So fanta..

If you are a heterosexual person who gives birth to a child it's no ones business how you rear the product of your sexual exploits?

That is an interesting premise.

If we follow your thinking a biological parent's offspring is merely chattel..no different from a cow, a goat or...even a house or car.

So..I guess not taking your child to the doctor while they die from a treatable disease like diabetes is the same as not changing the oil on a car? After all they are both your possessions right?

Run them into the ground just cause it's what you believe right?

hah I am pro choice and I have been called a monster because of my position more than once. Funny, I could never have an abortion myself nor could I opt out of medical treatment that could save my child's life.

If your premise is legitimate then a parent could legally beat, starve, molest, neglect, kill, torture and abandon their child...but...I guess that's okay right?

I am deeply sickened by people who support on one hand the rights of a cluster or cells that have no personality, no independence, no life...those same people who don't want to pay for child health care, education or food programs arguing that these parents have a right to deny medical care that might save their child's life.

Confused much?

Don't tell me I am wrong please for wondering WTF you all are thinking?

Gee..reading is hard...

Sorry...

I have a unique perspective on reading because both my parents are librarians. Oh, my being old might be a factor too.

It wasn't so long ago...thirty years ago when I was in high school when people saw this coming.

So, that in mind...

READ

The Federalist Papers

1984

Welcome to the Monkey House

Fahrenheit 451

Animal Farm

The Bible

Of Mice and Men

The Age of Reason

Lady Chatterley's Lover

Origin of Species

To Kill a Mockingbird

Tom Sawyer

Siddhartha

Catch-22

Please...I beg you read...read to defeat ignorance..read to defeat darkness...read to create...read to inspire...read...prove we are not just superstitious reactionary animals...I dare you!

I don't want to make this an abortion thread but if a collection of human cells that is indistinguishable from a collection of frog or goat or cow cells is a human being with a right to life you have just taken off the table birth control pills, stem cell research, organ transplants, blood transfusion, large portions of life saving medical research and treatments and so on.

Simplistic thinking and superstition yields uninformed, invalid and unworkable solutions...life simply isn't that simple.

Well...I am sure the conversation would be interesting and fun.

HA HA HA

Ya know Prisoner...you are a poster I occasional respect.

Nice reply...two points.

No using your logic abortion would be legal.

After all you assert it's between the parents and God right?

There is a key difference here. In the case of abortion that collection of cells is not yet a thinking, independent function human being...it cannot live and thrive independently. A child living outside the womb is.

But...I do see some consistency in that side of the argument...better to give birth to them then inadequately educate, cloth and feed them, better to withhold medical treatment and let them die...after all...we can always use more ignorant workers, cannon fodder and poster children to religious freedom.

HA HA HA

"it appears they where exercising thier personal freedom of religion

if they where preaching these things to the public your post may have a ligit point

even those in politics have freedom of religion (even if their actions are a bit foolish)"

If you cannot see the irony here you have very limited vision to be sure.

WOW...just WOW

Guess when Bush used the term "crusade" he really meant it.

Funny too to see the same posters who feel religious people in the United States are attacked unjustly feeling it is perfectly reasonable to attack others because their religion is not theirs.

The hypocrisy here is just too obvious to be ignored.

As for "exercising thier personal freedom of religion" this is a public servant. He swore to protect and defend the Constitution not to wage a religious war.

Any parent who neglects a child's health, when medical intervention could save that child, and embraces voodoo of any type resulting in that child's death..even if the allege they are doing it for religious reasons is a murderer.

I don't care what religion the parents embrace. I don't care if they worship flying spaghetti monsters, cows, trees, crosses, circles, whales, icebergs, dog, aliens...whiskey tango foxtrot ever.

If an aetheist neglects to take her child to a doctor for five years while the kid slowly dies of a chronic but treatable disorder she is a murderer too.

All I am saying here is that people who do this should not be able tolegally justify their neglect behind the guse of religion. It gives all people of faith a bad name.

Oh and as for me saying "those people" their isn't enough space on this or any forum for me to name people of faith I know personally who I deeply respect.

Before you jump on me for using the phrase "those people" perhaps you should examine the context it was used in. Those people whom I respect, who are extraordinary, wonderful and intelligent people of faith are again...simply to numerous to be named in this post.

Try actually reading please instead of picking out phases to throw stones at me...oh and remember please that little saw about people who live in glass houses.

One more time..I don't hate Christians or Christianity.

I have deep respect for many of those people.

I am keenly aware not all Christians are not like this woman.

