North Carolina yesterday became the 30th state to ban same-sex marriage. Early results showed the amendment to its Constitution passing overwhelmingly by as much as 61 percent. The popularity of the amendment and key position of North Carolina in the upcoming presidential election appears to have prompted the White House to cancel an event in the state. President Obama cancelled a scheduled trip to North Carolina on the day of the vote. While Obama opposed the amendment last year, this week the White House was ridiculed by the media over the President’s refusal to support gay marriage and his insistence that his views were still “evolving” on the subject. The cancellation was widely viewed as an effort to avoid renewed questions over Obama’s refusal to take a clear stand on the civil rights question.
There was a huge turnout on Tuesday in North Carolina — attributed to the draw of the referendum. The proposed amendment states that “marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.”
North Carolina is viewed as a key target with Virginia for both campaigns. The vote reflects the division in the state with more liberal urban areas opposing the amendment while more conservative rural areas supporting it.
Just for the record, I have long advocated that the solution to this debate is to get rid of “marriage” licenses in favor of a universal civil union standard — which is closer to the function of the state recording of such unions. I believe that marriage should be left to individual faiths and institutions as a religious-based concept. The role of the state is to record a civil commitment of two individuals to live as one couple. The current debate — including the demand for retroactive termination of marriages — shows how the term marriage continues to inject religiosity into what is a civil contract between citizens.
Notably, the last time North Carolina amended its Constitution on marriage was in 1875 when it banned interracial marriage. That ban only ended in 1971.
Source: CNN
#religionpoisonseverything
I agree.with JT. The argument that marriage is sacred tells me that it’s a matter for churches, not the government. Let the churches establish whatever rules they like around the sacred institution, while the government simply enforces the secular, contractual elements of the union.
[...Obama’s refusal to take a clear stand on the civil rights question.]
The only thing Obama does take a clear stand on as far as civil rights is that nobody on the planet really has any since his administration can pick out anybodies name and become their judge & jury — executing them without a trial.
He enriches the 1% by letting them charge the bloated Pentagon $400 per gallon for every drop of fuel used in an endless war against some of the poorest people on earth, $2 billion per week squandered while people at home are suffering from the criminal turpitude perpetrated by his biggest campaign donors, namely, crooked bankers & corrupt wall street swindlers that he and the previous torturer in the white house) bailed out with what turned to be the single largest transference of wealth from the 99% to the 1% in human history.
He enriches war profiteers and environmental despoilers like BP while going out of his way to make sure absolutely no corporate or governmental entity that truly hurts the American people will ever get prosecuted by the Attorney General who instead is busy dreaming up new ways to defend the fascistic undermining of Constitutional jurisprudence and civil liberties to the point where not a single human being on the planet is protected anymore by the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus which civilization recognized the primacy of over 800 years ago.
And people who post here are eager to vote for this man come November even though their favorite professor and founder of this blog clearly won’t be.
I saw two guys from NC being interviewed Monday. One was the gay mayor of a city in NC, the other was a minister. The mayor presented a logical, well thought out argument, advocating a ‘no’ vote on the amendment. The only reasons given by the minister was to quote the Bible and emphasize that government must be Bible-based. I can just see how far that will go in Federal Court. Those folks have not yet got the memo that the USA was created as a secular form of government, accommodating to a diverse population.
I’d hazard a guess that the folks who oppose same-sex marriages would also oppose same-sex civil unions.
The last time North Carolina amended its Constitution on marriage, it was to ban marriage between whites and blacks.
How did that work out for you, NC?
The Bible makes for a poor Constitution.
The law now will get include civil unions…..ie shacking up protection for the man and woman…… OK…. Now we know where they stand…..
Retro …
OS
“…The only reasons given by the minister was to quote the Bible and emphasize that government must be Bible-based.”
Thank you for saving me some typing. This is precisely at the heart of the issue and is thus closer to Sharia than to Constitutional law.
“This is the essence of retrograde, reactionary politics and there’s a long history of these “sovereign” states exercising their “rights” to deny minorities their freedom at the hands of the very people who use the word like a weapon when it comes to having to pay an extra five cents in taxes. There’s not a thing new about this.”
“This is why we have to depend upon the United States Supreme Court to enforce the fundamental American value that we protect the constitutional rights and liberties of minorities against the prejudices of the majority. Unfortunately, the Roberts Court is hardly likely to be the one to do it. But that’s how it’s going to have to happen, at least in order to extend the rights enjoyed by straight Americans to our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters all across America.” The problem with “states’ rights” Part 745, North Carolina edition
by digby
Well Mr. Turley, you have succeeded in blaming President Obama for the failure of a favorable ruling in favor of same sex marriage. AGAIN. http://wp.me/p6sYP-cGe Nearly your entire 1st paragraph is devoted to your point. I follow you for the legal aspects of your posting but I am unclear of the legal precedent you have used to formulate your opinion. Is it the president should shove the law down the throats of the NC population?
I mostly agree with Mike Sallese above, except I would add that it is time to put the Romney button on the lapel of the photo of the author of the blog at the upper right of the page. I believe in keeping churches out of everything and government out of relationships between two people–except maybe who are not standing their ground getting ready to shoot each other. The problem comes when two people live together and perhaps need to share in their co tenents pension benefit or other entitlement which is clearly available to a different gender married couple (DGMC).
Romney stinks on every issue so please dont judge our President Obama on this dumb little act of the RepubliCons of North Carolina. This barking dog lives in North Carolina and knows who the rednecks are. Did you know for example that a candidate for office in the Republican primary does not put his party name or symbol on his campaign literature or yard signs? They are a creepy lot. One can figure out the RepubliCons by the short messages on their yard signs like : passionate conservative or states rights. Then we know which yards to poop in.
Or where to howl at night.
BarkinDog aint no RepubliCon
In my opinion and many others, the Inalienable Right to Contract for the purposes of any reason, as long as it doesn’t harm others is the second most important right next to the right of Self-ownership, self governing or to do with your body as you see fit. So many people want to control the lives of others and it sets a bad precedent. If government can control your lives in one matter, it lieves it open for government to control our lives in other matters, until we wake up one day with more laws on the books than anyone cares to count. Does this sound familiar to any country you know? Yea, almost all of them. A right is a inalienable right people. You are not supposed to be able to take them away, even with majority rule. You must not believe in or trust God because you obviously do not trust God to punish those who you beleive are siners. Christians and other religious secs are often their own worst enemies and can’t see the forest for the trees. When you persecute others, how do you think they are going to react? People want to try to emulate Gods laws and place them into mans thinking that it will make the world a better place. If you’ve noticed, for 4,000 years, it hasn’t and that is because many condone the usurpation of individual inalienable rights. The primary intent that our great nation was founded on, we continue to ignore. Shame on the North Carolinians for not protecting the sanctity of indivudal rights. Thats is pure ignorance and we should kick them out of the Union.
This legislation is actually void because it usurps the IX Amendment. But our government no longer cares to follow our great Constitution, because we have continuously granted them the power to do so. Wake up America and stop thinking that you are this “all knowing” representative of God. That is what is called arrogant and just because you believe you are one of God’s children, you can properly interpreted his will.
As long as we are going to use the bible to set the law lets get busy – a constitutional amendment against shellfish! One against wearing cloths of more than one type of fiber. Stoning for any woman not a virgin on her wedding night! Stoning for adulterers (BTW – since divorce is not recognized all subsequent marriages are adultery). OH, and one that will make a lot of people very happy – SLAVERY IS BACK BABY!
Plural marriage is OK though as long as it is one man & many women.
Frankly,
There are probably better equipped biblical scholars out there, but I think the bible speaks of divorce and how to obtain one…..
I heard a lot of churches got involved in this one. It’s time they started cracking down on them and actually taking away their tax-exempt status… But that’ll never happen.
DREAMS!
“And people who post here are eager to vote for this man come November even though their favorite professor and founder of this blog clearly won’t be.”
Karl,
And your point is? Are you so enmeshed in your “party line” thinking that you thing those of us who write here are required to adhere to Jonathan Turley’s
“part line”. If so, by now you should know Professor Turley better and understand that he is a man who believes what he says and doesn’t require adherence to his beliefs as a standard of loyalty. He is far too much a real person, who doesn’t take himself seriously, while at the same time taking his ideals/beliefs very seriously. As for the fact that some of us regulars here will vote for Obama I would imagine that JT has no problem with that, nor does it diminish us in his esteem.
Now you on the other hand have shown a certain rigidity in your statements that brought me back many decades. You seem to be following a rigid set of beliefs that prevent you from dealing with any issue on its merits, but judging it from the perspective of whether or not it is consistent with your philosophical belief system. That feeling has stuck with me since you have been commenting here. Finally today I clicked on your avatar to get some background. What I got was “iskraagent”. Googling it I came to numerous comments made on Marxist websites and this definition of “Iskra Agent”:
“Iskra Agents:
professional revolutionaries who in 1901–1903 rallied around the Leninist newspaper Iskra. These agents of the editorial board were directly associated with the board and were its local representatives and the bearers of its ideas and slogans. The Iskra agents devoted themselves full time to the struggle for the creation of a Russian Marxist party, and were the nucleus of the party.”
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Iskra+Agents
It all comes clear to me as to what my senses about your comments were. Now please understand that I was raised on the Army/McCarthy hearings and that both my parents were radicals, as I still am today. However, where I differentiate myself from Marxists is that while I see economic tyranny of the people to be a symptom of human dysfunction, I see “isms” as the con game played on people by the egotists/narcissists/sociopaths, who prey upon people with “authoritarian” minds, in their “will to power”. Thus to me, Capitalism, Marxism, Religion and all the other “Isms” are merely tools to deceive people into following some crazed leader, by representing that the “Ism” will save them. Given your political bent though it is clear to me why you are bemused that us Turley regulars don’t always agree with him. Ideology limits options in my opinion.
Now on this specific issue, I totally agree with Professor Turley’s point of view.
Leave marriage to the religious ceremonies and use “Civil Unions” as society’s means of recognizing the life partnerships of individuals. In my own extended family there are two instances of gay married couples, whose unions
are blessings. Were I gay and a member of a faith that didn’t recognize the right of same sex couples to be married religiously, I’d reexamine my need to follow that faith.
Where’s the so called mainstream media request for GOP nominee Romney “to take a clear stand on the civil rights question?”
Without a target to hate, these folk have no God.
The Republican leadership is very good at putting targets on people’s backs and their followers are grateful for being given the opportunity to show how much they love God.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/07/05/260823/ohio-gop-weakens-election-law-by-allowing-poll-workers-to-refuse-to-inform-voters-where-they-can-vote/ Did you see this, Blouise?
Given the history of this sort of legislation around the country, the North Carolina vote was virtually a foregone conclusion. But fear, religious extremism and authoritarianism have been driving conservative politics for years.
When the inevitable court battle produces the inevitable court ruling reminding us for the umpteenth time that civil rights are not subject to the whims of majority rule, the inevitable response will be outrage about “liberal” judges, assaults on Christianity and the sacrifice of the nation on the altar of secularism.
Oh, for the NC guy who said the government should be based on Biblical law, here’s one of my least favorite Biblical laws (mostly because it’s not even-handed):
If a man is fighting with his neighbor in the alleyway between their houses,
and
If that man is losing the fight,
and
If the wife of that man (losing) comes out into the alleyway to help her husband, so he will not lose the fight,
and
If to help her husband, that wife reaches down and grabs the testicles of the man who is beating her husband, and squeezes them,
YOU shall cut off her hands for doing that.
Show her no mercy.
Well said Mike. I’ve been seeing the same BS out of the right wing Christian movement for close to 40 years, negating many of the potentially positive outcomes by the libertarian and patriot movement. You’re either for liberty or against it, make up your mind folks. You can’t continue to be hypocrits.
SwM,
This is something the League has been addressing for decades.
Helping confused voters find their precinct is time consuming but a necessary element in a democracy.
I’ve worked the polls in affluent neighborhoods and voters confused as to which precinct is theirs is common. As areas expand or contract precincts are redrawn and polling places change. Sometimes polling places change as the numbers accessing them change. New people move in and register to vote then forget which precinct they live in. Some people only vote every four years in the Presidential election and can’t remember where they voted four years previously.
Depending on the size of the precinct, we always had at least one person assigned to helping confused voters find their precinct.
Four years ago I forgot that precincts had been redrawn and Tex and I went to the wrong place to vote. Not only were we in the wrong precinct, our new precinct polling place was at a different address. I was embarrassed, as you can well imagine, as I’d received a postcard with the new info but had forgotten all about it on the day we went to vote. I was one of those confused voters republicans want to keep out of the booth!
