The debate isn't about size. It never was about size. "The size of government is the problem" is nothing more then a red-herring that lets our government get off the hook for doing a bad job.
The debate is, always was, and always will be about making sure the government does its job effectively. Every one of your bullet points are problems of their own. Their solution *might* be "make some aspect smaller", but their solution might be something entirely different as well. If all you say is "get rid of it", you might never actually solve the problem.
Regan basically thought the solution too all government problems is to remove them. He made mention of identifying the problems, to him the problem *was* government. This is a stupid argument--our world is to complex to believe that fixing our problems is as simple as shrinking the government. Look at the result! We let our government slack off on regulation and set us up for this recession thing we are now in.
Obama says "figure out what is wrong, and solve that". If a government program sucks, kill it. If it is a good program but badly managed, fix the management. If it is a good program and well managed, reward it.
Regan's entire argument was wrong. The entire argument was an excuse and a rationalization for poorly managed government. "Make something smaller" is a solution to specific problems, not a solution to all problems. The goal is to make the government work for the people, not make it bigger or smaller. If the government works well, who cares what the size is!
Thankfully I can be a pedant and point out we live in a republic that was designed to slow down our process so we can think rather then be ruled by the mob. A straight democracy looks exactly like Digg, and quite frankly I wouldn't want to live in Diggnation.
If you don't like the above hard truth
It is the hard truth. But wait until one of those ipod museum people hires a hot-shot lawyer and sues the feds for burying their precious idea. Make no mistake, a government website with moderation is uncharted water. Who knows what the legal boundaries are for such a thing.
So get ready, because if the Obama Administration does pull off such a site, there are going to be dozens of slashdot stories about trolls, spammers and "crackpot activists" suing the federal government for burying, hiding and filtering their inane trash. And the best part is, the people doing the suing might have a legitimate case too! Look at the "OMG youtube cookies" story the other day... these are uncharted waters big time.
I'm just thankfull we might have somebody who is willing to take us into this new area. Hopefully he'll set an example for state and local governments to follow. No matter what the future holds, this government-meet-inter-web won't be all peaches and roses.
The size, reach, and power of the federal government is the root cause of most of the problems
Actually it isn't. You don't judge a book by its size, do you? You don't judge how good a computer is based on its size, do you? No. You judge them based on how well they do their job, not based on their physical makeup.
Regan was wrong. Size doesn't matter. It is how well you do the job that matters.
During the inauguration, I got a text message from them asking if I wanted more info about the event. Once I set "yes", I got messages about the weather, where to go in Washington dc and other local info (even though I wasn't there:-). Once it was over, I got a thankyou email from "President Barack Obama" (info@pic2009.org) thanking me for participating.
Their campaign sent out all kinds of text messages and emails, I donated to the Red Cross/Hurricane Gustav by text message thanks to them. It was pretty impressive how much they used this new-fanged inter-tube-text-messaging thing. The fact they took that technology and are now using it for "serious business" is a great sign.
In short, when was the last time you ever got an email or text message from "President George Bush" thanking you for anything?
They won't want that info out and available the next time they're up for election
I voted for my congress critters based on how much money I thought they could get to fund Sound Transit. For me, I'd judge them based on how successful they were at doing that. This website, or any like it, will help me find that information out.
It will also let me know if our state gets a fair slice of the pie. If we aren't I'd blame our congress people, it is their job to make sure we get a fair share--they are elected to stand up for us Washingtonians.
I don't know where you live, but odds are good that many roads you drive on, libraries you use, or city halls you walk into were funded with "pork". What looks like pork to somebody on the outside just might be an important project for your state. As long as the "pork" is spent fairly among states and doesn't bankrupt us, who are we to judge what other states do with their share?
A lot of those line items in a bill don't apply to you or your state. How would you feel if your senator added a line for funding light rail in your region and it was voted down by some jackass who doesn't live in your state? After all, didn't they get their stupid Elvis Museum funded last year? Why should their state get a grant and then have our project get overruled based on the will of random internet users.
Letting random internet users vote on each line item would change the power balance in government. It would let a non representative sample of people influence the government "outside" the house or senate. On the surface, the idea of letting internet users "vote" on bills sounds good, but there would be a lot of unintended consequences. You'd have to re-balance a lot of how government operates before you let people vote digg-style on legislation.
