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McClatchy's story helps explain the fuller context:

In the rear window of the 1993 blue Ford Taurus that he was driving was

a red rose, a symbol often used by abortion opponents. On the rear of

his car was a Christian fish symbol with the word "Jesus" inside...

Dinwiddie said she met Roeder while picketing outside the Kansas

City Planned Parenthood clinic in 1996. Roeder walked into the clinic

and asked to see the doctor, Robert Crist, she said.

"Robert

Crist came out and he stared at him for approximately 45 seconds," she

said. "Then he (Roeder) said, 'I've seen you now.' Then he turned his

back and walked away, and they were scared to death. On the way out, he

gave me a great big hug and he said, 'I've seen you in the newspaper. I

just love what you're doing.'"

And this:

In April 1996, Roeder was arrested in Topeka after Shawnee County

sheriff's deputies stopped him for not having a proper license plate.

In his car, officers said they found ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse

cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder and two 9-volt batteries, with one

connected to a switch that could have been used to trigger a bomb.

Jim Jimerson, supervisor of the Kansas City ATF's bomb and arson unit, worked on the case.

"There

wasn't enough there to blow up a building,'' Jimerson said at the time,

``but it could make several powerful pipe bombs...There was definitely

enough there to kill somebody.''

The fusion of religion with politics is a dangerous, dangerous thing.

The president hails the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. The proclamation lists campaign promises with no pledge to achieve them and no sign of action on any of them.

Over at NRO I have an article suggesting that the Tea Party movement adopt as its program what I am calling “Reagan’s Unfinished Agenda.”? In one sentence, it describes a way of going on offense, and getting out of the defensive crouch that is the dominant posture of conservatives at the moment.

… starting in 1987, Reagan offered a more comprehensive package he called the ?SEconomic Bill of Rights.? In addition to the balanced-budget and line-item veto amendments, Reagan proposed three additional amendments that would impose a federal spending limit, require a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate for any tax increases, and prohibit wage and price controls.

There are plenty of instances of misleading and otherwise bad stats being used by anti-piracy groups, like the recent BSA numbers from Canada that were basically made up. Now, a group from the UK is saying that piracy costs that country's economy tens of billions of pounds. It makes the same mistake as plenty of other studies before it: counting every instance of piracy, or perhaps even just the availability of copyrighted material on file-sharing networks, as a lost sale. It's fallacious to assume that every single person that downloads a piece of content, or simply has access to it for free, would pay for it if the free version wasn't available. Furthermore, any study like this that says an entire economy is being harmed by X amount of money because of piracy is pretty much bogus. This money that's supposedly being lost because of piracy isn't being lost by the economy, as undoubtedly it's being spent elsewhere. It's not being flushed down the toilet or turned into ether, it's just not ending up in content companies' bank accounts.

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Roosevelt particularly liked Holmes' opinions in labor cases, for he expressed more sympathy for labor unions than most judges of his day. But TR was mostly interested in Holmes' views on the emerging American empire. Shortly after the Spanish-American War, President Theodore Roosevelt was concerned that the Supreme Court might insist that all constitutional guarantees extended to our newly-acquired empire-in popular parlance, that "the Constitution follows the flag." In 1902, TR sought and obtained a pledge from Holmes that he would not apply this standard. Holmes then lied to the press about his secret meeting with the President. He dutifully voted with the majority in the so-called Insular Cases, which held, for example that the right to a jury trial did not extend to Filipinos or Hawaiian....

For most of his career, Holmes really didn't believe that there were any constitutional limits at all to government power. He advocated the complete separation of law and morality, writing, "I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether," he wrote, "and other words adopted which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the law." He continued, "Manifestly... nothing but confusion of thought can result from assuming that the rights of man in a moral sense are equally rights in the sense of the Constitution and the law." Essentially, he thought that the majority had the power to impose its will on the minority, for good or ill. In 1873 he wrote that "It is no sufficient condemnation of legislation that it favors one class at the expense of another, for much or all legislation does that.... Legislation is necessarily a means by which a body, having the power, puts burdens which are disagreeable to them on the shoulders of somebody else." Holmes himself confessed in 1919 that he had come "devilish near to believing that ‘might makes right.'"

It's not surprising when Vice President Dick Cheney disagrees with President Obama. But it is surprising when he takes a more progressive position than the president.

Said Cheney: "I think that freedom means freedom for everyone. As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay, and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support. I do believe that... historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis... But I don't have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that."