratic because of economic issues no longer do because of so-called moral issues. Meanwhile, the democrats are wasting their time trying to get those votes at the expense of appealing to marginal republican voters. There are plenty of moderate republicans who are pro-choice and as uncomfortable with christian political movements as are the democrats. They vote republican however because democrats want to tax the crap out of them as they tend to be well off. If some waitress in Nevada working on minimum wage wants to vote for Bush even though he opposes raising the minimum wage simply because he opposes gay marriage, then I think it is a waste of time for the Democrats to try and get her vote. I wish her the best but the democrats don't need her if they can get socially moderate republicans whose numbers are increasing in places like Arizona and Nevada and even in some southern states like North Carolina and Virgina. That coupled with the youth vote which, though not enough to swing it for Kerry this time around is certainly growing and heavily democratic could be what they need to build a new coalition. We can cut taxes just as crazily as the republicans. Its not like the electorate ever rose up in righteous anger against a tax cut. Democrats need to stop being the reponsible parent and start dealing out candy like its Halloween.

There is no such thing as christian extremism. Have you ever read a single post from a righty on this board even suggesting that maybe, just maybe there really is a point where there is too much religion in politics? Have they ever suggested that there is a point where even they would draw a line separating church and state? To them, every complaint the left has on this issue is complete baloney, they, or at least the posters on this board, have never even acknowledged the slightest possibility that the influence of the christian right might be even the tiniest bit of a threat to civil liberty. They are 100% right and democrats are 100% wrong on this issue 100% of the time. Yet it is the democrats who are arrogant. You see, they are the "Real" America and I know that because they say they are. They are the "Heart" of America and I know that because they say they are.

I can't argue with the accuracy of drawing conlusions regarding millions of people based on the actions of a few. There is nothing wrong with condemning all based on the crimes of one. Right?

That decision isn't one based on saving them or even out of respect for their houses of worship. It is a practical and tactical decision that in the long run, destroying mosques will cost us more American lives than letting these cretins escape to them for what will only be a temporary refuge for them anyway. Think of the value in proving our sincerity to muslims by being be able to show that even in a firefight with our lives at stake, we respected their houses of worship. Balance that against killing those guys today or the next time they stick their heads out the door.

That is an excellent question and one I am sure has been the subject of some teeth gnashing at the White House and State Department. I think we should send whoever it is besides the Prez and the Veep that would send the strongest message that we take the Palestinian claim to a homeland very seriously. We do not need to convince Israel of our sincerity, objectivity nor the depth of our committment to their security. We do have a long way to go to convince Palestinians and other Arabs that they can trust us as a mediator not to sell them out or just parrott whatever positioin Israel would like us to take. This decision has to be made with the future in mind and not based on whether we think Arafat was the worst criminal of the last 40 years or a nationalist patriot or something inbetween.

Right, because voters are not seduced by a "message of hate" which is why Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and the like play to empty halls and their books collect dust on the shelves. Not. Why is it so arrogant and hateful for Yankees to imply that the midwest and south is full of a bunch of racist rubes and yet it is perfectly okay for them to refer to Yankees as elitist, country club radicals and claim that they are the "real" America, they are the "heartland"? That election was a contest between messages of hate that should leave the winners and losers alike disgusted.

Given the reaction around here that the mere mention of his name invariably invokes, I can only conclude that Moore is getting the best of you guys. Remember, the opposite of love is not rage, it is apathy.

I think studies like this are pretty useless. It is not as if there were no New Yorkers voting for Bush or no North Carolina voters voting for Kerry. For example, 2.7 million New Yorkers voted for Bush while only .9 million Oklahomans voted for Bush. I can accurately say then that Bush has 3 times the support in NY that he has in Oklahoma. Since NY is an "eastern elitist" state with a huge cost of living, can I then conclude that Bush appealed to more wealthy eastern elitists than salt of the earth types in Oklahoma? Details matter and you have to look at those pretty closely. States are somewhat arbitrary categories. I don't know many people who voted for a candidate and did so chiefly because they were a New Yorker or an Oklahoman. They voted because of issues, general perceptions, personal preferences, biases, prejudices and many, many other variables. You could use these kinds of numbers to support all sorts of strange positions. I heard Stewart on the Daily Show, in jest, point out that most of the 9/11 victims were from Manhattan where Kerry got like 97% of the vote or some such outrageous percentage. He used that to opine that the people with the most to fear from terrorists all voted for Kerry and that the people least likely to be victimized by terrorists, Kansans for example, all voted for Bush. Lies, damn lies and statistics.

Well, it could be that they have no money left after paying all those taxes that then get spent in the red states. Most blue states are tax creditors, they get back way less in federal pork than they contribute in tax revenues. The red states are the biggest tax debtors in that they get back way more pork than they contribute in tax revenues. Sucking so lavishly on the federal teat leaves them plenty of milk and honey to give away.

