When a gov fails its ppl, they can break free. King George’s tyranny—taxing w/o consent, ignoring laws, waging war—forces us to declare independence. All men equal, w/ rights to life, liberty. We, free states, pledge to defend this. #USA1776
I said:
Nice. Do another one and make it more elegant, more Jefferson-y
I got:
When a Crown’s despotism denies sacred Rights—Life, Liberty, Consent—we, the People, justly dissolve such bonds. King George’s manifold usurpations compel our Independence. Equal all, we pledge our sacred Honor to free States. #Liberty1776
I said:
Good. I like the inclusion of "sacred." Do another one and put in more of the rights coming from God
I got:
When tyranny defies God-given Rights—Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness—we, the People, reject such rule. King George’s oppressions force our sacred Independence. All equal by divine endowment, we vow our Honor to free States. #Freedom1776
"... religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice. We are conservatives because we see such virtues as essential to sustaining our civilization. We see such a restoration as the prerequisite for recovering and maintaining our freedom, security, and prosperity. We emphasize the idea of the nation because we see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe...."
There’s a lot to like about the burgeoning “national conservative” movement, which stands against the increasingly stale, pre-Trump intellectual orthodoxy on the right....
... but quickly switches to criticism. Trump is, of course, awful, so hooray for the alternatives that might lure conservatives away from Trumpism, but any alternative that works will swiftly become the new target.
The original line (from the Declaration of Independence is: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...."
Where he got tripped up was in saying "by" after "created," as if he were in a hurry to get to God, and in the original line, God is called the "Creator," but it's glaringly inelegant to say "created by their Creator." He needed to say "created equal," and get that word "endowed" in there to put some distance between "created" and "Creator." Having lost the flow, he resorted to "the thing." So his enthusiasm about God, rushing toward God and skipping the big idea of equality, flung him into the gaffe of calling God "the thing."
Conviction for a crime of violence makes deportation "a virtual certainty" for an immigrant, no matter how long he has lived in the United States, Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her opinion for the court.
The decision is a loss for President Donald Trump's administration, which has emphasized stricter enforcement of immigration law. In this case, President Barack Obama's administration took the same position in the Supreme Court in defense of the challenged provision.
What Gorsuch did seems like something Scalia would do.
ADDED: Here's the text of the opinion. Gorsuch has a concurring opinion. Let's read it. It's quite long, and no one joins him. He's concurring in part an concurring in the judgment. He begins:
Vague laws invite arbitrary power. Before the Revolution, the crime of treason in English law was so capaciously construed that the mere expression of disfavored opinions could invite transportation or death. The founders cited the crown’s abuse of “pretended” crimes like this as one of their reasons for revolution. See Declaration of Independence ¶21. Today’s vague laws may not be as invidious, but they can invite the exercise of arbitrary power all the same—by leaving the people in the dark about what the law demands and allowing prosecutors and courts to make it up.
The law before us today is such a law. Before holding a lawful permanent resident alien like James Dimaya subject to removal for having committed a crime, the Immigration and Nationality Act requires a judge to determine that the ordinary case of the alien’s crime of conviction involves a substantial risk that physical force may be used. But what does that mean? Just take the crime at issue in this case, California burglary, which applies to everyone from armed home intruders to door-to-door salesmen peddling shady products. How, on that vast spectrum, is anyone supposed to locate the ordinary case and say whether it includes a substantial risk of physical force? The truth is, no one knows. The law’s silence leaves judges to their intuitions and the people to their fate. In my judgment, the Constitution demands more.
In this passage, Gorsuch raises Scalia to trump Thomas:
These early cases, admittedly, often spoke in terms of construing vague laws strictly rather than declaring them void. See, e.g., post, at 4–5 (opinion of THOMAS, J.); John- son, 576 U. S., at ___–___ (opinion of THOMAS, J.) (slip op., at 8–10). But in substance void the law is often exactly what these courts did: rather than try to construe or interpret the statute before them, judges frequently held the law simply too vague to apply. Blackstone, for example, did not suggest the court in his illustration should have given a narrowing construction to the term “cattle,” but argued against giving it any effect at all. 1 Blackstone 88; see also Scalia, Assorted Canards of Contemporary Legal Analysis, 40 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 581, 582 (1989) (“I doubt . . . that any modern court would go to the lengths de scribed by Blackstone in its application of the rule that penal statutes are to be strictly construed”)...
