Tom Rants

• Barrapunto
• BlogMemes
• CoRank
• CoRank Español
• Delicious
• Digg
• Enchílame
• Fresqui Ocio
• Furl
• Google Bookmarks
• Menéame
• Netscape
• Newsvine
• Reddit
• Rojo
• Spurl
• Stumbleupon
• Technorati Favorites
• Yahoo MyWeb

• 26 comments
• 2 trackbacks

You have better odds of winning the lottery than you do of being killed by terrorists.

Also, it is financially unfeasable to fight it as a war. Killing the twin towers...$500.000 tops. Iraq 250 BILLION, Homeland Security $100 + BILLION.

This is how the US defeated communism...we forced them to spend more than they could....it will work on the US as well.

Didn't Osama say something similar about running to the farthest corner of the world and having someone raise a flag that says 'al Quedia' and then have the US military waste all their time and money attempting to dig them out? madmatt - you're right, this is likely their entire strategy. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

Way to take the discussion offtopic.

I think the point of this is that if more anti-abortion protestors put their money where their mouths are, more children would have the opportunity to experience life.

The logic applies to most anything: If you can solve the roots of the problem (in this case, a lack of money) you can remove the problem entirely.

Hot damn, and halleluiah buddy ... I was having this EXACT same thought this morning (too bad I couldn't copyright it). Take all that money spent on (futily) attempting to overturn ROE, put it in prevention (which may require - GASP - a bit of sex ed, but only because it works!) and one day you'll wake up and realize ROE doesn't compel anyone to have an abortion. When the root causes are dug up, abortion will be safe, legal, and (most importantly) rare.

Omigosh, so you're saying we don't need to hide under the covers everytime the Bush administration warns ominously of terrorist threats? And we don't need to tap everyone's phone? And we don't need to throw billions of dollars down the patronage factory known as the Department of Homeland Security? You're sounding pretty subversive there, buddy, I'd watch my step.

This is refreshing esp. coming from the right. What you're saying is, to paraphrase the pope,»be not afraid.» And I agree. Fear is the terrorists greatest weapon. So then why do I see someone (I forget his name) from the RNC gleefully telling Chris Mathews that they'll use it as a political tool in 2006? Because scaring the hell out of every american is about the only way to secure some votes. Wouldn't it be refreshing to hear something hopeful from the WH for a change. A message that brings everyone together and focuses us on the biggest issue we face as a nation:Iraq. Instead we get karl rove antics which is slime the other guy and sowing fear. Why? Because it might work long enough for the next election cycle, that's all.
I'm glad to see the right acknowldge it as well.

Glad to see a sensible observation from the right side of the page. Now, please feed this wisdom back to your friends and party leaders. Our long term security depends on defending individual liberties in the United States.

Thanks for all the comments.

The Bush administration never said to hide under the covers. In fact, what they've said is pretty similar to what I wrote here - go on with your lives.

Terrorism isn't something to lose sleep over - at least not out of fear. It is something to get angry about. When people try to kill us, we should be angry but we should not be cowering in fear. We should also have a healthy realization of what terrorists could do and plan based on that. There also comes a point when we need to ask, as a nation, which measures that were rushed through (acceptably) in an emergency are suitable for long term use. It's a healthy debate to have and the surest evidence that the terrorists haven't won yet is that we're having it.

Yes, totally. As others have said, whew. I'm so glad to see a common sense approach to this.

I myself am getting pretty tired of this constant state of alarmism. We are safer now than we have been since the start of the cold war. People easily forget that for 3 decades the world was roughly 1/2 an hour from total annihilation in a thermonuclear exchange.

That in no way means that terrorism should be ignored. It does mean that people need to keep a sense of perspective, and not run around and think and act from a sense of panic. Our parents and grandparents held it together under a greater threat; it behooves us to act with at least the same level of courage and dignity.

«The Bush administration never said to hide under the covers. In fact, what they’ve said is pretty similar to what I wrote here - go on with your lives.»

Yes, they do say that. But they also clearly manipulate through scare tactics in other ways. They have mastered the art of having it both ways. This way their «base» can continue to pretend that the administration is completely honorable, while the administration continues to get away with near Orwellian manipulation and control.

«Terrorism isn’t something to lose sleep over - at least not out of fear. It is something to get angry about.»

Correct. And it is most certainly not such a threat that we need to throw out Constitutional protections against unjustified search and seizure or the requirement for a speedy trial. As a baby boomer who grew up under the shadow of thousands of nukes, I can't understand why I should be so terrified of a few nuts with bombs that I would be willing to accept mistreatment of prisoners and searches without warrants. We will get these guys, and we'll do it without sacrificing our principles.

If only those terrible men had been aborted, they would never have grown up to become terrorists.

«26,346 babies lost to abortion» in a week! Where are you getting your numbers from?

Some (really) quick math:
U.S. females aged 15-64 (2000 census): 99,324,126

Taking into account the average age of the onset of menopause is 50 years, we can (roughly) extrapolate an approximate count of U.S. women aged 15-50 at 70,945,804.

26,346 abortions a week = 1,369,992 a year

divided by 70,945,804 women with ability to conceive (not taking into account those who, for medical reasons, cannot conceive)=

1 in 52 women between the ages of 15-50 have an abortion EVERY YEAR in America. EVERY YEAR!

