Two problems both of which, ironically enough, caused by the anti-death penalty groups and both of which are described above in several other posts.

1) Due to medical licensing regulations, most medical professionals in the US are not permitted to take part directly in executions. That in conjunction with the relative rarity of executions means the people administering the lethal cocktail are generally poorly trained.

2) The manufactures of many of the drugs that would be considered more humane for the purposes of lethal injection directly prohibit their use for that purpose. This leads to the people from problem #1 messing with less effective drugs to try and create a new lethal cocktail.

I don't believe any country in the world has a blanket law making killing illegal. Murder is illegal, but not simply 'killing' (most people over the age of 10 can understand the distinction).

Furthermore, since the illegality of an action is a decision made by the state, if the state create rules under which they can kill someone it is by definition, not illegal. It's not even illegal for citizens to kill other citizens under state specified conditions.

With over 33,000 assaults annually on prison staff by inmates I would hardly consider an incarcerated violent criminal to be "no present danger to anybody", not to mention inmate on inmate assaults. Until such time that all prisons are run by robots, a violent offender, even behind bars, has the potential to cause bodily harm to someone else.

That is not a defense of capital punishment, just a statement of fact.

Here are the numbers from the Guttmacher Institute study from 2004 (subjects were permitted to give multiple responses - at least 89% did) :

        74% felt "having a baby would dramatically change my life" (which includes interrupting education, interfering with job and career, and/or concern over other children or dependents)
        73% felt they "can't afford a baby now" (due to various reasons such as being unmarried, being a student, inability to afford childcare or basic needs of life, etc.)
        48% "don't want to be a single mother or [were] having relationship problem[s]"
        38% "have completed [their] childbearing"
        32% were "not ready for a(nother) child"
        25% "don't want people to know I had sex or got pregnant"
        22% "don't feel mature enough to raise a(nother) child"
        14% felt their "husband or partner wants me to have an abortion"
        13% said there were "possible problems affecting the health of the fetus"
        12% said there were "physical problems with my health"
        6% felt their "parents want me to have an abortion"
        1% said they were "a victim of rape"
        0.5% "became pregnant as a result of incest"

So the vast majority of respondents definitely gave answers that indicated convenience as a primary factor in their abortion decision (change in lifestyle, money). Health concerns don't show up until the very bottom of the list.

The entire ER free loader myth is just that, a myth. I believe Forbes pegged the costs of uninsured visiting emergency rooms in the US to a little under 1% (yes that's less than a single percent) of health care costs. They described it as a 'rounding error' in their report.

On the other hand the failure of the Government to pay for actual expenses for Medicaid/Medicare patients costs providers significantly more. That's the primary reason fewer and fewer hospitals and doctors accept Medicaid patients nowadays; it actually costs them money to see someone on a Government plan once their actual expenses are calculated.

So complain about health care costs all you want but in reality it is costing people with insurance a hell of a lot more to cover the costs of people with Government care than it is for people with no care whatsoever.

From all accounts he both continued and even extended LGBT friendly practices at Mozilla.

The ONLY thing ever said about him was he donated to Prop 8 and because of that it was assumed (I would guess rightfully so) that he believed the legal definition of marriage should remain 1 man 1 woman (as did the majority of Californians at the time). No one has ever come forward, to my knowledge, to say he ever put forward any proposals to limit same sex benefits at any place he ever had any control over.

Studies show that while aggressive drivers can cause traffic jams with their late braking, and may be your main problem, in general it is the timid drivers that cause the majority of traffic jams.

Leaving too much distance between cars, randomly braking, going excessively slow while merging and not capitalizing on turning lights all contribute to create huge interruptions in traffic flow. My personal favorite is the driver who watches crosswalk lights to try and predict the transitions from green to yellow because they are terrified of yellow lights.

Just for clarification, both of Bush's wars were started with Congressional approval and not by executive order. You might be mistaking them with Obama's incursion into Libya which was in fact by executive order only with no congressional involvement.

I'm trying to figure out how forcing someone to provide a service to another person (for whatever reason) does not have an affect on the person PROVDING the service.

For the cake buyers: their initial state is cakeless.
When they are refused a cake: their final state is cakeless.

There has been no change to their state of well being or a violation of any liberty. They are in the exact same point as where they started and are not restricted from making their own cake or finding another baker. They may be slightly upset over having their cake order refused but there is no constitutional protection from having your feelings hurt.

For the baker: Initial state is he is living his lives according to their beliefs
After being forced to cater a gay wedding: not only has he violated his beliefs but he's had to sacrifice his resources (time and product) to do so.