Another history-based shot at Thomas:
Alternatively still, JUSTICE THOMAS suggests that, at least at the time of the founding, aliens present in this country may not have been understood as possessing any rights under the Due Process Clause. For support, he points to the Alien Friends Act of 1798. An Act Concern ing Aliens §1, 1 Stat. 571; post, at 6–12 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). But the Alien Friends Act—better known as the “Alien” part of the Alien and Sedition Acts—is one of the most notorious laws in our country’s history... [I]t was widely condemned as unconstitutional by Madison and many others. It also went unenforced, may have cost the Federalist Party its existence, and lapsed a mere two years after its enactment. With this fuller view, it seems doubtful the Act tells us a great deal about aliens’ due process rights at the founding.
I put up a post last night, linking to a New Yorker tribute, with my own photograph from an airplane of the Madison lake where Redding's plane crashed. This morning, I'm clicking on my Otis Redding tag, because there's one thing I know is there and I want to find it. But I'm interested in all the old Otis Redding posts, and I'm going to list them here.
What songs well-known as girl songs would take on intriguing meaning sung by a guy?... The obvious actual example of this is Aretha Franklin singing Otis Redding's "Respect."... The trouble with a man singing that song is that it's a bit ugly: I make the money, so you owe me. It's the conventional arrangement. The lyrics are a bit awkward in the female re-sing. Why was Aretha giving this guy "all my money"? But we ignored that. It was the remnant of the Otis version. She sang through that and pulled out the better, female meaning through sheer force.
... I put in my earphones and fired up Pandora and meant to type in "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk" to get to some more music like that. Mixing in the movie title ["Coffee and Cigarettes"] and influenced by that coffee I was drinking, I typed in "Cigarettes and Coffee." Pandora turned up a song I'd never heard before called "Cigarettes and Coffee" -- by Otis Redding. I wasn't meaning to listen to that kind of music but I liked it well enough.... [T]he theme [of "Theme Time Radio With Bob Dylan"] this week is "Coffee," and one of the songs on the playlist was "Cigarettes and Coffee" by Otis Redding.... Bob mentions how Otis died, converging by airplane with a lake here in Madison, Wisconsin. And he plays a clip from the movie "Coffee and Cigarettes"...
Overwrought, jingoistic, self-righteousness, war-glorifying... really? Why does it make some people feel that's what it says when that's absolutely not in the words? Where does that extra-textualism come from?
Let's look at the words. It begins with a completely personal focus on the nuclear family:
If tomorrow all the things were gone I'd worked for all my life
And I had to start again with just my children and my wife
It then expresses appreciation for the country because of exactly one thing: freedom. If the man had to start again with nothing... Well, actually, he's not up for the hypothetical without keeping his wife and children. But if all that he'd worked for were lost, he'd still be "lucky" to be living in America because he'd have freedom.
I'd thank my lucky stars to be livin' here today
'Cause the flag still stands for freedom and they can't take that away
I always wonder at this point: Yes, but what if you didn't have that foundation of wife and children, would freedom be enough to give you the nerve and the drive to start over again? And also: But they can take freedom away! However you want to interpret the flag — some might think it stands for the glorification of war — symbolism doesn't ensure that the thing symbolized will not be taken away. The problem with the song at this point is naivete, and one suspects faux naivete.
Next we get the chorus, which begins with an underscoring of the importance of freedom:
And I'm proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free
The clunker in there is "at least." We go from the idea that a man could rebuild his life if only he has freedom to the idea of being proud about living in a country that might not offer anything else but freedom. (By the way, there's no antecedent for "where." Grammatically, it should be something like I'm proud to live in America where at least I know I'm free, but that would introduce the conceptual problem of non-Americans who live in America. I'm proud to be a citizen of America where at least I know I'm free... too many syllables.)
The chorus then brings in the "men who died," but maintains the focus:
And I won't forget the men who died, who gave that right to me
Not all who fought for freedom died, not all who fought (whether they died or lived) were men, and these people did not give you the right to freedom. The Declaration of Independence — which we celebrate this weekend — says that the Creator gave us these rights and that the people institute government to protect the rights that God endowed us with. Our government sometimes goes to war, and when it does men (and women) may die, and sometimes the war — notably the Revolutionary War — is fought to protect our ability to exercise our rights, but the war dead haven't given us our rights.
