In other words: “Dave is wrong about RSS because he is a liberal.” is an ad hominem, whereas: “Dave is an idiot” is simply an insult. There is a distinct difference between the two. The dictionary definition of the term doesn’t really do it justice, but in terms of arguments and logic, that’s what it means.

In fact, I’ve written several times about how Dave mis-uses the term “ad hominem” to discred those who disagree with him instead of responding to their arguments. He manages to use “ad hominem” AS an ad hominem.

As for the engines… the link I posted goes into great detail about what happened to the engines as well as the rest of the plane. Give it a watch. Science is your friend.

In other words, you can attack someone’s arguments (e.g. x person said this and that is wrong because of Y) as much as you want and it isn’t an “ad hominem” attack. It is only when you attack their person (e.g. This person is an idiot) that you get into that territory.

As far as I can tell from reading over the last few entries and from memory of the entries before I can’t think of a time where the author has attacked Dave’s person. It is all fairly topic based (in almost every occasion he goes so far as to quote the post he is responding to)

…sounds like the woe-filled lamentations that we heard from the folks on the far right at the end of the Clinton’s term in office. Not surprisingly, Clinton’s attempts to expand the reach of the presidency (skirting purjury laws, line-item vetos, etc…) didn’t have the far-reaching or long-standing effect that some folks claimed they would.

That, of course, is not proof that this will be exactly the same, but it should at least lend some skepticism that such thoughts are frequent and natural.

It’s likely that the most indellible effect that Bush’s term will have on the country is the appointment of two young Supreme Court justices and, luckily, it doesn’t look like he managed to appoint another Scalia or Ginsburg.

This kind of reminds me of Ralph Nader’s hoary old “heightening the contradictions” argument that Bush’s win in 2000 would be good for liberals by showing how much worse things are without us running things.

I hope there’s something good to come from such a bad presidency, but I fear we’re through the rabbit hole here.

I think people are over-looking a key point of information here: Bush’s hubris is actually helping justice and the American way. Because of his arrogance, things that have been going on for decades are now being brought to light and codified… which, frankly, is about the only way the judicial branch is going to get any oversight of them.

Yes, it looks horrible, and a great many people are making political hay out of it, but Bush really isn’t doing anything new or different… he’s just doing it publicly. That doesn’t make it right, of course, and that’s not really something to credit him for, but it is something we should all be thankful for.

…or at least those among us who realize that this is not a harbinger of the end times.

Before you start off on some conspiracy theorist rant, you might want to watch this video: http://www.lolloosechange.co.nr/ — education is a wonderful thing.

I know this doesn’t jibe with what you learned in 8th grade, but this is actually how things are supposed to be done. There are a great many reasons why the Supreme Court might find something. Most of those reasons can be cured by congress. It happens all the time. For example, in U.S. v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995), the Court held that congress had no authority to ban firearms in a school zone because such an action exceeded their authority under the commerce clause.

Congress later fixed the bill by making the fact that the gun had moved in interstate commerce an element of the crime, thereby restricting the law’s reach to only those cases allowed to it by the Commerce Clause. If you read Hamdan, you should notice that the Supreme Court’s major concern was the lack of congressional authority for what was going on, it was not a holding of the Supreme Court that Hamdan was being tortured. Congress took that as a cue and shored up what problems they could in the form of a bill.

There might still be constitutional problems with the bill, and if there are, you can bet that the Supreme Court will take the first case that petitions for cert. to clear that up.

You could’ve said the same thing six months ago to people who said the Bush administration would advocate waterboarding and other forms of torture. We’re living under a ridiculous president in ridiculous times. Who knows how far they’ll try to take things, especially if they thing the first thing that follows their term of office is prosecution?