So my question is: Who are these people? The only people who I've ever known to use abortion as contraception were single Conservative women who didn't like the feel of condoms or didn't want the hormonal headache that the pill can be. Still, those were about once every 2-3 years. Who are these people?!? Can't we just sterilize them or something?

Carry that math just a little further and you realize that

Sorry about that...

of women have abortions, a lot of Red State women, a lot of Christian women, a lot of married women, a lot of women you know. It is easy to be against legal abortions if you are not in the middle of an unwanted pregnancy.

Note: no man has ever been in the middle of an unwanted pregnancy and neither has Dr. Laura (or maybe she has during her wild oats days).

And actually the numbers for abortion are closer to a Million a year...imagine how low we could get them if you taught kids about...cover your eyes conservies...condoms.

I love how the conservies rail on about abstinence as though that would stop hormonally driven teens. Obviously they don't remember their own youth or they feel everybody should be punished for the mistakes they made. Criminalizing sex is what they are after!

Condoms? No. Birth control pills - 99% effective. The new patch, even better, since it doesn't get forgotten.

JT - the math. Yeah, actually I started from a number of 1,3xx,xxx and divided by 52 to get that, so I'm glad to see it works in reverse. Guess I divided right. Seriously though, I got the specific number I used from the women's issues section of about.com. The number jibed with every other number I'd ever seen and I can't find any that contradict it. I hadn't looked at it the way you suggested, but as you say «1 in 52 women between the ages of 15-50 have an abortion EVERY YEAR in America. EVERY YEAR!» (The CDC said that in 2002 it was 16 per 1,000, which is 1.6:100, instead of 2:104, but not much difference.)

Wading through statistics from the CDC I find a couple of things. First, madmatt is right that the number is closer to a million a year, but the comparison of 1 million a year to 4,000 in 22 years isn't sufficiently different to change the point. Second, I notice that the CDC engaged in what they call «Abortion Surveillance» all through the 1990s, during the Clinton administration.

None of which changes the point that I'd send $1 to Friends of Efrat or a US crisis pregnancy center before I a) bought a years supply of spam or b) sent money to any pro-life or pro-choice PAC. (Because whichever side you come down on politically on the issue, the money will do more good helping pregnant women than it will in the hands of politicians on either side.)

Didn't Kerry say something like «we want to return terrorism to a nusiance.»

And he was vilified by the right for being soft on terror and living in a pre-911 mindset.

I don't think it was the dems who created the Terror Alert Rainbow, and used it to distract attention from Bush's failings.

Terrorism kills less people than auto accidents. On a macro level, it's never been more than a nuisance, though it's obviously a huge tragedy for those involved. But while auto accidents are accidents, acts of terrorism are deliberate. So we get angry about them and want to do something about it - we're not willing to accept even a «nuisance» level of deliberate acts of mass murder. Which is as it should be.

It's amazing to me that the same country that took out Mussolini, Togo AND Hitler in less than 4 years still hasn't taken out Osama, and is bogged down in Iraq.

What's that again about America being the greatest country in the world?

Never read your own press releases, let alone believe them

This really was a great post, and a great thread of comments (so far!).

In response to Post #19 by Tom Hanna, yes, terrorism is a deliberate act. So is murder. So is rape. So is arson. So are the rest of the violent crimes. And yes, we should try to stop them whenever we can, but we must always act proportionately to the harm.

I submit that our actions since 9/11 have gone far beyond the response for the threat of terrorism. We overshot the gree, so to speak. And unfortunately, as much as we have hit the ball too hard, we have also shanked it far to the right, completely missing the true alleged perpetrator of 9/11.

The war on terrorism is a farce intended to keep us in a constant state of war. It is a farce intended to keep much of the population completely fearful and akways voting for the «leader» who can convey the darkest nightmares. We must take a step back and put terrorism into context. Our lives are surrounded by risks. But we don't go shooting 12 gauges at bumble bees, or even worse, shooting 12 gauges where bumble bees never lived.

The thing is, Jews don't beieve life starts until birth and, if my knowledge is correct, not really until three days after birth (you don't mourn babies who die within three days of birth or which are stillborn). So I suspect the motivation of that Israeli organization is not a religious or moral one, but rather a political one (Israel is trying to keep its population growing as fast as possible, becasue the Palestinians are reproducing like rabbits).

That being said, I hope some of you anti-choice types respect the fact that other religions do not believe life starts at conception, which implicates that the determination that aborting apregnancy is not an absolute moral wrong, but is a matter of religious faith and only violates some versions of religious morality. I'm no fan of abortion, and beleive in respecting life, but I am unwilling to impose my beliefs, based in faith and religious conviction, on others. If it wasn't disputable that «life» starts at conception I might feel otherwise, but that simply is not the case. Heck, some philosphers argue that ethical obligatiosn to others don't arise until identity forms - which requires memory and self-awareness. i don't go that far, but it at least highlights the fact that this issue is a religious one and appealing to particular religious principles is required to resolve the issue one way or another. It should give pause to anyone who would impose tennants of their faith on otehrs, which is not what the COnstitution is all about.

lazerlou, you cut to the core of things like a laser on one hand...and completely missed the point on others. What you got right: The organization is focused on the demographic issue, though I think the implication that Jewish mothers don't mourn stillborn infants smacks of the Blood Libel.

What you got wrong. Crisis pregnancy centers