Tex and I have lived in the same house for 35 years and in that time we have voted at four different polling places. That will be the Republicans next move … changing the physical polling places once every two years. Once the poll workers are no longer required to help voters find the address of their polling place, they can start further confusing the voter by constantly changing the address of their polling place.
What irks me about this is that SSM was already illegal in NC (please correct me if I’m wrong). All this does is remove the right of PRIVATE Business to allow domestic partners onto the insurance of their employee. I’d be willing to bet that most of the “pro” voters have at one time or another moaned about the federal govt’s interference in private business and religion. Now, it seems, since THEY are the ones interfering, it’s Aok.
SwM,
Further … this bill, Ohio H.B. 194, besides removing the requirement that poll workers direct voters (in many cases their friends and neighbors) to their proper precinct, also reduces the number of early voting days from 35 to 17, eliminates voting on the weekend before an election, and prohibits county boards of elections from mailing unsolicited absentee ballots. H.B. 194 will be subject to a ballot repeal measure in November.
More than thirty states have new or pending changes to current voting laws.
States seeking to change their laws have passed or proposed provisions that significantly reduce the number of early voting days, require voters to show restrictive forms of photo identification before voting and make it harder for volunteer organizations to register new voters.
Supporters, Republicans, of these laws argue that they will reduce the risk of voter fraud. The overwhelming evidence, however, indicates that voter fraud is virtually non-existent and that these new laws will make it harder for hundreds of thousands of elderly, disabled, minority, young, rural, and low-income Americans to exercise their right to vote.
You are spot on Mike A.
Blouise,
The next step for the Republicans in Ohio will be to reduce the number of voting locations in Democratic areas as has been done elsewhere. Is the Attorney General in Ohio a Democrat or a Republican?
Karl,
“And people who post here are eager to vote for this man come November even though their favorite professor and founder of this blog clearly won’t be.”
Eager? I think not. Speaking for myself–if I do choose to vote for President Obama in November, It’s because I fear what would happen to this country if the Republicans retain the house, gain the Senate, and Romney wins the presidential race. Republicans already own the Supreme Court. I don’t have a lot of faith in the Democrats–but they are better by far than the party that has given over its soul to far-right-wingers.
raf,
Mike DeWine, republican, who Sherrod Brown defeated for the Senate seat in 2006 after DeWine had held the seat for two terms. DeWine is of no help as he owes his present position of Atty Gen to the teabaggers. It’s too bad he sold out to those gooneybirds but I guess it was the only way he could keep a government job.
The interview with Obama has started. People are saying that there is “pink smoke” rising from the White House.
It is interesting that despite all the knowledge that is on the web today that people still believe that a Democratic Republic can provide what is in the best interest of the majority. Government is a power brokerage cartel that acquires it power by either overthrowing its government or by overthrowing anothers and once in power, they use the most horrible of methods of maintaining such powers. The French Revolution was the best example of that. If you can show me a good example of a government that has worked well for the majority, I will show you many lies within it’s history. You will never ever defeat the oligarchy at the political game they control through political means. We must agree on a better method to acheive success and it will not incorporate violence. It will incorprate the pen and the minds of the majority.
It’s amazing with all the knowledge that is available on the web today that people use words they don’t understand and often in a contradictory fashion.
democracy \di-ˈmä-krə-sē\, n.,
1a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
2: a political unit that has a democratic government
3 (capitalized): the principles and policies of the Democratic party in the United States
4: the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority
5: the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges
By definition, one cannot defeat oligarchy by the abandonment of democracy unless one opts for monarchy or dictatorship which are just as bad in practice as oligarchy.
Blouise,
“Without a target to hate, these folk have no God.”
I don’t know about that; it seems they have a god called Themonly.
“Themonly”
Nice smithing there, gbk.
“get rid of “marriage” licenses in favor of a universal civil union standard”
Absolute genius.
Get the state our of the business of marrying individuals in part because marriage clearly flows from a religious tradition. Let the church handle that for those who want it.
Let the state provide a structure for civil unions to couples who feel ready to commit through sickness and health, till death or through legal procedure they part.
Leave the marrying to the church and all the legal details of child raising, property, medical decisions, and inheritance to the state.
Who could possibly argue about that? Oops, maybe the wrong question. But still, quite simply the best suggestion re marriage since the invention of the nation state.
BTW, some have debated Obama’s position on same sex marriage. What ever his personal opinion, I doubt anyone ever accused Obama of not being a political realist. With the nation still firmly divided on this issue is there any surprise that he is using a little creative ambiguity. I think not.
bfm,
“Leave the marrying to the church and all the legal details of child raising, property, medical decisions, and inheritance to the state.”
Given the limitations of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, you have nailed down the essence of legitimate state involvement in marriage in the first place.
Blouise and Gene,
The etymology of the god Themonly has been slowly corrupted into Themoney. But in actual meaning there is little to distinguish the two.
“By definition, one cannot defeat oligarchy by the abandonment of democracy unless one opts for monarchy or dictatorship which are just as bad in practice as oligarchy.”
Why must I opt for monarchy or a dictatorhship when democracy fails?
Your are not considering the facts that democracies have never worked. Thinking that something that doesn’t work is the best, is an illogical thought. That is why our Citizens attempted to see if they could get a democratic Republic with the protection of individual rights to work. Sadly it hasn’t either.
I was in the Democratic Party and they do not even pratice their own democratic philosphies. The year I was in the Boca Raton Club, the State Party took our clubs campaign war chest from us without our concent and we had raised more money in Palm Beach than any of the other clubs. The Democratic Party is not even democratic and as every libertarian knows theyr’e just a bunch of lying political thieves just like their representatives.
So what do we do now Gene H?
Developing story: Obama Backs Gay Marriage
NOT EVOLVING Mitt Doesn’t Support Gay Marriage Jim Rogash / Getty Images
1. Mitt Doesn’t Support Gay Marriage
With chatter growing louder that President Obama will come out in support of gay marriage on Wednesday, Mitt Romney said at a campaign event in Colorado that he still does not support equal marriage rights—or even civil unions—for same-sex couples. “When these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts, I indicated my view, which is that I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name,” Romney told a local Fox News-affiliate reporter.
Read it at ABC News
“Why must I opt for monarchy or a dictatorhship when democracy fails? ”
Because those are your only options:
1) Rule by One
2) Rule by the Few
3) Rule by the Many
“Your are not considering the facts that democracies have never worked. ”
And that would be your ill-informed opinion. Democracy works when citizens are educated and participate and politicians are held accountable for their action. If you want to point to our current government as a failure, you’re not considering the fact that it is a democracy in name only and has been an ever encroaching oligarchy since the end of WWII. Democracy doesn’t work in this country because it has been stolen piecemeal over time by “special interests”.
“I was in the Democratic Party and they do not even pratice their own democratic philosphies.”
So what? You point to a flaw in partisanship, not democracy itself as a form. The form is fine. Partisanship is for suckers playing into the hands of oligarchs though.
The answer certainly isn’t Libertarians. Their policies play into economic tyranny even faster than those of the GOP or DNC. They are crippled by a lack of understanding of how government do, can and should work in the real world combined with an economic platform that is pure fantasy.
“So what do we do now Gene H?”
Remove special interest spending from the campaign/electoral and legislative processes and make taking money other than salary a felony for politicians that mandates removal from office, forfeiture of assets and substantial prison terms for both the graftor and graftee. Amend the Constitution to limit corporate personality back to its original form and utility. Campaign finance reform. Criminal law reform to adequately punish white collar offenders. If they don’t take this kind of change willingly, then history will teach them the hard math of 99>1 just like it did the French. I prefer non-violent change, but given the venal corrupt nature of Washington currently I predict something really bad will have to happen before they realize the only way a government survives long term is by looking out for the best interests of all citizens.
@Mike Sallese (@pesky9)
Mike, I think many of us would argue that constitutional rights should not be open to restriction on the basis of popular, democratic vote.
So when a popular vote interferes with the constitutional rights of a particular group, then yes we expect the federal government to ‘shove it down the throats’.
And BTW is there is ever a popular vote to seize your property, and march you off to a compound behind barbed wire, there are still some of us who will demand that the president ‘shove it down there throats’ because there is a fundamental violation – regardless of the popular vote.
Some would argue that marriage is not a constitutional right. Well maybe so. But when one thinks of natural rights, I can hardly think of any right more fundamental that the right to decide the person with whom one would spend one’s life.
And from another perspective, if they don’t hurt any body, don’t break anything, and don’t frighten the horses, whose business is it anyway?
And finally for those of you who are only implementing the laws of god. The last I heard he was all powerful. So why not follow his laws yourself and let him take care of enforcing his own laws on the rest of us?
Gene,
In a nutshell.
First, show me one democracy in world history that has ever worked for a prolonged period of time. That is not my only option. I can have the option of not wanting any of them which is my current option. Why do I have to choose to be ruled by anyone? If you want to be ruled by someone else or some group, have at it, but keep me out it. Try ruling yourself.
Not all religions have marriage ceremonies or expressly sanctify marriages (e.g., some branches of Buddhism). Marriage is the contract. If religions want to attach themselves that, call it something different or make the attachment clear. The idea of giving “marriage” to religions is the whole wingnut agenda for this and it obscures the historic and legal purposes of marriage.
hskiprob,
Democracy worked for substantial periods of time throughout history: Sparta, Athens, Rome, the Guild democracies of Medieval Europe, Venice, Florence, Flanders, the Iroquois, modern Europe and America until the end of WWII and the advent of the Cold War. Even the Aztec had elections, but only for a speaker, not a ruler. History is replete with examples of successful democracies.
That democracy needs to be maintained to survive is a separate issue. If you want a “set and leave” form government? You’ll end up with some form of tyranny every time. Democracy requires informed participation to survive. It takes work. That’s just the way it is. No democracy will last without the required work by citizens. Democracies don’t fail because the form is inherently flawed. They fail because people fail to do the maintenance required to keep them in place because the battle for democracy is a perpetual battle against those who would subjugate, i.e. the oligarchs and the would-be kings.
Now a couple of questions for you.
Point to a civilization of any substantive size that has ever worked for a prolonged period of time without a government of one for or another?
You can’t.
Point to a civilization with a government that has a form that works better for ensuring freedom and liberty than democracy? (Benevolent dictatorships/monarchs do not count.)
You can’t.
Point to a system of laws without a method of enforcement that has ever worked on the scale of a civilization?
You can’t.
A system of laws without a mechanism for enforcement is a list of suggestions and is in no way different from openly embracing the tyranny of the strong over the weak.
“That is not my only option. I can have the option of not wanting any of them which is my current option.”
Sure, you can opt for a fantasy option if you like. It doesn’t mean that you have that choice in reality. Your choices really are as listed above, your disapproval notwithstanding. The option you want isn’t available and to think it is viable requires a totally and completely unrealistic interpretation of human nature to happen.
I, too, have heard that President Obama has attained clarity and now claims to support same-sex-marriage. As with all things Obama, I’ll believe it when his administration’s justice department brings suit against states that infringe upon the civil rights of American citizens in this regard.
gbk,
“The etymology of the god Themonly has been slowly corrupted into Themoney. But in actual meaning there is little to distinguish the two.”
Thank goodness I decided to reread the thread other wise I would have missed your rather brilliant “smithing”. Well done!
The US made slavery work for a while just as it has democracy. It’s a fools position. Start thinking in terms of real changes and stop excepting authoritarian rule through various governmental systems.
Gene H. and Blouise: What happens in a society when the Citizens no longer have the right of Redress of Grievence? You should know that this has already occured in 2007.
If you no longer have the right to a redress of grievences than how do you think you are going to accomplish any of the things you suggest?
“Remove special interest spending from the campaign/electoral and legislative processes and make taking money other than salary a felony for politicians that mandates removal from office, forfeiture of assets and substantial prison terms for both the graftor and graftee. Amend the Constitution to limit corporate personality back to its original form and utility. Campaign finance reform. Criminal law reform to adequately punish white collar offenders. If they don’t take this kind of change willingly, then history will teach them the hard math of 99>1 just like it did the French. I prefer non-violent change, but given the venal corrupt nature of Washington currently I predict something really bad will have to happen before they realize the only way a government survives long term is by looking out for the best interests of all citizens.”
The problem with this position is that as soon as the so-called revolution is over – the oligarchs just pick up where they left off. A bunch of people die but nothing really changes.
