Merlyn_LeRoy

If 70% is "not good", why go with the 0% "no vaccination" option? And by the way, 94% is not ">95%"

pinkflame, what is "bogus" about vaccinating against 70% of the HPV known to cause cervical cancer?! Are vaccinations worthless if they're anything less than 100% effective or something? That's insane. Menveo is only about 94% effective, should we tell parents to not bother with it (and fail to prevent thousands of cases of Meningitis)? Should patients only have operations that have a 100% cure rate, and not bother with operations that are only 70% effective?

Funny how there's only "concern" about Gardasil and not other new vaccines like Menveo for Meningitis.

Beavah, heartbeat isn't the definition of life. Death is currently defined as the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain. We have the technology to keep hearts beating well after death. Technology will keep changing the abortion debate, too. It should be possible in the future to freeze a fetus, or transplant it, or have it develop entirely in vitro. Probably the best development would be to invent a form of contraception where everyone is normally infertile, and both the man and the woman have to take a pill to temporarily counteract it. That would end practically all unintentional pregnancies, pregnancies from rape, etc. and reduce abortions to almost none. But since religious nuts are against vaccines that prevent cervical cancer on the basis that it might encourge women to have sex, I'm sure they'd be against this, too.

Preachers can comment on anything, including politics. If they own a church and want to meet the requirements for tax-exemption, they can't e.g. endorse a political candidate. They can if they forgo the tax exemption. Free speech is a right, but tax exemption isn't.

Kahuna, you claim waterboarding isn't torture. The police can interrogate suspects, and if waterboarding isn't torture, what precludes the police from using it?

If waterboarding isn't torture, it's OK for your local police station to use it then, right?

While some people might agree that being a lawyer makes one competent to judge whether something is "torture," I don't. I can easily find a number of war tribunals where it has been prosecuted as torture, and I can't find any instances where it was judged as not being torture. It meets the criteria in the UN's Convention Against Torture. Yukio Asano was found guilty of torture in 1947 for waterboarding a civilian. On what basis do you claim it isn't torture, Kahuna?

eisely, the ACLU has made numerous statements about such cases. Why haven't you looked for them and read them?

My rule of thumb is, Fox news will get any story involving religion and law wrong. This is another example. This is apparently the language of that section: (funds may not be used for the) "modernization, renovation, or repair of facilities-(i) used for sectarian instruction, religious worship, or a school or department of divinity; or (ii) in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission." Notice that the language of the act only prohibits using the money for facilities that are only or chiefly used for religous instruction/religious worship and the like. If a church rents the local school gym every Sunday to hold services because they don't have a church built, that still wouldn't be a substantial use of the facilities, and the school could use these funds to fix up the gym. If, for some reason, the school has a room set aside only for religious use, they would not be able to use these funds to renovate that room, or to build such a room. This is just more typical rightwing religious paranoid lunacy. (fix typos)(This message has been edited by Merlyn_LeRoy)

Kahuna writes: Unpleasant? Scary? Definitely. Torture? No, sorry. The US attorney general disagrees with you.(This message has been edited by Merlyn_LeRoy)

Well, in my opinion, the Bush administration ignored the Geneva Conventions, and all that's really required is to state that the US will go back to observing the Geneva Conventions.

I agree there's plenty of blame to go around. But throughout the years I've been in this issues & politics forum, there were seldom non-scout related discussions of presidential politics. Yet now that a Democrat has been president for all of two weeks, the non-scout related posts are dominant. I can't see a couple administration nominees being withdrawn for tax problems as somehow suddenly worthy of comment when years of Bush administration scandals got nary a peep. So forgive me if I view the political concerns of many of the posters here as being more a case of sour grapes because the Republicans lost.

A bill to do what? Presumably, if Bush officials broke the law or treaties like the Geneva Conventions, no bills need to be passed to prosecute them. And if Bush officials didn't break the law, it would be unconstitutional to try and pass an ex-post facto law. So I don't know what kind of bill you want to see. What would it do?

The scout oath (as we all know) excludes atheists; the presidential oath/affirmation doesn't. No contest.

So your whole point was a red herring to divert attention from the Bush administration's use of torture and Gonzales' memos OKing it? Are you really trying to criticize Democrats for not moving fast enough to reverse Bush's introduction of torture, while never criticizing the Bush administration for using torture? I guess I'd call that tortured logic.

Well, the US prosecuted Japanese soldiers who used waterboarding as torture, so I'd say it's torture.

Oh, so you're only going on about nonpayment of taxes? I thought you were concerned about ethical lapses. Chavez housed an illegal immigrant. Eight former DOJ said Palmer failed to enforce antidiscrimination laws. Now are you only concerned over people who withdrew? I think there are plenty of ethical lapses with people like Alberto Gonzales.

It would be difficult to outweigh bush's incompetence, what with attacking a country for having nonexistent weapons and failing to pursue a mass-murderer, among a host of other things. As for nominees being withdrawn, anyone remember Linda Chavez as labor sec? Bernard Kerik for homeland security? David Palmer for EEOC? Me neither, but I knew it would be easy to find some, because it's the same for every administration.

"packsaddle, I doubt you care, but I do claim to know God's will." Sounds like you're claiming to know what god wants right there. Addendum: It looks like you may have meant to type "don't"; if so, I retract my statement.(This message has been edited by Merlyn_LeRoy)

Beavah, I always address arguments, I don't nitpick to avoid arguing. Arguments require using proper terms, otherwise you just get meaningless word salad. Mustard gas was used in the Iran-Iraq war in the 90s, and possibly since then, so I don't think it's a good example of something being 'checked'. Mustard gas is a lot easier to make than a nuclear weapon, so it's much harder to control. But yes, you can certain try to "control" people with retribution, especially when you have someone like TheScout who knows exactly what god wants.

Having an abortion IS one way to be responsible.

No, but now you've gone over into pretending that you can read my mind, so I'm obviously not needed in any conversation. You can just make up whatever straw man you like and claim that's what I think.

TheScout, you're still ignoring the fact that the constitution only allows congress to regulate land and naval forces, not air forces. Anything that flies, even if it's attached to the army or navy, isn't a land or naval force and can't be regulated by congress. Since you want to open up the necessary and proper clause wide enough to cover military use of air forces, that also enables congress to justify foreign aid. So you're stuck.

Some other interesting facts; Ben Franklin was at that first hot-air balloon flight in France, and also wrote letters discussing their possible military use, all before the constitution was written. So I'm forced to conclude the authors deliberately did not want congress to militarize the air.