Sunday, September 11, 2011
Terrorism and the Constitution
Terrorism alone cannot do anything to the Constitution. Only Americans can damage the Constitution. Are we conflating the act and our response to it — a response that is entirely within our power to affect. Indeed, as citizens in a democracy, it’s our responsibility to check the government from its excesses, and to stop adding fuel to the political fire. Now more than ever our country and the world is desperate for an authentic witness of God's love expressed through Jesus Christ. It is this, not religion or politics, that will ultimately win the war on terror.
Since were downsizing, we'll take a small fry with that freedom combo
Day’s End
It was “the day that changed everything,” until it didn’t. Even in the immediate aftermath, you could see that 9/11 was less momentous for some Americans who were at a safe remove from the carnage and grief. By late September, the ratings at CNN, then 24/7 terror central, had fallen by more than 70 percent. As I traveled across the country that grim fall to fulfill a spectacularly ill-timed book tour, I discovered that the farther west I got, the more my audiences questioned me as though I were a refugee from some flickering evening-news hot spot as distant and exotic as Beirut. When I described the scent of burning flesh wafting through Manhattan, or my sister-in-law’s evacuation by the National Guard from her ash-filled apartment on John Street, I was greeted with polite yet unmistakable expressions of disbelief.
Now, ten years later, it’s remarkable how much our city, like the country, has moved on. Decades are not supposed to come in tidy packages mandated by the calendar’s arbitrary divisions, but this decade did. For most Americans, the cloud of 9/11 has lifted. Which is not to say that a happier national landscape has been unveiled in its wake.
Three red-letter days in 2011 have certified the passing of the 9/11 decade as we had known it. The first, of course, was the killing of Osama bin Laden. We demand that our stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. While bin Laden’s demise wasn’t the final curtain for radical-Islamic terrorism, it was a satisfying resolution of the classic “dead or alive” Western that George W. Bush had dangled so tantalizingly before the nation in 2001, only to let the bad guy get away at Tora Bora. Once bin Laden was gone, he was gone from our politics, too. Terrorism has disappeared as a campaign issue; the old Bush-Cheney fear card can’t be found in the playbook of the GOP presidential contenders. Ron Paul’s isolationism increasingly seems like his party’s mainstream while the neocon orthodoxy of McCain-Palin looks like the cranky fringe.
The other red-letter days were August 5 and 6, with their twin calamities: the downgrading of America by Standard & Poor’s and the downing of a Chinook helicopter by the Taliban, making for the single most fatal day for Americans in Afghanistan. Among the fallen in that bloodbath were 17 Navy Seals, some of them members of the same revered team that had vanquished bin Laden.* Yet their tragic deaths were runners-up in national attention next to our fiscal woes. America may still ostensibly be a country at war with terrorists, but that war is at most a low-grade fever for the vast American majority with no direct connection to the men and women fighting it. The battle consuming our attention and our energies these days is the losing struggle to stay financially afloat. In time, the connection between the ten-year-old war in Afghanistan and our new civil war over America’s three-year-old economic crisis may well prove the most consequential historical fact of the hideous decade they bracket.
The hallowed burial grounds of 9/11 were supposed to bequeath us a stronger nation, not a busted one. We were supposed to be left with a finer legacy than Gitmo and the Patriot Act. When we woke up on September 12, we imagined a whole host of civic virtues that might rise from the smoldering ruins. The New Normal promised a new national unity and, of all unlikely miracles, bi-partisanship: The still-green president had a near-perfect approval rating for weeks. We would at last cast off our two-decade holiday from history, during which we had mostly ignored a steady barrage of terrorist threats and attacks. We would embrace a selfless wartime patriotism built on the awesome example of those regular Americans who ran to the rescue on that terrifying day of mass death, at the price of their own health and sometimes their lives.
What arrived instead, sadly enough, was another hijacking—of 9/11 by those who exploited it for motives large and petty, both ideological and crassly commercial. The most lethal of these hijackings was the Bush administration’s repurposing of 9/11 for a war against a country that had not attacked us. So devilishly clever was the selling of the Saddam-for-Osama bait-and-switch that almost half the country would come to believe that Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers. No less shabby, if far less catastrophic, was the milking of 9/11 for the lesser causes of self-promotion and product placement by those seeking either power or profit. From the Bush-reelection campaign ad with an image of a flag-draped stretcher carrying remains at ground zero to the donning of flag pins by television anchors and pandering politicians, no opportunistic appropriation of 9/11 was too sleazy to be off-limits. T-shirt hawkers and Scientologists rushed downtown to merchandise their wares; NBC re-branded its prime-time entertainment by outfitting its ubiquitous peacock logo with stars and stripes. (G.E., the network’s owner, had defense contracts to tend to.) Nor should we forget the preening architect Daniel Libeskind, who posed for an Audi ad to celebrate winning the contest to design the World Trade Center site (“the commission of the century,” as the copywriter had it).
National unity proved to be short-lived. An extreme, jingoistic patriotism soon gripped the land, accompanied by a rigid code of political correctness. You were either with the White House or you were with the terrorists. If you didn’t subscribe to what Joan Didion called the “fixed ideas” of 9/11, then it could be said “the terrorists have won.” ABC News found its patriotism questioned when it dared ban flag pins for its on-air journalists; the journalist William Langewiesche was heckled at readings for his book American Ground, a scrupulous firsthand account of the marathon ground-zero cleanup in which not every participant emerged a saint. Each time Hollywood attempted earnest (if less than brilliant) dramatizations like Flight 93 and World Trade Center, it would cue a debate about whether it was “too soon” to go there. The most famous journalistic photo of 9/11, Richard Drew’s “The Falling Man,” was banished from view following its morning-after appearance in the Times.
