And the American Medical Association also said that Intact Dilation and Extraction (partial-birth abortion) is never medically justified, so why does Obama support it?

Please stop with all the medical crap, because if you want to talk true medical facts, you'll lose -- big time.

The vast majority of the more than 40 million abortions since 1973 were for convenience. Even the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute admits that fewer than 2% of abortions are medically justified.

I'm not going to get into a major pissing contest here, but a minor point:

If one flies an F/A-18 Hornet (hence a Hornet Driver in military parlance), he must be either in the Navy or Marine Corps. The A-10 is an Air Force plane.

And Curtis LeMay was in the Army Air Corps, which became the U.S. Air Force. Hence, Hornet Driver could not be from the same service as LeMay.

Sorry, but I'm anal when it comes to history and had to get that off my chest.

an absolute core virtue of an obama presidency will be his replenishing the ranks of the supreme court and lower federal courts with, you know, qualified candidates. a country based on the rule of law needs judges who respect that rule.

But that's not what Obama has said he would do. Here he is on his judicial philosophy, from July 2007:

"We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/07/17/274143.aspx

Do we really want judges like this? A judge shouldn't know if you're rich, poor, black, white, gay or whatever. Ideally, he should know nothing about you aside from the facts of a case before him and the relevant law.

Our metaphorical image for justice is a blindfolded woman holding a scale, blindfolded because she should be blind to all but the facts of the case and the law.

By Obama's criterion, it doesn't matter if the law is clearly on the side of the rich white guy against the poor, pregnant black teen: the judge should judge for the teen because he has "empathy" for her.

Sounds good to you because you favor this outcome. But just wait a few years and reverse roles, a judge who has empathy for rich white guys because society is always putting them down and, darn it, they're just taxed to death, and they need a break.

You'd be horrified, as would I, because again the social or sexual status of the plaintiff and defendent should be irrelevant to the judge.

Obama's preferrences would lead to horrifying consequences once the law comes in second place behind a person's social status, whether it be high or low.

He can't use both criteria, at least in the courtroom, because one precludes the other.

A judge can be a fine citizen who gives money to the poor, adopts orphans, etc., but when he's sitting on the bench in his official capacity as a judge, the only thing he should take into account is the law and the facts of the case.

Under Obama's criterion, lady justice would be peeking from beneath her blindfold to see whom she should favor based on the person, not what's being weighed in the scales.

Wow, forgot that Dylan quote.

But what's happened in the past is wrong (O.J. Simpson comes to mind), as well as all the Wall Street types with the overwhelming brigades of lawyers steamrolling all opposition through sheer force of numbers and money.

You don't rectify the situation by lurching to the opposite extreme.

The entire process stinks to high heaven. Read here:

http://www.powerlineblog.com

Follow the entire thread since Wednesday on how multiple explanations for "found" votes that all somehow are for Franken.

This is especially egregious because the system Minnesota uses is so airtight. There is no room for "exhausted workers" or "clerical errors" in their system.

The biggest mystery: where are the machine tapes sealed and signed by both Republican and Democratic election judges on election night? In a few cases of "found" votes, they're going by the word of someone who says he "accidentally" wrote down a wrong number instead of the machine-tallied votes that are transmitted electronically to state election officials.

Axelrod had no incentive to lie a month ago. He has every incentive to lie now.

Gee, that's a tough one to figure out.

It would have made perfect sense for Obama to have spoken to the guv about the Senate seat, and he should have just said so. But to lie about it just makes it something that won't go away.

Tick .... tick ... tick.

What word can they append the "-gate" suffix this time?

He is being viewed as a hero throughout the Middle East, and with good reason.

And in every single country where he is being hailed a hero he would have been jailed for the very act they're praising him for.

They [the Iraqis] don't have to deal with the horrific tyranny of Hussein, but now have to deal with the horrific tyranny of a seemingly endless war.

Um, maybe you haven't been paying attention. The war is for the most part over. The streets are crammed with shoppers, the streets clogged with cars. New businesses springing up everywhere.

Is it perfect? No, but considering where it was a mere two years ago, the transition is nearly miraculous.

I always knew that Salon readers were not serious (or sane, for that matter), but the responses here are just silly beyond belief.

Mr. Greenwald presumably has had to take some sort of logic training in order to become a lawyer.

His headline is one large case of begging the question.