Don't you understand? If you utter anything other than enthusiastic approval of every tactic of this war or offer anything besides the rosiest of predictions you are an anti-American cowardly terrorist sympathizing blue stater. You see, it goes like this, if your party wins a Presidential election by 3%, you are no longer required to make sense or to be needlessly bound by the tyranny of facts. Common decency and simple politeness are for election losers to worry about. Seriously, what did you do in the first Gulf War?

"strike will continue" Isn't a "strike" a swing and a miss? I hope not.

It also takes more than just a sperm and an egg, it takes an umbilical cord, a womb and a woman attached to it. It often also takes a little Jack Daniels but that is another discussion.

Apart from abstract concepts of life, pre-life and cognition, I would argue that the two are not separate by virtue of the simple fact of the umbilical cord. You can't legislate it away. That being the case, I reiterate the points I already made: Even if I agreed with you that there are two lives here, they are tied together, literally, physically such that you have to make the rights of one or the other ascendant. They can't co-exist. If the court overturns Roe, I don't think they will do it by a judicial declaration of when life begins. It wouldn't be necessary for them to do so and the Court has almost never taken it unto itself to make those kinds of metaphysical decisions. They leave those to priests, preachers and philosophers. Politicians of course have joinded the show to harness the passions thus aroused and turn them into votes. The Court would simply rule that the States Right, its compelling interest, in protecting a fetus, regardless of whether it is "alive" or not, is sufficient to allow it to prohibit abortion because the right to privacy inherent in the 14th Amendment is not broad enough to encompass abortion. Since abortion would be stripped of its constitutional protection, the states could then step in and make whatever laws they wanted with regard to abortion. The federal government could do the same. My prediction would be that many states, though not all, would quickly ban virtually all abortions. Others would add more and more layers of restrictions so that a legal abortion would still be possible in theory but not very likely. That would be done in a variety of ways, anything from notification and consent of the father to parental approval (not simply notification) requirements. In some states, mostly the blue ones no doubt, abortion would remain legal but only for a time. Having nothing else to do, the pro-lifers would necessarily focus their energy in getting a federal law passed preventing abortion in all states. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate would certainly pass such a law and that would be it. It would simply be another example of the right disregarding states rights and endorsing rampant federalism as long as it favors their political view. As for the double murder thing, I would again invite you to read Roe. They never hold that a fetus isn't a human being. The question is whether under our laws, a fetus is a "person" as that term is used in the Constitution. You also sort of lump all "government" into one big ball and then identify two opposing views held by this blob and call it hypocrisy. The laws you refer to are enacted by states as they are in charge of determining the criminal law within their borders. I see no hypocrisy in say, the government of the State of Oaklahoma disagreeing with the Supreme Court's Roe decision and enacting this statue. In that sense you are dealing with two governmental entities holding different opinions, that is not hypocrisy, that is an argument. As I explained, such statutes do not implicate the contitution because the criminal has no constitutional rights at stake. Therefore, the government of the State of Oaklahoma can't be prevented from doing what it did by any other governmental entity including the US Supreme Court. There is no hypocrisy here because you do not have one entity holding conflicting views. These laws were pushed by the right to lifers for the very purpose of trying to create some sort of legal foundation for the notion that a fetus is a legal "person". Their legal and political advisors astutely pointed out that Roe could not prevent a state from adopting such a statute and it would be politically popular as any opponent would be labeled as one who sympathizes with the killers of pregnant women. Having passed these laws in several states, they now use them, as you do, as part of their argument to overturn Roe. Its like playing poker where you get to make your own chips.

I suggest you read the opinions inolved in the case: District Court Decision Circuit Court Decision If you only have time to read one, read the Circuit Court Opinion. It explains the law here pretty well.