That's a little sermon from me about rights and the meaning of The Declaration of Independence. But let's continue with the chorus:
And I'd gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today
'Cause there ain't no doubt I love this land
God bless the USA
That part is simple enthusiasm — love for country (which works for any country, free or not) — and a simple prayer addressed to the God who wasn't noticed in the first line of the chorus. Hopefully, he's used to weathering disrespect and isn't too irked at another demand for blessing.
Now, we get the other verse, the only other verse, and it's that from-the-mountains-to-the-prairies review of geography that we've come to expect in songs and speeches:
From the lakes of Minnesota, to the hills of Tennessee
Across the plains of Texas, from sea to shining sea
From Detroit down to Houston and New York to LA
The man who wrote the song — Lee Greenwood — was born in LA. I'm just reading his Wikipedia bio now. I see he's lived his life mostly in LA and Reno and Las Vegas. You might want to factor that into your understanding of the lyrics. As for how Tennessee got such pride of place in the song, Greenwood's wife is a former Miss Tennessee. She's his fourth wife. That makes me think of the first verse in a completely new way. My wondering is over. I think Greenwood would be just fine starting again even without his wife. Divorce still stands for freedom and they can't take that away.
The song's almost over. There's a couple of lines that seem to be written to set up another singing of the chorus. At first glance, they seem inconsequential, merely serviceable, but now that I reread them, I find them really very bad:
Well, there's pride in every American heart
That's plainly a lie, and it's a presumptuous lie that's out of keeping with his supposedly favorite value, freedom. It's not possible that every American is proud to be an American. Speak for yourself. Invite others to sing along if they agree. But don't purport to say how everyone else feels. Our freedom means that we are free to feel humility or even contempt for America. Your enthusiasm for freedom falls flat.
The final lead-in to the chorus is:
And it's time we stand and say that...
Don't tell me what to do. It's a free country.
But it's a song. As Bob Dylan said in his Nobel Prize speech, "songs are unlike literature." "They're meant to be sung, not read." They're "alive in the land of the living." And "God Bless the USA" is a big sing-along song that comes alive when people — free people — choose to stand up and sing, not because Greenwood dictates that "it's time" they stand up and sing, but because they feel inspired by something about the melody and the key words — flag, freedom, proud, love, USA. No one's parsing the words.
I've never parsed the words before just now, and I've heard the song many times and understood the spirit. I was surprised to find what I did in the lyrics. I was only motivated to look closely because of the WaPo column, because I didn't believe the lyrics would support Temkar's assertion that the song is overwrought, jingoistic, self-righteousness, and war-glorifying. I was right, and Temkar is wrong. But Temkar and I share the opinion that the song delivers a real-time experience of expressing enthusiastic love for America. It's alive in the land of the free.
"... and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."
Do Americans want the foreign-endorsed candidate? We're seeing Trump tarred as xenophobic, and meanwhile Hillary touts herself as the choice of foreign leaders. This deserves a closer look, and I expect some lampooning from Trump.
At last night's CNN town hall in Columbus, Ohio, Hillary Clinton got a question from Amit Majmudar, a radiologist and — Jake Tapper called this "trivia" — the poet laureate of Ohio. (Majmudar referred to the minority status of his religion, but didn't say what religion it was. The answer is Hindu. He's got a book of poems called "Dothead." That has a poem that refers to "my dark unshaven brothers / whose names overlap with the crazies and God fiends.")
Majmudar had already asked Bernie Sanders a question. He'd said Donald Trump had started to make him and his family "a little uncomfortable here, and frankly, a little bit scared." His question, to both candidates was: Which one of you has a better chance to defeat Trump? Sanders said that the polls show him beating Trump by a wider margin than Hillary and that Democrats win when turnout is high and he's the one who's exciting and energizing the crowds. Presenting himself as the one who'd be good at exposing Trump, Sanders misspoke ludicrously:
This is a guy who goes on Republican T.V. debate and says wages in America are too low. Tell that to the people in Ohio that wages are too low.
Oh, Bernie.
