Man Based Global Warming....

U,

"It might be instructive for you to actually read the Constitution and amendments, Icarus. It specifically states What our government MAY do and asserts that EVERYTHING else is left up to the individual states and individual men. It specifically enumerates what the government should be responsible for and left the rest for you and me to decide.


So because the constitution only mentions MEN,, am I to assume that you think that Females people have no rights because the constitution doesn't mention them?

Are Black men included?

"There is NOTHING in the Constitution that permits the government to dictate salaries of CEOs, take over private companies, overturn the rule of law (say, bankruptcy law - which Obama has done), run a national health care system, spend tax revenues for welfare or any other social program etc., etc. HELLO -- NOTHING


The generally accepted view of the constitution (affirmed by the courts over the years by the way!) that just because something is not mentioned in the constitution does not imply that it is therefore unconstitutional. Even your hated (I would guess) federal income tax has been affirmed by the supreme court.

You can feel free to hold a contrary opinion, but the bulk of settled constitutional law disagrees with you.

Icarus

PS I have read the constitution,, more than once. I am not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV either.

 

I'm just glad that we voted out the "statists" in 2006 and 2008.

Same old extremist right wing quackery. They've got a huge bin of words they don't understand that they try to tar others with. "Islamo-fascist" is one of my favorite oxymoronic terms from these history ignorant buffoons.

 

Mr. Ickes ~ I forgot to address your abortion Dr., and illegal alien murderers. They have all been arrested, right? I'm not sure how they get into the discussion except through your fevered imagination. These are disturbed individuals being dealt with.

If your wish is to link them to conservatism, this line can definitely be countered with domestic examples of the state executing innocents.

Let's see - 80 plus people incinerated at Waco, TX. because a federal organization wanted to make an example and a show of force around budget time. (Clinton administration, Janet Reno, etc.) No government employee charged with anything, not even poor judgement.

FBI agent kills pregnant woman with sniper rifle because her husband refused to help the feds falsely ensnare 'right-wing' extremists. Google Ruby Ridge. Sniper not charged with anything.

Our so-called 'war on drugs' kills more people through the over-zealous actions of raiders going to the WRONG address than any minutemen have killed - BY FAR. How many of those officers do you suppose will have the same fate as the murderes you mention?

I in no way condone the murder of any abortion doctor. But, let's look at what this latest victim did. He performed what are known as 'partial birth abortions'. That's where a baby's head emerges, but before the rest of the body is allowed to come out, the doctor ends its life. It's not pretty. Some people consider this as murder, but the doctors who do this are protected by existing law. No, I do not want to debate abortion. I'll just leave it at this: We determine that a person dies when his brain activity and heart cease to function - until they do, he is 'a live human being'. In the case of a fetus, he is not considered a live human even though there is demonstrable brain and heart activity at partial birth. Strange.

And just for giggles:

from Christopher Cook

Democrats have hated and been violent towards Republicans since Pennsylvania went for Lincoln,

President: Abraham Lincoln (R)
Assassin: John Wilkes Booth
Political identity and motive:
Booth was a Democrat, angry that Lincoln had freed the slaves and preserved the Union.


President: James A. Garfield (R)
Assassin: Charles J. Guiteau
Political identity and motive:
Guiteau was frustrated that he did not receive a political appointment in the Garfield administration, and he believed "that God had commanded him to kill the ungrateful President." Since we can assume that God did not, in fact, command him in this way, we must deem Guiteau mentally unstable.

President: William McKinley (R)
Assassin: Leon Czolgosz
Political identity and motive:
Czolgosz was an anarchist who believed that "there was a great injustice in American society, an inequality which allowed the wealthy to enrich themselves by exploiting the poor," and that he had to do something about it. Mimicking the assassination of King Umberto I of Italy, done for similar reasons, he shot and killed McKinley. Oddly, Czolgosz had earlier voted Republican, but the assassination motive was clearly as described above.

President: John F. Kennedy (D)
Assassin: Lee Harvey Oswald
Political identity and motive:
Defector to the USSR. Earlier attempted to kill General Edwin Walker, who was "an outspoken anti-communist, segregationist and member of the John Birch Society." Controversy about the assassination continues to persist, and Oswald was killed before any real digging could be done, so we are primarily left with his identity (as a defector to the USSR) as the prime indicator.

Attempts:
President: Andrew Jackson (D)
Would-be assassin: Richard Lawrence
Political identity and motive:
Lawrence was mentally ill, suffering from polymorphous delusions.


President: Theodore Roosevelt (R and Bull Moose)
Would-be assassin: John F. Schrank
Political identity and motive:
Schrank was mentally ill; he claimed "that it was the ghost of William McKinley that told him to perform the act."


