Please go read the First Amendment. I'm begging you. It's only 45 words long, and in fact you don't have to get all the way through it. Pay particular attention to the words surrounding "establishment".
You know maybe that's the tact reality based people ought to be taking.
"Dear School board,
I don't want my tax money going to the ACLU and I know you definitely don't want tax money going to the ACLU, therefore, for the sake of fiscal conservatism and the love of all that's good and holy, don't push creationism. We all believe in the his noodley-ness here, but we'd rather take care of teaching our kids in Sunday school than getting slapped down for the hundredth time by those damned liberal activist judges. Let's make a deal. After Sarah Palin appoints Scalia Jr. as justice Breyer's replacement then we'll try again, but in the meantime, but we're just wasting our time and money while the Court is made up of godless commies."
Your notion of entrenched interests is too narrow. It isn't a matter of big business being entrenched and little business being insurgent, rather, in many if not most cases, it's a matter of business interests in general being entrenched against the interests of consumers, or employees, or small time investors.
Look, none of the regulations I listed are perfect, and that is probably more true of SOX than the rest. However, the goal of SOX and regulation in general isn't to piss off big business, it's to protect the American public. Allowing new Enrons to spring up would more damaging to America than marginally increasing the barriers of entry into high-finance for would-be start ups is.
re: democracy/republic, it's semantics. Current usage tends to be that republic implies citizens directly voting on issues (a la CA referenda or the Swiss model), rather than voting for representatives. This was not the usage in the 18th century.
Anyway, because we elect representatives, it is impossible to isolate politics from policy, which was, of course, the rather obvious original point I was making.
yeah. the one that was working just fine for 70 years, but was regulation that didn't favor entrenched interests and was eventually repealed. Many observers trace some responsibility for the current financial mess to the repeal, so this is a good of example of why and how the federal government ought to regulate entrenched interests.
The FCC is a member of the executive branch, so will be influenced by whatever president is in office, right? Do you really want the precedent to be that the internet is to be ruled by a revolving door of figureheads?
You're familiar with the concept of (small d) democracy, yes?
Nullification has a long history, but it's more of a mixed bag than honorable, mostly because the two most notable nullification attempts were to protect slavery, one resulting in the civil war. (and don't tell me John C. Calhoun was protesting taxes)
As for medical marijuana, we'll talk after California mobilizes the guard to protect dispensaries from the DEA. Until then, they're not nullifying, they're just refusing to do the fed's job for them.
I tend to agree that the purpose of the second amendment is to make the government think twice about oppressing the American people.
But here is where you've got it wrong:
stop them from calling for reinforcements from the National Guard.
The National Guard is the closest think we have to the militias the second amendment calls for. What is going to stop the police from calling the guard is (theoretically) the fear that the guard won't take their side. Even in 1791, a bunch of ruffians with rifles couldn't take on the US government
It is important to recognize that the US has a long history of both pacifism and isolationism, and that these are two very separate movements. Pacifism flows out of Quaker traditions and represents a comparative handful of people who won't to fight under any circumstances. Then Martin Luther King Jr. put an exclamation point on the philosophy.
Isolationism on the other hand is a larger movement and grows out of our unique geography, and basically says we shouldn't be sticking our nose in other nations business. Because it is so ludicrously unlikely that the US will be invaded (and has been since 1812), the isolationist perspective is basically that the US is better served by not wasting our blood and treasure abroad. The long history of isolationism has, in many ways, allowed us to bide our time and gather our strength so that we don't run into battle half-cocked (like, for instance Germany or France have been known to do). Isolationists include such unlikely characters as Thomas Paine, George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR. Probably 90% of people who oppose war today are isolationists. They'd rather not be involved, but give them a Maine, Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11, and they'll support the war effort, at least until the threat is diminished. However, as was the case with the Maine and 9/11, the hawks tend to press their advantage and go further than isolationists are willing to support.