When Majmudar posed the same question to Hillary, she referred to all the votes she's gotten so far in the primary (more than anyone else), the "broad-based, inclusive" nature of her campaign, and how tough and ready she is to fight. She says she's got "a lot of arguments" she's going to be able to make against Trump but she's "not going to spill the beans right now" about what they are. Then she says:
But, one argument that I am uniquely qualified to bring, because of my service as Secretary of State is what his presidency would mean to our country and our standing in the world. I am already receiving messages from leaders — I'm having foreign leaders ask if they can endorse me to stop Donald Trump. I mean, this is up to Americans, thank you very much, but I get what you're saying.
So... it's "up to Americans," but Americans might prefer her because foreign leaders say they prefer her? Why do foreign leaders prefer her and not Bernie? I get that they are opposed to Donald Trump (and suspect Donald Trump counts that in his favor). But the question is why Hillary over Bernie? It seems that she's just enthused about this support from foreign leaders and wanted to clue us in about it. But why? Why does she think we'd be impressed and why are they supporting her? Who is supporting her?
Jake Tapper asks: "And can you tell to tell us who?"
She doesn't reveal who's been speaking to her behind the scenes, offering support. She just says: "Well, some have done it publicly, actually. The Italian Prime Minister, for example."
Tapper aptly pushes: "How about the ones that have done it privately?"
She says "No, Jake," and the audience laughs. She adds: "We're holding that in reserve too."
How can you refer to it and then hold it in reserve? Who are these people? Why are they supporting her?
She keeps talking, changing the subject — "But, I - you know, lots of times foreign policy doesn't play as big a role as I think it should, you know? The wonderful question that the woman asked me before...." — and blabbering up to the commercial break.
IN THE COMMENTS: Balfegor said:
Well, there's a not insubstantial segment of the American public today who believe that "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" requires that we follow their opinions, rather than that we merely explain why we're conspicuously not doing so, like in 1776.
• The rights of individuals do not originate with any government, but pre-exist its formation.
• The protection of these rights is both the purpose and first duty of government.
• Even after government is formed, these rights provide a standard by which its performance is measured and, in extreme cases, its systemic failure to protect rights—or its systematic violation of rights—can justify its alteration or abolition.
• At least some of these rights are so fundamental that they are “inalienable,” meaning they are so intimately connected to one’s nature as a human being that they cannot be transferred to another even if one consents to do so.
This miniature outrage arrives from Norfolk, Nebraska. A float in a 4th of July Parade had a fake outhouse labeled "Obama Presidential Library" and, standing outside it, a mannequin of a dark-skinned man wearing overalls.
Clearly, this is disrespectful, but there's nothing violent happening, so it doesn't implicate the concerns about presidential safety that bothered me during the 2013 mini-outrage over the rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask.
It's important to be able to express disrespect for the President, and race shouldn't immunize the President from criticism, though it's easy to see the temptation, for at least some Obama supporters, to push back critics by scaring them with accusations of racism.
Yes, it's a bad float, inappropriate for the 4th of July, but the only reason to pay any attention to this — what other bad floats appeared in local parades on the 4th? — is that the accusation of racism has been leveled.
What is racial about an outhouse? Outhouses are associated with poverty, and while there are correlations between poverty and race, the outhouse as a marker of poverty is associated with poor, rural white people. I think of the original iconography of Mountain Dew:
John Brichetto drew the first sketches of the original Mountain Dew bottle labels in 1948, depicting a character known as Willy the Hillbilly shooting at a revenuer fleeing an outhouse with a pig sitting in the corner. Below the illustration is the phrase “by Barney and Ollie”—as in FILLED by Barney and Ollie, a nod to the way a homemade jug of moonshine might be hand filled by the moonshiner. This labeling quirk was carried on until Pepsi Cola entered the picture many years later.
A priceless rube, Abner was so gullible that he could be tricked by a small child. The loutish Abner typically had no visible means of support, but sometimes earned his livelihood as a "crescent cutter" for the Little Wonder privy company, (later changed to "mattress tester" for the Stunned Ox mattress company.)
Now, let's move on to the overalls. What does it mean that the figure of the President is dressed in overalls? The association is to rural poverty (or rural work), but is it racial?
Thinking about race and overalls, I heard the line "You wear overalls!" What was that? Some recording from the 60s... Ah! I was thinking of Carla Thomas, singing with Otis Redding, in the 1967 song "Tramp." At 0:37, you hear:
You know what, Otis? What?
You're country. That's all right.
You're straight from the Georgia woods. That's good.