The sanitizing of 9/11 and the falsification of its genesis to jump-start a second war ended up muddying and corrupting the memory of the event rather than giving hawks and the right’s p.c.-police the permanent “war on terror” they craved. The attack’s meaning was eviscerated by its linkage to the endless debacle in Iraq. The images of the day were so bowdlerized and so shrouded in euphemistic pieties that the viciousness of the slaughter was gradually muted. When the World Trade Center–site developer Larry Silverstein said this July that “ten years from today, I suspect very few people will remember it as ground zero,” he was speaking the truth. To some degree, that’s already the case. It’s not just color-coded terror alerts, Freedom fries, and Rudy Giuliani’s once-unimpeachable political standing that are gone with the wind. It shows just how much 9/11 has been downsized in the American cosmography over a decade that when a conservative Republican senator, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, tried to derail a bill aiding those with 9/11-related illnesses last year, most of his own political cohort gave silent assent. The most vocal champions of the surviving 9/11 victims and their families were New York officials and celebrities like Jon Stewart, most of them liberal Democrats. The righteous anger of the right had moved on to the cause of taking down a president with the middle name Hussein.
In retrospect, the most consequential event of the past ten years may not have been 9/11 or the Iraq War but the looting of the American economy by those in power in Washington and on Wall Street. This was happening in plain sight—or so we can now see from a distance. At the time, we were so caught up in Al Qaeda’s external threat to America that we didn’t pay proper attention to the more prosaic threats within.
In such an alternative telling of the decade’s history, the key move Bush made after 9/11 had nothing to do with military strategy or national-security policy. It was instead his considered decision to rule out shared sacrifice as a governing principle for the fight ahead. Sacrifice was high among the unifying ideals that many Americans hoped would emerge from the rubble of ground zero, where so many Good Samaritans had practiced it. But the president scuttled the notion on the first weekend after the attack, telling Americans that it was his “hope” that “they make no sacrifice whatsoever” beyond, perhaps, tolerating enhanced airline security. Few leaders in either party contradicted him. Bush would soon implore us to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and would even lend his image to a travel-industry ad promoting tourism. Our marching orders were to go shopping.
From then on, it was a given that any human losses at wartime would be borne by a largely out-of-sight, out-of-mind, underpaid volunteer army and that the expense would be run up on a magic credit card. Even as the rising insurgency in Iraq began to stress American resources to the max in 2003, Bush doubled down on new tax cuts and pushed through a wildly extravagant new Medicare entitlement for prescription drugs to shore up his reelection prospects with elderly voters. David Walker, then the comptroller general, called it “the most reckless fiscal year in the history of the republic.” But Americans took the money and ran, and the same partisan voices now screaming about deficits in Washington remained mum as the cascade of red ink soared into the multitrillions.
By portraying Afghanistan and Iraq as utterly cost-free to a credulous public, the Bush administration injected the cancer into the American body politic that threatens it today: If we don’t need new taxes to fight two wars, why do we need them for anything? But that’s only half the story in this alternative chronicle of the decade’s history. Even as the middle class was promised a free ride, those at the top were awarded a free pass—not just with historically low tax rates that compounded America’s rampant economic inequality but with lax supervision of their own fiscal misbehavior.
It was only a month after 9/11 that the Enron scandal erupted, kicking off a larger narrative that would persist for the rest of the decade. The Houston energy company was a corporate Ponzi scheme that anticipated the antics at financial institutions, mortgage mills, and credit-rating agencies during the subprime scam. Enron had also been the biggest patron of Bush’s political career, and so the president dutifully promised a crackdown, with a new “financial crimes SWAT team” and “tough new criminal penalties for corporate fraud.” But this propaganda campaign was no more reality-based than the one that would promote Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Once the Enron collapse became old news, federal regulatory agencies and law enforcement were encouraged to go fishing as the housing bubble inflated and banks manufactured toxic paper that would send America and the world into a ruinous dive rivaling bin Laden’s cruelest fantasies.
It is that America—the country where rampaging greed usurped the common good in wartime, the country that crashed just as Bush fled the White House—that we live in today. It has little or no resemblance to the generous and heroic America we glimpsed on 9/11 and the days that followed. Our economy and our politics are broken. We remain in hock to jihadist oil producers as well as to China. Our longest war stretches into an infinite horizon. After watching huge expenditures of American blood and treasure install an Iran-allied “democracy” in a still-fratricidal Iraq, Americans have understandably resumed their holiday from history where it left off, turning their backs on the Arab Spring.
Thanks to the killing of the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and the scattering of Al Qaeda, at least no one can say, ten years later, that the terrorists won. But if there’s anything certain about the new decade ahead, it’s that sooner or later we will have to address the question of exactly who did.
By Frank Rich
It was “the day that changed everything,” until it didn’t. Even in the immediate aftermath, you could see that 9/11 was less momentous for some Americans who were at a safe remove from the carnage and grief. By late September, the ratings at CNN, then 24/7 terror central, had fallen by more than 70 percent. As I traveled across the country that grim fall to fulfill a spectacularly ill-timed book tour, I discovered that the farther west I got, the more my audiences questioned me as though I were a refugee from some flickering evening-news hot spot as distant and exotic as Beirut. When I described the scent of burning flesh wafting through Manhattan, or my sister-in-law’s evacuation by the National Guard from her ash-filled apartment on John Street, I was greeted with polite yet unmistakable expressions of disbelief.Now, ten years later, it’s remarkable how much our city, like the country, has moved on. Decades are not supposed to come in tidy packages mandated by the calendar’s arbitrary divisions, but this decade did. For most Americans, the cloud of 9/11 has lifted. Which is not to say that a happier national landscape has been unveiled in its wake.
