Last weekend, I was out cutting an old dead tree down for firewood and assumed it was going to fall the direction it was leaning, but tree and wind had other ideas and it went sideways, with the top landing on the cab of my truck. Ouch.

So, all is well, you did not hurt anybody else.
No, wait... Unless now you have to buy a new one using money from your kid's college fund. :) Damn, at some level, there are almost always consequences for others for one's stupid decisions.

I did inhale.

a la Swedish prostitution laws and aggressively prosecute prostitution rings, and then you break those rules,does that repeal the rules?

That you can get more people willing to impeach a sex hypocrite than a war criminal is nothing new.

That Spitzer's enemies, business and government would tail him is a given. I don't buy that it was a routine audit. Let's see what comes out on that one.

_{1."George Washington did not cross the Delaware for Capitalism," -Shmuley Boteach.
2.The Dems haven't punished the GOP enough, so you're going to reward the Republicans?}

In particular, hypocrisy from a crusader.

But as distasteful as it is, politics is hypocrisy; complaining about it is analogous to complaining about how dirty you got your shovel while digging a ditch.

A much bigger issue is *susceptibility to blackmail*.

Cautions about "honey traps" aren't a staple of security briefings because having sex is *immoral*.

If it is legitimate to make bad choices (that don't harm others) criminal, then we either have a nation behind bars, or an arbitrary system. Take pot: treated as criminal. And many will say that users should go to jail because they broke the law.

Yet stronger arguments could be made against tobacco (its use does harm others - like the 50,000 killed each year by second-hand smoke). It is deemed OK (even though a bad habit), because it is not illegal. All it needs to be illegal is for the law makers to say it is, like they did with pot.

If all bad choices were illegal and people sent to prison for those choices, we'd have a lot more people in prison. Instead, those in power choose which bad choices to make criminal - and thus we have a system that is patently arbitrary and unfair. This is not liberty.

Prostitution? If voluntary and regulated by public health: why not? It would be safer than the illegal system we now have. Forced prostitution? that's definitely not victim-less. But it is those who force who should be prosecuted, not the prostitutes or their johns, unless it can be proven that the johns know the prostitute is indeed being forced.

Agonist is one of my most favorite places. But I'm really disappointed by this post and these comments.

I invite you to read "An American Bill of Responsibilities" at http://charltonrose.com/misc/billresp/ and P!'s "A Nation of One, Pt. 3: Of Rights and Responsibilities" at http://ddjango.blogspot.com/2007/04/nation-of-one-pt-3-of-rights-and.html