You know what? You wear overalls, and big old brogan shoes, and you need a haircut, Tramp.
And, again, as the song is fading out, at 2:42, Thomas harps on those overalls:
You a tramp, Otis. You just a tramp. That's all right. You wear overalls. You need a haircut, Baby. Cut off some of that hair off your head. You think you're a lover?
There is zero chance that Thomas's problem with Redding is racial. She's rejecting him because he's country. His retort: That's good.
So I think the float used the iconography of poverty to express the point of view that Obama is utterly lacking in achievement worthy of a presidential library. Maybe you could build an argument that because so many black people have been poor, any depiction of a black person as poor is intended to associate him with black people in general, and that is enough to warrant an accusation of racism. But I think this float belongs in the innocuous category of traditional American disrespect for authority figures.
Looking at it that way, I suddenly see how it might be exactly what is appropriate for the 4th of July:
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States....
The original manifestation of this costume concept was nakedness underneath. One of the 2 founding students said: "People started running up at the end and tearing our skirts off of us... People were wowed. That was the best time I ever had at a parade."
Don't let the word "skirts" make you picture a female getting her clothes ripped off, wowing others thereby, and proclaiming it a great time. That was a guy, and now he's got it in the Wall Street Journal that "people were wowed" at whatever they saw.
These days the parade is "more family friendly" and "people just kind of attach veratrum to whatever they're wearing."
There's also the "RMBL Forward-Backward Marching Band," originated in 1976 by biologist Nickolas Waser who was "cynical about the political scene, so I think it had an
additional meaning of marching forward and backward into the third
century of the U.S." They played things like the Mickey Mouse Club song ("Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me...."). You can see how that would make for a mockery of patriotism. That's how some people feel about the 4th of July, but we're told it's "more family friendly" now, and I don't know what that extends to other than having a bathing suit under your skunk cabbage garb.
"He should apologize," says Joe Patrice at Above the Law, who I suspect just never liked Scalia anyway. Patrice is (or is pretending to be) all exercised about what is one of Justice Scalia's stock responses to what is a predictable question as Justice Scalia routinely travels around giving essentially the same speech about his thoroughly well-known, deeply entrenched theory of constitutional interpretation. The wonder is that it even gets reported let alone a big, drama queen response like Patrice's.
Scalia is really just pointing out The Declaration of Independence, which lies behind the Constitution. Patrice bandies the word "treason" about — his post title is "Justice Scalia Literally Encourages People To Commit Treason" and he ends with "apparently Justice Scalia thinks acts of treason are justified..." — so you'd think he'd have paused at some point to remember Patrick Henry's response to the cries of "Treason!"
It was in the midst of this magnificent debate, while he was descanting on the tyranny of the obnoxious Act, that he exclaimed, in a voice of thunder, and with the look of a god, "Caesar had his Brutus - Charles the first, his Cromwell - and George the third - ('Treason,' cried the Speaker - 'treason, treason,' echoed fro every part of the House. - It was one of those trying moments which is decisive of character. - Henry faltered not an instant; but rising to a loftier attitude, and fixing on the Speaker an eye of the most determined fire, he finished his sentence with the firmest emphasis) may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.
I supposed if Joe Patrice had been there on the scene back in 1765, he'd have editorialized at length about the need for an apology.
ADDED: Patrick Henry had the best instant comeback to heckling in the history of the world, even before you add in that, in the end, quite a few years later, people took his advice and made the most of it.
On "Meet the Press" this morning, David Gregory confronted Pelosi with her old statement, "But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy." He asked:
And hasn't that idea, that you have to pass it before you know what's in it, isn't that really the problem, as you look back on it? That the-- there was such a rush to get this done, no Republicans voting for it, and now there are unintended effects of this that were foreseen at the time that you couldn't know the impact of it. And now this is coming home to roost.
Unintended, yet foreseen. Foreseen, and yet with unknown impact. As one might say: the known unknowns.
The words President Obama had just quoted, in his Inaugural Address, were: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.
God! God is well-represented in this speech. In addition to that "gift from God" (and "their Creator"), there's:
From a list of "10 Things You Didn't Know About the Fourth of July."
Happy 4th!
Also, a Meadhouse dialogue:
MEADE (singing): We carried you in our arms...
ME: Why are you singing "Tears of Rage"?
