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White House: No Kerry Supporters at IATC Meeting
An anonymous reader writes "Time Magazine is reporting that the Bush Administration is removing U.S. delegates from the Inter-American Telephone Commission because they gave money to John Kerry in last year's election. A Bush spokesman admits it's true: 'We wanted people who would represent the Administration positively, and--call us nutty--it seemed like those who wanted to kick this Administration out of town last November would have some difficulty doing that,' says White House spokesman Trent Duffy. Employees of Qualcomm and Nokia are among those who have been removed from the commission."
Quite correct -- essentially what the Bush adminstration is telling these telecom companies is that they won't be allowed to send a representative to a conference UNTIL there is a Democratic president! Sounds like a pretty good reason to donate heavily to the Democrats in the next election to me!
No, that's not what they're saying at all. They aren't preventing all Nokia engineers from attending, just the engineers from Nokia who sent personal donations to the Kerry campaign.
This is a very frightening aspect of it- a donation to Kerry can hurt your chances of employment in the tech sector later on. One might imagine this will have a very chilling effect on non-corporate political donations in the next election.
Do you honestly believe that the founding fathers encoded violent revolution into the bill of rights?
I'm not exactly a gun nut here... in fact, I don't really like them. However, Jefferson wanted to encode precisely that. Here are a few quotes:
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere."
"what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that his people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms...The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Etc. Jefferson was at the view that all governments will inevitably become corrupt, oppressive, and/or unrepresentative of its citizens; and when that time comes, the people must rise up and overthrow it. I think he'd actually be pleasantly surprised at how long America has gone without a revolution.
Are there any deer in the theater tonight? Get 'em up against the wall.
I see this term used, "Founding Fathers" quite a bit as if they were a monolithic bunch. They weren't. They were quarrelsome and scrappy, and often disagreed on a number of major and minor issues.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.