Blouise,
Actually, I must correct myself. When I stated that, “[b]ut in actual meaning there is little to distinguish the two,” meaning the beliefs of Themonly vs. Themoney, it appears I was wrong.
According to Weston B. Smith’s tome, “The Angst Of Taxes: How To Solidify Your Possessions While Eating Your Neighbor,” it appears that Themoney is a subservient henotheistc belief that is proffered as a path to Themonly, and that both of these gods are subservient to Methe.
Sorry for the confusion.
gbk,
lol … I’m glad you cleared that up
Blouise,
No problem. Let me know if you want to borrow Weston B. Smith’s tome, as only one-hundred copies were printed and it’s nowhere to be found on the internet!
Peace to all.
hskiprob,
Slavery? Really? Appeal to emotion.
-15 points.
“If you no longer have the right to a redress of grievences than how do you think you are going to accomplish any of the things you suggest? ”
Please read the whole response to previous questions before re-asking answered questions: “If they don’t take this kind of change willingly, then history will teach them the hard math of 99>1 just like it did the French. I prefer non-violent change, but given the venal corrupt nature of Washington currently I predict something really bad will have to happen before they realize the only way a government survives long term is by looking out for the best interests of all citizens.”
- 0 points but a stern warning for not paying attention and mixing questions
None of the rest of yours response addresses that what I said above is true and you ignore that “DEMOCRACY TAKES WORK BY CITIZENS TO MAINTAIN”.
Non-responsive.
-85 points.
Total: -100 points.
Again, you are free to take a fantasy option if you like, but simply bitching about the problem of corruption isn’t practically looking to resolve it either. Your choices when dealing with non-responsive government are
1) peaceful non-violent resistance
2) do nothing/bitch about it/have fantasy solutions
3) revolt
Personally I advocate a variation of option #1 but realistically what is going to happen is a lot of #2 until enough people are in pain to where #3 happens by default. “The problem with this position is that as soon as the so-called revolution is over – the oligarchs just pick up where they left off. A bunch of people die but nothing really changes.” Is the position of a child. If your problem is with human nature, you engineer the systems to be proofed against human nature by instituting legal changes such as suggested combined with mechanisms of government that make enforcement not optional. If you get caught selling or buying influence and you should have the civilized equivalent of your head cut off for the good of society: a very very long time in prison plus all your assets stripped/your company liquidated/your removal from office now and evermore. Possibly forfeiture of citizenship. I’d even be willing to discuss the death penalty with limited appeals for malfeasance of office and pandering for political favors. If the problem is prostitution (which is a perfect analogy for the situation created by corruption) you make prostitution bear such a significant cost when caught that no sane and/or rational person would try it.
any info on how the primary vote in Wisconsin went? I heard it was a blood bath for the unions. Very few people showed up to vote democrat. Is that true?
I also have heard that a bunch of democratic voters have gone back to Mexico and points south. Is that true?
I think democrats are in trouble this year. I am thinking blood bath at the polls. Senate, house and Presidency to republicans? Romney would be the only liberal left in Washington. Although Bernie Sanders and Henry Waxman are perennial favorites.
In West Virginia an inmate got 40% of the primary vote for president. Wow! That sucks.
Then Lugar got his republicon ass beat in his primary.
Are democrats waging a war on Obama?
And then the North Carolina gay marriage loss, I have heard that very democrats came out to vote.
Elaine:
I understand perfectly that you choose to vote for Obama as the “lesser evil” as that’s the same position many of my union brothers & sisters, liberal friends & colleagues adopt but I always like to remind them that means they are still casting a vote for evil, for a party born from the slaveholders class, the party that prosecuted every shooting war in the 20th century [Grenada, Panama & Desert Storm weren't real wars since effectively only one side was shooting] — the same party that engineered not only NAFTA but also the odious ’96 Telecommunications Act that Fox News owes its existence to, the same party that laid the framework for the Patriot Act after OK. City, the same party oversaw the deindustrialization of America and the outsourcing of its manufacturing base, the same party that “ended welfare as we know it,” the same party that has taken money from the trade union movement but sold them down the river at virtually every opportunity, the same party that allowed the gutting of the NLRB and hasn’t lifted a finger to change it, the same party that greenlighted for Criminal Destruction of Iraq, the same party that greenlighted the greatest transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1% from which the criminally incompetent banksters are still pinching themselves in disbelief, the same party that continues to squander enormous blood & treasure in America’s longest & most mindlessly unwinnable war, the party that has now so undermined 200 years of Constitutional jurisprudence that even this blogs preeminent scholar, hero, and founder has drawn the line in the sand which he will not cross and will be abstaining, for the first time in his life, from voting for President.
I’ll conclude with a test question that I’ll wager nobody can answer:
Who here knows what President Clinton’s first official act in the White House was, that is, the very first thing he did officially after being inaugurated?
I’ll give you a hint: it was an act of mass murder that according to every reputable legal scholar, including Turley, constituted an International War Crime.
substitute the word gun for same sex marriage and see what happens.
OK. Quit wasting bandwidth searching for the answer to my test question because your Google world doesn’t portray working people’s realities, particularly Brown people’s and women’s history as neutrally as you all imagine.
Clinton’s first official act in the white house was one of the most cowardly criminal acts of mass murder in American history.
It’s an irrefragable fact.
That’s right, what he did, in a calculated effort to show all the right wing hawks sucking the teat of the Pentagon that manipulate our foreign policy, which in the end is derived from domestic policy, is to order the lobbing of 4 cruise missiles randomly into the heart of Baghdad which killed hundreds of innocent civilians instantly, one of which demolished an entire apartment building in the middle of an urban city housing millions, which just happened to kill the Woman who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize for poetry while she was sipping her morning tea.
Now why would Clinton, who earned a reputation for wrecking women’s lives with his compound adultery, murder a Nobel Peace Prize winner?
The answer is because he calculated very cynically that in order to prove to all the chickenhawks in the NSC that he wasn’t the gutless turd draft dodger that he really was he needed to do a “manly act” and that act was to retaliate for the attempt on Bush Sr’s life in Kuwait.
That’s right. If you’ll recall that after the First Gulf War Papa Doc Bush Senior made a trip to Kuwait to kiss the hands of the Kuwaiti Emirs and remind them that freedom wasn’t free. During that trip some alleged culprits, probably usual suspects that were rounded up just for the event, were accused of plotting against Bush’s life and were summarily executed.
Despite their Mideastern incompetence the CIA narrative was that Saddam Hussein had engineered a hit squad to take out Bush on that visit to Kuwait but their “prowess” had managed to thwart it.
The audacity of Saddam’s alleged assassination attempt meant payback was in order and Clinton meted out that punishment, not to Saddam and his minions but rather to an innocent sleeping city full of the victims of Saddam, that is, his first act in the white house was to order the launching from a warship anchored in the Gulf exactly 4 cruise missiles with a “random” target, meaning they obliterated whatever they hit in Baghdad, and one missile demolished the apartment building that just happened to house a famous woman who had earned the freakin’ Nobel Peace Prize for poetry.
So some philandering white educated prick, who virtually every “regular” blogger here voted for including Turley, started his administration with a genuine racist war crime against women no less, yet every degenerate Republican bastard alive hounded that weasel as some kind of bleeding heart liberal!
It’s truly hard to imagine what a twisted world we live in when erstwhile progressive & well meaning people hearken back to the good old days when brown women poets were vaporized while sipping tea in their apartment without question, let alone insisting that the best bet for America’s future is this guy whose vaporized entire wedding parties in Pakistan in the name of freedom & democracy.
Res ipsa loquitur
Blouise and SwM,
It’s confusing as hell, but back to Ohio and HB 194 and the changing of polling places that got me all pissed off. HB 194 has been repealed and prevented from going to a November referendum leaving in place some other earlier law that the Republicans favored. The repeal of HB 194 did not make Dems happy. I think the law that now stands is Senate bill something or other (sorry to be so unhelpful) and all I could find on that was no early voting on the weekend before election day which doesn’t sound too horrible.
I love your research, but you’re gonna kill me with stuff that is no longer relevant. Will you please watch that older stuff? My heart can’t take all this bad news. The other day somebody published a comment that the last two Chicago mayors had been jailed. I just read that the dentist that pulled all the teeth of her ex is a hoax. If I can’t count on the Turley folks (with notable exceptions) for the facts, where am I to go?
Final straw…..Bron may be right about Wisconsin.
@Karl Friedrich
This is off point and I could look it up but I am too lazy, besides you seem to be the guy who would know.
Didn’t Clinton initiate a bombing mission in the Balkans the night before there was some big impeachment vote?
Maybe there was absolute military necessity, but doesn’t it make you wonder?
I may be wrong but I have had this dim recollection, literally, for years.
BFMike.
Don’t get me started on Clinton’s war crimes in the Balkans because they are as notorious as the CIA lies about “mass rape” that were used as the pretext for the American bombing of civilians there.
I was flabbergasted in the late 90′s to watch a McNeil-Lerher News Hour that featured an official “CIA Spokesman” who said, and I paraphrase here, that look, the real reason the US military is bombing Serbia is not all the claims about human rights abuses but rather to, and this is an exact quote, “vanquish the last bastion of soviet-style planned economy on the European Continent.”
Meaning planning an economy for people’s needs rather than relying on the anarchy of the manipulated stock market that usually leads to the ruin of the workers & middle class is what that perfidious war was all about and all the hue & cry about raped women and mass graves was irrelevant to the Pentagon’s fascistic machinations & criminal turpitude in the Balkans.
You assume anyone was interested in answering your irrelevant and obviously loaded question other than yourself, KF. You also assume to know how others voted when you don’t have a clue in a very thinly veiled partisan attack that only makes one ask “to what purpose is KF bringing this up in this manner?” None of the answers to that particular question reflect favorably on your methodology or intent, KF.
Res ispa loquitur indeed.
BTW and on a personal note that really is none of your business, I didn’t vote for Clinton. I think he’s a first class asshole who enabled the financial crimes of the later Bush Administration by doing his particular Wall Street master’s bidding and aiding in the dismantling of Glass-Steagall. In addition, I thought Clinton was barely competent as governor of Arkansas (only marginally better than Bush Jr. did in Texas and he was an unmitigated disaster). We haven’t had a decent choice in Presidential candidates since I’ve been able to vote and only really one since Eisenhower to speak of and he got stonewalled by the graft weasels in Congress. When your choices are dumbass puppet #1 and #2 because the system has been rigged over 60 years, you shouldn’t blame others for voting as well as they can given the circumstances. They are at least participating in the appearance of democracy we are still allowed to have by the corporatist fascists who really pull Washington’s strings. So speaking of questions, what is your interest in making such blatantly partisan attacks here, eh KF? Whose boots are you licking exactly? The views of general contempt against both parties is widely held in this venue. That Elaine isn’t as vociferous as I am in saying that I won’t vote for Obama no matter what doesn’t mean that she is wrong because she retains the option to vote for the manifestly lesser of two evils given the far right shift taken place in the GOP (they’ve have indeed lost their brown shirted theocratic fucking minds in case you haven’t been paying attention). It just means she chooses to exercise her options to the best of ability given the constraints of her conscience. Undecided is a legitimate answer. I do not begrudge her this any more than I begrudge Mike Spindell’s statement certain that he will vote Obama for those reasons. The constraints on my actions are personal just as the constraints on their actions vis a vis voting are personal. My reasons are logically valid as are theirs. It is just the value weighting that differs in the decision process. They are people of good conscience even though we disagree in part or in whole about choosing the lesser evil as an option. Just so, they don’t begrudge me my decision and even knowing in detail the reason for that decision, they still respect it.
You don’t seem to respect their decisions because it isn’t in line with yours. And although we seem to have reached a similar decision, I suspect it was via very different paths.
So what exactly is your problem, KF? That people given a Morton’s Fork problem are damned if they do and damned if they don’t? That not all pols who deserve to be damned are damned equally? Tell us, Portnoy, the nature of your complaint in concise non-partisan language.
BFMike:
More on your excellent point was the movie “Wag the Dog” inspired by Clinton’s unilateral, and as it tuns out criminal according to the World Court, bombing of a Sudanese Baby Formula factory that was conveniently targeted by Clinton in a blatant manipulation of CIA Intelligence right before some big congressional or senate vote. It was that very war crime that inspired Bush and the Neocons that they could manufacture any justification they desired to inflict illegal war & misery upon any brown people they desired without consequence.
Facts are stubborn things or as Turley says: (“The thing itself speaks”)
Karl
I’m having trouble finding the Iraqi poet who won a Nobel to which you refer. Can you please supply a name?
