JayB

BTW, were you, by any chance, strumming a guitar (acoustic, of course), or vividly imagining yourself doing so when the phrase - "Why should someone profit from someone's illness or injury?..." - popped into your head? Just wondering.

Toad: If your intention was to insult me, rather than pay me an inadvertent compliment, in response to the following statement, ("Why should a professor profit from someone's ignorance..."), you should have written: "The professoriat must have been immeasurably enriched by the mere fact of your existence, then..." or something along those lines, instead of: "Apparently no professor made any money on you..."

Intellectually honest, morally serious critiques are one thing, the feverish conspiromongering born of nothing more than naked partisan animus that prevails here is quite another. I actually find it rather depressing.

Why should a farmer profit from someone's hunger... Why should a professor profit from someone's ignorance... Economic analysis by Leftist nursery rhyme. Fantastic. Glad to see the rousing defense of the WTO rankings, though.

Bob Novak has also forgotten his password, but he'd like to pass along the fact that he's as much a sucker for irony as I am, and given the tone of Matt's recent posts in general, and his last post in particular, he asked me to pass along the following comments: "When Richard Armitage finally acknowledged last week he was my source three years ago in revealing Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA employee, the former deputy secretary of state's interviews obscured what he really did. I want to set the record straight based on firsthand knowledge. First, Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he "thought" might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked, and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former Amb. Joseph Wilson. Second, Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear he considered it especially suited for my column. An accurate depiction of what Armitage actually said deepens the irony of him being my source. He was a foremost internal skeptic of the administration's war policy, and I long had opposed military intervention in Iraq. Zealous foes of George W. Bush transformed me improbably into the president's lapdog. But they cannot fit Armitage into the left-wing fantasy of a well-crafted White House conspiracy to destroy Joe and Valerie Wilson. The news that he and not Karl Rove was the leaker was devastating news for the Left." :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:

Drumroll.... "Responsiveness: The nations with the most responsive health systems are the United States, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Canada, Norway, Netherlands and Sweden. The reason these are all advanced industrial nations is that a number of the elements of responsiveness depend strongly on the availability of resources. In addition, many of these countries were the first to begin addressing the responsiveness of their health systems to people’s needs. Fairness of financial contribution: When WHO measured the fairness of financial contribution to health systems, countries lined up differently. The measurement is based on the fraction of a household’s capacity to spend (income minus food expenditure) that goes on health care (including tax payments, social insurance, private insurance and out of pocket payments). Colombia was the top-rated country in this category, followed by Luxembourg, Belgium, Djibouti, Denmark, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Japan and Finland. Colombia achieved top rank because someone with a low income might pay the equivalent of one dollar per year for health care, while a high- income individual pays 7.6 dollars. Countries judged to have the least fair financing of health systems include Sierra Leone, Myanmar, Brazil, China, Viet Nam, Nepal, Russian Federation, Peru and Cambodia. Brazil, a middle-income nation, ranks low in this table because its people make high out-of-pocket payments for health care. This means a substantial number of households pay a large fraction of their income (after paying for food) on health care. The same explanation applies to the fairness of financing Peru’s health system. The reason why the Russian Federation ranks low is most likely related to the impact of the economic crisis in the 1990s. This has severely reduced government spending on health and led to increased out-of-pocket payment. In North America, Canada rates as the country with the fairest mechanism for health system finance – ranked at 17-19, while the United States is at 54-55. Cuba is the highest among Latin American and Caribbean nations at 23-25. The report indicates – clearly – the attributes of a good health system in relation to the elements of the performance measure, given below. Overall Level of Health: A good health system, above all, contributes to good health. To assess overall population health and thus to judge how well the objective of good health is being achieved, WHO has chosen to use the measure of disability- adjusted life expectancy (DALE). This has the advantage of being directly comparable to life expectancy and is readily compared across populations. The report provides estimates for all countries of disability- adjusted life expectancy. DALE is estimated to equal or exceed 70 years in 24 countries, and 60 years in over half the Member States of WHO. At the other extreme are 32 countries where disability- adjusted life expectancy is estimated to be less than 40 years. Many of these are countries characterised by major epidemics of HIV/AIDS, among other causes. Distribution of Health in the Populations: It is not sufficient to protect or improve the average health of the population, if - at the same time - inequality worsens or remains high because the gain accrues disproportionately to those already enjoying better health. The health system also has the responsibility to try to reduce inequalities by prioritizing actions to improve the health of the worse-off, wherever these inequalities are caused by conditions amenable to intervention. The objective of good health is really twofold: the best attainable average level – goodness – and the smallest feasible differences among individuals and groups – fairness. A gain in either one of these, with no change in the other, constitutes an improvement. Responsiveness: Responsiveness includes two major components. These are (a) respect for persons (including dignity, confidentiality and autonomy of individuals and families to decide about their own health); and (b) client orientation (including prompt attention, access to social support networks during care, quality of basic amenities and choice of provider). Distribution of Financing: There are good and bad ways to raise the resources for a health system, but they are more or less good primarily as they affect how fairly the financial burden is shared. Fair financing, as the name suggests, is only concerned with distribution. It is not related to the total resource bill, nor to how the funds are used. The objectives of the health system do not include any particular level of total spending, either absolutely or relative to income. This is because, at all levels of spending there are other possible uses for the resources devoted to health. The level of funding to allocate to the health system is a social choice – with no correct answer. Nonetheless, the report suggests that countries spending less than around 60 dollars per person per year on health find that their populations are unable to access health services from an adequately performing health system. In order to reflect these attributes, health systems have to carry out certain functions. They build human resources through investment and training, they deliver services, they finance all these activities. They act as the overall stewards of the resources and powers entrusted to them. In focusing on these few universal functions of health systems, the report provides evidence to assist policy-makers as they make choices to improve health system performance."