Three red-letter days in 2011 have certified the passing of the 9/11 decade as we had known it. The first, of course, was the killing of Osama bin Laden. We demand that our stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. While bin Laden’s demise wasn’t the final curtain for radical-Islamic terrorism, it was a satisfying resolution of the classic “dead or alive” Western that George W. Bush had dangled so tantalizingly before the nation in 2001, only to let the bad guy get away at Tora Bora. Once bin Laden was gone, he was gone from our politics, too. Terrorism has disappeared as a campaign issue; the old Bush-Cheney fear card can’t be found in the playbook of the GOP presidential contenders. Ron Paul’s isolationism increasingly seems like his party’s mainstream while the neocon orthodoxy of McCain-Palin looks like the cranky fringe.
The other red-letter days were August 5 and 6, with their twin calamities: the downgrading of America by Standard & Poor’s and the downing of a Chinook helicopter by the Taliban, making for the single most fatal day for Americans in Afghanistan. Among the fallen in that bloodbath were 17 Navy Seals, some of them members of the same revered team that had vanquished bin Laden.* Yet their tragic deaths were runners-up in national attention next to our fiscal woes. America may still ostensibly be a country at war with terrorists, but that war is at most a low-grade fever for the vast American majority with no direct connection to the men and women fighting it. The battle consuming our attention and our energies these days is the losing struggle to stay financially afloat. In time, the connection between the ten-year-old war in Afghanistan and our new civil war over America’s three-year-old economic crisis may well prove the most consequential historical fact of the hideous decade they bracket.
The hallowed burial grounds of 9/11 were supposed to bequeath us a stronger nation, not a busted one. We were supposed to be left with a finer legacy than Gitmo and the Patriot Act. When we woke up on September 12, we imagined a whole host of civic virtues that might rise from the smoldering ruins. The New Normal promised a new national unity and, of all unlikely miracles, bi-partisanship: The still-green president had a near-perfect approval rating for weeks. We would at last cast off our two-decade holiday from history, during which we had mostly ignored a steady barrage of terrorist threats and attacks. We would embrace a selfless wartime patriotism built on the awesome example of those regular Americans who ran to the rescue on that terrifying day of mass death, at the price of their own health and sometimes their lives.
What arrived instead, sadly enough, was another hijacking—of 9/11 by those who exploited it for motives large and petty, both ideological and crassly commercial. The most lethal of these hijackings was the Bush administration’s repurposing of 9/11 for a war against a country that had not attacked us. So devilishly clever was the selling of the Saddam-for-Osama bait-and-switch that almost half the country would come to believe that Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers. No less shabby, if far less catastrophic, was the milking of 9/11 for the lesser causes of self-promotion and product placement by those seeking either power or profit. From the Bush-reelection campaign ad with an image of a flag-draped stretcher carrying remains at ground zero to the donning of flag pins by television anchors and pandering politicians, no opportunistic appropriation of 9/11 was too sleazy to be off-limits. T-shirt hawkers and Scientologists rushed downtown to merchandise their wares; NBC re-branded its prime-time entertainment by outfitting its ubiquitous peacock logo with stars and stripes. (G.E., the network’s owner, had defense contracts to tend to.) Nor should we forget the preening architect Daniel Libeskind, who posed for an Audi ad to celebrate winning the contest to design the World Trade Center site (“the commission of the century,” as the copywriter had it).
National unity proved to be short-lived. An extreme, jingoistic patriotism soon gripped the land, accompanied by a rigid code of political correctness. You were either with the White House or you were with the terrorists. If you didn’t subscribe to what Joan Didion called the “fixed ideas” of 9/11, then it could be said “the terrorists have won.” ABC News found its patriotism questioned when it dared ban flag pins for its on-air journalists; the journalist William Langewiesche was heckled at readings for his book American Ground, a scrupulous firsthand account of the marathon ground-zero cleanup in which not every participant emerged a saint. Each time Hollywood attempted earnest (if less than brilliant) dramatizations like Flight 93 and World Trade Center, it would cue a debate about whether it was “too soon” to go there. The most famous journalistic photo of 9/11, Richard Drew’s “The Falling Man,” was banished from view following its morning-after appearance in the Times.The sanitizing of 9/11 and the falsification of its genesis to jump-start a second war ended up muddying and corrupting the memory of the event rather than giving hawks and the right’s p.c.-police the permanent “war on terror” they craved. The attack’s meaning was eviscerated by its linkage to the endless debacle in Iraq. The images of the day were so bowdlerized and so shrouded in euphemistic pieties that the viciousness of the slaughter was gradually muted. When the World Trade Center–site developer Larry Silverstein said this July that “ten years from today, I suspect very few people will remember it as ground zero,” he was speaking the truth. To some degree, that’s already the case. It’s not just color-coded terror alerts, Freedom fries, and Rudy Giuliani’s once-unimpeachable political standing that are gone with the wind. It shows just how much 9/11 has been downsized in the American cosmography over a decade that when a conservative Republican senator, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, tried to derail a bill aiding those with 9/11-related illnesses last year, most of his own political cohort gave silent assent. The most vocal champions of the surviving 9/11 victims and their families were New York officials and celebrities like Jon Stewart, most of them liberal Democrats. The righteous anger of the right had moved on to the cause of taking down a president with the middle name Hussein.
In retrospect, the most consequential event of the past ten years may not have been 9/11 or the Iraq War but the looting of the American economy by those in power in Washington and on Wall Street. This was happening in plain sight—or so we can now see from a distance. At the time, we were so caught up in Al Qaeda’s external threat to America that we didn’t pay proper attention to the more prosaic threats within.