But the man kept hitting the "thumbs down" on each proposal. What kind of democracy is it when a dozen people on the internet support the ipod museum and all their suggestions get buried to the ground? I mean, why should any comment get buried?
That is a feature, not a bug.
Hopefully Obama will dedicate 24 billion to eliminating all software bugs everywhere. Those fat cats on wall street have let the bug problem carry on far to long. We need a bug-bailout *and* an ipod museum in every major city (Chicago, New York and Quahog, RI).
But seriously. If the Obama administration manages to pull off a successful, community oriented website during his presidency, I'll be very, very impressed. The moderation challenges alone will be a huge issue. How do you create a platform where
a) Your right to voice your opinion is protected by the constitution. b) The website should be open to all c) You want to create *some* kind of community, and to do so means sorting the wheat from the chaff. d) People will post redundant crap e) People will cry foul the second your bury their inane "ipod museum" idea. f) A controversial issue might easily generate thousands of comments.
I tell you where I'd start, personally. I'd break the site into multiple sites organized by agency and topic. That way if you are interested in transit, the website you follow will not get "polluted" by people interested in energy policy.
It *has* to be separate websites, not just sections. The easiest way to kill a community website is to open it up to topics that don't fit with the original ones (like when Digg or Kuro5hin added politics...). With the topics divided by domain, it will keep the heat down by removing the urge to drag off-topic flames into a post. Merged, somebody might inject some nugget about gun control into their argument against solar cars and derail the whole thread.
Bottom line, if they can pull off a series of good, participatory websites hosted by Uncle Sam, my hats off to them.
A list of software that shouldn't have been rewritten:
1) Winamp (version ??? to ???, the new version was full of bugs unlike the old one) 2) Apache 1.3 -> 2.0 (I bet Slashdot is still running 1.3) 3) Netscape (huge factor in killing the company) 4) Perl 5.0 -> 6.0
I'm sure there is more. What I'm curious is can anybody name a rewrite that went *smoothly* and didn't split the userbase into two camps (apache 1 vs apache 2 is the biggest example)?
Partisan stuff asside, dont forget that you can just slap on a "ROBOTS=NOFOLLOW, NOINDEX, NOCACHE" meta tag on any page you dont want indexed.
This actually begs the question--what kind of issues surround something like Google caching pages?
What are the ethical issues of having external links that are not tagged "no-follow"? If you don't "no-follow" the external links, a government website would be giving an external site "link juice" (i.e. pagerank) that could be seen as favoritism.
Issues like this are actually pretty interesting. Government websites are very much a legal gray area right now. They have to balance important things like "can't just change junk without a history of changes" against the very dynamic nature of the web. They have to balance "create a page that looks good, provides useful content, and is economically feasible" against "must be accessible by all, must have crazy records requirements, etc". I mean, are they required to translate most of the content to Spanish? What about Chinese or Vietnamese? What about mobile content? I dont see a link for that (could be a work in progress though).
(ps: damn does the Google Chrome spell check suck. how can it be their search engine is so good at spell checking but their browser sucks so hard?)
I doubt that Blackberry / iPhone / Whatever would use the public cell network for any communications. And I could easily imagine RIM / Apple / Whoever making a one-off build of their product that uses the super-secret government spectrum instead.
To hear people on Slashdot talk positively about marketing / sales people. In any other case, you'd have a dozen posts about "those stupid sales weenies told some stupid president that we have to make this thing 'secure' and do it in 3 days with no extra help".
What those whining programmers sometimes fail to see is sometimes the sales/marketing staff know what they are doing. If I was RIM management, I sure as hell wouldn't want to loose the president as a client, bitching programmers be damned.
If you think there is exactly one problem that caused this whole mess, you are wrong. Like any good engineering failure, this was caused by multiple little failures all concatenated to create a nice big one.
But I agree with the heavy jpeg compression. It is one of my pet peeves, actually. Especially when people use JPEG's for images that really should be GIF's.
And yes, PNG's are smaller but I've found that IE6 can do weird things to them. Even IE7 can sometimes do funky things with the colors in PNG images. And don't forget you can't easily do transparent PNG's until IE6 is finally flushed out of our system (if you are reading this and are using IE6, please upgrade for the love of god).