President: Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)
Would-be assassin: Giuseppe Zangara
Political identity and motive:
"In the Dade County Courthouse jail, Zangara confessed and stated: 'I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.'" From Zangara's own words, much can be taken. However, he may also have been mentally ill. (Perhaps anyone who wants to kill a president is a touch deranged.)


President: Harry S Truman (D)
Would-be assassin: Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola
Political identity and motive:
Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola were members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Puerto Rican Nationalists, represented by Marxist terrorist groups such as FALN, who were responsible for scores of bombings in the U.S.; they were arguably the most active terrorist group in U.S. history. (Interesting side notes: President Carter freed Collazo in 1979, and President Clinton pardoned several FALN terrorists. Il n'y a aucun ennemi du cote gauche?)

President: John F. Kennedy (D)
Would-be assassin: Richard Paul Pavlick
Political identity and motive:
Pavlick was anti-Catholic, and he was also upset by "the close 1960 U.S. Presidential election, in which Kennedy had defeated Republican Richard Nixon by 118,000 votes." However, "Judge Emmet C. Choate ruled that Pavlick was unable to distinguish between right and wrong in his actions." He was kept in a mental hospital for three years. Will this be the closest we get....?

President: Richard M. Nixon (R)
Would-be assassin: Arthur Bremer
Political identity and motive:
Bremer is an interesting case, one that would require more research than we're doing in this admittedly surface analysis. He hated Nixon, but apparently, he also hated segregation and bigotry, and he did shoot Democratic candidate George Wallace. He also clearly had mental instability. Why did he hate Nixon, and also Wallace? He stated "It is my personal plan to assassinate by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace," and that his purpose was "to do SOMETHING BOLD AND DRAMATIC, FORCEFUL & DYNAMIC, A STATEMENT of my manhood for the world to see." These are deep waters, and we'll have to give this one a pass for now.

President: Richard M. Nixon (R)
Would-be assassin: Samuel Byck
Political identity and motive:
Byck "began to harbor the belief that the government was conspiring to oppress the poor." He attempted to join the Black Panthers. However, he was also "diagnosed with manic depression, a mental disorder characterized by both depressive 'lows' and (less frequently) manic or euphoric 'highs.'" He had left-wing motives, but he was also mentally unstable.


President: Gerald R. Ford (R)
Would-be assassin: Lynette Fromme
Political identity and motive:
Insane member of the insane Manson Family.


President: Gerald R. Ford (R)
Would-be assassin: Sara Jane Moore
Political identity and motive:
Revolutionary leftist political activist.

President: James E. Carter (D)
Would-be assassin: Raymond Lee Harvey
Political identity and motive:
Harvey was possibly mentally ill, but also, charges were dismissed for lack of evidence. This one doesn't count.

President: Ronald Reagan (R)
Would-be assassin: John Hinckley, Jr.
Political identity and motive:
Mentally ill, no apparent political motive (despite some absurd references to his connections to the Bush family).

President: George H.W. Bush (R)
Would-be assassin: Operation of sixteen men working for Saddam Hussein's Iraq
Political identity and motive:
Geopolitical attack/act of war.

President: Bill Clinton (D)
Would-be assassin: Francisco Martin Duran
Political identity and motive:
From Wikipedia:
"Duran pleaded not guilty and mounted an insanity defense, claiming that he was trying to save the world by destroying an alien 'mist,' connected by an umbilical cord to an alien in the Colorado mountains. He also claimed to be incited by conservative talk show host Chuck Baker, who spoke on air about 'armed revolution' and 'cleansing' of the government.
In both cases, these are claims made by Duran. We would need more external information to make a judgment.

President: George W. Bush (R)
Would-be assassin: Vladimir Arutyunian
Political identity and motive:
Georgian national who threw a grenade towards President Bush. Not quite sure yet what his motivation was. Pass for now.

Totals:
Clearly mentally ill (5)

Guiteau
Lawrence
Schrank
Fromme
Hinckley, Jr.


Anti-catholic (and possible Republican) motivation, coupled with mental illness (1):
Pavlick

Left-wing motivations, coupled with mental illness (1):
Byck

Unclear/more info required/weak evidence--pass (4):
Bremer
Harvey
Duran
Arutyunian

Left-leaning political motivation (7):
Booth
Czolgosz
Oswald
Zangara
Collazo
Torresola
Moore

Remove the people who are clearly mentally ill, to leave the people who had a political motivation. That gives us an eight (left) to one (right) ratio of political motivations behind presidential assassinations and attempts.
To be fair to the two among that number who also suffered from some mental illness, one from the left and one from the right, we can remove both of them from the figures.

