Actually, lawyer face more punishment. Not only can they go to jail and get disbarred, but after they get out of jail, it will be much harder for them to get a job again--actually, it will be illegal for them to work as lawyers unless the bar re-admits them.

Much less common in Ontario than they used to be, but still available.

The US has lots of health-care systems, including some that are funded by The federal government. In fact, we are going broke in part because of those programs. We also have quite a few great docs and medical centers. If you are sick and your insurance is good enough (or you are wealthy enough, or the doc is also nice), and you know how to find the right doc, it is some of the best care in the world.

We also have bad medical care, on a par with or below what most Canadians get, for example, in a lot of our Podunk hospitals. (Their fedgov has just dropped the ball on a huge portion of the bill for health, so the delay times are going to get even longer).

What we lack is complete coverage of the population, coverage that makes it possible to be a rational economic actor, or good preventative care. We also have a really phenomenally stupid way of coupling health care to employment.

Juries can pretty much do what they want, and then they only get overturned if it would be impossible for a reasonable jury to come out the way they did. I don't even thinks that it will matter if they were all high and determined their votes by flipping coins; so long as it is *possible* that a reasonable jury would come out with the verdict they picked. The exceptions lie for things like reading about the trial in the media rather than only learning about it from the witnesses and other evidence.

NASA employs great people and okay people, just like other places. They're not magical.

Witness testimony is bad, but courts pretend it isn't. Overturn on appeal isn't guaranteed, the question on appeal would be whether any reasonable jury could conclude the driver was drunk--fifteen witnesses say yes, one test says no, an appeals panel could say a reasonable jury was entitled to weigh the testimony of fifteen witnesses above the test.

The question in criminal law is usually "beyond a reasonable doubt" in light of all the evidence. That includes drug tests AND testimony. If you have a drug test that showed a BAC of 0.0 and fifteen priests lined up to say they smelled alcohol on a driver's breath after he killed dear old Mrs. Compton, a guilty verdict is not an impossibility.

If we stick our collective heads in the sand for long enough...

they will burn off.

Based on no empirical evidence, I am guessing that rapes are actually more likely to lead to pregnancy than consensual sex because of modern family planning. A woman who is expecting sex is more likely to be using birth control than a woman who is raped.

The CIA has had the same problem, actually--I have heard complaints from their people that the single biggest problem they had was the single-year budget process, and that multi-year budgeting would make their planning much, much, much easier.

They were going to give a non-answer answer anyway. This is just an attempt to avoid any coverage of the issue.

No, on 911. Also, even if there were not other measures in place (e.g. background checks, multiple people in the cockpit, etc...), you could always keep the absurd security for the pilots only.

It's not that they're not doing a "good job"--most interactions with them are fine. It's that they're doing the wrong job.

There are enough horror stories that they get a bad rap, sure. But the bigger point is that they are doing a job that it is stupid for us to be paying for. It inconveniences every traveller in the US and it does not make us significantly safer. Secure the cockpit doors and stop worrying about bombs--if you secure the cockpit doors, all they can do is blow up the plane, and they can blow up a bus so it's a ridiculous waste of money and time to be providing absurd security.

9/11 was (1) an attack that could only work once and (2) about flying the planes. Take away the ability to fly the planes, and the plane is no longer a particularly useful terror target, it's just a target.

Don't get me wrong--I'm happy that there are people working to make terrorist attacks on the US harder. I just don't believe that the TSA is a useful way to spend those resources.

Some of us would like to see friends on other continents from time to time.

Everybody holds congress in contempt. Not many people in their right minds act contemptuously toward Article III judges. Among other things, if the TSA gets the judiciary mad at them, the TSA will begin to find the Fourth Amendment much less friendly.