And by their works, in aggregate, the Bush Administration is composed of a flock of brain farts. Spitting back factual errors from Maher's humor piece is fine and all, but it isn't turning the flock of brain farts into a collection of Nobel Prize winners, now is it? Have a laugh at the article. Or don't. It's funny precisely because it's on target, regardless of whether it's been fact-checked sufficiently to pass muster with a newspaper editor. It's an opinion piece, not a news story.

You remember opinions, don't you? They were those thoughts we were allowed to have back before the Bush Administration decided that opinions were just a bit to dangerous for regular folk.

Oh, and a big thank you to that nice person who pointed out that deciphering the meaning and intent of old testament biblical text is slightly more involved than simply accepting at face value the psychotic babbling of some pill-popping, wife-cheating, money grubbing, soul killing, mega-church tele-evangelist.

Those thirteen words that begin the 2nd amendment are the ones that our Supreme Court tend to ignore, deciding time and again that the right to bear arms is an individual right, rather than, as indicating by the beginning clause, a collective right (which, as written, it most clearly is).

This tendency to gut the 2nd amendment of its true meaning is by far and away a larger transgression on the part of SCOTUS than is their decision to place their Roe vs. Wade decision under the umbrella of 'privacy rights.'

I would like to note that in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, gun owners tend to natter on about needing their guns in order to protect their god-given rights to own their guns, but you seldom hear them talking about taking up arms to defend the remainder of our bill of rights, which the current Republican Administration have been dismantling brick by brick. Many of the responses to this article suport my observation.

I would hope that eight years of a liberal administration will result in stacking the Supreme Court in such a way that the majority of the justices actually read, parse, and understand the Constitution that should act as the basis of the decisions they render.

" ... 168 people were murdered in Oklahoma City 12 years ago ..."

Didn't we tighten up the regulations on the raw materials used to blow up the building in Oklahoma City? Wouldn't you say that worked, to some degree?

"... and over 3,000 people were murdered on 9/11/2001."

Didn't we harden cockpit doors in response? Doesn't that result in lowering the number of people that can be killed in any attempted or successful hijacking to the number of people on the plane plus the random casualties that may or may not take place on the ground when the plane hits?

I've been surrendering my rights to our government ever since the morning of September 12, 2001. What makes you think the right to purchase and own handguns is somehow special?

Easy enough to find an opinion in support of my statement:

Silveira v. Lockyer, 312 F.3d 1052

And via wikipedia's treatment of the 2nd amendment:

"Akhil Reed Amar, a leading scholar of constitutional law, writes in the left-leaning journal The New Republic that the word people is also used in a collective sense in the US Constitution: "The amendment speaks of a right of 'the people' collectively rather than a right of 'persons' individually.' And it uses a distinctly military phrase: 'bear arms.'"

9th circuit court of appeals:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_case_law#Ninth_Circuit_Court_of_Appeals

I don't believe it's been heard by the Supreme Court yet. When/if it is, I'm more than certain it will be overturned, but I wasn't asked my opinion of whether SCOTUS would or would not uphold the decision.

"Your arguments are specious. Just because one event precedes another doesn't mean that the two are causally linked. So no, I wouldn't say that regulating materials used in the Oklahoma city bombing has necessarily resulted in fewer terrorist attacks."

Bill, feel free to give us a well-thought out opinion on why we shouldn't have bothered to harden cockpit doors on commercial airliners. That should be fun.

"To quote one of my favorite agnostics, Ben Franklin ..."

A Deist. Ben Frankline was a deist. He was also an elitist, because while be believed in Deism, he felt that masses needed the structure of a more organized religion, such as Christianity.

Of course, if he'd had 21st century science at his fingertips, I woul expect he'd be an atheist.

Cheers,

Dave

"You don't go to court with the Supreme Court you want, you go with the Supreme Court you have."

In our country, the U.S. Constitution reigns supreme in matters of federal law. Whether one agrees with the logic behind Roe vs. Wade is irrelevant. SCOTUS really are "the deciders" (to quote a moron) on these sorts of things.

Now SCOTUS gives us a decision that upholds "partial-birth" abortions. Again, whether we as individuals agree or not is irrelevant.

Thank your lucky stars our laws are not interpreted for all times by screaming extremists facing each other across a police-enforced "demilitarized zone."

Yes, I wish that for the last 30+ years the right-wing fundamentalists had chosen to shut up about Roe v. Wade. Just as now I wish the pro-choice lobby would shut up about this decision. It's been made. Your reproductive rights, as defined by Roe v. Wade, have been infringed on. Vote accordingly.