The republicans in general, and in particular this administration and the former attorney general are dedicated to states rights unless of course you are dealing with the right of the state of Oregon to govern the practice of medicine within its borders. The now infamous "Ascroft Directive", more of a "dictat" really, tried to use the Controlled Substances Act and his twisted interpretation of it to render unto himself the power to overturn not one but two ballot measures approved by the voters of the state of Oregon approving, under the narrowest of circumstances, physician assisted suicide for the terminally ill. He basically ruled that a law enacted to prevent criminal doctors from using their power to write prescriptions to become legal drug dealers gave him the authority to go after any doctor who, fully in accordance with state law, prescribed drugs in a lethal dose as part of a physician assisted suicide. He was stopped by the federal courts and with an election coming, he backed off. However, the deadline for filing an appeal with the Supreme Court was today and lo and behold, now that the election is over and there is no need to worry about offending voters in Oregon, a "swing" state, the appeal was filed. I would indeed be a rich man if only I had a dime or two for every time I have read on this board how Kerry would do anything to get elected and took this or that position in a craven attempt to get votes. Apparently, the Bush administration is not above the same tactics, withholding its appeal until after the election to keep from ticking of Oregonians who, last time out, approved the assisted suicide measure overwhelmingly (60-40%). I guess it is a travesty to have judges deciding cases but as long as he makes the decision you want, it is perfectly okay for a political appointee to, in emperor like fashion, void the results of two state elections and reverse the universally and long held precedent that states and not the government (let alone an agency appointee) govern the practice of medicine within their own borders. How nice for us that a political hack appointee can decide for us against our will that if we are terminally ill and facing months of agonizing, unending pain, we can't die with some dignity and, with the help of a physician, as painlessly as possible. The biggest lie in politics is that Republicans are for less government interference in our lives and Democrats for more. It depends on the issue at stake. In some cases, like this issue, Republicans have no problem with big, intrusive, freedom sapping government trampling over the rights of the states. Sure there are issues where it is the Democrats that want bigger government but they have not cornered the market on that widget. Not by a long shot. Good riddance Mr. Ashcroft.

I use many sources, some are on that list, many are not. Of those listed, I use CNN the most.

Ever the pragmatist, AD has a good take on this that really removes it from the never ending merry-go-round of competing subjective moralities. Illegal or legal, it is going to occur so do we make it safe or do we pull a prohibition and start creating criminals out of citizens and tie up the police raiding doctor's offices instead of tracking down real criminals? Until a modern day Oracle at Delphi is available to solve the most insoluble mysteries of life, we will have to make do with being practical on occasion.

That type of reasonable thinking has no place in politics. You have to motivate and mobilize the troops by making demons of those who vote for the other guy. It has to be an epic battle between the forces of good and evil to attract the attention of the marginally interested voters. Whoever does the best job of freaking out their side wins.

Yeah I was worried they would skedaddle to help run the campaign of one of their daddy's cronies in Alabama somewhere, otherwise known as "pulling a Bush".

Have you actually read Roe? It is not a parable, it is a legal document. Questions of Constitutional law are based on "rights", not on this thing you call "matter of life" whatever that is. The unborn and the woman are not separate entities. You can't grant a right to one without taking away from the right of the other. To do that, you have to have grounds for the government to take the privacy right at issue away from the woman involved. The fact that they are doing so by the vehicle of granting some sort of right to the unborn doesn't change the fact that you are taking away her rights. For that to happen you have to take what is now the constitutionally protected rights of that woman and elimenate them so that the government may intervene. That grants to government a power it currently does not have. The fact that it is exercising it to protect a fetus is pretty much an "ends justifies the means" argument. You can't get around the fact that for the government to accomplish that end, it has to subjugate the rights of the woman to its own rights, rights it will exercise for the benefit of the fetus. That is the means. It is the government that will jail the doctor who performs an abortion if abortion is outlawed. It is the government that will jail the women who have an aboriton if it is outlawed. The fetus can't act on its own and do these things to protect itself, it will have to be the government that actually does that. It is the government who will monitor doctor-patient relationships and and review private medical records to be sure that there are no abortifacient contraceptives being given. No matter how you want to frame it as a noble effort to protect fetuses, the practical and legal effect is to provide a potentially unlimited grant of new powers to the government. How you can grant them that kind of power on this issue and not in a broad array of other privacy related matters is a mystery. Even using the logic of your argument, it simply doesn't work out to be a situation where simply equal rights are co-existing side by side. A woman's right to have an abortion simply can't co-exist side by side with her fetus's right to life, one must be ascendant. You have to take her privacy rights away inorder to honor the right to life you claim for the fetus. The only way to do that is to give the government the power to control her body or more specifically, her womb. That opens the door to government intereference in the most private realm of our lives. As for your example of double murder statutes when a pregnant woman is killed, there is really nothing all that puzzling once you apply some critical thought. The right to terminate a pregnancy is the right posessed by the woman who is pregnant. You are not violating a constitutionally protected right of the killer by calling this double murder. There is no constitutional violation. It is called a double murder by the legislators who passed these criminal statutes. Those statues are valid law unless they are unconstitutional as applied to those prosecuted under those statutes. Since there is no constitutional right to not be charged with double murder when you kill a pregnant woman, there is no constitutional violation. By the same token, in states that do not have such statutes, prosecutors and victims families would not be able to claim that their constitutional rights were violated because they can't prosecute for double murder. Remember that the Constitution governs the relationship between individuals and the government. It does not govern the relationship between citizens, one to the other.