Glad to see that everyone is satisfied with the soundness of the WHO ranking criteria, though. Anything that ranks Jamaica over South Korea, and Columbia 19 places above New Zealand says "rigorous and methodologically sound" to me.

Can the frequent contributors to this topic who argue on behalf of a "single payer" system please define exactly what they mean by the term? There are a number of permutations that full under the "single-payer" banner, and consequently the "single-payer" system in Switzerland that has secured it a position in the WHO rankings six places below Greece's "single payer" system is not quite the same as the "single payer" system in Canada that has secured the Canadians a spot 18 places beneath Portugal's "single payer" system. Also - one wonders whether administrative overhead is the sole determinant of efficiency. Would something like failure to catch excess billing and fraud be considered an inefficiency in a single payer system. If increasing the administrative overhead resulted in a reduction in both excess and fraudulent billing, and the net result was a reduction in total expenditures, would the administrative overhead necessary to achieve these savings still be considered wasteful?

Christopher Hitchens apparently couldn't remember his password, so he's asked me to pass along his thoughts and share them with the forum. He's apparently especially anxious to see if mattp can summon the zeal necessary to conjure up a point-by-point rebuttal. "If Scooter Libby goes to jail, it will be because he made a telephone call to Tim Russert and because Tim Russert has a different recollection of the conversation. Can this really be the case? And why is such a nugatory issue a legal matter in the first place? Before savoring the full absurdity of the thing, please purge your mind of any preconceptions or confusions. * Mr. Libby was not charged with breaking the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. * Nobody was ever charged with breaking that law, designed to shield the names of covert agents. Indeed, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, determined that the law had not been broken in the first place. * The identity of the person who disclosed the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak—his name is Richard Armitage, incidentally—was known to those investigating the non-illegal leak before the full-dress inquiry began to grind its way through the system, incidentally imprisoning one reporter and consuming thousands of man hours of government time (and in time of war, at that). * In the other two "counts" in the case, both involving conversations with reporters (Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time), Judge Reggie Walton threw out the Miller count while the jury found for Libby on the Cooper count. * The call to Russert was not about Plame in any case; it was a complaint from the vice president's office about Chris Matthews, who was felt by some to have been overstressing the Jewish names associated with the removal of Saddam Hussein. Russert was called in his capacity as bureau chief; any chitchat about Wilson and Plame was secondary. * The call was made after Robert Novak had put his fateful column (generated by Richard Armitage) on the wire, and after he had mentioned Plame's identity to Karl Rove. Click Here! Does it not seem extraordinary that a man can be prosecuted, and now be condemned to a long term of imprisonment, because of an alleged minor inconsistency of testimony in a case where it is admitted that there was no crime and no victim? I know of a senior lawyer in Washington who is betting very good money that if the case is heard again on appeal, the conviction will be reversed. This is for three further reasons, which I call to your attention. 1) There is an important constitutional question regarding Fitzgerald's original jurisdiction. It is a rather nice legal question, having to do with whether, as U.S. attorney for the northern district of Illinois, Fitzgerald is a "principal" or "inferior" officer under the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution. A dozen senior legal scholars have filed an amicus brief, arguing that the authority under which the original prosecutorial investigation was conducted was itself dubious. I have no expertise in this very important matter, but in granting them leave to file, Judge Walton made the following hair-raising comment, which I reproduce in full because it is longer than his order and needs to be read in full: It is an impressive show of public service when twelve prominent and distinguished current and former law professors of well-respected schools are able to amass their collective wisdom in the course of only several days to provide their legal expertise to the Court on behalf of a criminal defendant. The Court trusts that this is a reflection of these eminent academics' willingness in the future to step to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this Court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions even in instances where failure to do so could result in monetary penalties, incarceration, or worse. The Court will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries, as necessary in the interests of justice and equity, whenever similar questions arise in the cases that come before it. 2) This low sarcasm displays not so much bias against the defendant, but actual animus. What does the number of days have to do with it? In how many cases involving poor defendants is an issue of constitutional law involved? Does the judge not know that Libby has already been almost ruined financially and faces incarceration? Would he have adopted the same tone if 12 experts ranging politically from Robert Bork to Alan Dershowitz had filed a brief arguing the opposite position? It's difficult to see how an appeals court can avoid these questions. 3) The judge refused to let the jury hear from a memory expert and would not admit much of the evidence about Libby's extremely heavy workload on matters of pressing national security. An amazing collection of testimonials has been prepared, from all points of the political compass, regarding particularly Libby's concern about inadequate troop levels in Iraq and his work in strengthening the country's defense against bio-warfare terrorism. It seems to some legal observers that the judge's exclusion of some of this exculpatory evidence was a payback for Libby's decision not to take the stand, which is his constitutionally protected right. The rush to prejudge the case and pack Libby off to prison seems near universal. (Patrick Fitzgerald has denounced him for failing to show remorse; a strange charge to make against a man who has announced that he intends to appeal.) Given the unsoundness of the verdict, the extraordinary number of other witnesses who admitted to confusion over dates and times, and the essential triviality of the original matter (an apparently purposeless coverup of a nonleak, in private and legal conversations, involving common knowledge of information that was not known to be classified), it is unlikely that the verdict at present can stand scrutiny, let alone the sentence. But why go through all this irrelevant and secondhand hearsay again? Those who want to "get" someone for "lying us into war" have picked the wrong man and failed to identify a crime. Let them try to impeach the president, who should in the meantime step in to avoid any more waste of public money and time and pardon Libby without further ado"

When's the documentary coming out that chronicles the adventures of the hordes of South Korean's making a pilgrimage to Columbia in search of adequate health care?

