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Tag: "Constitution"

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Right wing calls for military coup

Right wing calls for military coup

Occasionally, items in the news make me sit up and take notice of how far from a constitutional republic we really have come. Like this:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

That’s the opening salvo from John Perry, a regular columnist with the right-wing website Newsmax, in an article entitled “Obama risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention’”. I would like nothing more than to provide you with a link to the whole article, but it has apparently disappeared down the memory hole. Perhaps the editors at Newsmax realized it would be inconvenient to have an article speculating on the potential for a military coup at the same time they are trumpeting the peacefulness of the tea-party protestors and wondering why anyone would accuse them of encouraging dangerous, violent extremism. The quote I harvested above came from Mediamatters.org, which detailed this story yesterday. Unfortunately, the did not reproduce the full column. I managed to grab a screenshot of the Newsmax website search function, which proves that the article really did exist, although the hyperlink for the article now returns visitors to the main Newsmax page.

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Proposed Amendment

Proposed Amendment

I’ve been mulling an idea for an amendment to the U.S. constitution that probably won’t have as much a chance as the failed Equal Rights Amendment, in which persons of the female persuasion would have been defined explicitly as full fledged people with the same rights as the white male landholders for which the constitution was originally penned.

How’s this?

“Government shall pass no law abridging the right of any person to decide whether an organism living within his or her own body is a harmful parasite or a welcome guest, and to respond accordingly.”

A lawyer could probably tighten up the wording, but I think the gist is there.

This amendment might save oodles of money on government health care in ways such as:

  • It would limit the ways in which lawyers determine what medical procedures are prohibited or required, and the associated overhead in managing those decisions.
  • It would remove the bureaucracy necessary to separate funding for procedures that everyone accepts under government insurance from those protested by a vocal minority.

Discussion?

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Time to Change Congress - - again.

Change Congress? Didn’t we just change control of Congress? Well, we did change the party that controls Congress, but we haven’t yet changed the money that controls the politicians who control Congress. Barack Obama will have an uphill claim, guaranteed, because politicians are not going to judge his proposals based on their merits. There is always the money, which feeds their cravings for reelection.

What if all federal politicians learned that potential donors took this pledge: “I’m pledging not to donate to any federal candidate unless they support legislation making congressional elections citizen-funded, not special-interest funded.”

This link will take you to a speech by Lawrence Lessig, who explains the urgent need to “Change Congress.”

As long as members of Congress keep themselves in a position where they can be influenced by large contributions of money, we shouldn’t trust them.

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What can you do when the police dig through your garbage without your permission?

What can you do if the police dig through your garbage without your permission?   You  get even by digging through their garbage.   Willamette Weekly published this article back in 2002. Their idea was both simple and effective.  Whose garbage did they investigate?:
We chose District Attorney Mike Schrunk because his office is the most vocal [...]

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Arianna Huffington on why the Right is wrong.

Arianna Huffington has just released her new book, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. Huffington has reviewed the main themes of her book at Huffpo.
In the book, Huffington concludes that there are three main areas to consider in order to understand [...]

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First Freedom First: Defending the right to worship . . . or not.

FirstFreedomFirst.org was co-founded by two Believers, Barry Lynn and Dr. Welton Gaddy. On behalf of First Freedom First, they have produced an hour-long video to inform others of the importance of maintaining a political wall of separation between church and state. The Separation Clause appears in an abstract form in the U.S. Constitution, [...]

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Center For Inquiry questions politically-skewed high school textbook for classes on U.S. government

I read quite a few textbook quotes from this report and I must agree:  they are shockingly inaccurate.  This book repeatedly pushes the conservative line, even when the facts don’t support it–just like the Bush Administration.   The existence of this high school textbook is yet more evidence that we are living in a post-fact era.  [...]