As for Ghandi, you're an idiot. He was jailed four separate times, in this part of the world and at this time jail carried a significant risk of being seriously hurt or killed. Then there were three unsuccessful assassination attempts, before one finally succeed. He was killed by an assassin because he allowed India to be partitioned rather than see civil war. That is to say, he was killed because of his non-violent policy. Was this the smartest, or best policy? I don't know, but given the animosity between Pakistan and India that persists to this day, it seems fantastical to think that the country could have been held together anyway.
It goes back a lot further than FDR. Andrew Jackson made the first really sizable executive power grab, and then there was a guy named Abe Lincoln... Whether by design or accident since at least Marbury v. Madison each of the three branches have more or less continuously fighting the others for power. (Before that everyone basically deferred to George Washington when he was president so there was no real struggle there, and John Adams was deferential to Congress to a fault.)
The Sarah Palin stuff doesn't bother me nearly as much as the David Duke stuff. Again the difference is GNAA trolls are being hateful to be obnoxious. The CNN commentators are hateful because they're hateful (either that or they're much better trolls, bus sadly I don't think so).
The GNAAs are bad, but it's all copypasta - you know it's a deliberate troll.
The comments on major media sites on the other hand... wow, people are just hateful. I'd rather scroll past another 10,000 GNAA posts than wade through the sludge at the bottom of a CNN political article.
What could happen is that some company realizes that the only thing really holding them back is the competitive advantage amazon controls in it's one-click patent. If only they could implement one-click shopping they'd take the world by storm. So, they relocate to Auckland, set up shop and relaunch their website now with all the glory of one-click. When they make their first billion dollars, instead of paying $250 million in taxes to the US, now the kiwis get it.
You know I was really scratching my head to come up with an exemplar for conservativism. I settled on George Will because, really there aren't too many around. There's also Bill Bennet and maybe Pat Buchanan, but in my estimation uncle Pat carried a bit too much water for Cheney in the last administration.
Hoover was Coolidge's secretary of commerce (and a powerful one at that), so if Hoover was staking out anti-conservative positions as commerce secretary, doesn't that mean the Coolidge administration was anti-conservative?
Besides, being a progressive and reformer in 1920 didn't necessarily mean larger or more central government in the golden age of classical liberalism. But I'll concede that Coolidge may have been a tad more small-government than Hoover, but to say that Hoover was closer to FDR than Coolidge is absurd.
Farm subsidies or land give aways and or protective terrifs for manufacturing date back at least to Jefferson. One thing Jefferson and Hamilton could agree on is that there was nothing wrong with the federal governmnent intervening in the economy to protect vital interests - what got their hackles raised was what exactly a vital interest was... You might not consider Jefferson or Hamilton to be sufficiently conservative, but if the guys who wrote the constitution don't reflect what the country ought to look like, well you might have a consistent position, but it has no historical basis - which makes me think it isn't really conservative.
As an aside, I don't think anyone was actually calling themselves conservatives during the gilded age, except maybe the temperance movement, who wanted (and got) radical government intervention.
Time is an important factor in defining the terms progressive and progressive - conservatives have to be conserving something and progressives have to be progressing from somewhere. On that note, Coolidge and Cleveland were both classical liberals, and the gilded age seems a rather arbitrary time period to try to conserve.
George W Bush and Dick Cheney were not, by several measures conservatives, but that doesn't make them liberals, in most cases it made them authoritarians. Right now, as near as I can tell, the GOP is trying to figure out if it want's to be conservative (George Will?), authoritarian (Dick Cheney), fascist/corporatism (Joe Barton), libertarian (Ron Paul), religious fundamentalist (Sam Brownback) , or batshit crazy (Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann). My estimation is that the conservatives are losing...
But that's all ok because they're still more organized than the democrats.
If you're a liberal you find conservative bias everywhere. If you're a conservative you find the opposite. Searching for the absolute position of bias is a really a fool's errand, because it assumes you can accurately identify the center at any given moment. And no, it hasn't been proven that the media is liberally biased, there are studies "proving" both sides and compelling responses to both. The best we can do is make rather sweeping statements about where different media sources are relative to each other, and yet still, a Tea Partier might consider the Wall Street Journal to be liberally biased.
