jujstin case wrote:

Methinks your understanding of scientists and the publication process is a bit undeveloped

Nope. I just happen to know that statistics can be used to "prove" or demonstrate just about anything one wishes to show - even if the instruments themselves weren't "fudged" or manipulated.

The very best scientific publications, such as in physics, rely on self-consistent mathematical models with predictive capacity.

Most of the social sciences- and much of health sciencce (look at the every increasing pile of "food" research - which snaps every which direction) use statistical procedures that may not even be appropriate to the sample size and contain significant selection effects. Often which aren't even reported. ('The Economist' had an excellent piece on this in its May issue).

Thus, your claim of "not understanding" scientists is naive and fulsome, especially as I used to work in physics for more than twenty years. But at least there, one could use the models, and also test the mathematics behind them - such as anisotropic assumptions for deviations in the E-, B-fields associated with a stellar plasma, or laboratory plasma.

Meanwhile, the negative halls of science are filled with pseudo-work, much of it relying on statistics. You can even go back to Sir Cyril Burt and his fudging of data (for his IQ studies) to show nearly perfect bivariate normal distributions.

The hard fact is YES - some "scientists" are willing to risk all in order to get their work published - especially if they're in a venue in which the "publish or perish" imperative causes them to face a kind of academic "hangman's noose" each day.

For the Democrats in Congress and their apologists who are claiming that they had no political choice but to enact the FISA expansions, this claim is conclusively disproven again and again

Indeed. The Dems have shown again they are enabling punks and wimps. Worse, they are mentally clueless wimps - who appear incapable of crafting cogent rationales to destroy the "soft on terror" crappola ruse. What? Don't they have think tanks to be able to craft these rebuttals? Don't they have people with superior brain power to be able to refute any would-be Rovian attacks?

The 1978 FISA laws were implemented for a very good reason, because the Church Committee, overseen by Sen. Frank Church - found multiple lines of evidence of security agencies overstepping their bounds. Church and others then raised the specter of totalitarianism arriving under the aegis of high-powered domestic surveillance on Americans.

Thus the law which reqired obtaining warrants for all surveillance. The law, moreoever, was flexible, allowing the warrant to be sent up to three days after the fact. What was so wrong, that this small ingredient of caution and oversight had to be abolished? Are we that much in a rush to implement full tilt fascism?

The Dems, as with the earlier military commissions act (the 2nd nail in our civil liberties' coffin after the "Patriot Act") compounded the Bush criminal act (breaking the 1978 law) by turning it into a BAD LAW.

Indeed, then, the Ds have learned nada from their 2006 victory.

What a pathetic bunch of clueless, brainless, mice and losers - so devoid of imagination and intellectual heft that they can't even summon powerful arguments for the defense of civil liberties - as opposed to defecating on them.

I am glad that I became an independent. The two parties are merely two sides of the same coin in the end.

All I can say is 'good riddance' to this calculating swine, who is responsible for the greatest polarization in this country since the 'Nam era. How? By the politicization of the executive branch, and operating it as the HQ of his charging, 'Mayberry Machiavellis' out of Tex-ASS.

I just hope the country can recover from 6 1/2 years of his meddling and undermining of the Constitution as well as the office of the presidency. Personally, I don't think it will ever be the same again, after 'Turd' boy got his chimp in office via the 2000 shenanigans in FL (with the help of that odious reptile Katherine Harris, of course - who kept more than 58,000 blacks from voting by putting them on 'Choice Point' felons' lists. See the first chapter of Greg Palast's The Best Democracy Money Can Buy - including samples of the named rolls he obtained from FL election boards)

It is all too disgusting for words. The odor and manure left in the wake of this pig's departure will take more than a new president to evacuate. More likely - a total disinfecting and fumigation lasting at least one week.