1. Per the same set of rankings, Canada comes in 29th, just behind Morocco, and New Zealand ranks 41st, and Colombia comes in at 22nd, just above Sweden. South Korea ranks below Jamaica, Venuezuela, and Albania. 2. Do you two honestly think that ordinary Cubans have access to the resources and standard of care shown in the movie? The World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems. Source: WHO World Health Report - See also Spreadsheet Details (731kb) Rank CountryView this list in alphabetic order View this list in alphabetic order View this list in alphabetic order 1 France 2 Italy 3 San Marino 4 Andorra 5 Malta 6 Singapore 7 Spain 8 Oman 9 Austria 10 Japan 11 Norway 12 Portugal 13 Monaco 14 Greece 15 Iceland 16 Luxembourg 17 Netherlands 18 United Kingdom 19 Ireland 20 Switzerland 21 Belgium 22 Colombia 23 Sweden 24 Cyprus 25 Germany 26 Saudi Arabia 27 United Arab Emirates 28 Israel 29 Morocco 30 Canada 31 Finland 32 Australia 33 Chile 34 Denmark 35 Dominica 36 Costa Rica 37 United States of America 38 Slovenia 39 Cuba 40 Brunei 41 New Zealand 42 Bahrain 43 Croatia 44 Qatar 45 Kuwait 46 Barbados 47 Thailand 48 Czech Republic 49 Malaysia 50 Poland 51 Dominican Republic 52 Tunisia 53 Jamaica 54 Venezuela 55 Albania 56 Seychelles 57 Paraguay 58 South Korea

I'm terribly sorry Jay, but again, you've wandered off from whatever your specialty might be. It's clear it's not health care economics. It's not mine either, but I am married to one of the heavy hitters in the field, and have spent many interesting evenings reading her work. * Cost controls and rationing are not "a fixture of single payer systems" in any way that reflects your use of language. I'd recommend examining Kaiser Permante California's management of doctors as an example of the standard of cost controls used in single payer systems. Doctors believe they don't need management, and they rarely keep up with advances in their field except from drug peddlers. KP ensures that their docs are informed in the best practices in their speciality, and manages them by tracking their outcomes and inputs. Interestingly, KP patients and doctors spend more time on preventive care than anywhere else in the USA as it is clearly a results effective method of controlling costs. * The vast majority of allocation of health care resources is currently done by the government through planning that is partially research driven and partially driven by lobbying by major insurance companies. If a particular procedure will not be covered or funded by CMS or NIH, there will be little to no research or practice of the procedure in the USA. No research means none at all. The "market" does not drive health care research in the USA; as the research arm of the single largest by expense health plan in the world, CMS drives virtually all health care research. If you're interested and in DC, I'd suggest that you go to some brown bag seminars and read some papers from the health policy groups at APT, Urban and Mathematica-MPR. Most of the studies are funded by CMS, and are therefore freely available. CMS also has a large body of freely available papers. Somebody wrote above that docs are humans too. That is so damn true. You've got a responsibility to doctor shop, just as you try to find a good mechanic, school for your children or anything else. Remember, you're HIRING them, and they work for you... Some basic questions you should at least consider asking before any invasive procedures: 1) how many times have you personally performed this procedure? 