That leaves us with the following:

Of the successful and attempted assassinations of U.S. presidents where there was a political motivation and no blatant mental illness, the political motivation behind the act was left-leaning 100% of the time.
We will grant that this is a somewhat surface analysis, and that detailed research and nuanced analysis may produce slightly different results. But still, don't you find the conclusion of even this surface analysis somewhat striking? It's 100%, after all.

Are you surprised by this result? I'm not. I did not know exactly what the results would be when I began, but knowing the left as I do, I knew it would lean in this direction. That it turned out to be (essentially) 100% is also not a surprise, though it does serve further to reinforce this grim understanding.

You will know them by their fruits.​

**This may appear at first glance to be an unequal comparison—the "left" vs. "Republicans." It is not, for you must understand that Democrats are well represented among the left's perpetrators of violence, both historically and in the present day. It's not just a fringe phenomenon. Mainstream people are among the perps. [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Brooks"]Congressmen[/ame]. Union members. It's a very old tradition for the Democrats, going all the way back to the terrorist wing of their party, the KKK. But it's also occurring today, in modern times, as you can read here, here, and here. And, if you would like a far more detailed exploration, read the impassioned article I wrote when I first began to really discover this phenomenon: Democrats are more violent. In fact, there's no comparison.

Democrats have hated and been violent towards Republicans since Pennsylvania went for Lincoln, and there's no sign of it abating any time soon.

 

Good luck discussing the Constitution with the right wingnuts. Few have even read it, although they profess to be experts on the subject. They completely ignore the general welfare clause.

The general welfare clause is one of my favorites because the right wingnuts are really expressing Southern conservatism of the slaveocracy time frame. The Confederate Constitution omitted this clause. On the other hand, our Founding Fathers' "Articles of Confederation" included it.

Truth is that conservatives don't like our constitution much, and would like to alter it. As Confederate President Jefferson Davis said, "If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a theory.'" Conservatives' primary motivations for wanting to alter it are not much changed from 1860. It is an appeal to baser instincts rather than to equality or true liberty. They prefer more tyrannical lower levels of govt. (local & state) to less tyrannical higher levels (federal). Conservativism at its core (philosophy, society, politics) is one of wanting to sustain a status quo and exert the will of a local majority over others. It is anti-libertarian and largely authoritarian.

 

Thank you Shawn,

As for Ufourya,, you will continue to hold your extremest views regardless of what I or any one else say. I, indeed will continue to hold my view and work to implement them. Now that the discussion has degenerated to Waco, Ruby Ridge and the abortion debate,, I chose to pass on wasting any more time with you.

I may chime in reply to others,,but I am done playing this game with you. Quite frankly instead of being stimulating like other debate are,, it is just tiresome. It is clear you come from the fringe of the right wing and there you will stay.

Best of luck to you. My side one the last two elections,, it is my fervent hope that we will win the next few as well. I hope we make progress fixing what needs to be fixed in this country. Clearly there is lots that needs fixing,, but since we won,, we get to make policy for a while. Perhaps as things begin to turn out different than your fear based, xenophobic politics of self and exclusion begin to be revealed as empty as they are you will begin to see the light. Until then enjoy your time in the wilderness. I'm sure that Sarah and Mike will enjoy the company, along with your minute men friends.

Icarus

 

There are plenty of outrageous things that have been 'affirmed' by the Supreme Court.

From Dred Scott (upholding slavery) and Plessy (upholding segregation) to Korematsu (upholding the imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese Americans and Americans of Japanese ancestry), the judiciary has a record of hostility to individual liberty and the rule of law that does not justify, as a policy or political matter, the kind of reputation for moral superiority over the other branches some confer on it. The Supreme court has, clearly, made unconstitutional decisions aplenty. And there will be many more if bigotted Sonia Sotomayor, or God forbid, more statists take the bench.

And, I hesitate to ask it, are you really so thick or whipped by political correctness that you can't see I used the word 'men' inclusively? And if you'd really read the Constitution including the Amendments you wouldn't ask silly questions about women and black men. And are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that any court has affirmed the governments right to flout bankruptcy law (which just happens to be mentioned specifically in the Constitution). If the share-holders whom Obama cheated out of their lawful right to preference (and favored his corrupt union buddies - big funders of his) at bankruptcy don't sue, I'll be really suprised. It's CLEARLY unconstitutional.

Somebody needs to slow the thugs down. Hey, maybe Americans are catching on:

 

I don't want to get banned again, so I'll refrain from crushing you verbally

 

As if.

 

Some folks delight in hopping into the middle of a discussion to add nothing worthwhile. They do not debate facts, make insightful comment, or provide humor. Their lives are so devoid of any excitement, that trying to bait others with ad hominem attacks is their only pleasure. They are called trolls on most sites. I call them pathetic, insecure and puerile.