Again, I'm not denying that certain news sources are biased. I called out the NY times and MSNBC. CNN is too close to the center to call, and it varies from program to program and issue to issue.
As for ACORN... when the investigation has been proven to be tainted all evidence from the investigation is suspect. No one has produced any untainted evidence that Acorn did anything wrong. On the flip side, we know that blackwater gunned down civilians in cold blood and KBR was negligent in wiring army bases resulting in the death of at least one soldier, and all the liberal media has managed to do is get blackwater to rechristen itself Xe. The DoD still contracts with KBR and the state department still hires Xe, yet fox news brought down Acorn with tainted evidence in a couple of months.
Populism is an economic policy, not social policy. The republicans are, in many cases, on the popular side of the culture wars, to the point that in large swaths of the country people vote against their own economic interests, even when they say the economy is the most important national issue.
As for NRA members defecting... this is why democrats have largely ceded the issue. It's not for nothing that the NRA is one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington - their voters will and have switch parties over the issue, just ask Jack Brooks. In rural parts of otherwise blue states even otherwise socially conservative democrats cannot get elected without supporting gun rights.
Is there such a thing as a liberal media bias? In some cases, sure. The NY times and MSNBC have a liberal slant, but really, conservatives have a bit of history crying wolf on this front. Tom Brokaw might have been a liberal, but that doesn't mean the NBC nightly news was.
I also think that Fox news is the most slanted major media outlet (this opinion is undeniably influenced by my bias), from the Acorn nonsense to the Fox News organized tea parties if they're not the worst, they at least have the most influence.
Slashdot Mirror
Freedom of and from religion.
Threaten to send them back to the French, that'll straighten 'em out.
Please go read the First Amendment. I'm begging you. It's only 45 words long, and in fact you don't have to get all the way through it. Pay particular attention to the words surrounding "establishment".
You know maybe that's the tact reality based people ought to be taking.
"Dear School board,
I don't want my tax money going to the ACLU and I know you definitely don't want tax money going to the ACLU, therefore, for the sake of fiscal conservatism and the love of all that's good and holy, don't push creationism. We all believe in the his noodley-ness here, but we'd rather take care of teaching our kids in Sunday school than getting slapped down for the hundredth time by those damned liberal activist judges. Let's make a deal. After Sarah Palin appoints Scalia Jr. as justice Breyer's replacement then we'll try again, but in the meantime, but we're just wasting our time and money while the Court is made up of godless commies."
Your notion of entrenched interests is too narrow. It isn't a matter of big business being entrenched and little business being insurgent, rather, in many if not most cases, it's a matter of business interests in general being entrenched against the interests of consumers, or employees, or small time investors.
Look, none of the regulations I listed are perfect, and that is probably more true of SOX than the rest. However, the goal of SOX and regulation in general isn't to piss off big business, it's to protect the American public. Allowing new Enrons to spring up would more damaging to America than marginally increasing the barriers of entry into high-finance for would-be start ups is.
re: democracy/republic, it's semantics. Current usage tends to be that republic implies citizens directly voting on issues (a la CA referenda or the Swiss model), rather than voting for representatives. This was not the usage in the 18th century.
Anyway, because we elect representatives, it is impossible to isolate politics from policy, which was, of course, the rather obvious original point I was making.
yeah. the one that was working just fine for 70 years, but was regulation that didn't favor entrenched interests and was eventually repealed. Many observers trace some responsibility for the current financial mess to the repeal, so this is a good of example of why and how the federal government ought to regulate entrenched interests.
Well for starters:
Sherman anti-trust
Glass-Steagall
Minimum Wage Act
Wagner Act
The Clean Air Act
The Clean Water Act
the OSH Act
FMLA
Sarbanes-Oxley
You're familiar with the concept of (small d) democracy, yes?