Gene,
There is really nothing puzzling about Karl’s accusations of those here who would vote for Obama. Interestingly he never answered my rather long comment to him above in which I outed him as a Marxist. Marxists tactics are to attack liberals and progressives much more than right wingers. The idea is that is who their real opposition in the quest for power is. Marxist belief is that the masses will only revolt and follow their lead when there is chaos. Their problem is their doctrinaire rigidity born of adhering to a dialectic view which is really a tautology. They’re personally annoying and not fun to hang out with. Ultimately though the are similar to teabaggers, but at this point far less dangerous. Too many years of blind support for the USSR and Mao destroyed their credibility but I guess hope springs eternal.
Mike,
Who can blame him for avoiding that subject? Admitting you’re a Marxist at this point in history is as embarrassing as explaining why you might have a perfectly preventable venereal disease.
Mike and Gene,
Thanks for the excellent perspectives. Although, Mike, don’t you mean a, “[false] dialectic view which is really a tautology.”?
Mike: I took you to school on Vaclav Havel less than a year ago and now you resort to red baiting!
That’s typical of ex- trade union leader wannabes — red bait the rank & filers that want to stop all the class collaboration and liquidation of the union that winds up with a lousier & lousier contract.
It’s precisely that pattern of behavior by union bureaucrats that has reduced American unionism to its pathetically weakened state today.
When people are losing a debate their first resort is to change the subject.
The subject is not Marx & Mao but why somebody here would vote for Obama considering his abysmal record, particularly since the blog’s founder won’t be based on Constitutional principles he considers inviolate, that is, as Turley articulated in his LA Times article, Obama has decreed himself judge, jury & executioner of every person on the planet and such a notion does violence to the US Constitution & every civil liberty principle he holds dear.
As far as the name of the Iraqi woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize only to be murdered shortly thereafter by Clinton, it was 2 decades ago and my memory is sharp but not that sharp.
Surely the regulars who loathe my critique of Obama & the dems, many of who sit at the computer all day & night, will gladly prove my test question wrong if it were possible which it isn’t.
Thus I predict silence will be deafening except for those who will try & change the subject or otherwise attempt to stifle the messenger despite the facts of the message.
“Although, Mike, don’t you mean a, “[false] dialectic view which is really a tautology.”?”
gbk,
Not only are you witty and a wordsmith, but you’re also smart and correct.
It is very obvious to me that we have a Two Party system that is for the most part in collusion to control the means of production, just as Karl Marx had suggested. Every single one of his plaforms have been placed into law to some degree and the 2nd, 5th and 10th totally; an Income Tax, a Central bank and Free education for all children, respectively. Thanks to especially those enactments we now live in a totalitarian state that is not smart enough to know it. From Fascism to Totalitarianism: http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Letter-to-Editor.htm?EdNo=001&Info=0193662
Curious,
I’m sorry … the info was one day old. On May 8th (Tues) of this year the Republicans passed Senate Bill 295 to repeal HB 194. HB 194 was scheduled for a referendum in Nov. which the republicans figured they would lose so for the first time in the history of the state the legislators repealed a bill up for referendum.
Democrats unanimously opposed the repeal of House Bill 194, originally a GOP-backed election law passed last year. They said it subverts Ohio citizens’ constitutional right to referendum.
Although I understand why the Ohio democrats are upset about the republicans’ successful attempt on Tuesday to avoid an embarrassing loss at the polls in November, I’m grateful that it was done now for reasons that should be obvious. However, the Constitutionality of repealing a bill that is up for referendum remains a question for the State.
Once again, I apologize to you and your heart. I wasn’t trying to give erroneous info, I honestly didn’t know that the bill had been repealed on Tuesday when I wrote about it on Weds.
hskiprob:
It’s quite true there’s few notions more totalitarian than Obama’s decree that his admin. has the right to be judge, jury & executioner for every human being, however it’s clear you’ve never read a single word of Marx but rather only have a Fox News level of understanding about him and his views which were not only the abolition of all taxes but all money in general and private property in the means of production in particular, an idea summed up in the famous motto that society should strive for: “From each according to their ability — to each according to their need.”
Only a right wing ignoramus would argue that this 99% versus 1% state of affairs we live under today has been in any way, shape or form been influenced by Marx, an idea that is as patently absurd as the notion that Obama is some kind of Marxist.
Please read the Democratic Capatalist Illusion and the Myth of the Rule of Law. Hopefully those should help you get out of your delusional state. https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!topic/HarrietRobbins/mURGvK3knbQ http://rsjexperiment.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/the-myth-of-the-rule-of-law/
“No problem. Let me know if you want to borrow Weston B. Smith’s tome, as only one-hundred copies were printed and it’s nowhere to be found on the internet!” (gbk)
How did you obtain a copy? If I borrow it will we have to insure it through the post office? If we do, how much? Can we afford it?
Blouise,
Well, with Comstock being gone I suppose I could mail it, but now that I think about it I’m worried it would get lost. I found the book in the Spartan Library at the now defunct Jim Jones University when they were liquidating their assets in the late ’70s. Let me think about it.
gbk,
You know … Anthony Comstock is under-appreciated.
“they were liquidating their assets” … what a lovely way to put it
“I took you to school on Vaclav Havel less than a year ago and now you resort to red baiting!”
Karl,
You are a Marxist though aren’t you? since I believe you have every right to be one I’m certainly not “Red Baiting”. I am really pointing out useful information about you, to allow people perspective on where your views are coming from and what your agenda is. The same would be true if you were your direct opposite number on the Right, a tea bagger.
See having dealt with many I am well aware that from a Marxist perspective, a Romney victory and all the chaos it would cause to most of the people in this country, would be desirable for recruiting purposes. This was what I always found to be wrong with the Marxist perspective. While giving plaintive cries in defense of the oppressed, to Marxists that is an intellectual exercise, since they need people’s continued misery in order to achieve what they think they can achieve. Unlike you, people’s suffering to me is an emotionally gut wrenching feeling and I see my duty as trying to ameliorate it as much as I can.
“That’s typical of ex- trade union leader wannabes — red bait the rank & filers that want to stop all the class collaboration and liquidation of the union that winds up with a lousier & lousier contract.”
Actually, the people that defeated me in that election both had Communist Party people in their retinues and the person who won was CP himself. He proceeded to assist in destroying the democratic nature of the union. As I said before my biggest opponents were Trotskyites.
“Thus I predict silence will be deafening except for those who will try & change the subject or otherwise attempt to stifle the messenger despite the facts of the message.”
Is it stifling the messenger to point out what the messenger’s political perspective is and therefore what he is attempting to do, I think not? If that were true than I think your writing:
“It’s precisely that pattern of behavior by union bureaucrats that has reduced American unionism to its pathetically weakened state today.”
was an effort to stifle me? As for myself I was never a “union bureaucrat”, which was precisely why I wasn’t electable. What I must admit amuses me so much about you Karl is that your sentence structure, adjectives and writing are so typical of those I encountered more than 40 years ago. It proves to me what slavish devotion “party line’ people have. You are what is known as a
“Left Wing-Right Wing Authoritarian”.
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/01/21/the-authoritarians-a-book-review-and-book/
@Karl Friedrich – Many people are confused by the various “isms” as I call them colletively. Marx’s 1st Platform is the abolistion of all private property. What society today defines as Communism – FNMA and FREDDIE MAC are our examples but so is Central Park and all govenment owned properties. It does not really matter how the State controls the profits of both individuals and businesses and the redistribution of those funds, the results end up being the same. Whether your system is fascist, marxist, socialist or communist, it ends up being controled by centrally determined political power and not by the free markets as Adam Smith and our founding fathers had invisioned. People don’t want to look at government as the power brokerage catel it is because it has been so ingrained in us that government is a necessity. How can something be a necessity that doesn’t work for the benefit of the majority and instead almost always ends up redistrbuting the wealth of the majority into the hands of the super wealthy and their cronies. Under the Monarchs the cronies where the aristocracy. Things haven’t really changed that much. We just now have the historical and imperical evidence that no govenment so far incorporated into law has worked to achieve peace an prosperity for the majority, over the long term. I’ve written about this in much greater detail and will be publishing it in the near future. Over history many people have written about the various systems and how they work or might work. The web is changing the entire communications experience and over time I will predict that many of the prior misconceptions of political economy will become obvious to a greater number of people.
The recent Atlas Shrugged movie on Rand’s book of the same name, which I recomend all should see, is filled with this same quote “From each according to their ability — to each according to their need” in the context of the government giving that reason for legislation being adopted that increases the level of government central planning and takeover of various businesses and industries; the 1st platform of communism.
In my opinion, what people don’t want to beleive about Marx is that his real target was not the majority/proletariat but the ruling classes of the world. He basically gave them the guide to take back the controlls over the means of production after the American, French and British Revolutions. it was a scam perpitrated against the proletariat and many having fallen for it. I think it was Bastiat that stated that, communism is the means to still the wealth of any nation when he was writing is essays to defend against those in the French Leglislature that were trying to introduce Marx’s platforms.
We get all tied up in trying to define the various terms, instead of looking at the results or the negative ramifications of the multitude of laws enacted. We have the largest military indutrial complex in the world and the greatest percentage per capita of incarcerations in the world. We’re at least first in two areas. Sadly in the areas you want to be in we’re not doing that well, and we are comparing ourselves against communist, fascists, monarchies and even totalitarian regimes.
Blouise
Please, no apologies necessary. I hope your comment was meant to be taken lightly as was my original “heart” complaint. I picked up on the date of SwM’s link to ThinkProgress which was dated July 2011. Neither of you should be expected to know that it had been repealed the day before yesterday.
The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first. – Thomas Jefferson
Sadly not even the greatest Constitution ever written can stop the tyranny of govenrment.
Karl,
You can’t supply the name of the poet? You remember it was the VERY first thing Clinton did in office. You remember the city, the date and what beverage was being consumed and you can’t remember the name of this Nobel poet? Well guess what. There is no Iraqi woman who wrote poetry and won the Nobel that might have been in Iraq on the day that you ask us to recall. Now tell me why I should believe anything else you have to say
People are afraid of what and who they don’t know.
One suggestion is that the organized gay movement could have a reach out program to conservatives. I was thinking the elderly. My thought is that gay activists could wear T-shirts with a name like Gays for Family Values and help the elderly scan their family photos and put them on the internet. Then they could show them their family photos and evolve from seeming threatening to nonthreatening.
CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT:
The Iraqi Woman that Clinton murdered with a Tomahawk missile was named Layla Al-Attar.
Turns out her daughter was also permanently blinded in the attack.
Turns out about a dozen civilians were killed, not more than a hundred, but still enough to constitute a war crime.
Forgive my memory lapse but turns out she wasn’t a prize winning poet but rather a medal winning painter/artist & director of the Iraqi National Art Museum.
Here’s some of her art: http://www.iraqiart.com/artists/l_attar.htm
Kris Kristofferson even wrote a song by her called “The Circle”.
It also turns out this cowardly attack wasn’t exactly random as I originally thought but rather her apartment building that was demolished happened to be in the way of the Iraqi Intelligence Building so she’s what in Orwellian speak the Pentagon calls “collateral damage.”
Also turns out that it was his first military action as commander in chief instead of his first official act in the white house.
Still not too bad a memory for having read a single article back in June of ’93.
Meanwhile you can believe what I say as the truth but of course you don’t have to let facts get in the way of your voting behavior.
Alas Turley voted for Clinton’s second term despite this war crime but when it comes to Obama’s 2nd term he won’t get burned again.
Curious,
I should have known for I was at a big meeting on Tues and heard people talking about the “latest stunt” but since I was involved with a committee that was reviewing other proposed legislation, I didn’t pay attention to the stunt conversation. My bad.
HB 194 had been voted in during the 2011 season but wasn’t going to take effect until the 2012 election in November which was when the referendum was also scheduled to be on the ballot.
The game playing could drive one insane. What will be really weird is if the democrats decide to test the constitutionality of the repeal. Having already forced the republicans to back off … it’s crazy here!
Karl,
So much for your “irrefragable facts”…..
Good lord. I hope you aren’t a high school history teacher preparing the final exam. Your students don’t stand a chance.
Curiosity Killed the Cat:
Nice evasion of the gist of my point as the “irrefragable fact” I was referring to weren’t the minor details of the exact prize she won nor which first official act but rather the fact that virtually all non-partisan experts in international law viewed her death the result of a war crime.
Talk about a legacy of abused women in Clinton’s wake!