I do not have any respect for people like the woman in this story who clearly neglected her child and who is now trying to avoid responsibility for the death of her child citing religious freedom.

I think this woman gives all people of faith a very bad name.

I posted this article because it absolutely relates to the op.

How many people who supported the parents of that boy also support this woman?

She killed her child through neglect.

Back in the dark ages when I went to school this book was required reading.

To bad it isn't anymore.

Okay Ladies and Gentlemen...we are fighting religious extremists and terrorist who act outside the law right?

Trouble is we are all those things too.

Please visit the site and see what the religious extremists who acted outside the law did.

This stuff makes me want to throw up.

"This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy."

http://men.style.com/gq/features/topsecret

"War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength" - Watch 1984 online, free.

For those of you here on the politics forum who don't want to or who challenged by reading I give you this gift.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-5464625623984168940

Ah..how comforting it must be for some to think (and I use that term generously) in such stunningly simplistic terms of the world around them as some here clearly seem to do.

Comforting for those non-thinking folks anyway....sad and scary for the rest of us who see them making this country a little more superstitious and stupid every day.

For all you rabid hang 'em high and hang 'em quick folks (I am pro-death penalty) here is a bit of a story that shows why the death penalty should be used only after every legal avenue has been explored.

This is a story of an "expert" and how his testimony convicted one innocent man twice and how he may have ruined alot of lives and the lawyer who is bringing some real justice to bear.

The full story is long and includes some video that is graphic and may upset some readers. So, should you visit the site linked here be aware of that before viewing.

This story reminds us why we must allow defendants every chance at justice.

An excerpt from Reason on-line.

After 10 years in prison, including two spent on death row, Ray Krone was exonerated and released from prison in 2002.

But Krone’s lawyer wasn’t quite finished. In addition to his job as a criminal defense attorney, Christopher Plourd is a legal specialist in forensic science, having served on several government commissions looking at the role of DNA testing in the criminal justice system.

Plourd was livid that his client could have been convicted not once, but twice, based on obviously erroneous testimony that was presented as scientific. It seemed to confirm what Plourd and other critics of bite-mark analysis have long suspected—that there is little "science" behind the method at all. So in 2001, the lawyer decided to conduct a “proficiency test” on some unknowing and prominent bite-mark expert.

Plourd chose Mississippi dentist Michael West for his test. West had long been under fire for dubious testimony in dozens of criminal cases, including one in which he claimed to be able to match the bite marks in a half-eaten bologna sandwich found at the crime scene to the dentition of a defendant. I’ve written extensively on West over the last few years, most recently in a feature about the 1992 Louisiana murder trial and eventual conviction of Jimmie Duncan. In that case, I obtained a video showing West repeatedly jamming Duncan’s dental mold into the body of the young girl Duncan was accused of killing. Forensic specialists say that what West does in the video isn't a remotely acceptable method of analysis, and may amount to criminal evidence tampering. Duncan is on death row in Louisiana, based in part on West's analysis.

Plourd selected West because, even though the dentist was still active in the Mississippi and Louisiana courts, he had been suspended from the American Board of Forensic Odontology since the mid-1990s, and therefore might not be aware of the somewhat notorious Krone case. Plourd was right.

In October 2001, working for Plourd, a private investigator named James Rix sent West the decade-old photographs of the bite marks on Ancona’s breast. Rix told West that the photos were from the three-year-old unsolved murder of a college student in Idaho. Rix then sent West a dental mold of his own teeth, but told him that they came from the chief suspect in the case. He also sent a check for $750, West's retainer fee.

Two months later, West sent Rix a letter and accompanying 20-minute video. In the video, West meticulously explains the methodology he uses to match bite marks to dental molds. Using the photo of Ancona’s bitten breast and Rix's own dental mold, West then reaches the conclusion Plourd and Rix suspected he would: That the mold and the photos were a definite match.

"Notice as I flex the photograph across these teeth how it conforms to the outline very nicely," West explains confidently. "The odds of that happening if these weren’t the teeth that created this bite would be almost astronomical." He adds that the "matching" patterns he found between the photo and the dental mold "could only lead an odontologist to one opinion and that [is] these teeth did create that mark."

Though Plourd’s proficiency test has been noted in court briefs and law journals, this is the first time the video of West’s analysis has been published.

Following the methodology that he has used in more than 100 other cases over the years, West confidently matches a dental mold and a photo of bite marks that have absolutely nothing to do with one another, decorating the fiction with the language of science. Though West is dead wrong, he sounds convincing, and it isn't difficult to imagine how he might prove persuasive to judges and juries.