Nullification has a long history, but it's more of a mixed bag than honorable, mostly because the two most notable nullification attempts were to protect slavery, one resulting in the civil war. (and don't tell me John C. Calhoun was protesting taxes)
As for medical marijuana, we'll talk after California mobilizes the guard to protect dispensaries from the DEA. Until then, they're not nullifying, they're just refusing to do the fed's job for them.
I tend to agree that the purpose of the second amendment is to make the government think twice about oppressing the American people.
But here is where you've got it wrong:
The National Guard is the closest think we have to the militias the second amendment calls for. What is going to stop the police from calling the guard is (theoretically) the fear that the guard won't take their side. Even in 1791, a bunch of ruffians with rifles couldn't take on the US government
It is important to recognize that the US has a long history of both pacifism and isolationism, and that these are two very separate movements. Pacifism flows out of Quaker traditions and represents a comparative handful of people who won't to fight under any circumstances. Then Martin Luther King Jr. put an exclamation point on the philosophy.
Isolationism on the other hand is a larger movement and grows out of our unique geography, and basically says we shouldn't be sticking our nose in other nations business. Because it is so ludicrously unlikely that the US will be invaded (and has been since 1812), the isolationist perspective is basically that the US is better served by not wasting our blood and treasure abroad. The long history of isolationism has, in many ways, allowed us to bide our time and gather our strength so that we don't run into battle half-cocked (like, for instance Germany or France have been known to do). Isolationists include such unlikely characters as Thomas Paine, George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR. Probably 90% of people who oppose war today are isolationists. They'd rather not be involved, but give them a Maine, Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11, and they'll support the war effort, at least until the threat is diminished. However, as was the case with the Maine and 9/11, the hawks tend to press their advantage and go further than isolationists are willing to support.
As for Ghandi, you're an idiot. He was jailed four separate times, in this part of the world and at this time jail carried a significant risk of being seriously hurt or killed. Then there were three unsuccessful assassination attempts, before one finally succeed. He was killed by an assassin because he allowed India to be partitioned rather than see civil war. That is to say, he was killed because of his non-violent policy. Was this the smartest, or best policy? I don't know, but given the animosity between Pakistan and India that persists to this day, it seems fantastical to think that the country could have been held together anyway.
It goes back a lot further than FDR. Andrew Jackson made the first really sizable executive power grab, and then there was a guy named Abe Lincoln... Whether by design or accident since at least Marbury v. Madison each of the three branches have more or less continuously fighting the others for power. (Before that everyone basically deferred to George Washington when he was president so there was no real struggle there, and John Adams was deferential to Congress to a fault.)
The Sarah Palin stuff doesn't bother me nearly as much as the David Duke stuff. Again the difference is GNAA trolls are being hateful to be obnoxious. The CNN commentators are hateful because they're hateful (either that or they're much better trolls, bus sadly I don't think so).
The GNAAs are bad, but it's all copypasta - you know it's a deliberate troll.
The comments on major media sites on the other hand ... wow, people are just hateful. I'd rather scroll past another 10,000 GNAA posts than wade through the sludge at the bottom of a CNN political article.
What could happen is that some company realizes that the only thing really holding them back is the competitive advantage amazon controls in it's one-click patent. If only they could implement one-click shopping they'd take the world by storm. So, they relocate to Auckland, set up shop and relaunch their website now with all the glory of one-click. When they make their first billion dollars, instead of paying $250 million in taxes to the US, now the kiwis get it.
You know I was really scratching my head to come up with an exemplar for conservativism. I settled on George Will because, really there aren't too many around. There's also Bill Bennet and maybe Pat Buchanan, but in my estimation uncle Pat carried a bit too much water for Cheney in the last administration.
Hoover was Coolidge's secretary of commerce (and a powerful one at that), so if Hoover was staking out anti-conservative positions as commerce secretary, doesn't that mean the Coolidge administration was anti-conservative?