2) how many times was the procedure successful, and what is your definition of success? What was your follow up procedure? How long is your time interval of follow up? 3) how many times did the procedure fail? what were your follow up procedures and how did you correct the error that lead to the procedure failing? Doctors hate it; they trained in school to think that they're gods, not humans. It's your body. EDIT: Personally, I loathe Michael Moore. He has a track record of embellishment and truth bending that I find offensive and just as dangerous as the demagogery of Rush Limbaugh. While his "health care numbers" may or may not be accurate, I must question the integrity of his argument and the specific use or abuse of any statistic he might (mis)use. The second hand condescension in your post would be more appropriate if it was based on an actual refutation of my main point. There are a number of things about the market for health-care in the US that make it unique - but at the end of the day real demand for health-care is driven by phenomena that can't be managed, unless you assume that the total incidence of disease, car-wrecks, pregnancy, cuts, breaks, bruises, migraines, cough, colds, herpes, AIDs, etc can be centrally controlled by fiats issued an omniscient bureaucracy of some sort. Demand will always be an independent variable. Effective demand will be a function of the afflicted party's ability and/or willingness to pay for the care that they want or need with their own resources or those furnished by another party, or some combination of both. Any single payer will have a finite pool of resources with which to satisfy these demands. Once the total costs required to satisfy total demand reach a certain threshold, the only means that the single-payer entity will have at its disposal to do so will be via price controls or rationing. There is no escape from this. None. Once the price controls and rationing are in place, the only means by which the single-payer will have to coordinate supply with demand is by estimating the latter, and allocating a specific quantity of resources to fulfill it. Demand that exceeds this allocation will not be satisfied, and the end result will be denial of care, wait-listing, or both. What happens to supply, and it's responsiveness to demand, when you cap prices is equally inexorable. Ever wonder why so few doctors accept new Medicaid patients? Think it has anything to do with the cost of providing their care relative to what doctors are paid to provide it? Now to move on to a couple of the micro-points embedded in your post: 1) How, exactly, does anything you've written above undermine the claim that cost controls at least as onerous as those imposed by private insurers will be inevitable in a single payer model? Kaiser and Medicaid use various measures to minimize outlays and this undermines my statement - how? 2)If a given procedure won't be covered by Medicaid or the NIH, there will be no research into or *practice* of the procedure in the USA? So cosmetic surgery and LASIK - just to take a couple of examples - aren't practiced here? Cialis and Minoxodil were brought to market at the behest of the effective demand generated by NIH research grants and Medicaid reimbursement schedules? Claiming that these factors play a significant role in shaping research priorities and effective demand is one thing, but pretending that they are the only variables at play in the medical marketplace that determine what treatments eventually make it to market is just insane. 3)How would the elements of the doctor-patient relationship that you dislike be improved under a single-payer system?