In such an alternative telling of the decade’s history, the key move Bush made after 9/11 had nothing to do with military strategy or national-security policy. It was instead his considered decision to rule out shared sacrifice as a governing principle for the fight ahead. Sacrifice was high among the unifying ideals that many Americans hoped would emerge from the rubble of ground zero, where so many Good Samaritans had practiced it. But the president scuttled the notion on the first weekend after the attack, telling Americans that it was his “hope” that “they make no sacrifice whatsoever” beyond, perhaps, tolerating enhanced airline security. Few leaders in either party contradicted him. Bush would soon implore us to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and would even lend his image to a travel-industry ad promoting tourism. Our marching orders were to go shopping.
From then on, it was a given that any human losses at wartime would be borne by a largely out-of-sight, out-of-mind, underpaid volunteer army and that the expense would be run up on a magic credit card. Even as the rising insurgency in Iraq began to stress American resources to the max in 2003, Bush doubled down on new tax cuts and pushed through a wildly extravagant new Medicare entitlement for prescription drugs to shore up his reelection prospects with elderly voters. David Walker, then the comptroller general, called it “the most reckless fiscal year in the history of the republic.” But Americans took the money and ran, and the same partisan voices now screaming about deficits in Washington remained mum as the cascade of red ink soared into the multitrillions.
By portraying Afghanistan and Iraq as utterly cost-free to a credulous public, the Bush administration injected the cancer into the American body politic that threatens it today: If we don’t need new taxes to fight two wars, why do we need them for anything? But that’s only half the story in this alternative chronicle of the decade’s history. Even as the middle class was promised a free ride, those at the top were awarded a free pass—not just with historically low tax rates that compounded America’s rampant economic inequality but with lax supervision of their own fiscal misbehavior.
It was only a month after 9/11 that the Enron scandal erupted, kicking off a larger narrative that would persist for the rest of the decade. The Houston energy company was a corporate Ponzi scheme that anticipated the antics at financial institutions, mortgage mills, and credit-rating agencies during the subprime scam. Enron had also been the biggest patron of Bush’s political career, and so the president dutifully promised a crackdown, with a new “financial crimes SWAT team” and “tough new criminal penalties for corporate fraud.” But this propaganda campaign was no more reality-based than the one that would promote Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Once the Enron collapse became old news, federal regulatory agencies and law enforcement were encouraged to go fishing as the housing bubble inflated and banks manufactured toxic paper that would send America and the world into a ruinous dive rivaling bin Laden’s cruelest fantasies.
It is that America—the country where rampaging greed usurped the common good in wartime, the country that crashed just as Bush fled the White House—that we live in today. It has little or no resemblance to the generous and heroic America we glimpsed on 9/11 and the days that followed. Our economy and our politics are broken. We remain in hock to jihadist oil producers as well as to China. Our longest war stretches into an infinite horizon. After watching huge expenditures of American blood and treasure install an Iran-allied “democracy” in a still-fratricidal Iraq, Americans have understandably resumed their holiday from history where it left off, turning their backs on the Arab Spring.
Thanks to the killing of the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and the scattering of Al Qaeda, at least no one can say, ten years later, that the terrorists won. But if there’s anything certain about the new decade ahead, it’s that sooner or later we will have to address the question of exactly who did.
By Frank Rich
Friday, March 18, 2011
Tepco, Fukushima plant latest efforts to pump seawater
Tepco, the Fukushima plant's operator, has provided these details on the latest efforts to pump seawater into reactor 3's spent fuel pool, which is at risk of overheating: "At 0:45 am (Japan time), March 19th , water discharge by hyper rescue troop has started with the cooperation of Tokyo Fire Department. At 1:10 am, March 19th , they had finished water discharge."
UN nuclear watchdog handy pyramid diagram to a raised Level 5 on a scale of 1-7
The nuclear crisis at Fukushima had been raised to Level 5 on a scale of 1-7, same as Three Mile Island, not as bad as Chernobyl. For an explanation of what that means, the UN nuclear watchdog has a handy pyramid diagram.
The term half-life
The comment explaining the term half-life is slightly confusing. It sounds like the substance is disappearing, and that is not what happens. Radioactive materials are by definition unstable, and will decay into non-radioactive materials. In doing so, they radiate the extra particles that make them radioactive. For example, radioactive iodine, such as we have heard about from Fukushima nuclear plant, will decay into regular ordinary iodine. So if you had 100 grams of the radioisotope of iodine, if its half-life is 8 days then at that point you would have 50 grams of the radioisotope ANDalmost 50 grams of ordinary iodine. It's not 50 grams of regular iodine, because some material was emitted as radiation during the 8 days of decay.
When fuel elements are taken out of the reactor right after they shutdown, they are dispersed in container postitions in the canal so that they are not all together from one fresh core. Each element is still thermally hot and have very high radition levels which is why they cool them so long and shield them from workers. the green crane you see in one of the photos is the gantry crane that goes over the cana and is used to transfer the elements from the reactor to the canal area. they also have over head cranes which are used to lift the fuel elements that are ready to ship into a shielded cask and then off to another facility.
When fuel elements are taken out of the reactor right after they shutdown, they are dispersed in container postitions in the canal so that they are not all together from one fresh core. Each element is still thermally hot and have very high radition levels which is why they cool them so long and shield them from workers. the green crane you see in one of the photos is the gantry crane that goes over the cana and is used to transfer the elements from the reactor to the canal area. they also have over head cranes which are used to lift the fuel elements that are ready to ship into a shielded cask and then off to another facility.
TEPCO external power line to reactor 2
Tokyo Electric Power Co, which operates Fukushima Daiichi, says it has now connected an external power line to its stricken plant and would first supply reactor 2 because it is less damaged, Reuters reports. The power is needed to operate the plant's badly-needed cooling systems, which were damaged last Friday.
400,000 people are spending another night in shelters
It's 0400 in Japan and the temperature is just below zero in Fukushima. Nearly 400,000 people are spending another night in shelters in the north-east, where supplies of food, water, medicine and heating fuel are low.
