Thank you. I completely agree.

To those who dismiss JusticeIsEquality's post as a hysterical rant: I predict that, fifty years from now, today's Republican Party will be taught in schools as an example of dangerous extremism on a par with the Taliban and perhaps even the Nazis. While I would never claim that Bush was anywhere near as evil as Hitler, it could be argued that the people who voted for Bush and supported his policies were more morally repugnant than the Germans who went along with the Nazis. Remember that most average German citizens did not know about the full extent of the Holocaust until after the war, and every effort was made to present Nazi party officials as compassionate, nice, culturally sensitive people. Remember also that the Nazis provided infrastructure and economic stability, and that casual anti-Semitism was an ingrained German trait for centuries, hardly invented by Hitler. On the other hand, American Republicans saw the Abu Ghraib photos and laughed. They saw the footage of Hurricane Katrina devastation and shrugged. They saw the economy collapse and understood who was suffering and who was profiting. They knew that torture was taking place, that people were losing their jobs and homes while the rich got richer, that people were dying of salmonella because government regulatory agencies were asleep at the wheel. They knew the war in Iraq was a costly mistake that did nothing to make our country safer. They knew all this and more -- and they didn't care. And they still don't care. Their cultural identification is so strong with the Republicans that no amount of empirical evidence will shake them, that no amount of death and destruction caused by their party's policies will move them. How can you not call these people psychopathic monsters? What will it take?

As for abortion: remember that it was legalized in the first place in order to SAVE lives. Abortion is a fact of life: there has always been abortion, there will always be abortion, and a grown-up society is one that acknowledges that and makes it a safe and legal procedure. The only people entitled to have discussions about the ethics of abortion are pregnant women and doctors. The rest of us need to keep it legal and keep our when-does-life-begin soliloquies to ourselves, because they do nothing to help the issue, which is really none of our business.

By the way, I do not come by my position on abortion cheaply. Had abortions been as easy to get in 1961 as they are today I wouldn't be here. But that doesn't matter. A woman must have the right to evict anything living in her body -- period.