Still waiving this wet noodle around, I see. Perhaps the sponsors of this bill are not vehemently opposed to re-establishing checks and balances and the rule of law. Perhaps they are also willing to compromise to attain these valuable objectives. Perhaps both Republicans and Democrats are interested in these very same goals. Welcome to politics. And the fact that FISA, or any complex piece of legislation, may be amended every now and then, for political or procedural purposes, should be news to no one. Legislation need not be flawless to be fundamentally sound. They didn't amend the rules for "procedural and political purposes," or for any vague and nebulous purposes such as "restoring the rule of law." If that was their only purpose, they would have simply insisted that the present administration and all that followed strictly abide by the existing, unmodified rules. They recognized that the statute, as written, needed to be amended to provide for effective intelligence gathering and they did so.

Read that bill yet, oh serious one? Have any comment on why a Democrat might co-sponsor such a thing? My point vis-a-vis Condorcet is that those who agitate for domestic revolutions are often amongst their first victims. You have neither much of a point nor much knowledge of how congress works. Bills such as this always have bipartisan sponsorship if they are to have a prayer of passing. That's legislative business as usual. Yawn. Let's have another yawn for the contents of the bill, which I have read. The only controversial sections deal with enhanced surveillance powers during wartime, and what exactly constitutes wartime. In the aggregate, the bill seeks to re-establish the rule of law and checks and balances over secret surveillance, something that has not existed since the Bush administration started it's extra legal (according to the courts) NSA spying program. In other words, you can't possibly be serious with this 'hard hitting' posting... ...Oh Serious One. Right - they need bipartisan sponsorship if they have a prayer of passing, so people in the legislature routinely attach their names to bills that promote objectives that they are vehemently opposed to because - that's just how things work over there. That's also why they proposed legislation that amends the rules and procedures, because the ones in place already are clearly flawless and not in need of any modification.

As opposed to the grand Islamic conspiracy where we have a billion people trying to destroy the US in a grand social war that the right gets their rocks off on? Open hostility is one thing, a conspiracy is quite another.

Consider the "9/11 Truth" movement. This is the most abundantly documented, exquisitely investigated incident in the history of mankind, yet an astonishingly high percentage of your ideological counterparts have convinced themselves that the collapse of the towers, the attack on the pentagon, etc were an elaborately orchestrated conspiracy conducted by their own government. This story has had no support whatsoever in any legitimate media.

