"The terrorists" are playing the role of latest invisible scare, just as the communists did before them -- a rallying cry for those who traffic in fear."

There's an excellent three part BBC documentary on just this topic. It's called "The Power of Nightmares" and it covers the switch-over from fear of the USSR to fear of terrorists. It's well worth watching if you can get a hold of it.

I agree that "pro choice" is a disaster. It's easily countered by, "It's not a choice, it's a child."

I suggest we get to what's really at stake in the abortion battles: I'm Pro-Spirit. Flesh is nothing unless it contains a spirit/mind/soul within it. No fertilized egg, no fetus, has a soul, they are entirely soulless flesh. The anti-abortion movement says "life", but what they're really doing is putting the welfare of spiritless flesh above the welfare of thinking beings. Shame on them. They are wantonly immoral. Which, come to think of it, should be the way the pro-abortion people speak about the anti-abortionists. Pure wanton immorality. Why the hell do they think the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade anyway?

Dave Mullenix

"But it's a fetus -- unable to live without the mother's consent. It's not a baby."

It's not a baby, but viability is not what counts.

What counts is that THE FETUS IS NOT CONSCIOUS. It's not a BEING because it's not conscious. It's flesh, not spirit.

Hammer on fetal consciousness and flesh vs spirit and forget about "viability", "choice" or any other distraction.

CONSCIOUSNESS is the only thing that counts in abortion and a fetus is not conscious. It's purely flesh.

Elephantman: "On the one hand, there is a "claimant," and of course every claimant deserves "compensation." On the other hand, this particular claimant is that most undesirable of non-persons in the liberal universe: the unborn "fetus." In liberal cosmology, fetuses rank somewhere above Osama Bin Laden but below Dick Cheney in terms of their threat to civilization as we know it."

Read the story again. The claimant is not a fetus, it's a seven year old girl who was injured before birth.

If anything, this is a good argument FOR abortion. If the mother had known the fetus was damaged, she could have had an abortion and prevented the birth of a girl with learning disabilities.

I'm waiting for the first case where someone sues their parents because they knew their fetus was injured/deformed/whatever and did NOT get an abortion and thus caused a damaged human being to be created.

djm: If anything, this is a good argument FOR abortion. If the mother had known the fetus was damaged, she could have had an abortion and prevented the birth of a girl with learning disabilities.

man: it's a good point because people with learning disabilities have little or no value and should be exterminated before taking their first breath - if only the mother knew!

You miss the point. Until sometime after birth there is no "people" present. To use religious terminology, a fetus is purely flesh, it has no spirit. It has no mind. The mind begins to develop at birth. Before birth, there is no "person" to kill, just spiritless flesh. A fetus that is damaged should be terminated before it develops into a damaged person.

The whole anti-abortion argument is based on the lie that a mindless, spiritless fetus is a person.

Nice picture of that Saha Air 707. I notice that on the bottom of the aft fusilage, under the exit door, there are a series of bulges that remind me of a KC-135 tanker's refueling boom and boom operator's station. You can even see what looks like covered over windows in the forward bulge, where the boom operator lay on his stomach, facing the rear, looking at his target as he guided the boom towards it. I don't see bulges like this in other 707 pictures. The 707 is a civilian version of the KC-135. Is there any chance that this 707 was once a KC-135 tanker?

What should happen here is that Murdoch shouldn't be allowed to buy another newspaper. His purchase will have to go through the anti-trust devision of the Justice Department. Right now, there is no hope of it being stopped. But if every Democratic candidate was to annouce that if they are elected, Murdoch's monopolizing purchase will be stopped cold, it would cool his jets a bit.

I look at the rolling disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Al-Quaeda strikes in Spain, England and other areas since 9/11 and then I listen to these immoral idiots telling me about the success of waterboarding! Jeus H. Christ! How stupid do they think we are? How stupid are they if they believe their own crap?

I assume they are aware that Osama knew that his #1 man had been captured and would talk about future operations and therefore changed those operations. He must have been doing something like that because the years since 9/11 have been great for him and have nearly destroyed us.

P.S. As I type this, an ad for "Charlie Wilson's War" is playing at the top of the screen. It starts tomorrow. I wonder if the movie will point out that Wilson (who dragooned the CIA into supplying ground to air missles to the Afgans to use on the Russians) also taught the Afghans and every other Muslim fanatic in the world that they could defeat a major nation's army AND trained thousands of them, including Osama, on how to do it? Here's some simple math: If no "Charlie Wilson's War" then No 9/11 + no disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nice going Charlie. Nice going Tom Hanks.