Besides, being a progressive and reformer in 1920 didn't necessarily mean larger or more central government in the golden age of classical liberalism. But I'll concede that Coolidge may have been a tad more small-government than Hoover, but to say that Hoover was closer to FDR than Coolidge is absurd.
Farm subsidies or land give aways and or protective terrifs for manufacturing date back at least to Jefferson. One thing Jefferson and Hamilton could agree on is that there was nothing wrong with the federal governmnent intervening in the economy to protect vital interests - what got their hackles raised was what exactly a vital interest was... You might not consider Jefferson or Hamilton to be sufficiently conservative, but if the guys who wrote the constitution don't reflect what the country ought to look like, well you might have a consistent position, but it has no historical basis - which makes me think it isn't really conservative.
As an aside, I don't think anyone was actually calling themselves conservatives during the gilded age, except maybe the temperance movement, who wanted (and got) radical government intervention.
Time is an important factor in defining the terms progressive and progressive - conservatives have to be conserving something and progressives have to be progressing from somewhere. On that note, Coolidge and Cleveland were both classical liberals, and the gilded age seems a rather arbitrary time period to try to conserve.
George W Bush was an authoritarian, not a conservative, and certainly not a liberal.
Wow.
If you're not going to let women vote, why not repeal the reconstruction amendments too?
And what how do you justify Coolidge being conservative and Hoover getting impeached? They had the same politics.
You might not like that whole list of amendments, but they're every bit as American as the second and tenth.
Whatever it is you think you have on your side it's neither just nor American.
not conservative != liberal
George W Bush and Dick Cheney were not, by several measures conservatives, but that doesn't make them liberals, in most cases it made them authoritarians. Right now, as near as I can tell, the GOP is trying to figure out if it want's to be conservative (George Will?), authoritarian (Dick Cheney), fascist/corporatism (Joe Barton), libertarian (Ron Paul), religious fundamentalist (Sam Brownback) , or batshit crazy (Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann). My estimation is that the conservatives are losing...
But that's all ok because they're still more organized than the democrats.
If you're a liberal you find conservative bias everywhere. If you're a conservative you find the opposite. Searching for the absolute position of bias is a really a fool's errand, because it assumes you can accurately identify the center at any given moment. And no, it hasn't been proven that the media is liberally biased, there are studies "proving" both sides and compelling responses to both. The best we can do is make rather sweeping statements about where different media sources are relative to each other, and yet still, a Tea Partier might consider the Wall Street Journal to be liberally biased.
Again, I'm not denying that certain news sources are biased. I called out the NY times and MSNBC. CNN is too close to the center to call, and it varies from program to program and issue to issue.
As for ACORN... when the investigation has been proven to be tainted all evidence from the investigation is suspect. No one has produced any untainted evidence that Acorn did anything wrong. On the flip side, we know that blackwater gunned down civilians in cold blood and KBR was negligent in wiring army bases resulting in the death of at least one soldier, and all the liberal media has managed to do is get blackwater to rechristen itself Xe. The DoD still contracts with KBR and the state department still hires Xe, yet fox news brought down Acorn with tainted evidence in a couple of months.
Populism is an economic policy, not social policy. The republicans are, in many cases, on the popular side of the culture wars, to the point that in large swaths of the country people vote against their own economic interests, even when they say the economy is the most important national issue.
As for NRA members defecting ... this is why democrats have largely ceded the issue. It's not for nothing that the NRA is one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington - their voters will and have switch parties over the issue, just ask Jack Brooks. In rural parts of otherwise blue states even otherwise socially conservative democrats cannot get elected without supporting gun rights.
Is there such a thing as a liberal media bias? In some cases, sure. The NY times and MSNBC have a liberal slant, but really, conservatives have a bit of history crying wolf on this front. Tom Brokaw might have been a liberal, but that doesn't mean the NBC nightly news was.
I also think that Fox news is the most slanted major media outlet (this opinion is undeniably influenced by my bias), from the Acorn nonsense to the Fox News organized tea parties if they're not the worst, they at least have the most influence.