Can we choose the right technologies for a website?
If they were using ASP.NET MVC you wouldn't have even known the thing was running ASP.NET. You could have thought it was mod_perl or ruby until you looked at the headers. Like most PHP sites, the aspx extension is a dead giveaway:-) ASP.NET MVC is url based, just like a good mod_perl app or a rails app.
And any second we aren't spending our lives toiling away in factories is time wasted. It is unpatriotic to take a day off to watch an inauguration! If you want to help America recover from this recession, stop taking time off and get back to the salt mine for your 12 hour shift. Weekends are for the week.
And I'd like to see the same thing. But I don't hold much hope for such a thing to happen. The only route I can see happening is to just redefine marriage to mean gay or straight and be done with it. I'll settle for that.
Well leaving "Marriage" however defined to the locals sounds great in theory guess what, the federal government *has* to intervene. Why? "Interstate Commerce".
What if you are a gay couple happily married in California and your brokerage account with a company located in Florida. Gay marriage is forbidden in Florida. Your partner, sadly, dies. Do you inherit his brokerage account? And before you say "switch brokerage firms", hang on for a second, is that Florida based company legally obligated to recognize your California-based marriage? I'm no lawyer, but I bet such a thing would be quite a gray area, legally. If they refused to give you his inheritance, could you sue the company and win? If you did sue, odds would be good that it would get appealed to a... you guessed it... a federal court.
Shit... what if you got married in California but decided to move to Florida. Would they have to recognize your marriage as valid?
Marriage, defined any way you like, is a federal issue. It very clearly falls under the interstate commerce clause.
You are correct, "gay marriage" is redefining a word with thousands of years of history behind it. I can certainly respect those who take issue with that.
While what I'm going to suggest is politically impossible, it would be far better to remove the use of the word "marriage" from all law and replace it with civil union. As far as the government should be concerned, "marriage," "civil unions" or whatever you call them are nothing more then a legal construct for tax, "rights" (hospital visitation, hippa, etc), and property law (inheritance, "divorce").
One way or the other, gays partnerships will be afforded the same rights as traditional ones. The question boils down to what you call "gay partnerships" and I'd bet good money on it being far more feasible to cast it under marriage than to cast all partnerships, gay or straight, under the term "civil union". What you cannot have is where straight partnerships are legally defined as "marriage" and gay partnerships are legally defined as something else, even if they are granted the same legal rights.
Obama says he is for "civil unions", and I take him at his word he'll make sure gay partnerships are granted the same legal rights as straight couples. I believe he takes this stance because of his pragmatism--it would be virtually impossible to go whole-hog, he'd never get it passed. I also believe he wouldn't lift a political finger if some states wanted to take the idea of "civil unions" and rename them "marriage". Eventually, enough states will do this that the feds will be forced to rename "civil union" to "Marriage".
And it should be clear *why* taking office should be time-based, not oath-based when you consider what might happen during wartime. Like, what if serious military shit was hitting the fan on the day of the inauguration? Under an oath-based system, the incoming president would probably have more pressing things to do then swear an oath on a bible. With a time-based system like we now have, it is very clear who is in power at all times. Oath-based, not so much.
Before that amendment was passed, the incoming president would have to drop everything and get sworn in before deal with whatever. Lets not even forget that if he or she did something requiring executive privilege and wasn't technically sworn in. During the aftermath, without the amendment, everything the new president did prior to taking the oath would fall into question (i.e. were they technically president)?
No, taking the the oath is more for show then a requirement. As it should be.
I think you basically restated what I was attempting to say, only way better. Just because a right isn't listed as explicitly applied to you doesn't mean it shouldn't be. It is kind of the magic of the document.
And animals as people? Naw.. Wait until intelligent robots seek constitutional rights. Good times. Good times.
It reminded me of when you are at a wedding and either the bride or groom forgets part of their vows or the pastor stumbles on a line. Big woop. Laugh about it (Obama did, Roberts did) and move on.
I think the operative word here should be "smile" possibly coupled with "laugh". Of course, this is the internet we are talking about, so obviously "conspiracy" is the actual operative word.
