Crap Throwing Monkey

Please do me a favor and never agree with me again.

Conversely, pharmacists refusing to dispense medication prescribed by a doctor are overriding the medical judgement of said doctor and going WAY beyond their training and license. It's bad enough that lawyers and accountants can override a doctor's medical judgement already...

And that is where your analogy breaks down...

Same things I always say, counseler. Methinks YOU'RE the one that goes off his rocker periodicly...

"Two Brokeback Drive" was the line, you !@#$ing idiot. Thanks for butchering it.

It sounds like he's arguing, though, that pharmacists should have the right to stock drugs according to their own morals. Even though women don't have the right to govern their bodies according to their own morals. Pharmacists should have a choice because women shouldn't. I love the logical fallacy of abortion arguments

Yes. They're clones. All liberals are clones. Some day they'll make a liberal clone out of you as well.

"Mmmmmm, that's goooood retatta!..."

Well...he combs his hair...uhhh...not horribly. And he never poked himself in the eye with his thumb, like Gerald Ford. Of course, he was nearly killed by a pretzel...so maybe that's a wash. Ooooh, I know! In NYC after 9/11, he spoke through the right end of the bullhorn!

Right. We can't even put him in Gitmo without the leftists loonies wetting their pants...

Is that really your wife? Because if it is, I'd like to take back some of the things I've been saying and thinking about her...

Retatta.

That's what us crap throwing monkeys are for...

A lot of it has to do with people like you posting stupid sh-- like this...

Of course, that ignores the simple fact that they all taste like malted battery acid.

Problem is...if we "get him", we've either captured him and put him on trial - and he becomes a martyr and an even bigger symbol. Or we kill him - and he becomes a martyr and an even bigger symbol. Frankly, at this moment, having him hiding in a cave somewhere releasing the occasional video threatening action that never materializes is probably the best thing for us. It marginalizes him. Which is not to say it was the best thing in earlier moments, or will be in later ones, of course. Right now...think of anything better in the global scheme of things.

Except for the theory that Hillary, being at least nominally female, won't polarize women voters...so there's 50% right there (in theory. In practice, most die-hard conservative women wouldn't vote for her, so it's probably more like 35%...but it's still a good chunk of votes). And THAT is what disgusts me about the process. Hillary's a good candidate...because she has a vagina.

Pharmecutical regulations. I don't know what they are, and they'd vary from state to state anyway, but it's at least theoretically possible for a state to require a pharmacy to make medication available or to not refuse treatment on non-medical (i.e. moral) grounds.

I think they're still stuck in Clinton's "law enforcement" paradigm, for better or worse. Regardless of WHAT paradigm they're stuck in, though...just being stuck is what inhibits discussion. I'm dead-nuts certain it gets discussed behind closed doors by the people that do the work (I know, in particular, that posse comitatus issues get hashed out in great detail - and usually with difficulty - for every domestic relief operational plan...e.g. the "What happens when someone detonates a dirty bomb in Omaha?" military plan. I'm sure New Orleans added some interesting new insights to those discussions, too.) But it doesn't get discussed in public...nor is it likely, frankly. Politicians don't like bothering the electorate with abstractions; it costs them votes. That's why they say stupid sh-- like "I voted for it before I voted against it" rather than "I supported it until the various committees and the administration added so many riders and so much pork that I believed it did a disservice to the troops."

I wasn't, nor would I, state that concretely...but it's certainly another possible distinction to make (and by the way...I don't claim that my idea of relying on the physical border is a good distinction. I think it's a bad one. It's just the best I've thought of.) Really, as far as I can tell the criminal vs. military distinction now relies on the whim of the executive - treating terrorism as a criminal justice problem was Clinton's whim, just as treating it as a military issue is Bush's whim(although I hasten to add that Clinton - or, more accurately, Jamie Gorelick - at least tried to argue the distinction in a concrete manner. It was an entirely arbitrary distinction, in other words, but codified in policy. I haven't seen anything like that from the current administration - which is a big part of the problem as well.)

It's not that they don't need to. It's that, as I just stated (and which you haven't had a chance to read yet, I know), if you postulate combatting terrorism as a military activity, warrants don't even apply. And the Bush administration most certainly looks at terrorism as a military issue first and criminal issue second...and since you can't get a warrant anyway for domestic use of military assets, why the hell would you even try...? I don't agree with it (I've stated for a very long time my belief that the border between military and criminal treatment of terrorism should be the US border...which in this case would mean that the NSA taps, physically being within the borders, should require a warrant) but I can understand it given the administration's position on terrorism. And as I said, the real discussion - the complementary and competing roles of criminal law enforcement vs. military action in combatting terrorism - hasn't even started in public. Make that set of distinctions, and the wiretap issue here starts looking a lot less ambiguous.

And I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for sale. The inertia inherent in the way the system runs will overpower any 4- or 8-year attempt to clean it up...even if anyone ever sincerely tries, which they won't, I'm convinced in part because the system's designed to select for people who will propagate the system itself. Because the real question here isn't legal vs. illegal. The real question here is criminal justice vs. military action. If you treat terrorism as a criminal matter, warrants are absolutely needed. If you postulate that combatting terrorism is a military exercise (as the current administration does)...not only is there no requirement for warrants, there's not even a legal basis for issuing them, since posse comitatus prohibits the use of the military in domestic law enforcement. Theoretically, domestic surveillance for military purposes is allowed sans warrant, as far as I know...but such information is typically not used in criminal cases (that issue actually came up in the DC sniper case, where DoD flatly refused to provide overhead imagery to the police to aid with the case, on the grounds they couldn't legally get involved.) But to complicate that further...now we have a set of laws in place - the PATRIOT Act - that is supposed to, among other things, facilitate information sharing among agencies. That will very likely lead to situations where some group or other in DoD gathers domestic information without a warrant - which, again, as far as I know, is not illegal if not used by the DoD in a domestic operation - but is required by law to share it with law enforcement, even though law enforcement's use of it would be illegal as due process was violated...which basically means they get to pick and choose which set of laws they want to break, the PATRIOT Act and related or the Fourth Amendment and related. There is a very basic and very serious disconnect between the various sets of laws governing this situation that hasn't yet been publicly discussed...largely because everyone's focused on the "Illegal wiretaps! Bush bad!" story - or the "Detainees in Gitmo are held illegally!" story - to consider the very difficult abstract issues that are ultimately the root cause of the whole thing.

Yeah...didn't we all know Glenn was "Black Ice" when that happened, anyway?

"I'd like a Coke please." "Sure...would you like New Coke, Coke Classic, Diet Coke, Caffeine-free Coke, Caffeine-free Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Vanilla Coke, Diet Cherry Coke, Caffeine-free Vanilla Coke, Caffeine-free Cherry Coke, Caffeine-free Diet Vanilla Coke, Caffeine-free Diet Cherry Coke,...or a Caffeine-free Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Classic New Coke with Lime?" "I just want a !@#$ing Coke!!!" Christ...it's getting to be like trying to buy a simple cup of coffee at Starbucks.

The only way my "shut the hell up" message is ever getting through to Theisman is with a roll of duct tape.