 

Conservatives clearly revere the Constitution more than statists. To suggest otherwise is to be completely ignorant of its meaning and intent Simply saying that conservatism " is anti-libertarian and largely authoritarian," does not make it so.

As to the general welfare, the Constitution clearly intends that wording to pertain to the states rather than individuals.

While the meaning of words changes over time, I think this definition taken from the 1828 edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, is close enough in time to determine what the founders intended.


WEL´FARE, n. [well and fare, a good going; G. wohlfahrt; D. welvaard; Sw. valfart; Dan. velfærd.]

1. Exemption from misfortune, sickness, calamity or evil; the enjoyment of health and the common blessings of life; prosperity; happiness; applied to persons.
2. Exemption from any unusual evil or calamity; the enjoyment of peace and prosperity, or the ordinary blessings of society and civil government; applies to states.


A clear distinction is made with respect to welfare as applied to persons and states. In the Constitution the word "welfare" is used in the context of states and not persons. The "welfare of the United States" is not congruous with the welfare of individuals, people, or citizens.

In addition, any tyranny at any level is anathema to conservatives; and certainly it is far easier to remedy a local tyranny than a national.

Today, we see leftists, statists inviting national tyranny with open arms - fools.

 

A document written ages ago in a fundamentally different society. Intelligent men must evaluate the present rationally, regardless what the constitution says and amend as necessary.

Just like the founding fathers did a few years after writing the constitution.

 

Actually the Republican party base does not particularly like the Constitution since it does not designate the US as a Christian nation, and contains evil concepts such as "separation of church and state."

 

Just as you say, the Constitution includes a format for change that is the amendment. When, for instance, a single political party controls the Presidency, both houses of the Congress and enough Supreme Court justices lean the same direction, it becomes possible to change the Constitution and affirm the change in an unconstitutional manner. This has happened repeatedly and subverts the original intent of the founders. Consequently, large numbers of the population are forced to fund, through taxes, policy that they find morally repugnant - and indeed unconstitutional.

Amendment should be the only way to change the Constitution.

 

Unfortunately for you, the words "separation of church and state" occur nowhere in the Constitution. You might be surprised to learn that the founders prayed many times that their differences and deliberations be guided by the hand of divine Providence.

The words are in a letter written by Jefferson to a group of Baptists who had expressed concern to him that one Christian denomination might gain ascendency over another and be tied to the federal government. He assured them that there would be no STATE religion - the very thing that many Americans loathed about the places they fled - to which all must adhere. The founders did not want that despite the fact that most of them were Christians.

The entirety of the Constitution's comment on religion:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.â€


You will note that the Constitution prohibits the government from influencing religion, but not the other way around.

Part of Washington's farewell address:

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness -- these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.â€


There are many, many examples to be found indicating the importance of religion in the founder's lives and in their beliefs of its importance to the civil society they founded.

 

It's not unconstitutional if it is what the people voted for. The constitution is a guideline. The branches or government are the actual practice.

 

Quite wrong. The only way one maintains a constitutional government is if the changes to the Constitution are made in accordance with its direction.

"...Just after the completion and signing of the Constitution, in reply to a woman's inquiry as to the type of government the Founders had created, Benjamin Franklin said, "A Republic, if you can keep it."

Here's the difference between what the founders created and what you believe is the case:

Democracy vs. Republic: "A Republic, if you can keep it..."

Just as there is no 'wall of separation of church and state' in the Constitution, the word 'democracy' does not appear even a single time.

 

I believe that in order to amend the constitution, in addition to getting approval of the house and senate,, one also needs to get consent from 2/3 of the states through their elected legislatures.

If the courts affirm the constitutionality of a particular law or action, and it is affirmed up to and through the Supreme Court of the United States it is deemed "Constitutional" and ergo legal. Individuals may not like it, and indeed may work to change the statute but barring that, it remains the law of the land,,like it or not.

Icarus

 

It's actually 3/4. 38 legislatures these days. Not an easy thing to do.

 

Rob,

Sorry for the error, (something else for someone to criticize me for!)

"Not an easy thing to do." just ask any ERA supporter,,, not an easy thing to do by design. Look at California. The have had hundreds of amendments and have become virtually ungovernable as a result. (Please don't quote me on the number! I know it is a lot,, and I don't have time to look up the "real" number! The point is valid none the less)!

Icarus

 

Nothing to apologize for. I was a political science major a few decades ago! I was only confirming the difficulty of amending the US constitution. As Judge Sotomayor said, it's timeless. Much of that comes from a careful decision-making process to insure we adjust it only as necessary.

The "general welfare" argument was won by those who believe there are areas that the nation as a whole has to deal with- nation-wide banks, national products like cars, interstate highways etc. And dealing with global warming- hopefully being able to stop it rather than having to engineer around it.