TEPCO statement deep apologies
The power company, Tepco, has issued a statement today containing the following: "We would like to make our deep apologies for concern and nuisance about the incident of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station and the leakage of radioactive substances to the people living in the surrounding area of the power station".
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Protecting Traditional Marriage
President Obama recently announced that he considers the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to be an unconstitutional law, and he therefore will no longer allow the Department of Justice to defend the law in the courts. Since that decision, we have received a flurry of inquiries about whether the President has the constitutional authority to declare a law unconstitutional. The answer is, "Yes; he does have that power" – a point frequently reaffirmed by the Founders.
Granted, most Americans believe that the President's decision about the constitutionality of DOMA was wrong (and certainly, from an original intent standpoint it definitely was), but that is a completely different issue from whether he has the constitutional authority to declare the law unconstitutional. However, history and the constitution make clear that the President does not have the final say on what is constitutional (nor does any other single branch, whether Judicial or Legislative). The other two branches still have recourses if they disagree with the President.
For example, Congress can intervene to appoint legal counsel to defend the law in Court. And the upper courts can still find the law to be completely constitutional (as they have in previous challenges to the law), regardless of whether the Executive Branch chooses to enforce the law or defend it in court.
The Founders affirmed that any of the three branches could review a law for constitutionality. For example, James Wilson (Supreme Court Justice and signer of the Constitution) declared that the President can "refuse to carry into effect an act that violates the Constitution." An excellent example of this surrounds the four Alien and Sedition laws passed in 1798 by a Federalist Congress and signed by Federalist President John Adams. Under those laws, twenty-five individuals were arrested, and ten convicted.
The law was never declared unconstitutional by the courts, but when Anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson became President, he believed the law was unconstitutional. He therefore promptly freed all of those imprisoned under it, without regard to the specifics of their particular offense. Jefferson was criticized for nullifying this law, yet notice his response to one critic:
You seem to think it devolved on the judges to decide on the validity of the sedition law. But nothing in the Constitution has given them a right to decide for the Executive more than to the Executive to decide for them. Both magistracies are equally independent in the sphere of action assigned to them. The judges, believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a sentence of fine and imprisonment because the power was placed in their hands by the Constitution. But the Executive, believing the law to be unconstitutional, were bound to remit the execution of it because that power has been confided to them by the Constitution.
Similarly, when President Andrew Jackson was told to take certain actions by the Supreme Court, he ignored the Court's order, explaining:
Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. . . . The opinion of the judges has no more authority over the Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.
Later, when the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott that the other branches could not prohibit slavery, the other two branches ignored the ruling. On June 9, 1862, Congress prohibited the extension of slavery into the free territories; and the following year, President Lincoln issued the "Emancipation Proclamation" – both acts were a direct affront to the Court's decision. Because Congress and President Lincoln were guided by their own understanding of the Constitution rather than by the Judiciary's opinion, both declared freedom for slaves.
In short, the Founders held that any of the three branches had the constitutional authority to expound the constitutionality of laws. As Thomas Jefferson explained:
Each of the three departments has equally the right to decide for itself what is its duty under the Constitution without any regard to what the others may have decided for themselves under a similar question.
Very simply, the separation of powers wisely permitted each branch to determine within its own sphere what was and was not constitutional.
Write, phone, email, text your Congressman and Senator to let them know how you feel and that they can still do something about protecting traditional marriage.
Granted, most Americans believe that the President's decision about the constitutionality of DOMA was wrong (and certainly, from an original intent standpoint it definitely was), but that is a completely different issue from whether he has the constitutional authority to declare the law unconstitutional. However, history and the constitution make clear that the President does not have the final say on what is constitutional (nor does any other single branch, whether Judicial or Legislative). The other two branches still have recourses if they disagree with the President.
For example, Congress can intervene to appoint legal counsel to defend the law in Court. And the upper courts can still find the law to be completely constitutional (as they have in previous challenges to the law), regardless of whether the Executive Branch chooses to enforce the law or defend it in court.
The Founders affirmed that any of the three branches could review a law for constitutionality. For example, James Wilson (Supreme Court Justice and signer of the Constitution) declared that the President can "refuse to carry into effect an act that violates the Constitution." An excellent example of this surrounds the four Alien and Sedition laws passed in 1798 by a Federalist Congress and signed by Federalist President John Adams. Under those laws, twenty-five individuals were arrested, and ten convicted.
The law was never declared unconstitutional by the courts, but when Anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson became President, he believed the law was unconstitutional. He therefore promptly freed all of those imprisoned under it, without regard to the specifics of their particular offense. Jefferson was criticized for nullifying this law, yet notice his response to one critic:
You seem to think it devolved on the judges to decide on the validity of the sedition law. But nothing in the Constitution has given them a right to decide for the Executive more than to the Executive to decide for them. Both magistracies are equally independent in the sphere of action assigned to them. The judges, believing the law constitutional, had a right to pass a sentence of fine and imprisonment because the power was placed in their hands by the Constitution. But the Executive, believing the law to be unconstitutional, were bound to remit the execution of it because that power has been confided to them by the Constitution.
Similarly, when President Andrew Jackson was told to take certain actions by the Supreme Court, he ignored the Court's order, explaining:
Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. . . . The opinion of the judges has no more authority over the Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.
Later, when the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott that the other branches could not prohibit slavery, the other two branches ignored the ruling. On June 9, 1862, Congress prohibited the extension of slavery into the free territories; and the following year, President Lincoln issued the "Emancipation Proclamation" – both acts were a direct affront to the Court's decision. Because Congress and President Lincoln were guided by their own understanding of the Constitution rather than by the Judiciary's opinion, both declared freedom for slaves.