The Federal government does not have the Constitutional authority to make laws about gay marriage
Sure it does. Where does it say "gays cannot marry" in the constitution? In fact, I could (rightly, I believe) argue that until gays can marry, the government is currently out of line with the constitution. However, I agree with what you had in parenthesis... that gays cannot marry is a symptom of a larger problem--government has no business in the marriage business regardless of who is marrying what.
stem cells, abortion
Well, some argue that stem cell research is essentially murdering unborn children. Murder is something the federal government deals with, no?
bank bailouts, medicare, social security, education
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States".
The mistake you make is thinking I'm being "anti constitution". I'm not. All the debates you quote are debates about modern issues that get resolved using the process created by the constitution.
But the constitution did not explicitly say "whether you're a man or woman, black or white, gay or straight", did it? I mean, even read literally, it doesn't matter what the constitution says if you don't consider blacks to be humans.
The fourteen amendment was only created after the civil war, don't forget. We fought a war with ourselves to resolve that issue.
(and a healthy one too). My opinion? We simply cannot be competitive as a nation with a "weak" federal government in concert with "strong" state governments. There has to be a balance, yes. But one must realize that our competition doesn't want to negotiate with 50 little states, they want to negotiate with a single big one. I suppose, though cannot back it up, that this was the logic behind the formation of the EU--each country just couln't compete in a modern global market so they had to unite.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The wording of this amendment is intentionally vague. If it was overly strict, the constitution would quickly become irrelevant as the times changed. For example, what if the constitution was formed when people thought radio was a novelty and they included "the federal government should not regulate radio". You and I might not agree with everything about the FCC, but you have to admit that it would be a mess if every state had it's one mini-FCC regulating our radio spectrum. And if the language in the constitution was as strong and strictly worded as "no radio", you'd need to re-amend the constitution to overturn such a ill-thought piece of legislation.
Hell, what if that amendment said "The federal government should not create nor regulate the roads used by horseless carriages"? No highway system would have been built.
The constitution is vague for a reason. Democrats vs Republicans vs Libertarians are not debates about "are you loyal to the constitution", but really debates carried out under the constitution about how to deal with modern issues. The constitution is what gives us the ability *to* debate the issues.
Slashdot Mirror
The debate isn't about size. It never was about size. "The size of government is the problem" is nothing more then a red-herring that lets our government get off the hook for doing a bad job.
The debate is, always was, and always will be about making sure the government does its job effectively. Every one of your bullet points are problems of their own. Their solution *might* be "make some aspect smaller", but their solution might be something entirely different as well. If all you say is "get rid of it", you might never actually solve the problem.
Regan basically thought the solution too all government problems is to remove them. He made mention of identifying the problems, to him the problem *was* government. This is a stupid argument--our world is to complex to believe that fixing our problems is as simple as shrinking the government. Look at the result! We let our government slack off on regulation and set us up for this recession thing we are now in.
Obama says "figure out what is wrong, and solve that". If a government program sucks, kill it. If it is a good program but badly managed, fix the management. If it is a good program and well managed, reward it.
Regan's entire argument was wrong. The entire argument was an excuse and a rationalization for poorly managed government. "Make something smaller" is a solution to specific problems, not a solution to all problems. The goal is to make the government work for the people, not make it bigger or smaller. If the government works well, who cares what the size is!
zModem support is the *best* feature of SecureCRT. Much easier then the alternatives. While I've switched to PuTTY, I sure miss it.
Thankfully I can be a pedant and point out we live in a republic that was designed to slow down our process so we can think rather then be ruled by the mob. A straight democracy looks exactly like Digg, and quite frankly I wouldn't want to live in Diggnation.
It is the hard truth. But wait until one of those ipod museum people hires a hot-shot lawyer and sues the feds for burying their precious idea. Make no mistake, a government website with moderation is uncharted water. Who knows what the legal boundaries are for such a thing.
So get ready, because if the Obama Administration does pull off such a site, there are going to be dozens of slashdot stories about trolls, spammers and "crackpot activists" suing the federal government for burying, hiding and filtering their inane trash. And the best part is, the people doing the suing might have a legitimate case too! Look at the "OMG youtube cookies" story the other day... these are uncharted waters big time.