Only 1 party in this transaction has had any major change in their status and that is the baker.

If you disagree with this baker the proper option is to open up a competing bakery which does provide services to gay weddings and let the market decide. In reality, in one bakery case the owner was told that he would have to provide services for all gay weddings in the future or face up to 12 months in prison and another closed his shop and started working out of his home because of the harassment from organized gay rights groups and death threats to his children.

In at least one of the original cases (I believe the cake one) and possibly both, the business owners DID in fact give the couple a list of other businesses that would be fine with providing the service they needed. There didn't appear to be any animosity on the businesses part, merely a deep held religious belief that they did not want to violate. The couples decided to sue anyway out of spite and not out of lack of options.

In a proper free market, a privately owned business would have the right to discriminate based on whatever criteria they wanted with the complete knowledge that in doing so they would be opening themselves up to potential competition. You bake cakes but don't do gay weddings, then another baker can open up and grab not only the gay wedding business but that of those who are offended by your choice.

They are not government entities so shouldn't have to cater to all members of the community but in most cases actively discriminating against a certain clientele is just simply bad for business.

Up until 1980 Barry was in fact a name he commonly went by. It was also a nickname his father adopted in 1959 when first coming to the US so calls of racism is hardly accurate. Just like it's not racist to refer to G.W.B. as Dubya. For good or bad it's merely a nickname.

As for leadership, getting caught in the act and then taking half a year to react is hardly leadership, it's a PR response, nothing more.

The average wait from an Obama nomination to appointment is about 240 days, it was 277 under Bush (that was from Politifact). His appointment do spend more time on the floor for debate but much less time in committee. The big issue is he is 44% slower in even bothering to nominate anyone (compared to Clinton and Bush) which, when added to retirements and other planned/unplanned vacancies had led to a large increase in open appointment slots. That in turn is used to make the Senate approval process look completely out of whack with his recent predecessors, when in fact it's not all that unusual with the baseline set during Bush 2s time in office.

The best analysis is on judicial appointees, and as of his first term Obama had a 80.5% (173 out of 215) confirmation rate while Bush had a 77.4% rate (192 out of 248). Those numbers are from the Congressional Research Service.

The original 30+ million uninsured included Medicaid, Medicare and Chip eligible persons who were not enrolled, but still technically covered if anything happened. There were also a very large number of financially secure people who chose not to ensure. The actual number of involuntary uninsured was somewhere in the teens to low 20's (though some put that number even lower).

The predictions for the rate of uninsured, after the ACA, by the CBO itself, is almost identical, 30million plus.

The Medicare, Medicaid and Chip users should now be registered but the people who choose not to buy are still likely not to (the fine is unenforceable and a pittance compared to most yearly plan rates). But now you can add the relative poor, who even with subsidies cannot afford the increased plan prices.

There is also a new group, those who were insured but can now play the insurance lotto. Since they cannot be denied coverage when needed, if they're willing to pay out of pocket for the waiting period between enrollment and coverage, they can simply cancel their plans and wait to see if anything catastrophic happens, then enroll. And by catastrophic I mean cancer not broken bone (which can often cost less to pay cash for than going through insurance anyway). So this person can save thousands a year and if something unforeseeable happens, pay their medical expenses for a couple months until their new policy takes affect. If they put even half of their normal premiums into a savings account, in most cases this would be a financial win for them.

What free market exists when the government dictates by fiat what must be included in every product sold? Companies are free to add extra benefits (although that can lead to the gold-plated tax) but the base level has been raised for EVERYONE regardless of whether or not those benefits are of any use.

And how do you price your policy for males when you're not legally allowed to separate the sexes in your pricing policy? The same policy has to be available to both sexes. In fact, since more of the added benefits are geared towards women their new policies, while also going up relative to their old ones, are increasing significantly less than an equal aged mans.

The main difference in pricing comes from network, deductible and co-pay options, which directly impact out of pocket expenses.

So if you were paying $200 a month prior, now that everyone's been tossed in the same pool and additional benefits have been forced, you're either going to pay more (national average increase is 41% according to Forbes) or take drastic hits to available hospitals and a massive increase in deductibles and co-pays.

The majority of pre-ACA plans cannot be grandfathered according the the very tight restrictions placed on the grandfather clause. Almost any change, even including adjustments for inflation or age, automatically invalidate the plan and make it a violation of the ACA.

This was not an accident and is mentioned in discussion within the administration from the beginning.