In February, the National Academy of Sciences published a highly critical report about how forensic evidence is used and abused in the courtroom. The study was especially critical of bite-mark testimony, noting that it has contributed to a number of wrongful convictions over the years. The report concludes that there’s simply “no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others” using bite-mark analysis. Yet bite-mark testimony is still common, and there are still plenty of people in prison as a direct result.

It would be nice to see more "proficiency tests" like Plourd's with West, only not just from defense attorneys. More importantly, the criminal justice system needs to act swiftly when "experts" like West are shown to conduct bogus examinations.

West failed Plourd’s test in 2001. Yet as late as 2003, the Mississippi State Supreme Court still upheld West’s bite-mark testimony in a murder case. In rejecting an appeal by convicted murderer and death row inmate Eddie Lee Howard, the court wrote that “Just because Dr. West has been wrong a lot, does not mean, without something more, that he was wrong here.” And as late as 2006, Mississippi District Attorney Forrest Allgood relied on West’s bite-mark testimony to keep rape and murder convict Kennedy Brewer in prison. Though DNA evidence had shown back in 2003 that Brewer didn’t commit the rape, Allgood argued that because West matched bite marks he claimed to have found on the victim to Brewer’s teeth, Brewer must have bitten the victim while someone else raped her. (Other analysts say the marks weren't even bites.) Brewer remained in prison an additional five years, and was only released in 2008.

Plourd’s video sting ought to move public officials in Mississippi and Louisiana to thoroughly, if belatedly, investigate just how much damage this dentist has inflicted on the judicial systems of those states. There are still dozens of people in prison due in some part to "expert" tetimony that has been shown to be anything but.

http://reason.com/news/show/132574.html

It doesn't matter who Obama nominates.

Some here will howl.

Pretty amusing...didn't see these sorts of posts when Bush put that dolt Roberts on the court. Bush absolutely had a litmus test with his nominees but that's okay with you right?

HA HA HA

So, it's between the parents and God eh? Guess you are all pro-choice then right? Glad to hear you admit it.

Here is where I see a distinction just to be clear. This is a human being, independent, intelligent, fully functioning, with a mind and personality, and truly has a right to life.

Here is a related story.

Tell me...you ridiculous Bible thumpers and indignant boobs who assert that the courts protecting the lives of children is wrong when you see crap like this.

These parents had not taken her child to a doctor since she was three years old? She prayed? This child is dead because of neglect,myth based voodoo and deliberate ignorance. Explain to me why the actions or more accurately the lack of action of her parents okay? Because they claim their religion or God made them do it?

Funny when this murdering, ignorant, superstitious woman gets ill she gets a doctor.

DA: Girl Whose Parents Prayed to Defeat Illness Suffered 'Needless' Death

WAUSAU, Wis. — A Weston woman, accused of praying instead of seeking medical attention for her dying daughter, suffered a medical emergency as her homicide trial got under way but appeared OK about 30 minutes later.

Her case is believed to be the first of its kind in Wisconsin involving faith healing in which someone died and another person was charged with a homicide.

Prosecutors had begun laying out their case against Leilani Neumann, 41, on Saturday morning. About 20 minutes in to their opening statement, as they described the girl's condition the day before she died, Neumann put her head in her arms on the table.

Moments later her attorneys expressed concern, asking for a recess so they could get her some air. She appeared visibly weak as her husband and others escorted her from the courtroom to a downstairs office.

Judge Vincent Howard ordered court security to call 911 and have Neumann medically evaluated.

While she was being examined by paramedics in the office, her defense attorney, Gene Linehan, told the judge Neumann was suffering a total physical and emotional breakdown.

"She claimed she has no feeling in her arms and legs," Linehan said, telling the judge Neumann could not participate in her defense in her current state.

The judge agreed to a recess, saying Neumann "needs a medical evaluation, not a judicial one, at least at this stage."

About 30 minutes later Neumann was brought back to the courtroom in a wheelchair. Her attorney indicated she was going to be OK.

The judge was expected to question her to see whether she'd be fit to continue.

Neumann is charged with second-degree reckless homicide in the Easter 2008 death of her 11-year-old daughter Madeline from undiagnosed diabetes. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison.

Neumann has said her family believes in the Bible, which says healing comes from God, and she never expected her daughter to die.

According to the criminal complaint, Madeline's father considered the girl's illness "a test of faith" and Neumann never considered taking the girl to the doctor because she thought her daughter was under a "spiritual attack."
Related Stories

The family does not belong to an organized religion or faith, Neumann has said.