In short, the Founders held that any of the three branches had the constitutional authority to expound the constitutionality of laws. As Thomas Jefferson explained:
Each of the three departments has equally the right to decide for itself what is its duty under the Constitution without any regard to what the others may have decided for themselves under a similar question.
Very simply, the separation of powers wisely permitted each branch to determine within its own sphere what was and was not constitutional.
Write, phone, email, text your Congressman and Senator to let them know how you feel and that they can still do something about protecting traditional marriage.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Congress Introducing Kill Switch Legislation - More of our freedoms eroding away
A million people took to the streets of Egypt earlier this week to protest the Mubarak regime and call for democratic reform. The Egyptian government responded, again, by cutting off Internet access and plunging the nation into digital darkness.
Such drastic action is a new way for governments to smother popular movements worldwide... just as more and more people are turning to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and using cell phones to speak out against authoritarian regimes.
We also have cause for concern at home: Plans are afoot that could give the U.S president the authority to flip the "kill switch" on our Internet.
Tell Your Senators: Say 'No' to the Internet Kill Switch
Senators Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Thomas Carper (D-Dela.) introduced legislation in the last Congress that would give the executive branch vague and unchecked authority to cut off “critical infrastructure” in times of crisis.
The "Protect Cyberspace as a National Asset Act" wasn't passed in 2010. But, according to a recent report in Wired, Sen. Collins plans to reintroduce the bill in the new Congress.
We need to be dead certain that no bill gives government the authority to cut off Internet access. Such power, in the hands of the nation's top executive, poses a drastic threat to our First Amendment right to free speech.
Please send this letter to your senators telling them to vote "NO" on any legislation that gives government the unchecked authority to black out the Internet.
The events in Egypt show the power of the Internet in fostering free speech and reform worldwide. Both progressive and conservative activists in the United States have relied on the Web to rally supporters and build popular movements.
We must guard against any effort to curtail our access to the open Internet.
Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Save the Internet
Free Press Action Fund
www.freepress.net
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
You live by the sword, you die by the sword
As we look back in recent days to Tucson Arizona and the rhetoric that has been discussed, we all took a step backwards and contemplated what it all meant. Lives were taken, was there more than just one person to blame. Had it been the climate of discontent and the angry rhetoric that has been tossed about in the past few decades? Is all this a precursor to worse days ahead? We just celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. birthday and reread his Letter from the Birmingham Jail. This should be required reading by everyone once a year. It is rich with ideas of non-violence and using rhetoric that lifts up and not tears down. It is full of profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every human being as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, possessing inherent rights of equal dignity and life. Broadly speaking, non-violence has meant not relying on arms and weapons of struggle. It has meant direct participation of masses in protest, rather than reliance on indirect methods which frequently do not involve masses in action at all.
Violence as a way of achieving justice is impractical and immoral, but also mindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Our nation has frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. As Dr. King said “the ends don’t justify the means, for the means represents the seed and the ends represent the tree.”
Dr. King has been the moral guide of our time, if there was a prophet ever sent to our nation he was the man. But where did Dr. King learn this from, did he just snatch this out of thin air? Dr. King was also a Baptist Minister, he had studied, learned, and preached from the Bible. I believe it was his encounter with God that made him into what he eventually became. He felt after his release from the Birmingham jail that God had knocked on his door, which God was showing that non-violence and the direction that he was taking was a path that God wanted him to take. Dr. King describes this encounter in the book “A testament of hope: the essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.”.
Even though the Bible does not directly say to not use violence, it does so indirectly. In the sermon on the mount in Matthew chapter five Jesus says “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. Contrary to many people's understanding, the Law wasn't given so that we could keep it and earn relationship with God.
The Law was given to show us that it was impossible to have relationship with God by our good acts. The Law showed us how sinful we were so that we would quit trying to earn God's favor and call out to Him for mercy.
In these verses, Jesus was simply amplifying the impact of the Law by going beyond actions to the thoughts and intents of the heart. The Old Testament law had said not to do these things. Here, Jesus was saying that if we have embraced them in our hearts, we are guilty of the same transgression as if we had done them. God looks on the heart and not just the actions. In Matthew chapter twelve Jesus further reveals for out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. That is where we are with rhetoric, it starts in the heart and will eventually work its way to our actions. Our actions will follow our heart.
In Luke chapter nine Jesus directs His disciples to go out and preach the kingdom of God, heal the sick, and bless whatever home they stay in. Jesus told them not to take a staff, bag, bread, money, or extra coat. He was trying to show the disciples how to trust and rely on God and that He would take care of all their needs. In Luke chapter ten Jesus then appoints seventy two others to go out and do the same. He directed them the same way He told the twelve disciples. When the seventy two returned they announced how powerful that God worked through them that even evil fell like lightning from heaven.
If we depend on God, He will provide all that we need. In Second Corinthians chapter ten, the apostle Paul says “Though we walk in the flesh, we don’t war in the flesh for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. But mighty through God.” In Ephesians chapter six Paul iterates “the war is not against flesh and blood”, if we are coming against the flesh it is the wrong war. Non-violence fits perfectly here.
Jesus continued to show the disciples in a very real manner all that He was trying to teach them, and in this way He showed them the path to non-violence. In Luke chapter twenty two it looks like Jesus was giving the disciples a contradiction in what He told them in chapter nine and ten of Luke. “Then Jesus asked them, "When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?" "Nothing," they answered. He said to them, "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. It is written: 'And he was numbered with the transgressors'; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment." The disciples said, "See, Lord, here are two swords." "That is enough," he replied.”
