I had a chance to meet Hal last night. He is a very engaging speaker – recounting his adventures up at the DNC in Denver. And he has some good ideas on what Congress needs to be working on, check out his web site –
It’s the Alexander Hamilton bit that worries me…I tend to be more Jeffersonian…
Obama, Biden descended from Irish cobblers: researcher – Yahoo News.
“About 34 million Americans claim an Irish connection.”
The rest have one that they don’t claim,
Denvention 3. is coming real soon now
testing
This one is too good not to pass on. Even if you don’t understand the subject matter, the treatment is wonderful.
I have sort of half been paying attention to the buzz going around this year on the pending elections. The Nominees have been determined and now each side is looking for a VP that will make a difference.
I saw a reposting of a Washington Post piece on the allegiance of a patriot an American. It does well to capture what I think of as the base ideals of America, ideals that are run over roughshod in the current political climate.
I see that Clark made a statement that being a war hero, to have made a large personal sacrifice for your country, does not mean that you are qualified to be commander-in-chief. I also heard the follow-up – that reaching the strategic command level begins to reach the level of qualification Clark was referring to. Clark was lambasted for dissing McCain, which he wasn’t doing. And McCain’s people can’t say that just because McCain has made great personal sacrifices for his country that he is qualified to be President. Neither approach is correct; neither being a war hero nor being a strategic genius qualifies you to be the President – or Commander-in-Chief. And it is foolish to pretend it does. But, I suppose the pundits need to prattle on about something. The very thought of MacArthur as President sends shivers down my spine.
The President is a civilian authority. He, or she, has the resources of the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs to call upon to review military options. That’s their job. I am afraid that too many in the current administration see the military as a foreign policy tool and since we paid so much for it, it seems kind of silly not to use it. So they invade sovereign nations that are not an eminent threat to the US or to its allies and squander billions of dollars of the US treasury and thousands of soldier’s lives. And Congress, our representatives, lets them get away with it. Why are WE letting THEM get away with it?
The President is not the King of the United States of America. Yet many seem to think of him as a king and to treat him as a king. His deciding decisions are the final authority on all matters great and small. If the President makes a decree that the pundits agree with, then it is treason to disagree with the President. (Of course, if the pundits disagree with him then he is a buffoon or a criminal.) Presidents shouldn’t make decrees; they should make suggestions, and maybe even suggest how a suggestion can be implemented, but they shouldn’t make decrees. Leave that for the idiots in Congress.
As we have observed this past Fourth, the United States of America was founded on the principle that we do not owe allegiance to one man, to one sovereign. The people are sovereign; the citizens are sovereign.
And there are natural rights that apply to all humans. These are inherent human rights that we hold to be self-evident. We started to define them in our Declaration of Independence and further refined them in our Constitution. These are natural human rights, unalienable; not just American rights. We just happened to be the first to codify these rights for all and our prosperity. It does well to ponder these rights on the Fourth, to remember where we came from and why, and to look upon our current path, and to see if we are still moving, progressing in the desired direction.
Elaine was clearing out the old ISP site that held stardel.com and came across my old photos of our 1999 Australian trip. I don’t remember exactly what software package I used to organize the photos, but it still works.
Elaine also noted that I haven’t updated e.g. since April, but I have been busy.
The essential human freedoms don’t change over time, driven by partisan politics. They are a constant basic foundation of our social fabric.
Please don’t forget them.
American Rhetoric: Franklin D. Roosevelt — “The Four Freedoms”
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception — the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
I read an article over on Making Light and it got me to pondering.
What libertarians (and the softheaded quasi-libertarian burghers of science fiction fandom, most of whom think the Economist is a voice of reason) need to learn is that capitalism is never about free markets, or in fact “freedom” of any sort; it’s about using the power of the state in order to make it easy for large amounts of capital to get together and rearrange the rules for its own convenience. “Privatize the profits, socialize the losses” is the logical consequence of capitalism’s prime directive. What we wind up with is socialism for the powerful, and tough shit for everybody else.
“Privatize the profits, socialize losses” seems to be a very apt description of Wall Street Capitalism. Every decade or two we seem to need to learn the lesson all over again. If rules and regulations get set up, the players learn to game the system while continually trying to undermine the regulators – Oh! they’re not needed anymore since we learned that lesson!
But I did start to ponder about the full matrix that the statement creates.
I must continue my pondering.
When I looked earlier at LJ it didn’t have my posts for the past month and wouldn’t let you comment on the LJ test posts. Now they are all there with comments. Boy, Elaine is good. Didn’t even get on the PC and fixed the problem.