GRAND RAPIDS — A Michigan school district told a teacher activated for military duty that he must cover the cost of a substitute during part of his absence and give the district some of his military pay.

How is that even, you know, legal? Isn’t military duty covered by state salary contracts? At any rate, if National Guardsmen were treated like this back in say, 1972, then it’s not hard to understand why Bush might have wanted out.
(Ed. I guess that’ll have to pass for humour on this blog.)

The Labor Department reported Thursday that for the week ending Nov. 15, new claims for jobless benefits declined by a seasonally adjusted 15,000 to 355,000. For seven straight weeks claims have been below the 400,000 mark, suggesting that the job market is turning a corner.

Thank God for that.

I reassured [the patient] that I do not perform the “partial-birth” procedure and that there is no likelihood that the ban’s passage would close my office and keep me from seeing her. The fetus cannot be delivered “alive” in my procedure?as the ban stipulates in defining prohibited procedures?because I begin by giving the fetus an injection that stops its heart immediately. I treat the woman’s cervix to cause it to open during the next two days. On the third day, under anesthesia, the membranes are ruptured, allowing the amniotic fluid to escape. Medicine is given to make the uterus contract, and the dead fetus is delivered or removed with forceps. Many variations of this sequence are possible, depending on the woman’s medical condition and surgical indications.

And then later, he writes the following:

Earlier this year, I began an abortion on a young woman who was 17 weeks pregnant. Because of the two days of prior treatment, the amniotic membranes were visible and bulging. I ruptured the membranes and released the fluid to reduce the risk of amniotic fluid embolism. Then I inserted my forceps into the uterus and applied them to the head of the fetus, which was still alive, since fetal injection is not done at that stage of pregnancy. I closed the forceps, crushing the skull of the fetus, and withdrew the forceps. The fetus, now dead, slid out more or less intact. With the next pass of the forceps, I grasped the placenta, and it came out in one piece. Within a few seconds, I had completed my routine exploration of the uterus and sharp curettage. The blood loss would just fill a tablespoon. The patient, who was awake, hardly felt the operation. She was relieved, grateful, and safe. She wants to have children in the future.

Could it be that he is completely without feeling with regards to these lives he’s snuffing out? Can he really be that cold and uncaring? How does this description, much less the actual, physical procedure, not sicken him with its total lack of humanity and morality?
What he fails to understand is that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban is aimed at stopping exactly this type of procedure, because no matter how clinical you make it sound, the truth is, life is being snuffed out as gruesomely as can be imagined, with such utter detachment it makes Idi Amin look like a humanitarian.

“The intelligence from Bush 1 to Clinton to Bush 2 was consistent” in concluding Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was trying to develop a nuclear capability, Clinton said this morning. And Saddam’s expulsion of weapons inspectors and “the behavior” of his regime “pointed to a continuing effort” to produce WMD, she added.

My, my.
She believes the evidence was sufficient enough to make a case for war. She’s actually defending Bush.
For some reason, I can only think of a number…2008.
I’ve really got to learn to suppress my cynical instincts. They’re making me so…cynical.

Despite the differences over gay marriage, the Democratic presidential candidates agree with most of the policy positions of the Human Rights Campaign. They expressed support for anti-discrimination laws, hate crimes legislation, increased funding for HIV/AIDS research and treatment, and federal domestic partnership benefits.

I wonder how this equates to “marginalization”. Sullivan and the entire gay movement would have you believe that opposition to gay marriage is the civil equivalent to preventing blacks from drinking at the same water fountain as whites.
How much tolerance are the gays shooting for, anyway? The tolerance movement has long since passed into the normalization movement. Tolerance implies acceptance, if only on a limited basis. This the gays have. But they’re not shooting for tolerance anymore. It’s about creating a society where the idea of gayness is as blasse as microwaving a Hot Pocket. After all, that’s what heterosexual marriage is, and in that case, far too many Hot Pockets are simply thrown out after a couple of bites.
What to do, what to do? I do not like the idea of gay marriage; it goes against every moral code I believe in and every traditional idea of marriage that I am familiar with. Yet I cannot argue against it from a Constitutional, legal standpoint.
The only thing that I can even remotely use in my defense is the democratic process. This is a system that, in theory, gives the majority of a group of people to decide the laws of the land. In practice, I know that normally quite the opposite occurs, and with the seeming redefinition of the Constitutional powers granted to the Judicial system by the Judicial system leaves me little hope that a true “democratic process” will prevail in the future of this debate.
According to the democratic majority of the United States, most oppose gay marriages. Even in states like Massachusetts and New Jersey support for gay marriages trickles barely over 50%, with opposition running at about 44%. According to a Globe/WBZ poll, most people favour civil unions over marriages for gays in Massachusetts. A Pew Center poll in 2001 showed only 35 percent of people favor same-sex marriage (see website for full article, and here’s a second source with the similar info, including some graphs charting the polls on various issues such as gay marriage).
By that measure, it should be the people deciding whether they want gay marriage or not. Which falls to the state, not the federal government. If states want gay marriages, let them have it. If not, don’t piss and moan and say you’re being marginalized. If you’re gay and you want to be married that badly, then you’ll do what it takes to do so (make all the inferences you want from that).