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Hmmmm, I'm sensing censorship!!!!

Odd.  I'm just sensing CYA...   :?

I haven't been reversing myself often enough lately, but this looks like an opportunity to get in some much needed practice.   8)  Here goes:

My earlier opinion was wrong.  In time honored tradition, I blame the misinformation given out by the London Police.  However, I should have known better than to accept an official police statement at face value so soon after anything, much less a shooting death.  Sorry about that.

Admittedly, the man's death had a poetic justice quality to it (what with jumping the turnstile and all).  However, if the actions of professional police forces were meant to be judged by their potential as dramatic devices, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and the Keystone Cops would be the absolute pinnacles of law enforcement history.  Whether or not the suspect "needed killin'" is irrelevent.

Did the agents act properly?  Would I have pulled the trigger in their place?  I honestly can't say.  Perhaps I would have attempted to verify that the man was carrying explosives.  Perhaps I would have looked for evidence of a detonator switch.  Perhaps I'd have shot only once.  Or perhaps, having a few rounds left, I would not have stopped with one suspect.

Such things always depend on the circumstances.   

As the three plain-clothes officers closed in on Mr Menezes, they say that they screamed their first warning that they were armed police. Their version is that he turned, ran into the station concourse, vaulted the ticket barriers and reached a waiting train before they could catch him. They shot him five times in the head when they believed that he was trying to trigger a bomb.

His cousin, Alex Alves, claims in one account that Mr Menezes was “playing around with a friend in a game of chase outside the station”.

The police insist that he was alone during the entire journey.

Another family member said that he had recently been attacked and robbed in that area by a gang of young white men and thought the plain-clothes officers were muggers.

By far the most controversial claim comes from a number of witnesses who have cast doubt on police statements that they shouted a warning or identified themselves to the suspect before opening fire.

Lee Ruston, 32, who was on the platform, said that he did not hear any of the three shout “police” or anything like it. Mr Ruston, a construction company director, said that he saw two of the officers put on their blue baseball caps marked “police” but that the frightened electrician could not have seen that happen because he had his back to the officers and was running with his head down.

Mr Ruston remembers one of the Scotland Yard team screaming into a radio as they were running. Mr Ruston thought the man that they were chasing “looked Asian” as he tumbled on to a waiting Northern Line train.

Less than a minute later Mr Menezes was pinned to the floor of the carriage by two men while a third officer fired five shots into the base of his skull.

Again, Mr Ruston says that no verbal warning was given.

NASA is completing an internal review that proposes using an expendable launch vehicle derived from space shuttle components to launch and complete the International Space Station following retirement of the shuttle orbiters in 2010, according to senior agency and industry sources.

The study is to be completed in the next two to three weeks. As a result, the public release of Mike Griffin's full 60-day exploration architecture study will be delayed until after the House and Senate return from summer recess in early September, sources explained - a delay of almost two months from Griffin's earlier plans.

Sources familiar with the SDV review say a side-mounted so-called "Shuttle-C" type configuration is once again being strongly looked at as the configuration for the heavy lift booster. Agency planners have favored a stacked or "in line" configuration that mounts a large liquid fueled upper stage and payload module atop a modified space shuttle external fuel tank. While such a design would yield greater payload weight, sources have said that it would also require the most expensive modifications to the existing space shuttle launch infrastructure. A side-mounted configuration, on the other hand, would replace the winged orbiter with the liquid stage and payload module, using many of the same pad interfaces as now employed with the manned vehicle.

...defend Griswold and reject Roe. How?

Griswold vs. Connecticut was not the only precedent for an implied right to privacy.  There was already considerable philosophical debate in judicial circles about a right to privacy during the time of Woodrow Wilson's administration.  Griswold vs. Connecticut just happened to be decided by the participants in that debate.

You do have one good point, though, Bill.  Despite Clark's (true) statement about how the Roe vs. Wade decision is a limitation of governmental power rather than an extension of it, every related supreme court decision has been couched in terms of "The Right to Privacy", not just limitation of power.  The arguments are all deontological, not literal interpretations of what the constitution allows. 

"The Right to Privacy" has been the key concept.  Knock that one pin out, and the rest will topple.

There's just one problem with that little trick, though:  The US Supreme Court's technically correct.  The constitution and bill of rights, taken together, do imply a right to privacy/self-determination.  And plenty of other implied rights, too.  It's inescapable that a deontology would lend itself to a deontological argument.  Right or wrong, that's just its nature.

Nowhere does it grant authority for government to restrict contraception.

Outlandish? Okay, Justice Cobra, defend Griswold and reject Roe. How?

I'm not rejecting Roe! <throws hands up in exasperation> 

But on a practical level, it isn't hard to draw a legal distinction between contraception and abortion, they aren't the same thing.