Yet this proven example was only his first war crime. Other’s followed, as in Sudan with the infamous “Wag the Dog” bombing of the baby formula factory and of course in the Balkans, nevermind all the CIA black ops perpetrated those 8 years that framed up, railroaded & murdered union leaders throughout the 3rd world & Liberation Theologist nuns who defended the poor.
FYI — I used to teach Sociology at the University level but of course my finals questions weren’t drawn hurriedly from 20 year old memory for a blog 30 minutes before having to rush to work.
Res ipsa loquitur
@ Mike Spindell: About 15 years ago I had a remarkable phone conversation with a woman whose name I cannot remember. We were trying to brain-storm a child abuse case in which the state agency was acting even stupider than we were accustomed, and suddenly we were beseiged with people who wanted us to “give us your cases” so they could brief them to this or that “powerful person.” I found it astonishing that people we had been trying to get an audience with were now asking us to “give [them] our cases” — as if we had some kind of “corner on the market” and they wanted to get in on the game.
She gave me some insights and then she said, “Remember, victims are a commodity.”
Huh?
She said that there were plenty of organizations, and some government agencies, that could take down grant money from this or that source if they could show that they had a lot of “cases” and the money was necessary. They wouldn’t offer ANY HELP AT ALL, but they wanted to “collect victims.”
I couldn’t get that cynical at the time. I spent about three months writing up “cases” for all these allegedly interested people. There were no results at all except that I had to buy a new ink cartridge.
Mike S. — and Gene H. might learn something too — you were taken to school on all the drivel you wrote about Vaclav Havel a few months ago — for which you proferred a public apolgy — and you’ve been taken to school on why Turley won’t be voting for Obama this November so whatever redbaiter nonsense you want to spew about my politics is diversionary irrelevance insofaras my politics happen to be closer to Turley’s on why we both won’t be voting for Obama come the end of this year.
Res ipsa loquitur
Karl,
The difference twixt you and me is I admit it when I’ m wrong and I have the courage to be honest about myself. Why aren’t you proud of your Marxist beliefs? You make assertions but give little support for them other than invective. As far as taking me to school on Havel let’s just say that the point wasn’t important enough to track down. You couldn’t take me to school in a real debate because you’re so rigidly doctrinaire and I have something you sorely lack: An open mind.
“She gave me some insights and then she said, “Remember, victims are a commodity.” Huh? She said that there were plenty of organizations, and some government agencies, that could take down grant money from this or that source if they could show that they had a lot of “cases” and the money was necessary. They wouldn’t offer ANY HELP AT ALL, but they wanted to “collect victims.”"
Malisha,
My last job before becoming disabled and retiring was running a drug prevention program for a very well-known foster care agency. Child Welfare has always been a passion of mine and I worked 8 years at it in NYC’s agency as an expert in abuse investigation. At this Agency I was now on the other side of the case, where children went when we placed them. I worked for their group home division. The people there were good people with good intentions, however, it seemed they related more to the kids who knew how to play to their feelings and were punitive towards those kids with emotional issues. I don’t think it was conscious on their parts, rather they lacked insight into themselves. The other thing I learned before illness caused me to leave was how invested they were in the money aspect of the service. This struck me as odd since they were a religious, well-endowed non-profit. I worked for 3 different no-profits in my career and in all cases, with those 3, money was more important than mission.
Isn’t it telling how Curious & Spindell, by questioning my politics and quibbling over the small things avoid the real discussion about the routineness of American mass murder which has historically been perpetrated overwhelmingly by democratic presidents?
As Glenn Greenwald pointed out last week in in Salon when Obama was responsible for the murder of 5 Afghan kids & their mother: “To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.”
“At some point — and more than a decade would certainly qualify — the act of continuously killing innocent people, countless children, in the Muslim world most certainly does reflect upon, and even alters, the moral character of a country, especially its leaders. You can’t just spend year after year piling up the corpses of children and credibly insist that it has no bearing on who you are. That’s particularly true when, as is the case in Afghanistan, the cause of the war is so vague as to be virtually unknowable. It’s woefully inadequate to reflexively dismiss every one of these incidents as the regrettable but meaningless by-product of our national prerogative. But to maintain mainstream credibility, that is exactly how one must speak of our national actions even in these most egregious cases. To suggest any moral culpability, or to argue that continuously killing children in a country we’re occupying is morally indefensible, is a self-marginalizing act, whereby one reveals oneself to be a shrill and unSerious critic, probably even a pacifist. Serious commentators, by definition, recognize and accept that this is merely the inevitable outcome of America’s supreme imperial right, note (at most) some passing regret, and then move on.”
It appears that both Curious & Spindell qualify as one those “Serious Commentors” that Greenwald just described.
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/08/us_attack_kills_5_afghan_kids/singleton/
Of course it follows just like the liberal media pundits they follow they’ll all be casting a vote for another Democrat mass murderer this November under the time worn delusion that he’s somehow a “lesser” mass murderer because he supports gay marriage, Roe vs. Wade, collective bargaining (in name only) along with… bank bailouts, protection of financial swindlers, perpetual war, torture, renditions, the elimination of habeas corpus & the strengthening of the Surveillance State.
What a repugnant M.O.: Ask a question then dodge the answer, pick at straw men, avoid the facts at hand and live in shame without even knowing it.
“Isn’t it telling how Curious & Spindell, by questioning my politics and quibbling over the small things avoid the real discussion about the routineness of American mass murder which has historically been perpetrated overwhelmingly by democratic presidents?”
Karl,
Questioning your politics is specifically because of the positions you take. To me it is peculiar that your anger is directed specifically at “historically been perpetrated overwhelmingly by democratic presidents”. Why would someone adopting purportedly left wing positions such as yourself, only be criticizing “democratic presidents”? I’ve explained the reasons why above and that is directly because of your Marxist slant. This is especially true since G.W. Bush committed mass murder in Iraq and last I heard he was a Republican.
Viet Nam was bi-partisan but it was left to Nixon to further escalate the murderous bombing of Cambodia and the North, while increasing the use of
napalm and chemical warfare. However, from your particular political niche you need to attack those you stupidly perceive as your competitors on the left wing. I say stupidly because you actually believe your rigid analysis has dialectical value, rather than the fact that it actually blinds you.
“Of course it follows just like the liberal media pundits they follow they’ll all be casting a vote for another Democrat mass murderer this November under the time worn delusion that he’s somehow a “lesser” mass murderer”
How droll that you accuse me of following political pundits, by slavishly quoting one. Sift through everything I’ve written here through the years and you will discover that I never cite pundits opinions on anything. I may agree with them, but I never use others opinions in forming my own. Nor do I use any pundits opinion as if their opinions were facts. This would be hard for you to understand since your whole world view was formed by the opinions of Karl Marx, political pundit.
How well I remember the same thought construction that you use now,back then praising the work of Chairman Mao, who murdered millions. My father related to me stories of dealing with those CP people who were enraptured by Stalin, who murdered 20 million, in the cause of Marxism. You of course would denounce them today for following incorrect notions, but back then you would have been slavishly adoring them.
The truth is that you’re a tea bagger mentally in leftist clothing, or even perhaps you’re a tea bagger in fact playing at being a Marxist as disinformation. In any event, what comes through as you talk of real tragedy that has wrongly been unleashed upon people by American militarism, is that there is little empathy for the lives lost, except as pawns in your vapid political game. What I most disliked in most of the Marxists I knew was their humorless
demeanor and lack of real empathy. They were great at crying crocodile tears and in the profession I was in, they were the worst social workers.
“How droll that you accuse me of following political pundits, by slavishly quoting one.”
Droll and ironic, I might add.
Why? Because unlike Turley this election you admitted you’re voting for, meaning, aiding & abetting, a mass murderer who goes out of his way to protect some of the biggest criminals still running free in our lifetimes.
Gene H. You’re part of the problem too insofar as you’re guilty of aiding & abetting truly odious forces in the false & pompous name of “lesser evilism.”
I think you have made some important observations in the past. But isn’t that a little strong.
Even if in some sense true, doesn’t being effective necessarily mean working within the realm of what is possible. I would sign up with the Devil himself right now if I though that would get things going in the right direction.
But exactly what alternatives do you see besides
(1) voting for some one that we believe might be influenced to move in acceptable directions
(2) throwing the vote away on no win candidates like Nader for the greens or whoever is representing the perennial never, never land communists.
What else do you suggest, armed insurrection? Sorry, as long as we have the vote I think I will stick to making cruel remarks, arguing with my neighbors and once every two or four years taking a stand with a few million other frustrated and sometimes outraged citizens.
In the final analysis, democracy is not a position. It is a process. Some times it works with in a reasonable range. Sometimes it runs out of range and produces really bad results. As long as the essential parts of the process are in place I think most of us would prefer to use the democratic, political process.
When they cancel the vote and turn the courts into three officer military tribunals let me know. Until then I would appreciate it if you would pass this along – it is really important to register and then vote.
BFM:
Why’s it so wrong to copy Turley & I this November – abstention out of the principle that neither candidate deserves a vote of confidence.
Voting the lesser of 2 evils is still a vote for evil.
Suppose for the sake of argument the choice was voting between Hitler & Stalin?
Both were mass murderers, but so were JFK (Operation Ranch Hand), Johnson (Vietnam), Nixon (Vietnam), Reagan (Libya & Central America), Bush 1 (Panama & Iraq), Clinton (Iraq, Somalia, Sudan & Serbia), Bush 2 (Iraq & Afghanistan) & now Obama in Iraq, Afghanistan & Yemen.
Bombing civilians IS still considered mass murder by the Geneva Convention you know.
What do Hitler, Stalin & Obama have in common? Mass murder; torture; a blatant disregard for international & domestic law; a lust for decreeing that they are the supreme judge, jury & executioner over you & your family; a psychopathic penchant for building up the Security State Apparatus; and last but not least, they deny the inviolability of the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus.
Clearly the solution is to work toward organizing a political alternative, a 2nd party if you will that deserves a vote of confidence by progressives, since this is clearly a One Party State with 2 factions bickering over the best way to enrich the 1% at the expense of the 99%.
As Glenn Greenwald concluded sarcastically in a recent article documenting yet another of Obama’s crimes: the most vigorous prosecution of WhistleBlowers in American history:
“…this unprecedented attack on whistleblowers, as obviously significant as it is, also enjoys full bipartisan support (as well as the indifference of a supremely passive media), and so it, too, will be completely ignored by the grand Election-Year clash of America’s two great and oh-so-fundamentally-different political parties.”
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/07/the_american_character/singleton/
@Karl Friedrich
Some quick responses, I don’t think there is anything wrong with working toward an alternative party, nor in following your own conscious in voting or not voting.
I distinguish voting for a Stalin or Hitler from our choices today on the basis of whether we can have influence on policies. As I mentioned, I don’t care who the alliance is with (at least with a very broad range). I care about the possibility of making changes in their policies.
To my mind the candidates differ in their amenability to influence. Considering the potential for damage posed by candidates, I consider it irresponsible not to attempt to influence candidates to better policies when that possibility presents itself.
Perhaps you believe you have a better chance to bring about change by sitting out the election. I disagree.
And I see no contradiction in working to bring into existence a different political party and at the same time working to elect not just the lesser of two evils but the candidate that you might influence the most.
BTW when it comes to national security, which more and more is in fact internal security, Obama is largely Bush II or maybe Bush on steroids.
You seem to think it is only OK to work with high minded politicos of good character, or at least the ones who are not felons. To me the issue is where are the levers of influence and can we get to them to make things different.
That’s is the quick and dirty for now. I have two humans and two dogs that are getting snarly because dinner is late.
I too have 2 dogs (alas my 3rd, a 14 year old Rhodesian Ridgeback named Ilych, just passed a month ago) and respect your disagreement, albeit a fairly minor one in my view, but just ask yourself this question: If smart guys like Turley, Greenwald & myself wouldn’t vote for Obama this November — why should a smart guy like yourself do any different?
I mean why, in the face of all the evidence of what a despicable scoundrel we are dealing with, a betrayer of of all the working people who believed his hype in ’08, give a vote of confidence to this guy and his party historically rooted in the slaveocracy that perpetuates this current plutocracy, who has committed war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan & Yemen (thereby ensuring vengeance against us in the future) who continues to prosecute a war with an incomprehensible mission that drains unfathomable amounts of blood & treasure amidst the second Great Depression, a guy who abridges habeas corpus and the main principles of our Constitution by decree, who protects swindlers on Wall Street & Fraudsters running big banks, who rewards the incompetence of firms supposedly too-big-to-fail and calls it free market capitalism, a guy whose more vigorously prosecuted more Whistle Blowers than anybody in history rather than protect them, a guy whose let BP off the hook for ruining the Gulf Coast with a penalty of only perhaps 2 quarters worth of profits at most, a guy who some imagined had an opportunity to really change the system rather than reinforce it?