This was not a contradiction but Jesus showing the disciples in a very real manner that the consequences of following Jesus, depending upon Him, that all their needs were going to be taken care of. Using the world’s ways and using violence was going to cause more violence to come. In Matthew twenty six the guards, Judas, and a large crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests and the elders of the people had come for Jesus and violence was taken up. “With that, one of Jesus' companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear”. "Put your sword back in its place," Jesus said to him, "for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”
Jesus was teaching that violence begets violence. In contrast Jesus who used no violence, showed that depending upon Him that everything was going to be taken care of. All of this starts in our hearts. The vitriolic rhetoric that has been used the last few decades has invaded every aspect of our life here in these United States. This rhetoric has laid seeds that we are experiencing today and seeing the fruit of the tree in our government, schools, churches, and in all aspects of our lives. We need to quit planting those seeds, it starts in our hearts. Non-violence does not seek to humiliate or defeat but to win friendship and understanding. The aftermath of violence is bitterness, anger and in the end death, the aftermath of non-violence is reconciliation, peace and in the end redemption.
Violence as a way of achieving justice is impractical and immoral, but also mindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Our nation has frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. As Dr. King said “the ends don’t justify the means, for the means represents the seed and the ends represent the tree.”
Dr. King has been the moral guide of our time, if there was a prophet ever sent to our nation he was the man. But where did Dr. King learn this from, did he just snatch this out of thin air? Dr. King was also a Baptist Minister, he had studied, learned, and preached from the Bible. I believe it was his encounter with God that made him into what he eventually became. He felt after his release from the Birmingham jail that God had knocked on his door, which God was showing that non-violence and the direction that he was taking was a path that God wanted him to take. Dr. King describes this encounter in the book “A testament of hope: the essential writings and speeches of Martin Luther King Jr.”.
Even though the Bible does not directly say to not use violence, it does so indirectly. In the sermon on the mount in Matthew chapter five Jesus says “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. Contrary to many people's understanding, the Law wasn't given so that we could keep it and earn relationship with God.
The Law was given to show us that it was impossible to have relationship with God by our good acts. The Law showed us how sinful we were so that we would quit trying to earn God's favor and call out to Him for mercy.
In these verses, Jesus was simply amplifying the impact of the Law by going beyond actions to the thoughts and intents of the heart. The Old Testament law had said not to do these things. Here, Jesus was saying that if we have embraced them in our hearts, we are guilty of the same transgression as if we had done them. God looks on the heart and not just the actions. In Matthew chapter twelve Jesus further reveals for out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. That is where we are with rhetoric, it starts in the heart and will eventually work its way to our actions. Our actions will follow our heart.
In Luke chapter nine Jesus directs His disciples to go out and preach the kingdom of God, heal the sick, and bless whatever home they stay in. Jesus told them not to take a staff, bag, bread, money, or extra coat. He was trying to show the disciples how to trust and rely on God and that He would take care of all their needs. In Luke chapter ten Jesus then appoints seventy two others to go out and do the same. He directed them the same way He told the twelve disciples. When the seventy two returned they announced how powerful that God worked through them that even evil fell like lightning from heaven.
If we depend on God, He will provide all that we need. In Second Corinthians chapter ten, the apostle Paul says “Though we walk in the flesh, we don’t war in the flesh for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. But mighty through God.” In Ephesians chapter six Paul iterates “the war is not against flesh and blood”, if we are coming against the flesh it is the wrong war. Non-violence fits perfectly here.
Jesus continued to show the disciples in a very real manner all that He was trying to teach them, and in this way He showed them the path to non-violence. In Luke chapter twenty two it looks like Jesus was giving the disciples a contradiction in what He told them in chapter nine and ten of Luke. “Then Jesus asked them, "When I sent you without purse, bag or sandals, did you lack anything?" "Nothing," they answered. He said to them, "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. It is written: 'And he was numbered with the transgressors'; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me. Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment." The disciples said, "See, Lord, here are two swords." "That is enough," he replied.”
This was not a contradiction but Jesus showing the disciples in a very real manner that the consequences of following Jesus, depending upon Him, that all their needs were going to be taken care of. Using the world’s ways and using violence was going to cause more violence to come. In Matthew twenty six the guards, Judas, and a large crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests and the elders of the people had come for Jesus and violence was taken up. “With that, one of Jesus' companions reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear”. "Put your sword back in its place," Jesus said to him, "for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”
Jesus was teaching that violence begets violence. In contrast Jesus who used no violence, showed that depending upon Him that everything was going to be taken care of. All of this starts in our hearts. The vitriolic rhetoric that has been used the last few decades has invaded every aspect of our life here in these United States. This rhetoric has laid seeds that we are experiencing today and seeing the fruit of the tree in our government, schools, churches, and in all aspects of our lives. We need to quit planting those seeds, it starts in our hearts. Non-violence does not seek to humiliate or defeat but to win friendship and understanding. The aftermath of violence is bitterness, anger and in the end death, the aftermath of non-violence is reconciliation, peace and in the end redemption.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Anniversary of Roe vs. Wade and Soylent Green
In the film Soylent Green the police procedural and science fiction it depicts is an investigation into the brutal murder of a wealthy businessman in a dystopian future suffering from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans and a hot climate due to the greenhouse effect and climate change. Much of the population survives on processed food rations, including "soylent green" which is processed food (small green wafers) made from humans who were euthanized at a designated early age.
Even though this film is science fiction it has some truth in our reality today. The earth is suffering from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, and climate change. Even though these are the categories most known they are not the least. As in the film we are also coming to the place of genocide where the earth and its resources are more important than human life. With the advent of terrorism, risk of nuclear war, and conventional war our hubris on handling such proves how naive we really are. We are already heading towards the brink of denying human life not just by the depleted resources which lessens availability to each person but we are already eating other human beings as in Soylent Green.
