Thom, why do you have Horace Cooper on your show? His idea of debate is to talk louder and more incessantly than his opponent. When one listens to him it becomes clear that he is a boorish moron who make Bill Buckley seem astute in contrast.

Roland

It's a norm for food labels to list ingredients. It's not a norm to say how the ingredients were combined. To mandate a special label if and only if ingredients were combined using recombinant DNA -- but not if they were combined using conventional breeding, or using a blender, a mixer, or a percolator -- conveys an implicit message that there's something uniquely dangerous about this particular way of combining things. If there were actually a scientific consensus to that effect, I could support such labels. But there isn't. In fact a leading biologist like Richard Dawkins thinks this campaign is profoundly misguided, as conveyed in his "Open Letter to Prince Charles": http://greatbloke.blogspot.com/2007/03/open-letter-to-prince-charles-ric...

Anyone who thinks GMOs are dangerous anyway knows how to avoid them. But to mandate labels implying this amounts to government disinformation.

Historically, the only thing torture has ever been successful at is to get a victim to confess to a crime they did not commit. The Salem witch trials and the Inquisition are some examples. The main motive for using torture was extortion. Once the victim confessed to a trumped up crime the state took their property and divided it up. Today, we see the same old song. The state forces innocent victims to confess to terrorism; thus, creating a terrorist threat enabling them to extort money from the American People to fight it. The MAJOR problem with this policy is that once the right not to be tortured has been removed from the law, anyone can be tortured. Precisely why we have to fight for our right, not to be tortured. The beginning of that fight has to be with the prosecution of the people in power who ordered it. No one is above the law!

Justice Scalia undoubtedly kwows for a fact that there is no way that any unconstitutional wrong doing could ever be done by any republican administration. So, if torture was done by the Bush administration it must have been constitutional and the right thing to do. So if you're reading the constitution as saying torture is unconstitutional, you're just reading it wrong??? I'm getting concerned about Justice Scalia's sanity.

Gator Girl ~ You took the words right out of my mouth! Bravo. I wonder why Thom didn't cite that most obvious Amendment that every 6th grader--at least when I was a kid--knows by heart.

Scalia is a very dangerous man. He and his lackeys are singlehandedly responsible for the destruction of this nation, its laws, and everything it used to stand for. In a perfect world Scalia and his ilk would be brought up as accessories after the fact on the same charges the Bush administration deserves.

Scalia should be removed from his seat!

Great post, Gator Girl. Personally, I believe that all five of the oligarchs within the SCOTUS need to be removed. Especially after the grievous Citizens United fiasco.

Is Scalie right on anything anymore? Not that I can see and he can't even remember what he wrote in opinions just a couple of years ago. The man is losing his mind and needs to be taken out before he can do more damage that he has already done.

As for torture, the following may apply"

The 8th Amendment

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

I do believe that torture is cruel and unusual punishment

The man is dangerous

Perhaps Scalia is a masochist, and really enjoys being tortured. Let's make him ecstatic.

You know what I find especially troubling about the people who defend torture and even most of the people speaking against it? Many of the people U.S. shipped to Guantanamo to be tortured posed absolutely no threat to U.S. in the first place.

Let me give one specific example.

Dr. Hafizullah, an Aghan tribal elder with a long anti-Taliban track who had once been imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban for refusing to live by their social edicts. He was elected governor of Afghanistan's Zurmat province after 2001. Very popular and competent, but became a victim of Kabul politicking and was replaced by a Hamid Karzai funky.

Under this new administration crime soared, police robbed merchants and motorists. It got so bad that the government formed an emergency task force to be lead by Dr. Hafizullah, in order to crack down against growing anti government sentiment. Any one caught opposing Kabul would have his house burned down—a local tribal custom—and be fined nearly $50,000.

Hardly the actions of a Taliban supporter—yet that's how Hafizullah was branded. His criminal investigations began to embarass the powers that be. The final straw was when he found a get away car involved in a reported $3,000 theft of local shopkeepers sitting brazenly by the main police station, which was under the command of Abdullah Mujahed, a key American ally.

Hafzullah publicly humiliated this criminal police chief and forced him to repay the victims.

Abdullah Mujahed quickly avenged him by informing the Americans, falsely, that Hafizullah was a Taliban double agent. He was promptly shipped to Guantanamo.

There are many other Hafizullahs that I give examples of. Sorry I couldn't make my point a little more concisely. To better understand what I'm talking about please read Anand Gopal's "No Good Men Among The Living". Or at least look up his interview on "Democracy Now!".

It's times like this, Matt, when I think you're a shill for big business

There are certain standards that have to be maintained and children deserve not to be indoctrinated,

There is nothing that anyone teaches that can't be viewed as "indoctrination" by someone else. Even basic things, like using a base-10-digit system in math, aren't universal. To someone whose culture counts in groups of 60 (like some Native American tribes), this is indoctrination.

That's why we have separation of church and state, ideology is no different than religion in this and most other instances. Just like we don't need, and it doesn't serve them well, to teach children Creationism instead of Darwinism in science and biology class, religion or ideology being taught as history doesn't help them any either.

Perhaps you should just worry about raising your own children, and not telling other people how to raise theirs.

If the problem is Koch brother's ideology being mandated from central planning, then the solution is to get rid of the central planning. Let each community set its own curriculum based on that community's values. And, if their children can't compete in the global economy, that's their problem.

Democrats are a somewhat softer line of the same big business policy party. These days they campaign as progressives but govern as moderate Republicans in a regular "bait and switch" scam. Ralph Nader described in his book, Crashing the Party, Joe Lieberman, toward the end of the 2000 election campaign, when Al Gore was saying, "I'm gonna fight for you against the oil companies and big business!", would be on the phone with those same oil companies and big businesses that same night assuring them that Gore didn't meant ANY of it. He was just flim flammin' the public and you understand that, of course.
I knew as soon as he appointed Rahm Emmanuel, Mister " Where else are they (Democratic Party voters) gonna go?", his chief of staff that the only "change" we were gonna see was in Obama's tune.

I mean, I hate intrellectual elitism but Americans (particularly but perhaps all people, as well) are doddering idiots. They think daddy (Warbucks - Reagan, Dick Chenney, H. W. Bush, Mitch, Mitt, Big Business, "your father's" Republican Party, etc.) is gonna take care of them and they just have to suck their asses and be obedient while the paranthetically forementioned keep the traditional paternalistic attitude a master takes to his slaves. He's cynically exploiting them and they place all their trust in him.

It's the perennial, universal, "lost dog" mentality of the exploited that throughout the world and throughout the ages has undergirded the relationships of the ruling classes to the masses and which Marx analyzed and laid out scientifically. He showed that the exploited and enslaved segments of society typically believe that their exploitation is "right, just, and even for their own benefit."

(quote from college Sociology 101 text)
Feudal serfs, African American slaves, women and now, the industrial worker are all examples of this - although the informed, urban proletariat, according to Marx, being free from the usual accompanying superstitions and ignorance (presuming they are), should have an advantage in overcoming this.