Why would anybody want to re-elect somebody whose proven to be the Betrayer In Chief?
KF,
“Gene H. You’re part of the problem too insofar as you’re guilty of aiding & abetting truly odious forces in the false & pompous name of “lesser evilism.””
Really. I guess you missed the part many months ago and the numerous times since then that I’ve stated I absolutely will not be voting for Barrack Obama this fall. However, my reasons are quite personal and specifically related to my training. I do not expect others to apply the standards to political action like voting that I do unless they are in a similar situation as myself. Aiding and abetting? Hardly. I’ve explained my position to many of those here taking the “lesser of two evils” approach. They by in large understood the logic of the arguments. Some agreed, some didn’t, but none failed to respect both my choice and my logic in reaching it. However, unlike you, I don’t feel the need to excoriate them if they choose differently from me when they come from different situations and different backgrounds. Actions have consequences and the ethics by which actors come to their decision is not mine to dictate as you apparently think it is yours to dictate. Just because I cannot in good conscience vote for Obama does not mean that others cannot vote for him with both good intentions and a clear conscience. If their decision proves to be a bad one (and make no mistake, both choices are bad in this election), then the consequences of their choices will be theirs to live with at the end of the day. If they are truly people of good conscience, they will punish themselves if they are making a misstep. That many of them are doing so with clear misgivings isn’t a failure in ethics on their part so much as it is a reflection of being put in the unfortunate position of dealing with a Morton’s Fork problem by a system that pretty much all are in agreement on it being broken to the point that “lesser evils” are the only choice.
Even the choice to abstain is a lesser evil whether you realize it or not.
Nobody is telling you that you have to vote for Obama.
That you are too arrogant? judgmental? presumptive in your ability to dictate their exercise of their Constitutional voting rights? dense? to reciprocate that courtesy is your failing.
Make your case, but when the curtain closes, the decision is still theirs.
Gene H. I stand corrected & aplogize for my erroneous assumption. I’m glad to hear that I won’t need to waste my time excoriating you as an Obama supporter however I’m hardwired to feel a duty to educate, and if necessary excoriate, any sentient eligible voter from helping re-elect a mass murdering war criminal and eager architect of this increasingly monolithic Surveillance State.
Well said bigfatmike, however in my opinion, I would like to suggest to you that the current state of affairs of our great society, can not be repaired via any currect political means. The Judicary has now (actually 2007) blocked any formal redress of grievence, negating potential reforms. I believe the flaws are much deeper and more ingrained and the mere replacement of individuals at the top or even througout the system will change really nothing in the long run. I stand by this even if Ron Paul were to be elected. The two party system is to entrenched to be replaced and some of these people are near sociopaths in their ferver. Expecting the politicos as KF believes to solve the problems, is like thinking the Aristocracy should have been willing to turn over greater rights and priviledge to the proletariat.
I don’t suggest violence either as it has only given us temporary relief. Of course I’m looking in terms terms of true cultural change, so a couple of hundred years although it doesn’t relate to individuals, only generations, is the goal.
As an example, repealing the Charter of the Federal Reserve Bank would be a great win but what do you really believe those changes are?
Is there a repair? I think, but we have had a tough time to get the sociopaths and the apathetic to change. I have even been trying to present a well thought through idea and yet, the idea is so admittedly foreign, that even like minded people such as libertarians are finding it difficult to get involved. Perhaps It’s not a good idea? Or perhaps it’s an idea before it’s time. People continue to follow the same path, dispite its failure for decades and perhaps millienias. I suggest that the ingrained institutional evils are just as great today as they were under the Monarchs, with the difference as Gene H. like to point out, as only the acceptible social norms have changed a bit, but only a bit. Our govenrment still places little value on those who become colateral damage.
HSKI has raised a valuable point. Reformism at this stage is impossible because ever since the Spanish-American war US capitalism became tied to a predatory foreign policy, that is imperialist, and no civilization has ever been able to vote away imperialism.
Nor was it suggested anywhere by me that violence is required but rather a revolution IS required.
There is such a thing as the working class and they are the vast democratic majority of this nation. The key is organizing them around a party that fights for their class interests as vigorously as the bosses, bankers & landlords fight for their interests with their one party system that has 2 factions bickering over the best way to transfer wealth from the 99% to the 1%.
KF, right on. People are so entrenched in the system that it is extremely dufficult for them to change their minds, especially those that have the necessary experience, knowledge and wisdom to assist in a transfomation. The 3% have to provide the 97 percent with better alternative and the free marketers have just not done that in my opinion. Obviously going cold turkey is impossible, so it much be a gradual change. But what to? I suggest that we have been erroneously looking for government to be the entity that creates the change. I have now given up on that possiblity, having been under this miscomception for way to long and wasting decades of time, energy and thought. I’ve even ran for public office with a primary campaign goal of a voucher system. A partial success, but in my opinion to small to be even counted.
I also believe that justice is the key and until real justice is somehow gained for the majority, no real transformation of the human experience will occur. Half of the majority can ‘t even afford our justice system so we have a real diliema on our hands. I think that there are a number of things we could try.
If you want change, your choices are:
1) Reform
2) Revolution
That’s not a false dichotomy. Those really are your only two choice. One transaction usually has a significantly higher cost as illustrated by history.
Asking those in power to create reform of themselves is like trying to get a fox to stop raiding the chicken coup. A revolution is only a short term fix as our nation experienced; a short time being relative in the course of human history and as you noted a much more violent and tumultuous transfomation. I believe that is a couple of other potentials.
“There is such a thing as the working class and they are the vast democratic majority of this nation. The key is organizing them around a party that fights for their class interests as vigorously as the bosses, bankers & landlords fight for their interests with their one party system that has 2 factions bickering over the best way to transfer wealth from the 99% to the 1%.”
Karl, Karl, Karl,
You don’t know how many times I’ve heard this same rant over the years. There is nothing wrong with the spirit of it except for the fact that you people are incapable of organizing around anything, or by starting a mass movement to get it done. That is exactly why you and your cohorts believe the path is towards making things as intolerable as possible for the 99%, with the false premise that once that range of despair is reached, the people will accept your message and revolt. How did that work out for both Russia, Cambodia and China?
The flaw is that while you rant about the mass murder of people, you lack any real compassion for the suffering reaching the lowest ebb will have on people here. If that end is achieved, then the revolution will either be by fascist tea baggers, or by Marxist ideologues like yourself who will oppress the very “people” they are fighting for, in the pretense that they’ll need political re-education from their bourgeois beliefs, before they can have the “democracy” you’ve held out as a carrot. Unfortunately, that will ever happen as your revolutionary leaders will deem themselves irreplaceable because of their “deeper” understanding of doctrine. Now refute me by explaining that Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were not Marxists and I’ll just laugh at your blind rigidity.
The question is who then must do the reforming and how.
Mike, as I have shown in various writings democracy is an illusion that implies that the majority opinion is correct and that people will vote for what is in the majorites best interest, instead of their own. That by doing so, things will just magicly provide a good outcome for the plurality. It like thinking it will all average out, and that is the best potential outcome that we can rely on. We have seen what that has gotten us in the 20th century. Relying on a politcal cure, I now see as a waste of time from both a logical analysis and imperical historic data. I think it is going to require the free market to solve free market problems, since you can not obviously rely on government to provide it.
Gene H, one of your sentences intrigued me: “However, my reasons are quite personal and specifically related to my training.”
A friend of mine says, “Malisha you always have some PERSONAL story that leads you to PUBLIC action.” Well, that’s true, I admit that. I can read about something and say it’s good, it’s bad, I doesn’t seem right, it should be this way or that way. But I generally make my decisions about individual politicians (and candidates, government people, authorities, etc.) based on personal histories and “stories” that meant something to me at the time. I had a personal story with Governor Cuomo of NY (the one who decided not to try to run for Pres). Although I could not support his opponent in the next election (and it didn’t matter because I was not then a New Yorker), I opposed HIM.
For the very same kinds of reasons I opposed Joe Lieberman, Joseph Biden, and some guy from Wisconsin whose name I have forgotten. It has also caused me to SUPPORT people specifically because of a personal experience I had of them. At one point I testified before the Judiciary Committee of the Maryland House of Delegates. I made eye contact with Anthony G. Brown (now Deputy Gov but back then, state legislator) and realized he understood what I was saying about the case “In re Gault” [children's constitutional rights]; he was nodding. From that point forward I trusted him. This goes as high as a vice presidential candidate and as low as the Clerk of Court in the County where I live. They can be from the party I generally support or they can be anybody; once I have a real experience with them and put them “on the list” for something I consider utterly unacceptable, I cannot give them any political support; it feels like I am taking poison! And once I trust them, even if it was because of something as simple and equivocal as a head nod, I’m for them. What can I say?
“Mike, as I have shown in various writings democracy is an illusion”
hskiprob,
You have asserted it, but certainly haven’t proved it.
“Relying on a politcal cure, I now see as a waste of time from both a logical analysis and imperical historic data. I think it is going to require the free market to solve free market problems, since you can not obviously rely on government to provide it.”
Speaking of “illusions” I believe that you cannot prove by example that a “free market” is anything more than an illusion and wishful thinking, much less a solution to anything. I believe that my logical analysis and empirical historic data proves the illusory nature of a “free market” and even the terms coiner Adam Smith, believed it needed regulation to prevent its harming the public good.
Mike, you’ve got it backwards again (just like when you portrayed Havel as this saint of peace when really he was one of the world’s biggest exporter of AK47′s) as what we’ve really heard too much of over the years is reformists like you advocating “lesser evilism” politics which only perpetuates evil.
As far as bringing up old dead Marxists that’s just your old trade union bureaucrat instincts of red baiting coming to the fore as those people have never been the issue of this thread rather they’re the red herring straw man you keep regurgitating in order to divert attention away from the fact that Turley won’t, out of principle, be voting for the guy you will for President and therefore his politics are actually closer to mine as I’ll be following his example.
Has anyone ever seen a study of the potential effects to the federal budget with or without same sex marriage? many issues — income tax brackets, social security benefits, federal pension benefits, inheritance taxes etc.
I’m only worried about the budgets for the state court proceedings once the same-sex custody battles start. Perhaps it will be a good thing. Perhaps after that, the ONLY thing a court will have time to do in custody battles will be to toss a coin, and then perhaps they’ll come out 50% right, which would be a great improvement on what’s going on right now.
“divert attention away from the fact that Turley won’t, out of principle, be voting for the guy you will for President and therefore his politics are actually closer to mine as I’ll be following his example.”
Karl,
Please show me where JT has stated he unequivocally won’t vote for Obama. Secondly, please explain to me how he is close to being a Marxist politically as you are? Thirdly, please tell me why you simply won’t admit your political orientation? I doubt you’re ashamed of it, so the only answer is you try to conceal it for political reasons.
“your old trade union bureaucrat instincts of red baiting coming to the fore”
Having watched Marxists take control of my Union, only to “constitutionally reform” away the Union’s highly democratic nature, I do take issue with them.
On nights where there were meetings of our Union’s Delegate Assembly, they had a 300 pound thug rip the microphone away from anyone expressing a contrary view. It helped me realize that what your type of “reformer” spouts is merely bullshit to suck people into your cult.
Finally, re: red baiting, I would defend unconditionally your right to hold your views and spread them, as I would that of a NAZI. Defending your rights, or a NAZI’s, rights doesn’t mean that you are immune from my criticism of your silly beliefs, or that I am “red baiting” when I do so. You throw that out because you are politically unable to take responsibility for your point of view.
Another word for that would be disingenuous. As for Havel and the AK-47′s, you are aware that the arms industry has been a main industry of that country for at least a century? I would also say that part of the reason you dislike Havel so much is that he hated Marxists, which is reasonable give how the USSR treated his people. Now since you want to make an issue of me liking Havel, would it be fair for you to explain your feelings for Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot?
I’m of course for the right for any adult couple to marry I just cannot fathom why so many young people today would want to get the State entangled in their personal affairs?
“I’m of course for the right for any adult couple to marry I just cannot fathom why so many young people today would want to get the State entangled in their personal affairs?”
Karl,
How kind of you to finally get on target with this thread.
Mike Spindell:
“I believe that my logical analysis and empirical historic data proves the illusory nature of a “free market” and even the terms coiner Adam Smith, believed it needed regulation to prevent its harming the public good.”
