I've been asking these questions for some time on various blogs and comment threads, and have yet to be answered:

(1)Will someone who is absolutely convinced on religious grounds that HUMAN life begins at conception (or implantation, or something that happens in the first few hours or days after insemination) point out a reference to any scriptural support for this belief? For those whose point of departure is Protestant, the Bible is the sole source of truth (that is the basis of Protestantism*, after all); yet I have never heard anyone cite chapter and verse on the matter of "ensoulment", i. e. when does a small ball of undifferentiated cells become endowed with the soul that will presumably remain after that body is born, matures, and dies. The only text I know of that refers to anything like abortion (in this case inducing a miscarriage), Exodus 21:22 implies rather the contrary view, that a fetus is not yet a human being.

(2) Granting you hardline "pro-lifers" your premise, doesn't it follow that both the doctor who performs the procedure and the woman who requests it are criminals who should be treated as the law other murderers? In other words, if Roe is overturned and a state law establishes that abortion is murder (1st degree no less, there is clearly a great deal of premeditation) will you want to prosecute the doctor, the mother, and as accessories before and after the fact, the nurses, the clerks and receptionists for the clinic, maybe even the guy who takes out the garbage (OK, that's hyperbole but I haven't had my coffee yet)? If not, why not? I know that logic is not one of your great strengths, but this conclusion seems hard to avoid. Of course, being open about this (as Randall Terry and some others seem to be, to credit at least their consistency) might cost you a lot of your not so certain public support.

But not to be too cute: the loss of Roe as a fund-raising and organizational tool might explain why, with all the Republican political dominance of the last years, this has not happened. Some concern for the fate of the innocent babies** saved after they are born might help to dispel the whiff (nay, the stench) of hypocrisy surrounding this whole miasmic mess.

* If the approach is from the Catholic position, the justification for this seems to be simply that the Church says it is so. But the Church seems to have noticed this problem (abortion) rather recently, and anyway it once decreed that the Earth was the center of the universe, so they could be wrong here too.

**If you really subscribe to the Christian world-view, then since we are all conceived in sin, nobody is innocent...but that's another matter.

I thought I had seen enough wingnuttery to be unshockable, but Drake comparing Tiller to Hitler (with higher marks for the latter) made me gasp out loud.

You'd think that a political commentator would understand something about politics. Which is that it is the art of the possible, that there are three branches of government, that Senators and Representatives have to answer to their own constituents, and that changing the course of an ocean liner is quite different than cornering a sports-car.

It's one thing to point out that we haven't got what we need yet and to keep the pressure from the left on, but quite another to whine and throw tantrums because one man (not a Messiah, not ein fuhrer, not a magician, stage or otherwise) however powerful hasn't made everything right in 4 months. If the employment numbers are really improved by the end of this year and if reform of health care is moving, if the wind-down in Iraq is on schedule and especially if Rush's head is exploding every other day, I will be more satisfied than I have been since...well, since I began to vote in 1960.

If you live in the real world, you accept that the best deal you can get usually leaves everyone partially pleased and partially unhappy. Deal with it.

according to Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. You say that "conservatives have worried that anyone left of Dwight Eisenhower was a Comintern stooge", but Welch wrote (I quote from memory after decades, but it is a truly memorable phrase) that Ike was "a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy". Maybe because he decided to put the kibosh on Joe McCarthy after the latter attacked Gen. Marshall, Ike's idol and "rabbi". But more on account of fluoridation in the drinking water (I kid you not...the gag in Dr. Strangelove was not entirely a gag!).

where someone will answer some simple questions that I have been asking for months on threads like this, with no response.

If you believe that human life begins at conception, on what do you base that belief? Is there Scriptural support for it? (If so, what is it and where is it?)

Is it philosophical? Is it based on scientific evidence? If so, what is that evidence?

If you believe that abortion is murder, so you agree that is should be punished as murder usually is? That is, should both the doctor and the woman who solicits his/her services be punished by life in prison or execution? If not, why not?

It seems to me that most of difficulty hangs on this question: when does a fetus become a human being?

More complicated is the question of when is it moral to sacrifice one life in order to save another...but without some agreement on the former question I think it is impossible to discuss the latter.

If one wants to discuss, that is, and not rant. That's another question entirely.