MEADE (talk singing): ... on Independence Day...
ME: Oh....
And here I was thinking he was reading about the Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise divorce, within which there's the topic of Suri getting carried everywhere. I'd just read: "Kids as young as five can be sent to the military like Sea Org. I’m guessing she can’t bring her child-heels or get carried everywhere, which is something Katie would not approve of."
Oh what dear daughter ’neath the sun
Would treat a father so
To wait upon him hand and foot
And always tell him, “No?”
That's what Bob asked, mysteriously. Who is this daughter who always says "no," but waits upon him hand and foot? She sounds pretty devoted. The opposite of a daughter who says "yes," but does nothing. I'm assuming the official Bob Dylan website erroneously placed the question mark inside the quotation mark.
Perhaps the song really is about Independence Day, and the daughter is the United States, carried in the arms of England....
[H]e received a note from a friend who wrote, “I think it is a very worthwhile venture, but one fraught with potential problems.”
"'What potential problems could there be?’ I asked myself upon reading this," Gerber said. "Has academia come to this? Have academics really become so political that we are now required to write partisan pamphlets rather than scholarly treatises? Note that this does not mean I am supporting Clarence Thomas; it does mean, however, that I am not against him."
By the way, I can't find Gerber's book on Amazon or in the iTunes bookstore. My Amazon search for the title turned up a bunch of mismatches, led by "Original Sin: Clarence Thomas and the Failure of the Constitutional Conservatives." Hmmm. [ADDED: The article at the link got the title of the book wrong, and Amazon's search tool isn't good at guessing its way around problems like that. Here's the book, which is called "First Principles," not "Founding Principles." Unfortunately, you can't get it in ebook form.]
Anyway, as the first link above shows, Clarence Thomas marks his 20th year on the Supreme Court this year. Oh, to have been blogging then!
Thomas’ critics strove to mischaracterize his views about the Declaration of Independence during his nomination process in 1991, according to Gerber.
“For example, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe wrote in a scathing “New York Times” op-ed that Thomas would use the Declaration to turn back the clock to the darkest days of the nation’s history. Quoting Tribe: ‘Most conservatives criticize the judiciary for expanding its powers, creating rights rather than interpreting the constitution. Thomas, judging from his speeches and scholarly writings, seems instead to believe judges should enforce the founders’ natural law philosophy… which he maintains is revealed most completely in the Declaration of Independence. He is the first Supreme Court nominee in 50 years to maintain that natural law should be readily consulted in constitutional interpretation.’
“What critics such as Tribe fail to appreciate was that Thomas was articulating the standard individual rights interpretation of the Declaration, an interpretation shared by Jefferson, Lincoln and Rev. [Martin Luther] King Jr.,” Gerber said. “To secure these rights, the Declaration proclaims, governments are instituted among men.”
Here's that Tribe op-ed in its natural habitat. If only blogging had been around back then, what would we lawprof bloggers have said? It's nice to have Gerber's book — except that it's impossible to get (in the sense that I can't download it into my computer right now. I do have a library!). But the ability to blog these things in real time is something that we now see as an essential check on liberal media. It's frightening in retrospect to think of the one-sided manipulations we simply endured back then.
I'll write a law review article — perhaps one thought — and it might come out in less than a year, if I'm lucky. Oh, but what if the law reviews are looking for "partisan pamphlets"?
Conservatives were boxed in, and blogging opened the box.
[A debate in Philadelphia], presented by the Temple American Inn of Court in conjunction with Gray's Inn, London, pitted British barristers against American lawyers to determine whether or not the American colonists had legal grounds to declare secession.
For American lawyers, the answer is simple: "The English had used their own Declaration of Rights to depose James II and these acts were deemed completely lawful and justified," they say in their summary.
To the British, however, secession isn't the legal or proper tool by which to settle internal disputes. "What if Texas decided today it wanted to secede from the Union? Lincoln made the case against secession and he was right," they argue in their brief.
That's all very interesting and relatively sedate compared to: Is America built on a lie?
That's almost devil-may-care! Are we playing the odds here?
What if some big project today, something much less momentous than an all-new government — let's say Obamacare — were presented on the theory that it seems most likely to make us safe and happy.
You'd scream no, wouldn't you? You'd blog/comment with derision and contempt at the dangerousness of radical change. Wouldn't you?
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