One of them is the charging pregnant women thing; Deliberate abortion is legal, but accidentally killing your baby results in a murder charge? Wow.

Well this is one of the ironies of most of the pro-choice women I’ve met. They will rant and raved like a hysterical banshee about their sovereign right to vacuum out their unborn child’s brains, but want to crucify a woman who wants to smoke while going to term. In their feeble little minds, it’s better to outright take the child’s life than risk doing minor harm by smoking tobacco.

Too bad the Framers didn’t take this doctor’s advice:
“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others: The Constitution of this Republic should make a special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.”
— Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence

How terrible.

Moreover, again, what function does a cordless hammer have in your body’s biochemistry? Most people do *not* have the highly specialised skills required to judge drug interactions, having people kill themselves en-mass by accident is generally considered a bad thing.

Well, I think so. You apparently disagree. Not to mention the drugs where there are public health effects. (quite apart from antibiotics, there are some drugs which are contradicted for use while driving, for instance)

One of them is the charging pregnant women thing; Deliberate abortion is legal, but accidentally killing your baby results in a murder charge? Wow.

The other trend is the growing tendency for authorities to charge people based on appearances, rather than what actually happened. Someone does something innocuous and entirely legal, someone else wildly misinterprets it and freaks out. And when the dust settles, the person who didn’t break any laws gets charged with the misinterpretation (which would be illegal…if it had actually happened).

So when they collide, we’ll probably see a pregnant woman get brutalized in such a way the baby dies, then see the woman charged with murder.

I think you just argued for instituting a policy in which the Lowe’s Depot Pharmacist is required to discuss every table saw transaction with every customer (aka: if you prefer, potential future Emergency Room patients with their fingers in Zip Loc baggies). Nearer to the bottom of that slippery slope, where would one go to obtain a scrip for a Dewalt 1/2″ 18V cordless hammer drill? “Well, son, I think the 18V might just be a little much for you. There’s an Ace Harware down next to Arty’s Hot Weiner’s with some 14.4s that would be just right for you.”

You can ask the guy and he may or may not know that much. You know, or are. at least, pretty darn sure that it does what you want done, you purchase it with your own hard-earned money, and you take your chances. Doesn’t matter if it’s meds, saws, beer, cars, porn, or forcing all children under the age of 6 to wear a safety helmet at all times other than when they’re asleep.

There are risks associsate with everything and some of us non-condesecendingly assume that most of the rest of the population is capable of assessing it on their own, performing their own cost-benefit analysis against their own needs and desires. Some people are actually pretty swell at taking care of themselves.

Or are you just trying to protect the, uh, less able amongst us, Leon? It might not be as noble a gesture as you seem to be assuming that it is.

@39 – Exactly.

It disturbs me that the biggest no-no’s in legal ethics are mixing client funds with your own or pretending to be a lawyer when you are not. However, corrupting the truth to send an innocent man to prison or death row rarely gets touched.

Anderson~

What was it in his 200 pardons–192 of them to former inmates that had served their “time” but were convicted felons unable to vote or own a weapon–perverted?

It was the most apolitical act in his political career.

They should probably warn people not to do that. Maybe a good place for that would be on the commercials for birth control pills.

The MS Supreme Court made the right decision. The powers of pardon, clemency and commutation are some of the most important powers granted to the executive to check the judicial and legislative branches. The pardon power has also become one of the most infrequently exercised executive powers, especially at the federal level, where it has become a sacrosanct tradition for the President to annually mock the pardon process by pardoning a turkey, usually while simultaneously being stingy about pardoning actual convicts. This is a grotesque national disgrace.

It is extremely important to give governors and presidents broad latitude to exercise their pardon and clemency powers. The judiciary and legislature should intervene only in the most extreme circumstances, if at all. If the public is unhappy with a governor’s or a president’s exercise of pardon or clemency, it can vote him out of office at the next election. Impeachment or recall can be used if the electorate or legislature are particularly appalled and want an immediate remedy.

The problem with judicial or legislative interference in the pardon process is that it is ripe for abuse and easily able to neutralize a very important executive power that is often practically the only vestige of mercy in a very vindictive legal culture. Restricting pardon, clemency or commutation powers is a slippery slope. In the current political climate it will not be used only to check governors who use these powers dubiously, like Haley Barbour, but also those who use them more equitably, honestly and to much better ends, like Mike Huckabee and George Ryan. Even in this case, where Barbour’s motivations appear to have been pretty perverted, it’s good to see a court reject a challenge to a governor’s power to pardon convicts as he sees fit. Lisa Madigan’s unanimous judicial slapdown for challenging George Ryan’s de facto closure of death row was even better.

I can’t remember a single time a pharmacist has ever given me counseling on a drug. Well, one told me that paying extra for Synthroid over generic was a waste of money and I believe he was flat wrong there (he wasn’t the one who had to go in for months of tweaking and blood tests every time the generic formulation changed).