During opening statements, Assistant District Attorney LaMont Jacobson told the jury this case isn't about religious freedom or religious rights.

"This case is about Madeline Neumann's needless suffering and death," he said.

Jacobson recounted a chronology of events leading up to Madeline's death and got as far as the night before the girl — called Kara by her parents— died.

"Kara was left to lay on a couch overnight in a coma and nothing was done," he said.

It was about that point that Neumann started putting her head down. Jacobson continued, describing how Madeline was lying on the floor, neither talking nor eating.

By nightfall on the eve of her death, Madeline was "completely helpless" and Neumann commented to a friend, "she sensed the spirit or Angel of Death present at her home," Jacobson said.

Moments later the defense raised its concerns about Neumann's health.

An autopsy has determined that Madeline died from diabetes that left her with too little insulin in her body. The girl likely had some symptoms of the disease for several weeks and months, court records said.

The girl was finally taken to a hospital after other family members, including one in California, called 911 to seek emergency help but it was too late.

The parents told investigators Madeline had not been to a doctor since she was 3.

Linehan has said Neumann, a 41-year-old mother of three other children, is expected to testify in her own defense.

Her husband, Dale Neumann, is also charged with second-degree reckless homicide. His trial starts July 23.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520393,00.html

Thoughts on this?

Just hours after Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin voiced her support for embattled Miss California Carrie Prejean, Biblical scholars noted that the alliance between the former and present beauty queens is prophesied in the Holy Scriptures.

While many observers have called the Palin-Prejean link-up predictable, few suspected that it was in fact predicted in The Book of Revelations.

"The unholy alliance between Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean is explicitly stated in the Book of Revelations as a harbinger of the End of Days," said the reverend Dr. Davis Logsdon, Dean of the University of Minnesota's School of Divinity. "They're right in there, after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

But Dr. Logsdon was quick to point out that the first person to notice the Palin-Prejean reference in the Bible's book of prophecy was actually the sixteenth-century seer Nostradamus, legendary for his predictive powers.

According to Dr. Logsdon, in 1555 Nostradamus predicted the alliance between the two right-wing beauties when he wrote, "The slayer of beasts shall meet the barer of breasts."

When asked whether the alliance between Gov. Palin and Miss California means that the world is about to end, Dr. Logsdon was unequivocal: "That would be the best-case scenario."

haha

Fanta says:

"Really!

She's naturally beautiful, she's exhibited hard work and perseverance, she likes men!

What a terrible role model for a young girls!"

Sorry dude...she isn't...breasts are bought and paid for by the CA pageant committee.

Go ahead and ask her out Fanta...let us now how that goes.

I think there are hundreds of thousands of better role models for girls out there. You may have seen them doctors, lawyers, plumbers, teachers, pilots, writers, dancers, service women...competent, honorable, smart women make much better role models for girls be they gay or straight than a girl who rose to fame by playing the poor beset victim of the liberal media me.

Sorry, but I prefer my women smart and sexy.

I am sorry but...this kid is and has been under the constant sway of his parents. Is his opinion really independently formed?

I asked this in my other post and I will ask it again. How many of you all follow your parents religion in the same manner as they did?

Hasn't your relationship with God changed over the years? Even those of you who are very faithful and consistent believers I bet do not fall in lock step with your parents version of faith and obedience.

This kid deserves a chance at living so he can make his own call unfettered by his parents ideas of right and wrong.

As for the lawyer? It's my bet that the kid does have independent council or at least had the option to have it.

In my early married days my then husband was stations at the D&S Piers at Norfolk Naval Base. Even when his boat was in port he had a four day duty section so often had to go on base to see him.

This entailed a trip through the gate manned by marines. Those of us who were younger dreaded the trip. If traffic was slow they would inevitably find reasons to detain you and bring you inside the guard shack.

These detentions were almost always the same. Starting with asking what boat your husband was on to crude suggestions about how they singly or in pairs could help us pass the time they were deployed.

On several occasions there were gropes, shoves and "searches" Sorry, but leaving the car I drove unsearched and putting me against a wall groping my breasts and reaching in my jeans wasn't keeping the base safe.

Funny, they didn't search the older women or the guys.

This abuse of power continued for some time. Most of us were afraid to say anything. Until they picked the wrong woman to grope. The younger and very attractive wife of the Exec officer. The long and short of it is she wasn't afraid to tell her husband, the other wives and the base commander.

The rat bastard marines in question all did brig time.

The question here is who is watching the watchers? Who is holding them accountable? What are the consequence of these sorts of abuses?