In a lot of discussions about free speech in America, typically referring to the First Amendment, I've seen what feels like conflation of several different ideas into one concept, leading to the use of strawmen to avoid actual discussion, often unintentionally. I'm not a constitutional scholar, but from decades of reading and recent court cases, I can tease apart the separate issues.

Give me some runway to define the situation before I get to the heart: consequences to speakers who engage in extreme speech.

Government-run institutions, whether at a local or federal level, can't pick and choose the speech they allow. That's the fundamental bedrock of free expression in America: in whatever fora are available in which some people may speak (or simply be), the government cannot choose among various kinds of expression and choose which is acceptable and which isn't. The sole exception is a sub-category of hate speech,

There's a weird debate raging right now in the U.S. If you're not an American, you're going to be baffled by this. Pharmacists want the right to refuse on ethical or moral grounds to fulfill certain prescriptions. Now, now, I know that if you're outside the U.S., you're checking your calendar to see if it's April 1. This isn't about Christian Scientists getting jobs in drugstores and then not selling any drugs (although that would be a great test case). Rather, it's about people with specific religious beliefs wanting to exercise those in a regulated environment to deny legal drugs or devices to people with a prescription from a medical doctor or another professional with a right to prescribe.

Here's The Seattle Times and The Seattle P-I on an information meeting by the state Pharmacy Board in Washington yesterday. The problem isn't someone abusing a drug--I'd like to

I never thought I would write these words: I have great admiration for Bob Barr. Most of his policy positions and his method of campaigning are abhorrent to me. But his out-of-office role as defender of the Bill of Rights is quite remarkable, especially when he stands up in front of Republicans and points out that that party should come after country.

There's a fundamental problem with Bush's stance on his role as executive, and that is that his faithful are (or perhaps were) largely defending him because of a host of reasons mostly related to personal trust or party affiliation, not law or reason. If Clinton had attempted this seizure of power from checks and balances, I'd be dismayed, too, even more so because Clinton was a lawyer, was a scholar.

Here's the key line from Dana Milbank's Washington Post story:

"Whether it's a sitting president when I was

I've been seeing a concierge practice doctor for several years now since he and his partner decided after the departure of two of their colleagues to form their own high-priced retainer service to opt for a middle-class one. I pay several hundred dollars a year for unlimited care from my doctor. This has been invaluable to me, although more useful when I was coordinating my cancer care in 1998 than in recent years. Until Ben's first cold several months ago, I had avoided any cold or flu that was more than a passing runny nose for two years. Now I've had several colds via Ben, and I don't blame him a bit.

Concierge medicine involves a doctor assuming only the risk to provide their service to a patient and the services of their office. This has caused Washington State's insurance commissioner to investigate the practice as he believes it might

Does any small fraction of our population understand that WalMart is a scourge not because it offers low prices, but because it's destroying our healthcare system?

The company has 1.33 million employees. According to a leaked memo in today's NY Times on reducing health-care costs, 46 percent of those employees children are uninsured or on Medicaid. Because WalMart pays essentially poverty wages (legally), when they replace jobs in communities through their predatory practices that first drive out businesses through underpricing, they do the following:

• Reduce money going into the community. They don't grow jobs, they replace them, typically higher-paid jobs within a town or city with lower-paid jobs often outside the tax boundaries.
• Reduce tax revenue. Despite selling lots of merchandise, they often replace revenue rather than increasing it. Because people are paid less and the owners aren't local so that profit is spent local, money is sucked to

By denying a Democratic move to raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 an hour ($10,300 per year for a full-time job) to $6.25 over 18 months, the Senate Republicans have decided that on one hand, wages don't need to increase along with inflation's affect on decreasing buying power and, yet, on the other that business isn't increasing its revenues at least as fast as inflation. The most recent previous proposal by the marvelous and bilious Sen. Ted Kennedy was for a $2.15 increase (to $7.30) over 26 months, and this reduction picked up a vote.

A Republican counterproposal would have kept the $1.10 increase but required a remarkable array of horrible add-ons, such as allowing "flex-time," in which overtime one week could be made up through undertime another. These senators are pretending that people working these kinds of jobs have the easy flexibility

New Orleans police are confiscating all firearms in the city, even those registered, but not those carried openly by private security guards protecting rich folks' property. Huh. Shouldn't the NRA get involved in this blatant 2nd amendment violation?

It's still about who's rich.

I've only seen this mentioned once in all of the coverage I've read of the descent to madness in New Orleans:

a) What percentage of New Orleans residents were estimated to be hard drug users before the evacuation?

b) What percentage afterwards?

People keep writing about a breakdown in order and so forth, and mention deteriorating mental health as one reason. The other is certainly withdrawal. There were no extra drugs in the city, and I imagine rich dealers fled along with the rest of the middle and upper class of the city.

If 100,000 people were left behind, which was the early official estimate (about 20 percent of 480,000 residents), and just 1,000 of them were drug users--thus estimating the drug usage in the city at 0.2%, laughably low for an urban town--then you have crazy people on the loose hallucinating, with the shakes, with

I had this thought this morning that the architect of smaller government (which hasn't happened under Bush) has always talked about shrinking government to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub.

I wonder what he would have been saying about drowning and bathtubs had he been on a roof in New Orleans for this last week wondering why the money and organization that would have allowed him to be rescued had disappeared?

Norquist et al. haven't shrunk government one bit. They've reduced taxes on the wealthy while tacitly not criticizing the massive growth in non-entitlement spending on military and homeland security that has, apparently, resulted in zero additional preparedness and zero additional international terrorist attacks.

No modern Republican president has shrunk government while shrinking deficits. Only one Democrat has.

See Daily Kos for a good image and comments.

There's nothing I can say about the hurricane or the government's response that hasn't been said elsewhere.

My only hope is that the callousness of the Bushies and the inadequate, terrible, unsympathetic response on their part will finally alert the red states to understand that these millionaires and power-hungry zealots don't care a rat's ass for them.

Where will the money come from rebuilding? From the blue states, as it has for the south many times before. Where will the private donations come from? In largest portion from the blue states.

When will someone stand up Rodney King like and say, "Can't we all just get along?"

Totally frightening article in Salon today about how the CDC, drug companies, and others suppressed clear evidence linking thimerosol to autism. Thimerosal is a mercury-derived preservative that used to be widely used. A friend with a fellowship at Oxford in 1990-1991 had me ship her non-mercury-containing saline solution from the US because the mercury-free version was unavailable in England at that time.

In the past, there has been a lot of bad science, supposition, and conspiracy theories that connect this preservative with increased rates of autism. Unfortunately for those of us who were skeptical, this Salon/Rolling Stone article that relies on information obtained via the Freedom of Information Act shows that beginning in the Clinton Administration, a determined effort has kept the good science, direct correlation, and actual conspiracies secret.

We have not had our son exposed to thimerosal because the CDC currently advises that it thinks it is