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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (76378)	7/25/2008 12:06:00 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 543206

And you know why I can be so confident that "liberal police state" will never happen? Because liberals don't want that They don't want hard totalitarianism, but they want creeping increases in government control through more regulation, higher taxes, more domestic government spending etc. -- "After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." Alexis de Tocqueville --- Not that they necessarily want that end, but they want to take continual steps in that direction thinking they will never reach that end. Each new increase is something people get used to, it becomes the new baseline. Then the next increase, is usually relatively small, and has some sort of justification, why don't we "be reasonable", instead of being "a free market fanatic" or "a worshiper of tax cuts". Each new increase is normally not so large as to be really objectionable, but you keep adding tiny sand grains, and eventually you have a "heap" of them reason.com Unfortunately most Republicans aren't much better.

To: Cogito who wrote (76378)	7/25/2008 12:12:14 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543206

Thanks for the welcome back. I monitor the thread from time to time. Tim's message to me was the first that interested me. I am not predicting about a police state if Obama is elected, liberal or otherwise. I'm talking about loss of personal rights, and with that, loss of freedom. In the recent Supreme Court decision of DC vs. Heller, four out of nine justices held that the Second Amendment, the meaning of which is unmistakable, did NOT mean what it says, i.e. "the right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It only takes ONE Ginsburg/Kennedy-like Obama appointment to turn that around. The United States of America is THE ONLY country in the world with the equivalent of the Second Amendment, and that is one of the things that Obama will work to change in the wrong direction. Obama frames himself as a citizen of the world and goes around campaigning in foreign countries, delivering 'major policy speeches' over that which he has no authority. Yes, I am scared to death of what an Obama administration will do to this country while he tries to 'perfect' it. District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. ___ (2008) is a legal case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects an individual's right to possess a firearm for private use. It was the first Supreme Court case in United States history to address directly whether the right to keep and bear arms is a right of individuals or a collective right that applies only to state-regulated militias. On June 26, 2008, the Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Parker v. District of Columbia, 478 F.3d 370 (D.C. Cir. 2007).[1] The Court of Appeals had struck down provisions of the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 as unconstitutional, and determined that handguns are "Arms" that may not be banned by the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.), also striking down the portion of the law that requires all firearms including rifles and shotguns be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock." en.wikipedia.org snipurl.com

To: Cogito who wrote (76378)	7/31/2008 5:30:31 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 543206

RUSH Limbaugh is always on the lookout I took a rare opportunity to listen to Rush Limbaugh today while waiting for my wife at the urgent care. You made a comment some time ago that Rush thrives on fomenting outrage, but I heard no such activity during the 20 minutes that I listened. On the other hand, Rush did quite effectively expose Howard Dean doing just that. Dean repeats the rant over and over again that "It's time we take back the American flag because it's not the exclusive domain of Rush Limbaugh." I probably heard him say that two dozen times, not one of them a repeat. It just sounds like a convenient rant for somebody who doesn't have a better idea. Rush had a very amicable conversation a few days ago with a woman who is notable for being opposed to his point of view. I can't remember her name. You have demonized Rush Limbaugh. I think that's funny, not in the standup comic sense.