If you want a really detailed answer, I wrote a very long analysis of Personhood's potential impact on Wisconsin here: http://www.jamesjheaney.com/2012/07/30/per… Basically holds true for other states as well. (Warning: I am pro-Personhood, so, while my analysis answers your question using only neutral legal…

Merely interesting. We often comment and take note when, say, the three women on the SCOTUS write a pro-choice dissent. (This is often followed by calls for more women on the court, or insistence — as by Sen. Reid — that the courts reach the decisions they do because male judges fail to understand female issues.) …

Interesting fact: Judge Elrod, who wrote the decision, is a woman.

Argh, I'd really like to answer some of the questions springing up about this bill (and pose a few of my own), but the text isn't up on Congress.gov yet because the bill was just submitted today. GRAH. It should be illegal for legislators to give press conferences about bills they are proposing without giving a link…

Two different 5th Circuit panels have ruled differently on similar clinic regulations, so I expect it will go to En Banc review. Anything could happen!

You must be right. I've certainly never heard of a single report from a local news network missing relevant context or inaccurately reporting key facts.

But it is very, very rare to find a dead baby (which it may well have been) on the floor of the school bathroom. Police helicopters is *exactly* what I'd expect to see when you have a dead child on school grounds.

It's possible that (like me), she thinks that the abortion episodes of Maude, Scrubs, and Roseanne were failures. She may even think (like me) that sitcoms *always* fail when they try to do Very Special Episodes. None of the examples you give were funny or even entertaining half-hours for me, and (as a result) all…

If you have a fetus outside the womb that is no longer alive, what you have — under the law of the land — is a dead baby. Even in a state with a Freedom of Choice Act, police would be obliged to investigate the circumstances of the death and consider prosecuting the mother for negligence or murder. I suspect that,…

Legally speaking — this is federal law and always has been — a fetus who is born alive already <i>is</i> a living child. You don't gain legal personhood status by surviving for a certain amount of time outside the womb; you have it the instant you exit.

Wonderful to see the good folks of the Star Wars Players Committee get such a high-profile plug!

I thought everyone stopped taking Toobin seriously as a pundit after they started looking at his predictions record. (He thought NFIB v. Sebelius would never even reach the Circuit Court of Appeals, much less win a Commerce Clause restriction at SCOTUS!) But I guess the New Yorker decided otherwise. Oh, well — you…

Electability in a general has never stopped anybody from running for and winning the GOP nomination! Look at Mitt Romney.

The judge who appointed the prosecutor is a Republican, but both the group that brought the criminal complaint and the special prosecutor himself are Democrats.

Actually, over on the Right, I think this has, if anything, boosted his chances. Last week, he was still (nationally) the nincompoop who couldn't remember the third federal department he wanted to get rid of. This week, he's the victim of the most absurd felony charge in the history of politics, having been charged,…

What we have right now is certainly not working, but it is entirely possible for poorly crafted legislation to make things *worse*. One should never pass a bill if one isn't 99% certain what the impact of it will be.

I mean, the outcome is bad, but correct. The FDA is under an obligation to ensure the health and safety of foodstuffs, but helping prevent the rise of superbugs is not part of its mandate. It's Congress's responsibility to pass something to fix this — and Congress should do so, posthaste.

Jezebel, of course, pulled out one line of Sen. Kelly Ayotte's bill and mocked it. According to her press release, the bill adds this (arguably unnecessary) protection / confirmation of current law, but also expands contraception access. Unfortunately, it was only introduced yesterday, so the bill's text is not yet…

Under ecclesiastic law (which literally <i>is</i> the civil law in the Vatican), any person accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty. There's good reason for that: amid the many completely true reports of sex abuse (which make the morning papers), there have been a great many others that were either never…

I've never seen G.I. Joe before, and my wife had to inform me — several minutes into the episode — that G.I. Joe was not actually a single person, but a whole organization of dudes with ridiculous names.

That episode was still beyond amazing. The thing about pop culture references is you don't necessarily have to…