Read that bill yet, oh serious one? Have any comment on why a Democrat might co-sponsor such a thing? My point vis-a-vis Condorcet is that those who agitate for domestic revolutions are often amongst their first victims.

Good question. I suppose that depends upon what you'd like to pass along and who your anticipated audience is. My much-beloved grandfather on my Dad's side (my Mom still tears up on a regular basis whenever he's discussed) died when I was four, and consequently I only have a few fleeting memories of him. I probably would have devoured any written material that he left behind, irrespective of how it was written or organized but, so far as I can tell, there was none. I'd say write first, ask questions later, on the off chance that the folks that are closest to you may take some comfort from or find some inspiration in what you've left behind.

Yup. Pretty short road from the end of Condorcet to the beginning of Marat and Robespierre.* *Help: "Condorcet took a leading role when the French Revolution swept France in 1789, hoping for a rationalist reconstruction of society, and championed many liberal causes. As a result, in 1791 he was elected as a Paris representative in the Assemblée, and then became the secretary of the Assembly. The institution adopted Condorcet's design for state education system, and he drafted a proposed Bourbon Constitution for the new France. He advocated women's suffrage for the new government, writing an article for Journal de la Société de 1789, and by publishing De l'admission des femmes au droit de cité ("For the Admission to the Rights of Citizenship For Women")in 1790. There were two competing views on which direction France should go, embodied by two political parties: the moderate Girondists, and the more radical Montagnards, led by Maximilien Robespierre, who favored purging France of its royal past (Ancien Régime). Condorcet was quite independent, but still counted many friends in the Girondist party. He presided over the Assembly as the Girondist held the majority, until it was replaced by the National Convention, elected in order to design a new constitution (the French Constitution of 1793), and which abolished the monarchy in favor of the French Republic as a consequence of the Flight to Varennes. At the time of King Louis XVI's trial, the Girondists had, however, lost their majority in the Convention. Condorcet, who opposed the death penalty but still supported the trial itself, spoke out against the execution of the King during the public vote at the Convention. From that moment on, he was usually considered a Girondist. The Montagnards were becoming more and more influential in the Convention as the King's "betrayal" was confirming their theories. One of them, Marie-Jean Hérault de Seychelles, a member, like Condorcet, of the Constitution's Commission, misrepresented many ideas from Condorcet's draft and presented what was called a Montagnard Constitution. Condorcet criticized the new work, and as a result, he was branded a traitor. On October 3, 1793, a warrant was issued for Condorcet's arrest. The warrant forced Condorcet into hiding. He hid for five months in the house of Mme. Vernet, Rue Servandoni, in Paris. It was there that he wrote Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (English translation: Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind), which was published posthumously in 1795 and is considered one of the major texts of the Enlightenment and of historical thought. It narrates the history of civilization as one of progress in the sciences, shows the intimate connection between scientific progress and the development of human rights and justice, and outlines the features of a future rational society entirely shaped by scientific knowledge. On March 25, 1794 Condorcet, convinced he was no longer safe, left his hideout and attempted to flee Paris. Two days later he was arrested in Clamart and imprisoned in the Bourg-la-Reine (or, as it was known during the Revolution, Bourg-l'Égalité, "Equality Borough" rather than "Queen's Borough"). Two days after that, he was found dead in his cell. The most widely accepted theory is that his friend, Pierre Jean George Cabanis, gave him a poison which he eventually used. However, some historians believe that he may have been murdered (perhaps because he was too loved and respected to be executed)."

MGBC: If nothing else has worked, this stuff might be worth trying: http://www.zanfel.com/ One day I was convinced that I had a serious exposure and gladly forked over the funds for the stuff and gave the skin that I was worried about a thorough cleansing. The reaction never materialized, probably because I misidentified the plant and didn't actually come into contact with poison ivy - but as someone that was cursed with fairly sensitive skin, and with a passionate loathing for itch-related discomfort, it seemed like a bargain at $40 a tube, even if half of the promises on the label were true. After looking over the list of ingredients, it looks to me like it's composed of a panel of reasonably strong detergents, some mild abrasives, and one or two emulsifiers - none of which I would expect to work given the urishiol's mode of action, but they do have quite the litany of testimonials on the site, which seem to be corroborated on blogs and whatnot elsewhere on the web. http://www.rockclimbing.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=1618617;guest=15018011 Genuine? Bogus? Who knows. If you are miserable enough that the $40/tube price seems like a bargain, give it a shot and let us know if it actually works.