If you would actually read Adam Smith and not Noam Chomsky’s opinion of the Wealth of Nations, you would see that Adam Smith’s regulations were meant to improve the market not hamper it. Regulations Smith proposed were, for example, such that neither employers nor workers could conspire to set wage prices.
If he did not want employers or wage earners to set wage rates, that leaves that pesky “invisible hand”.
Mike: I already established above that an “unequivocal declaration” by Turley is not necessary for proof but rather deductive logic and common sense make crystal clear that no world famous Constitutional lawyer would ever write a series of articles documenting how Obama has done more to undermine the Constitution than anybody in the nation’s history — reducing it to a scrap of paper really insofar as he’s decreed himself judge, jury & executioner of every soul on the planet — and then have the audacity & hypocritical self loathing to turn around and vote for him — for if you love the Constitution you cannot possibly abet it’s grave digger.
These principles are implicit in his articles and your inability to connect the dots cannot alter the stubborness of the facts.
Res ipsa loquitur
Hey Mike, A couple of relatively short essays, The Democratic Capital Illusion at: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!topic/HarrietRobbins/mURGvK3knbQ and one by John Hahnas, The Myth of the Rule of Law: http://rsjexperiment.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/the-myth-of-the-rule-of-law/. It’s a difficult realization but some relief as it gives you some of the issues why democracy hasn’t worked. I can’t say that it cannot work, it just hasn’t yet and thinking that you or I and our secret admirers can make it work is……..
Here is what Thomas Naylor, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University” stated in a recent interview. There is no longer any moral justification whatsoever for the existence of the United States. The only morally defensible alternative to empire is peaceful dissolution.”
While I agree with the Obama bashing on this thread, I can imagine that Romney bashing (if he gains the office) would uncover even worse acts and policies. Romney would bully the whole world by having his posse tackle it and cut off its hair.
Yea, Obama is working in an evil system, an imperial system.
Speculating on Constitutional changes each would make, Romney would be supporting the one man one woman marriage amendment (shit out of luck gay people-forever!) and Obama supporting the remedy for Citizens United.
I disagree Bron, nothing that I seen you write shows me that the free market is not best at solving free market problems. I’ve seen government try for two generations, and the problems today are the same but even more exascerbated. If government is your solution, OMG were screwed. Lets’ not solve the problems, lets continue on the same path of thinking that govenerment is going to come to the rescue and make them even worse. Sounds pretty logical to me.
hskip:
did you actually read what I wrote to Mike?
Or do you not know what an “invisible hand” is? Which is what I am inferring from your reply.
HA HA! @Mike Spindell and KF: During the 90s I was doing a lot of activism in the child abuse prevention area, and I was publicizing (before www days) a case where the Army had colluded with a high-ranking officer to help him gain control over his four children, who had credibly alleged abuse by him in the past. Just at that time the gay rights folks were demonstrating in DC against the ban on gays in the military. So we joined up for a couple of our demonstrations and for a while I trained with them so my people and theirs were on the same page. At one point, when we went out for coffee after some event or other, I began to get funny (I can do funny when I’m very tired) and I pointed out to them that the two worst traps our culture has to offer are MARRIAGE and the MILITARY. I said: “THE VERY TWO WORST INSTITUTIONS WE HAVE IN OUR SOCIETY, THAT HAVE RUINED MILLIONS OF LIVES, that any number of people will tell you were the biggest mistake of their whole lives, and you guys don’t have it but you WANT IT?”
It was a gay crowd and they all laughed with me, nobody took offense, and we demonstrated anyway.
Hskip:
I dont think government has all the answers, in fact I only think government is there to protect our rights and should be strictly limited. Our Constitutional Republic with our Constitution and Declaration is pretty dam good. It has just been abused by fools and evil men.
Where libertarians go wrong is assuming you can revert to the state of nature and still support individual rights. You cannot, you need an objective set of laws with the ability to uphold those laws. You cannot have a 1000 court system with a 1000 different laws.
I am a big free market guy but I am no anarchist which is basically a nihilist. Having a 1000 different court systems all competing for supremacy of market is like having nothing at all. And the winner would be the court system which gave the most people what they wanted regardless of whether it was right or not.
Free markets work well to bring milk, eggs and cars to market, but not so well in protecting our rights. For that you need government with a codified, objective set of rules and regulations which protect individual rights of all people.
Shano: Nobody’s implying that Romney is a viable alternative, on the contrary, which is why, unfortunately, folks like Turley & I and so many others will be abstaining this round.
“If you would actually read Adam Smith and not Noam Chomsky’s opinion of the Wealth of Nations, you would see that Adam Smith’s regulations were meant to improve the market not hamper it.”
Bron,
I don’t like or read Chomsky. As for getting something through ones head when will you understand that regulations are meant to improve the market, not hamper it. Those against regulations are people like……Jaime Dimon.
“Mike: I already established above that an “unequivocal declaration” by Turley is not necessary for proof but rather deductive logic and common sense make crystal clear that no world famous Constitutional lawyer would ever write a series of articles documenting how Obama has done more to undermine the Constitution than anybody in the nation’s history — reducing it to a scrap of paper really insofar as he’s decreed himself judge, jury & executioner of every soul on the planet — and then have the audacity & hypocritical self loathing to turn around and vote for him — for if you love the Constitution you cannot possibly abet it’s grave digger.”
Karl,
Not logic, merely your opinion. I certainly know JT better than you do and I couldn’t possibly venture an opinion of what he will do once in the privacy of the voting booth. Even though your political philosophy disdains voting, you can’t deny that it is a process that one performs in secret. All I know is that in 2008 JT rightly didn’t endorse any candidate and certainly didn’t disclose his vote. You are merely opining is a duplicitous manner: “and then have the audacity & hypocritical self loathing to turn around and vote for him” to advance your political views. Your statement: “folks like Turley & I and so many others will be abstaining this round” rounds out your duplicity by trying to equate yourself and the Professor. The easy difference is that he has the courage you lack.
Now truthfully Karl, you don’t love the Constitution at all do you? Oh that’s right you lack the guts to ow up to your political viewpoint, even though the only penalty that would accrue, is that people will better understand what an authoritarian place you’re coming from. Your entire verbiage bespeaks an authoritarian mindset.
Mike Spindell:
you neglect to mention that the 2 billion trading loss is someone else’s gain. But then so has the NY Times and other main stream media outlets.
From what I know, a bunch of firms made hundreds of millions of dollars on that JP Morgan Chase loss.
Where is the harm? Someone wins and someone loses, that is the market. Some people literally made fortunes.
Why should government regulate voluntary exchanges of goods and services? Why should government pick losers and winners? Why should government have the power to prevent the winners from making bank and the losers from going out of business?
We have several hundred court systems now, each a monopoly run by some government throughout the world. I say we need a thousand more and we must eliminate, of course, the monopolies controled by various power brokerage cartels. I think if people have the option of choosing between a private company and a government court monopoly, many would choose, as they do already with mediation companies, the private concern. The entire world of international trade created the Law Merchant to escape the various political courts. We as people have let brawn rule over the pen and it is only our fears that prevent us from changing. Just as the cultures around the world lived under the tyranny of monarchs, we live under the tyranny of fascism.
@Bron
Well for one thing banks play a special role in the society and the economy. Even when they play with their own money they may get into situations which place depositors money in jeopardy, or in situations which may require a bail out from the government.
Society may be faced with the choice to bank-roll their foolish behavior or face the prospect of collapse of large parts of the economy. There are good arguments to restrict the business activities of banks that accept deposits from ordinary people. If banks insist on mixing deposit and investment banking then it makes sense to regulate the kinds of investment the banks can make. If banks refuse splitting the banking business, or regulation of investment choices, then it makes perfect sense to restrict the size of of banks. A few decades ago there were more than 13,000 banks in this country. If a few of them failed the consequences did not include economic disaster for the country. Today the failure of a single bank can cost millions of individuals their life savings and set off an economic death spiral that can lead to the loss tens of millions of jobs, with international consequences.
Banks are one of the few business that by their own actions can bring on a depression or set us all back to subsistence living. Why would any one or any society place their living and perhaps their lives in the hands of business leaders delusional enough to think they really are master of the universe?
@bron “the 2 billion trading loss is someone else’s gain.”
You seem to imply that the economics of trading securities is a zero sum game, that is, what one person looses the other person gains so every thing balances out. When it comes to banks that is clearly not the case. Again, banks occupy a special place in the economy. When they loose it is not necessarily just for their own account. Their actions can have consequences for individuals who never wanted to be in the game. There actions can force others to intervene in order to save what should never have been put at risk in the first place.
There is much to be said on each side of this discussion. But the idea that banks should be left alone because their actions only affect their own accounts is simply false – which can be ascertained by anyone willing to look at the headlines in the past few years.
You stated, “I don’t think government has all the answers, in fact I only think government is there to protect our rights and should be strictly limited. Our Constitutional Republic with our Constitution and Declaration is pretty dam good. It has just been abused by fools and evil men.”
You’re absolutely correct on this. However, because government is a power brokerage cartel, and this is very important, libertarian understand, that we as a society cannot, no matter what we have tried, curtail the abuse of those in power. As you have seen, they lie, cheat, steal and even kill to get into power or maintain it because government truly is a power brokerage cartel. How are you going to stop them when they have such vast police and judicial powers? Who is regulating the regulators, when the regulators are controling the entire system of justice.
If someone can show me something different I’m all ears. I’ve been around a long time and I’ve seen constant corruption and abuse from our political system over 45 years. The only way to beat them is by not allowing them to redistribute or wealth, in the first place, hence limited government or anarchy. The U.S. Constitution attempted to limit government and I say we have failed miserable. So what’s left? True free enterprise if you have enough balls. That’s my biggest fear.
Bron. that is not the market. that is gambling. The market used to be investing in real companies that produced real things. What they are doing now is pure gambling on whether an index will go up or down. whether a group of people will or will not pay off their mortgages. Whether gold or silver will go up in price or down, whether the dollar will be stronger than the euro, etc.
It is not production and it is not the market when they are frontrunning by a billionth of a second in order to make a profit on their customers traders.
It is not the market when they can get free money from the fed and lend it back to the government at a profit. I could go on.
Mike: Your arguments are getting weaker & weaker like a tired old boxer whose running out of steam.
The only thing authoritarian in my mindset is having the authority of 20 straight years of education to predict with mathematical certainty how certain actors will behave under certain circumstances.
Now you take the case of a highly ethical legal scholar & Constitutional expert who after his bar exam had to take a sworn oath to protect & defend & uphold the US Constitution and then juxtapose that fact with the fact he recently published a series of articles in major publications documenting how & why Obama has done more to damage, undermine, thwart & render meaningless the world’s most powerful & enduring legal principles, rendering his administration the ultimate arbiter of life & death — guilt or innocence — by decreeing that he alone has the right to be the judge, jury & executioner of anybody on the planet he sees fit — a leap back to medieval jurisprudence one decade into the 21st Century for crying out loud!
Now why would any rational person keep desperately clinging to the notion that’s it’s even 1% possible for a Professor like Turley to violate his sworn oath & duty by casting a vote of confidence for the man that he’s just sounded the loudest possible alarm bells about being the most pernicious & supreme gravedigger of every principle he holds dear and was sworn to protect?
Maybe you can sleep at night by stomaching such hypocrisy but rest assured the nation’s preeminent Constitutional Lawyer with sworn oaths to uphold cannot, and will not. Q.E.D.
The more you struggle against the logical power of this argument the more you look like a silly old fool, clinging to his religion, as closed minded as any conservative that ever was, whose perhaps not quite as smart as everybody here once thought.
Res ipsa loquitur
Karl,
Only the fool or the knave declares his assertions to be logical, without providing actual proof. You then assert to having twenty straight years of education. I guess you haven’t worked much in your life. This makes you an empty braggart with disingenuous tendencies. Ho hum. Seriouly is this the best you’ve got after all those years of study?
KF, I have no dog in the race, as to who votes for whom and how, but I do want to make an observation about one of your observations.
You described Professor Turley as someone who “after his bar exam had to take a sworn oath to protect & defend & uphold the US Constitution and then … he recently published a series of articles in major publications” etc.