I'm just thankfull we might have somebody who is willing to take us into this new area. Hopefully he'll set an example for state and local governments to follow. No matter what the future holds, this government-meet-inter-web won't be all peaches and roses.
Actually it isn't. You don't judge a book by its size, do you? You don't judge how good a computer is based on its size, do you? No. You judge them based on how well they do their job, not based on their physical makeup.
Regan was wrong. Size doesn't matter. It is how well you do the job that matters.
During the inauguration, I got a text message from them asking if I wanted more info about the event. Once I set "yes", I got messages about the weather, where to go in Washington dc and other local info (even though I wasn't there :-). Once it was over, I got a thankyou email from "President Barack Obama" (info@pic2009.org) thanking me for participating.
Their campaign sent out all kinds of text messages and emails, I donated to the Red Cross/Hurricane Gustav by text message thanks to them. It was pretty impressive how much they used this new-fanged inter-tube-text-messaging thing. The fact they took that technology and are now using it for "serious business" is a great sign.
In short, when was the last time you ever got an email or text message from "President George Bush" thanking you for anything?
I voted for my congress critters based on how much money I thought they could get to fund Sound Transit. For me, I'd judge them based on how successful they were at doing that. This website, or any like it, will help me find that information out.
It will also let me know if our state gets a fair slice of the pie. If we aren't I'd blame our congress people, it is their job to make sure we get a fair share--they are elected to stand up for us Washingtonians.
I don't know where you live, but odds are good that many roads you drive on, libraries you use, or city halls you walk into were funded with "pork". What looks like pork to somebody on the outside just might be an important project for your state. As long as the "pork" is spent fairly among states and doesn't bankrupt us, who are we to judge what other states do with their share?
A lot of those line items in a bill don't apply to you or your state. How would you feel if your senator added a line for funding light rail in your region and it was voted down by some jackass who doesn't live in your state? After all, didn't they get their stupid Elvis Museum funded last year? Why should their state get a grant and then have our project get overruled based on the will of random internet users.
Letting random internet users vote on each line item would change the power balance in government. It would let a non representative sample of people influence the government "outside" the house or senate. On the surface, the idea of letting internet users "vote" on bills sounds good, but there would be a lot of unintended consequences. You'd have to re-balance a lot of how government operates before you let people vote digg-style on legislation.
But the man kept hitting the "thumbs down" on each proposal. What kind of democracy is it when a dozen people on the internet support the ipod museum and all their suggestions get buried to the ground? I mean, why should any comment get buried?
Hopefully Obama will dedicate 24 billion to eliminating all software bugs everywhere. Those fat cats on wall street have let the bug problem carry on far to long. We need a bug-bailout *and* an ipod museum in every major city (Chicago, New York and Quahog, RI).
But seriously. If the Obama administration manages to pull off a successful, community oriented website during his presidency, I'll be very, very impressed. The moderation challenges alone will be a huge issue. How do you create a platform where
a) Your right to voice your opinion is protected by the constitution.
b) The website should be open to all
c) You want to create *some* kind of community, and to do so means sorting the wheat from the chaff.
d) People will post redundant crap
e) People will cry foul the second your bury their inane "ipod museum" idea.
f) A controversial issue might easily generate thousands of comments.
I tell you where I'd start, personally. I'd break the site into multiple sites organized by agency and topic. That way if you are interested in transit, the website you follow will not get "polluted" by people interested in energy policy.
It *has* to be separate websites, not just sections. The easiest way to kill a community website is to open it up to topics that don't fit with the original ones (like when Digg or Kuro5hin added politics...). With the topics divided by domain, it will keep the heat down by removing the urge to drag off-topic flames into a post. Merged, somebody might inject some nugget about gun control into their argument against solar cars and derail the whole thread.
Bottom line, if they can pull off a series of good, participatory websites hosted by Uncle Sam, my hats off to them.
A list of software that shouldn't have been rewritten:
1) Winamp (version ??? to ???, the new version was full of bugs unlike the old one)
2) Apache 1.3 -> 2.0 (I bet Slashdot is still running 1.3)
3) Netscape (huge factor in killing the company)
4) Perl 5.0 -> 6.0
I'm sure there is more. What I'm curious is can anybody name a rewrite that went *smoothly* and didn't split the userbase into two camps (apache 1 vs apache 2 is the biggest example)?