You are also apparently aware that members of the Democratic party helped to sponsor and draft legislation that would address some of the concerns and objections raised by the administration. If both were completely without merit and little more than an open window for grievous civil rights abuses and naked criminality I don't imagine such efforts would have been forthcoming. The sane members of your party are serious. You are not. With regards to the prosecutors, part of doing their job means directing their efforts in a manner that's consistent with the administration's law-enforcement priorities. If a particular administration thinks that prosecuting X is more vital to the national interest than prosecuting Y, and a prosecutor insists on using his or her offices resources to prosecute Y, the administration is perfectly within their rights to fire them since they serve at the pleasure of the president. This is why most presidents clean-house and appoint their own prosecutors when they enter office. You seem to be convinced that they were fired because they were directed to use the resources of their office in a manner that was consistent with a personal or party interest, rather than a legitimate national interest. This may be, and if it is, then I won't cry any tears for whoever gets the axe - but I'm also not terribly keen for Congress to secure the ability to have carte blance when it comes to getting their hands on internal communications within the executive branch, so it won't bother me too much if the Supreme Court has to adjudicate here. This would be true regardless of which party had the office. You could just as well consider this matter with regards to the present war.

"Some claim a place in the list of patriots, by an acrimonious and unremitting opposition to the court. This mark is by no means infallible. Patriotism is not necessarily included in rebellion. A man may hate his king, yet not love his country."

"Anybody else notice how JayB and KK cannot seem to defend the Bush administration's actions but in thread after thread feel the need to attack anybody who complains about it as partisan?" Exhibit A chimes in. You are to morally and intellectually serious political discussions what "Loose Change" is to the Warren Commission. Most of the issues that you brought up have to be discussed at length to be discussed seriously, and I have tried to do so on various occasions, but simply don't have the time to respond in that fashion to every histrionic missive that you and the rest of the incantations that you and the rest of the chorus here chant repeatedly on a daily basis. I think I've actually addressed every one of those issues in other posts, and you are welcome to search them out and review them at your leisure. While you are doing so, perhaps you'd like to comment on this piece of legislation: http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_cr/s3001.pdf Take special note of the sponsors.

I have to say, I'm not terribly enamored of the idea of jailhouse justice. Much prefer that punishments inflicted therein be limited to those specified by the law. If we collectively decide that violent anal-rape is a reasonable and just punishment for a given offense, then we should include that in the sentence. If I recall correctly, there was a young activist protesting the Vietnam war who was arrested for engaging in civil disobedience and intentionally thrown in a cell with some of the most violent and notorious sodomites - to borrow a turn of phrase from "The Shawshank Redemption" - who proceeded to take turns on the guy. The odds are quite high that if I met the guy I wouldn't be a fan of either him or his politics, and accepting the punishment specified for the laws that you are intentionally breaking is part of the civil-disobedience game, but what happened to this guy always struck me as an especially tragic and grotesque miscarriage of justice.

"Politics: A strife of interest masquerading as a contest of principles." Yawn. Ah yes, the lament of the righteous heretic. As a played-out self-serving political trope, it's right up there with the "Reluctant-Warrior-Who-Wants-Nothing-More-Than-Peace-But-Who-Is-Forced -To-Whup-Some-Serious-Ass---One....Last....time..." And about as convincing as the oft-mouthed "That's it I'm Moving to Canada...sooon. Seriously. Really. Honest." type stuff that was echoing across the aisles of every Restoration Hardware in the country a few days after the '04 election. Might well drop the pretense that your outrage is inspired by anything other than naked partisan zeal until the fervor/rageo-o-meter stops red-lining after every action the administration takes.