My comment has nothing to do with predicting Professor Turley’s future conduct — it’s just about being able to judge someone’s conduct by their bar exams, their sworn oaths, and their publications or pronouncements thereafter. Just one example: Kenneth Gribetz, Esq., an attorney practicing in New York, was once the Prosecutor of Rockland County, New York. He passed the bar exam and had to take a sworn oath etc. etc. and then he wrote, spoke and publicly displayed his authority and his positions for years. On Wednesday, May 3, 1995, THE INDEPENDENT (newspaper) reported,. under the headline “GRIBETZ PLEADS GUILTY,” that Gribetz, “facing a battery of federal felony charges,” pled guilty to two federal misdemeanors, resigned his office, and reportedly left the country. (He has returned now and practices law again, his bar license apparently unaffected by the “flap.”) But really, who could have predicted his conduct simply on the basis of his status as a lawyer, his oath, and his public acts, deeds and writings?
In spite of my reputation, I am also not trying to say that all DA’s are corrupt, that all lawyers should be suspected of corruption, that oaths are generally meaningless, or anything else like that; I am not going farther than this:
You just can’t always predict what someone will do by their credentials and what they put into writing or speech for public consumption.
Malisha:
Have you really been following this thread closely? Have you read Turley’s articles on “Obama’s Kill Policy” after Holder’s NWU speech?
Forget oaths for crying out loud.
No Constitutional Lawyer that has an ounce of credibility and self-respect is going to sound the alarm to the world that Obama is the greatest threat to over 200 years of this democracy’s most precious legal principles and then 7 months later cast a vote of confidence for him.
—————————————————————————————————
Sorry Mike: despite those 20 years of school I started a shoe shine business on the streets of Chicago when I was 8 years old one summer break and have been gainfully employed every year since, often in union jobs, some in factory jobs where one of my thumbs was crushed and rendered partly mangled, and both my parents retired from trade union jobs.
I realize it gets you all bunched up to imagine your beloved Professor that’s given you the closest thing to your 15 minutes of fame won’t be voting out of principle alongside you this presidential election but I suspect if you were a famous Constitutional Lawyer who took an oath to protect the Constitution and then you learned the President you just voted for 4 years ago has now decreed, like a medieval King, that he can lock up or summarily execute anybody he wishes without recognizing habeas corpus — that you too would consider such an act so far beyond the Pale that you couldn’t reward him again.
bigfatmike:
“Well for one thing banks play a special role in the society and the economy. Even when they play with their own money they may get into situations which place depositors money in jeopardy, or in situations which may require a bail out from the government.”
And that is why people have a brain, so they can figure out which banks take risks and which dont. I have my accounts with a nice little regional conservative bank which doesnt do those types of things or at least not on that large a scale.
If you dont know the CEO of your bank and you dont know their philosophy, maybe you shouldnt have your money in a bank. Maybe a credit union is better.
Stupidity should not be a get out of the poor house on someone else’s dime card.
Enough bailing people out, even AIG execs now say it should have gone bankrupt. Let JP Morgan get itself out of the jam and if its customers are hurt then so be it. If I had money in JP Morgan Chase it would have in another bank as soon as I found out about this trade. Let the market pick the winners and losers; government, Krugman and the NY Times dont know enough.
shano:
“It is not the market when they can get free money from the fed and lend it back to the government at a profit. I could go on.”
Oh I agree. But until you get rid of the Fed and the idea of too big to fail, we will keep seeing this crap.
For the life of me I cannot understand why libs dont want a market economy, it would hammer these people like Jaime Dimon and the other incompetents who run major companies. It would crucify them, as it is they hide behind government regulations and use them to cry no foul when they screw the pooch.
The market puts incompetence and inefficiency out of business. Government regulations allows both to run wild unchecked and rewards it to boot.
hskip:
“True free enterprise if you have enough balls.”
Most small businessmen and women would love to have real free enterprise, then we could compete on a level playing field with the big boys who get all kinds of goodies from government. It is megacorps who need to grow a pair and quit milking government [read tax payers].
@Bron “Let JP Morgan get itself out of the jam and if its customers are hurt then so be it.”
You and I actually agree on quite a bit. But the problem with just letting the market clear and take care of business is that some of these banks are so big that the damage will extend beyond bank shareholders and depositors.
The last time the damage nearly did extend far beyond the banks and their depositor to thoughtful depositors like yourself. The fact is that these big banks are so large and so intertwined in the economy that their bad behavior can affect all of us no matter how careful we are with our own financial affairs.
At that point I think it is both reasonable and essential that we take action together in the form of government regulation to protect all of us. Of course, I acknowledge and it should be noted that regulation also can cause serious problems as well.
BTW, emotionally, I would like nothing better than to cut these guys loose and let them rise or fall by their own hand. The problem with that is that lots of innocent and careful and thoughtful people would be wiped out financially.
“I realize it gets you all bunched up to imagine your beloved Professor that’s given you the closest thing to your 15 minutes of fame won’t be voting out of principle alongside you this presidential election but I suspect if you were a famous Constitutional Lawyer who took an oath to protect the Constitution and then you learned the President you just voted for 4 years ago has now decreed, like a medieval King, that he can lock up or summarily execute anybody he wishes without recognizing habeas corpus — that you too would consider such an act so far beyond the Pale that you couldn’t reward him again.”
Karl,
If you think “fame” is of interest to me then you’re really more of an ass then I thought. I do this as my contribution to trying to make the world better, but unlike you, it comes out of my compassion for humanity. I neither need people’s approval, nor do I need a “party line” to cleave to, as you so obviously do. I’m quite happy with who I am and quite grateful that I have no celebrity. At the early part of my life when small celebrity presented itself as an opportunity for me, I consciously walked away from it, since I didn’t need others adulation to boost my own self-esteem. If the workings of this blog were to run counter to my personal ideals, then I would walk away from it without a second thought and enjoy obscurity, because I enjoy my life.
All you are doing is merely repeating your one point over and over again in the spirit of “when did you stop beating your wife?” However, Professor Turley votes is no concern of mine, because believe it or not I even have close friends that are antediluvian Republicans. My measurement of esteem for people is based on their innate humanity, not some pre-judged political stance. Your repetition of the same assertions time and again represents either logic, nor proof. It is mere rote repetition of an allegation and a constant evasion of questions asked you. Your comments are the equivalent of an eight year old going “NYAHH, NYAHH, NYAHH” on a schoolyard. Surely your “twenty continuous years of education” should have schooled you better.
“You seem to imply that the economics of trading securities is a zero sum game, that is, what one person looses the other person gains so every thing balances out. When it comes to banks that is clearly not the case. Again, banks occupy a special place in the economy. When they loose it is not necessarily just for their own account. Their actions can have consequences for individuals who never wanted to be in the game.”
BFM,
In this and your ensuing comment, you detail the situation elegantly and I agree with all you’ve written
“Bron. that is not the market. that is gambling. The market used to be investing in real companies that produced real things. What they are doing now is pure gambling on whether an index will go up or down. whether a group of people will or will not pay off their mortgages. Whether gold or silver will go up in price or down, whether the dollar will be stronger than the euro, etc.”
Shano,
Excellent points. Years ago the “market” was about investing in companies that actually produce products, or services. Now it is like Las Vegas, except that in Vegas the game is more or less straight, whereas here it is rigged towards the insiders, but as we see even they bet irresponsibly.
“However, because government is a power brokerage cartel, and this is very important, libertarian understand, that we as a society cannot, no matter what we have tried, curtail the abuse of those in power.”
hskiprob,
The problem with the Libertarian analysis is that in the end it becomes all about social-Darwinism, with the strong oppressing the weak. Nice if you’ve got the guns and/or money, but bad for everyone else.
“The problem with the Libertarian analysis is that in the end it becomes all about social-Darwinism, with the strong oppressing the weak. Nice if you’ve got the guns and/or money, but bad for everyone else.”
You have neither the logicla analysis or historical data to come to that conclusion and make rme realize that you do not have a clear understaning of how the free market really works.
It is the unfettered ability to go out into the world and contract with others to do those things that you beleive will give you life liberty and the pursuit of happiness with taking the rights away of others.
How can this be bad? and why are you so fearful of it. You should be more fearful of governemnt because it has been the one to create such harm.
You guys???
Good point HSKI: the libertarian ideology not only utilizes social darwinism: “let them die if they cannot affor health care” said Ron Paul’s son but also it’s ultimately a conservative ideology insofaras it harkens back to a bygone era that cannot be replicated, that is, a mythological free market capitalism ufettered by both regulations & rigged markets stacked with uneven trade agreements engineered by inherently predatory supra & multi-national corporations.
KF — I confess, I did not read the thread closely. I pretty much always skim the blogs, unless they’re about the Trayvon Martin case. Anyway, as I stated in the beginning of my comment, I do not have a dog in the race.
Mike Spindell, you said “believe it or not I even have close friends that are antediluvian Republicans.” I enjoyed that; I like sentences with the word “antediluvian” in them. Besides which, I had a fun experience recently. A friend of mine (very interesting woman, high i.q., fascinating background in India, Hindu, independent, educated, great cook!) told me that it was her intent to become a Republican political activist! She told me with fear because she expected me to condemn her for it. I, however, supported her decision and congratulated her. (Her reasoning was distinctly different from that of most of her colleagues engaged in that endeavor.)
She made her choices and carved out this life for herself while maintaining and even enhancing her habit of deep humankindness!
The world is full of such an incredible variety of things. It’s really a cabbages and kings kinda thing — even when it’s a bummer!
Mike, to be honest, you don’t strike me as having the type of ego that craves fame, and my apologies if I implied that you did, since I sense you’re of a purer & more honest spirit than that, but come on, don’t keep making me beat the dead horse point that guy’s who live & breathe legal principles like Turley cannot allow themselves to advocate for upholding the Constitution at all costs then turn around and vote for the guy he just articulated vociferously in major publications as the biggest gravedigger of the Constitution to take office in over 200 years.
I’ll tell you what, let me propose this Mitt Romney like wager even though I’m a man of modest means. The bet is this. If in the highly unlikely (I’d say mathematically impossible) event that you can get your friend Turley to admit that despite all the alarm bells he’s publicly raised re: Obama as the biggest gravedigger of the Constitution in US history, that he’ll still be voting for Obama this November (presumably under the rationalization as a lesser evil) then I will mail you, and this will be a publicly declared legally binding contract, a check for the sum of ten thousand US dollars.
Just put your money where your keyboard is and we’ll settle this lopsided debate once and for all.
Note that if in the highly likely event Turley confesses he must abstain this presidential election then you are required to mail me a check for exactly 10 US dollars, so I’m giving you 100 to 1 odds.
My mailing address will be forthcoming in a private email. I await your eager taking of this no-brainer challenge.
KF, interesting. I tend to look at various cultures/countries around the world in terms of typical 100 to 300 year economic cycles. The free market always exists. Without trade and contracts of trade we cannot survive. To judge the quality of life in a specific society, I think that all one has to do is look at the level of government intervention into the market place to determine its current position in the economic cycle. Of course things like war, famine, technologies and desease etc. can cause huge variations or changes in the cycle in terms of both lenght and quality. I’ve always wanted to do a thesis on this to see how acurate it would be. The least amount of government intervention creates a better quality of life for the majority and the greatest level of government intervention creates the greatest quality of life for the ruling class, is what appears to be suggested from my broad historical analysis. It however would necessitate trying to determine which forms of government interventions create the greatest social and econonomic imbalances. For example. In some countries like So. Africa and Costa Rica, licensure laws, effecting both med schools and medical practitioners appear not to have created such economic imbalances in incomes, as in the U.S. yet appear to still maintain the quality of care. Of course a number of Americans have caught on to this and are going overseas for both their dental and medical care because it’s less than half the price . America is rated around 40th in overal healthcare but remains costly for the majority. Never the less, it would be a highly incompassing analysis to look at ever single intervention, evaluate its effect on the market place and then compare the apples to oranges. Alcohol is legal in one country with different sets of regulations and it’s out right illegal in another country. The conclusion is however, is that every single law creates negative ramifications to some degree depending on a vast set of conditions, yet offer some level of benefit. As an example, Fraud and Yong argued against one another, that an individuals sexual repression had both a neccesary benefits to society but also had tremendous negative impacts on behavior. The key to me is to determine those laws that create the greatest benefits and the least detriments. I have concluded for myself that almost all malum in se laws do that and almost all malum prohibitum laws do not and cause more harm than good. And the battle goes on. We’d have to repeal a lot of laws to give me hope.
Correction: I’m actually offering Mike 1000 to 1 odds! Damn, that so good I might consider for one second a side, hedge bet, but naw, Turley just won’t be giving a vote of confidence THIS TIME for the cowardly schmuck who has the brazen audacity to decree that he and he alone, the presumptive King of the World, has the right (is it God given?) to execute without due process anybody on the planet he judges fit.