Partisan stuff asside, dont forget that you can just slap on a "ROBOTS=NOFOLLOW, NOINDEX, NOCACHE" meta tag on any page you dont want indexed.
This actually begs the question--what kind of issues surround something like Google caching pages?
What are the ethical issues of having external links that are not tagged "no-follow"? If you don't "no-follow" the external links, a government website would be giving an external site "link juice" (i.e. pagerank) that could be seen as favoritism.
Issues like this are actually pretty interesting. Government websites are very much a legal gray area right now. They have to balance important things like "can't just change junk without a history of changes" against the very dynamic nature of the web. They have to balance "create a page that looks good, provides useful content, and is economically feasible" against "must be accessible by all, must have crazy records requirements, etc". I mean, are they required to translate most of the content to Spanish? What about Chinese or Vietnamese? What about mobile content? I dont see a link for that (could be a work in progress though).
(ps: damn does the Google Chrome spell check suck. how can it be their search engine is so good at spell checking but their browser sucks so hard?)
I doubt that Blackberry / iPhone / Whatever would use the public cell network for any communications. And I could easily imagine RIM / Apple / Whoever making a one-off build of their product that uses the super-secret government spectrum instead.
To hear people on Slashdot talk positively about marketing / sales people. In any other case, you'd have a dozen posts about "those stupid sales weenies told some stupid president that we have to make this thing 'secure' and do it in 3 days with no extra help".
What those whining programmers sometimes fail to see is sometimes the sales/marketing staff know what they are doing. If I was RIM management, I sure as hell wouldn't want to loose the president as a client, bitching programmers be damned.
Reganomics is dead, pass it on.
If you think there is exactly one problem that caused this whole mess, you are wrong. Like any good engineering failure, this was caused by multiple little failures all concatenated to create a nice big one.
But I agree with the heavy jpeg compression. It is one of my pet peeves, actually. Especially when people use JPEG's for images that really should be GIF's.
And yes, PNG's are smaller but I've found that IE6 can do weird things to them. Even IE7 can sometimes do funky things with the colors in PNG images. And don't forget you can't easily do transparent PNG's until IE6 is finally flushed out of our system (if you are reading this and are using IE6, please upgrade for the love of god).
If they were using ASP.NET MVC you wouldn't have even known the thing was running ASP.NET. You could have thought it was mod_perl or ruby until you looked at the headers. Like most PHP sites, the aspx extension is a dead giveaway :-) ASP.NET MVC is url based, just like a good mod_perl app or a rails app.
And any second we aren't spending our lives toiling away in factories is time wasted. It is unpatriotic to take a day off to watch an inauguration! If you want to help America recover from this recession, stop taking time off and get back to the salt mine for your 12 hour shift. Weekends are for the week.
Obey.
Something tells me that even if there was some legal loophole, the American people wouldn't let him get away with it.
And I'd like to see the same thing. But I don't hold much hope for such a thing to happen. The only route I can see happening is to just redefine marriage to mean gay or straight and be done with it. I'll settle for that.
Well leaving "Marriage" however defined to the locals sounds great in theory guess what, the federal government *has* to intervene. Why? "Interstate Commerce".
What if you are a gay couple happily married in California and your brokerage account with a company located in Florida. Gay marriage is forbidden in Florida. Your partner, sadly, dies. Do you inherit his brokerage account? And before you say "switch brokerage firms", hang on for a second, is that Florida based company legally obligated to recognize your California-based marriage? I'm no lawyer, but I bet such a thing would be quite a gray area, legally. If they refused to give you his inheritance, could you sue the company and win? If you did sue, odds would be good that it would get appealed to a... you guessed it... a federal court.
Shit... what if you got married in California but decided to move to Florida. Would they have to recognize your marriage as valid?
Marriage, defined any way you like, is a federal issue. It very clearly falls under the interstate commerce clause.
You are correct, "gay marriage" is redefining a word with thousands of years of history behind it. I can certainly respect those who take issue with that.
While what I'm going to suggest is politically impossible, it would be far better to remove the use of the word "marriage" from all law and replace it with civil union. As far as the government should be concerned, "marriage," "civil unions" or whatever you call them are nothing more then a legal construct for tax, "rights" (hospital visitation, hippa, etc), and property law (inheritance, "divorce").