How so you ask? It is our sexual appetite that has caused a Soylent Green type situation. Since January 22, 1973 we as Americans have had over 50 million abortions. If that date sounds familiar it is the landmark decision of Roe vs. Wade. It is legal euthanasia and no matter what words that someone wants to put to this, it is still killing babies. Some say they are not babies, for they have not been fully conceived. However you want to call it, it is still not allowing life to continue. It does not matter if the person is 1 month old in the womb or 95 years old out of the womb it is still not allowing a life to continue.
This way of life, which has continued for almost 40 years, has now been accepted and imbedded in our psyche, what is our next step as we look at pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, and climate change? Will we be more interested in saving our planet and less interested in saving life. Are animals more important than humans, are the oceans more important than humans, is our climate more important than humans? If we think that sex is more important than humans then why not these other things. Wars and terrorism is already denying humanity of others and killing them, why not climate control.
Soylent Green is already taking place, like anything when it is done in small ways it will always be a precursor to larger events. Never underestimate what a small band of committed people can do. Do you know why? It is because it is the only thing that has worked. It is the small group of people who were dedicated with our new government in 1776, it is the small group of disciples of Jesus Christ that turned the world upside down. But just as much as these were two positive instances, the same applies to negative ways. These precursors of eliminating life has grown into 50 million with abortions, now add wars, terrorism, and ecological disasters and we have the making of genocide on a major scale. Put into our psyche that your own carbon dioxide, and depletion of resources footprint can be the precursor to global genocide. That is when Roe vs. Wade will be minor in comparison to euthanasia to save our planet.
btw - The movie Soylent Green was released in 1973
Even though this film is science fiction it has some truth in our reality today. The earth is suffering from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, and climate change. Even though these are the categories most known they are not the least. As in the film we are also coming to the place of genocide where the earth and its resources are more important than human life. With the advent of terrorism, risk of nuclear war, and conventional war our hubris on handling such proves how naive we really are. We are already heading towards the brink of denying human life not just by the depleted resources which lessens availability to each person but we are already eating other human beings as in Soylent Green.
How so you ask? It is our sexual appetite that has caused a Soylent Green type situation. Since January 22, 1973 we as Americans have had over 50 million abortions. If that date sounds familiar it is the landmark decision of Roe vs. Wade. It is legal euthanasia and no matter what words that someone wants to put to this, it is still killing babies. Some say they are not babies, for they have not been fully conceived. However you want to call it, it is still not allowing life to continue. It does not matter if the person is 1 month old in the womb or 95 years old out of the womb it is still not allowing a life to continue.
This way of life, which has continued for almost 40 years, has now been accepted and imbedded in our psyche, what is our next step as we look at pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, and climate change? Will we be more interested in saving our planet and less interested in saving life. Are animals more important than humans, are the oceans more important than humans, is our climate more important than humans? If we think that sex is more important than humans then why not these other things. Wars and terrorism is already denying humanity of others and killing them, why not climate control.
Soylent Green is already taking place, like anything when it is done in small ways it will always be a precursor to larger events. Never underestimate what a small band of committed people can do. Do you know why? It is because it is the only thing that has worked. It is the small group of people who were dedicated with our new government in 1776, it is the small group of disciples of Jesus Christ that turned the world upside down. But just as much as these were two positive instances, the same applies to negative ways. These precursors of eliminating life has grown into 50 million with abortions, now add wars, terrorism, and ecological disasters and we have the making of genocide on a major scale. Put into our psyche that your own carbon dioxide, and depletion of resources footprint can be the precursor to global genocide. That is when Roe vs. Wade will be minor in comparison to euthanasia to save our planet.
btw - The movie Soylent Green was released in 1973
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Tell Republicans: Repeal health care? Give up your own first!
For two years, GOP leaders in Congress fought tooth and nail to oppose health care reform. They did their best to keep tens of millions without coverage, decrying any effort to help citizens as "socialist," "fascist" or some other equally baffling "ist."
Incredibly, now that they are the majority, their first act will be to vote to repeal health care reform that gives affordable care to 32 million Americans.
And yet, when it comes to their own coverage, Republicans in Congress are not only using government-sponsored health care, they even whined about having had to wait for it.
As the Republicans are gearing up to appease Tea Party extremists and vote to repeal health care reform for Americans who need it, Senator Chuck Schumer is calling the GOP on their hypocrisy, and calling on them to give up their government-sponsored health care:
"It was a central value to us when we passed health care, and a central value to the American people, that members of Congress should get the same health care as everyone else. It seems unfair that house Republicans want to deprive middle-class Americans of the same health care as members of Congress but to keep it for themselves."
"Will Eric Cantor urge every Republican who is going to be for repeal to not take government health care themselves and to drop their existing health care?"
We think he should, and applaud Schumer for his challenge. Write Eric Cantor, and ask him if he will practice what he preaches — and ask other GOP members to do the same. Click here to automatically sign this petition.
Incredibly, now that they are the majority, their first act will be to vote to repeal health care reform that gives affordable care to 32 million Americans.
And yet, when it comes to their own coverage, Republicans in Congress are not only using government-sponsored health care, they even whined about having had to wait for it.
As the Republicans are gearing up to appease Tea Party extremists and vote to repeal health care reform for Americans who need it, Senator Chuck Schumer is calling the GOP on their hypocrisy, and calling on them to give up their government-sponsored health care:
"It was a central value to us when we passed health care, and a central value to the American people, that members of Congress should get the same health care as everyone else. It seems unfair that house Republicans want to deprive middle-class Americans of the same health care as members of Congress but to keep it for themselves."
"Will Eric Cantor urge every Republican who is going to be for repeal to not take government health care themselves and to drop their existing health care?"
We think he should, and applaud Schumer for his challenge. Write Eric Cantor, and ask him if he will practice what he preaches — and ask other GOP members to do the same. Click here to automatically sign this petition.
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