Thanks to the concept of original sin, none of the already born are completely innocent.

Therefore Republican blocking of single payer health care does not cause the death of innocents.

Surely, Roman Catholic doctrine would hold that original sin inheres in a human being from the moment of conception, not from the moment of live birth, so Aycharaych's notion of "complete innocence" would be no more applicable to a foetus than to any person after birth.

In 1928 the Citizenship Manual for soldiers read as follows:

"Our Constitutional fathers, [snip] that they had founded a republic."

This was stripped away by FDR in 1952 to read:

"Meaning of democracy. [snip]"

In 1952, FDR had been dead for seven years. What's your point?

There's a fundamental difference between (a) common espionage between different countries -- which virtually every country on the planet does and always has done -- and (b) a government spying on its own citizens.

Agreed, but if I understood kingfelix07 correctly, he was asking what difference there is between (a) a government spying on its own citizens, and (b) two or more governments, such as those of USA and UK, agreeing to conduct warantless eavesdropping or surveillance on each other's citizens and then to exchange their entire raw intelligence "take" from that eavesdropping or surveillance.

(1) Do you know whether the USA is actually party to any such "operating arrangements", and (2) in your view, would such a practice pass statutory or constitutional scrutiny in the USA?

What you describe as "a black eagle reminiscent of the Nazi symbol" looks to me to be just a silhouetted version of the eagle in the official seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. Eye of the beholder, I guess.

A long time ago (in the late '50s or early '60s), the Partisan Review published a mock proposal for the establishment of an Office of Nomenclature Stabilization. If I recall correctly, the author purported to be advancing this proposal in the interest of protecting the powerless (generally infants) from the folly of the more powerful (most often their parents).

The author then listed (at considerable length) some examples of egregious offenses. I remember only a few, but I think they serve to illustrate the silliness of this whole issue:

Phoebe B. Beebe Peabody

Margaret P. Wyper-Dexter

Nancy Ann Cianci

a Parisian prefect of police, Alfonse Bidet

Clearly, the parents of both Ms. Wyper-Dexter and M. Bidet should be absolved of any folly. They merely passed on a surname (no matter how many prior generations of its bearers may have endured ridicule). The parents of Mrs. Peabody (nee Beebe) and of Ms. Cianci, however, must bear at least the suspicion that they weren't thinking very carefully -- no matter how familiar or "conventional" their choices of given names -- when they named their children.

Names that -- alone or in combination, in standard or non-standard spellings and punctuations, at one time or another -- may seem risible to almost everyone but the name-givers are the result of many influences. Racial, linguistic, generational, ethnic, religious, class, and economic rivalries and hostilities will always make some things appear "laughable" to someone. What people find "laughable" is more often a product of rivalry or hostility than of empathy or comity. That's life. As a species, we're just not always very admirable. Fortunately, we also tend to be oblivious of how laughable others find our own "folly".

"Political policy differences"????? Is that what you call the undisputedly illegal detention of a person as a "material witness" for six months or more because the government had NO BASIS WHATSOEVER for bringing the actual criminal charges of which it apparently suspected that person? When an attorney general simply sweeps the Fifth Amendment under the rug by wilfully and blatantly mis-construing the material-witness statutes, that's not a "political policy difference". That's a criminal act. If successor attorneys general decline to prosecute, what other recourse does a person have but to bring suit against the offending former attorney general personally?

True: We have decided as a country to give up the "freedom" part of things. The terrorists have won. RIP the freedom experiment that was the USA.

-- CarolCrown, Sunday, November 1, 2009 08:12 AM

and that is perhaps the most discouraging truth of all -- that "we" have actually decided "as a country" without any participation whatsoever in that decision-making by a very large number of citizens who would have advocated a very different outcome. Many of us citizens vested our last hope of reversing that decision in our votes for a presidential candidate who pledged repeatedly to do so. So much for the efficacy of suffrage in this, Our American Empire.