One way or the other, gays partnerships will be afforded the same rights as traditional ones. The question boils down to what you call "gay partnerships" and I'd bet good money on it being far more feasible to cast it under marriage than to cast all partnerships, gay or straight, under the term "civil union". What you cannot have is where straight partnerships are legally defined as "marriage" and gay partnerships are legally defined as something else, even if they are granted the same legal rights.
Obama says he is for "civil unions", and I take him at his word he'll make sure gay partnerships are granted the same legal rights as straight couples. I believe he takes this stance because of his pragmatism--it would be virtually impossible to go whole-hog, he'd never get it passed. I also believe he wouldn't lift a political finger if some states wanted to take the idea of "civil unions" and rename them "marriage". Eventually, enough states will do this that the feds will be forced to rename "civil union" to "Marriage".
Baby steps.
And it should be clear *why* taking office should be time-based, not oath-based when you consider what might happen during wartime. Like, what if serious military shit was hitting the fan on the day of the inauguration? Under an oath-based system, the incoming president would probably have more pressing things to do then swear an oath on a bible. With a time-based system like we now have, it is very clear who is in power at all times. Oath-based, not so much.
Before that amendment was passed, the incoming president would have to drop everything and get sworn in before deal with whatever. Lets not even forget that if he or she did something requiring executive privilege and wasn't technically sworn in. During the aftermath, without the amendment, everything the new president did prior to taking the oath would fall into question (i.e. were they technically president)?
No, taking the the oath is more for show then a requirement. As it should be.
I think you basically restated what I was attempting to say, only way better. Just because a right isn't listed as explicitly applied to you doesn't mean it shouldn't be. It is kind of the magic of the document.
And animals as people? Naw.. Wait until intelligent robots seek constitutional rights. Good times. Good times.
It reminded me of when you are at a wedding and either the bride or groom forgets part of their vows or the pastor stumbles on a line. Big woop. Laugh about it (Obama did, Roberts did) and move on.
I think the operative word here should be "smile" possibly coupled with "laugh". Of course, this is the internet we are talking about, so obviously "conspiracy" is the actual operative word.
Sure it does. Where does it say "gays cannot marry" in the constitution? In fact, I could (rightly, I believe) argue that until gays can marry, the government is currently out of line with the constitution. However, I agree with what you had in parenthesis... that gays cannot marry is a symptom of a larger problem--government has no business in the marriage business regardless of who is marrying what.
Well, some argue that stem cell research is essentially murdering unborn children. Murder is something the federal government deals with, no?
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States".
The mistake you make is thinking I'm being "anti constitution". I'm not. All the debates you quote are debates about modern issues that get resolved using the process created by the constitution.
But the constitution did not explicitly say "whether you're a man or woman, black or white, gay or straight", did it? I mean, even read literally, it doesn't matter what the constitution says if you don't consider blacks to be humans.
The fourteen amendment was only created after the civil war, don't forget. We fought a war with ourselves to resolve that issue.
(and a healthy one too). My opinion? We simply cannot be competitive as a nation with a "weak" federal government in concert with "strong" state governments. There has to be a balance, yes. But one must realize that our competition doesn't want to negotiate with 50 little states, they want to negotiate with a single big one. I suppose, though cannot back it up, that this was the logic behind the formation of the EU--each country just couln't compete in a modern global market so they had to unite.
The wording of this amendment is intentionally vague. If it was overly strict, the constitution would quickly become irrelevant as the times changed. For example, what if the constitution was formed when people thought radio was a novelty and they included "the federal government should not regulate radio". You and I might not agree with everything about the FCC, but you have to admit that it would be a mess if every state had it's one mini-FCC regulating our radio spectrum. And if the language in the constitution was as strong and strictly worded as "no radio", you'd need to re-amend the constitution to overturn such a ill-thought piece of legislation.
Hell, what if that amendment said "The federal government should not create nor regulate the roads used by horseless carriages"? No highway system would have been built.
The constitution is vague for a reason. Democrats vs Republicans vs Libertarians are not debates about "are you loyal to the constitution", but really debates carried out under the constitution about how to deal with modern issues. The constitution is what gives us the ability *to* debate the issues.