So a Supreme Court justice that hardly anyone noticed has announced his retirement and all of a sudden the lips of The Experts are all a-flutter with the word "Empathy".
President Obama reports he wants his nominee to have it; and Republicans are convinced that the word is a secret code for something that eventually ends in the death of free speech, massive roundups of guns by the Secret United Nations World Police, and the Internment Of All The White People In Reeducation Camps Run By Americorps And ACORN And Gay People Who Want To Marry And Are Funded By George Soros.
It is suggested that Evil Activist Judges will trample the Constitution as they create Law out of whole cloth; and that only those who interpret the Constitution just as it was written can bring the proper attitude to the Court.
It sounds like somebody needs to come along and provide a couple of cogent thoughts about this whole empathy thing...and lucky for you, Gentle Reader, we have before us today specific examples of how the quality of empathy can express itself in Court Doctrine.
Dangerous Things are happening in America these days, we are told, and the once-innocent citizens of Iowa and Vermont have already been exposed to the hazard...and now it looks as though the contagion might spread to States across New England.
But lucky for us, our friends on the Right are here again to save to save us from...(insert horror film music here)...
...The Gay.
The Gay, it turns out, want the opportunity to marry.
Among other complaints, our friends on the Right feel this will destroy religious tradition, which will ultimately destroy first Christianity, then the Nation. Therefore, religious tradition must be protected at all costs.
Well as it turns out, there are some people from our past who know a few things about religious traditions and how they distort reality-and today, we'll examine the lessons they have to teach us.
(I'm afraid we'll all have to be much more familiar with these terms before this is all over. - promoted by boadicea)
There is a new law on the books that affects all U.S. citizens. It has the potentially comforting but ironic title, "The Protect America Act." The law (PAA, for short) is the latest amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. It was hurriedly passed by Congress in August, 2007.
The subject of the legislation - PAA - is very difficult to comprehend. As a matter of fact Congress did not really comprehend the amendment for which they were voting. Wisely, they made it temporary with a "Sunset" provision. It will have to be fixed by February of next year. And Congress needs our help to do this. But in order to weigh in to your elected officials on the law's problems, we must understand the complexities of the Act.
America has never been perfect and most likely never will be. We have seen things happen in the last six that I never thought I would see happen in America. I have seen a President believe that lying to Americans was a noble thing. I have seen the Constitution abused and many Civil Liberties stripped away at the whim of a Political Party which seems to only care for the Rich, Religious or Bigoted. I have watched Legalized Discrimination written into many State Constitution and watched a President break his oath of Office by asking for the same discrimination to be written into the U. S. Constitution. I have watched the Religious Right and Ultra Conservatives try to change our America into a Theocracy and rule by their narrow interpretation of the Bible instead of by the Constitution and Laws of the land. They have taken everything our Founding Fathers worked hard to build and in six have almost completely destroyed it. This is not the America I want to live in or have my great-nice grow up to inherit.
(Founding documents remind us of who we set out to be, and who we still can be if we choose. - promoted by lightseeker)
A document produced in the heat of our Nation's birth, back in that distant time of 1776, remains etched in our consciousness today for its revolutionary declarations regarding the roles of Citizen and Nation.
To this day it remains as relevant as it did then, both as a rallying cry for Freedom, and an expression of our greatest aspirations as a People.
Another document, produced in the town of Washington, remains much less well known, yet that document also offers great relevance, and warnings that shine clear and bright through the fog of today's politics.
Before you jump to the conclusion that this means that the number of idenitifed terrorist has leaped by 400%, realize what it means is that if you use a vacuum cleaner, you pick up damn near everything. Sometimes it is even dirt and trash, or terrorist. Sometimes , it is even on purpose.
In the case of the Terrorist Watchlist, this does NOT inspire confidence:
Some of the False Positives the list has spawned: link * Numerous children (including many under the age of five, and some under the age of one) have generated false positives.[4]
* Daniel Brown, a United States Marine returning from Iraq, was prevented from boarding a flight home in April 2006 because his name matched one on the No Fly List. The rest of his company refused to leave the airport until Brown was allowed to board.[5]
* In August 2004, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) told a Senate Judiciary Committee discussing the No Fly List that he had appeared on the list and had been repeatedly delayed at airports. He said it had taken him three weeks of appeals directly to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to have him removed from the list.
* Jesselyn Radack, a former United States Department of Justice ethics advisor who argued that John Walker Lindh was entitled to an attorney, was placed on the No Fly List as part of what many believe to be a reprisal for her whistleblowing.
o In February 2006, U.S. Senator Ted Stevens stated in a committee hearing that his wife Catherine had been subjected to questioning at an airport as to whether she was Cat Stevens due to the similarity of their names.[14][17]
* U.S. Representative Don Young (R-AK), the 3rd most senior Republican in the House, was flagged in 2004 after he was mistaken for a "Donald Lee Young".[19]
The Justice department finds that the FBI acted illegally in obtaining information about US citizens. Of course they blame it on agent error and shoddy record keeping and not the Bush Regime's total disregard for American Civil Liberties.
As part of the effort to tighten border security, the US government is now requiring all Americans who plan to travel within the Western Hemisphere - Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean and Bermuda (Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, or other territories are excluded) - to have a passport. This includes infants and children. The new passport rules will definitely affect millions of travelers. And to ensure people are "going across" for business and/or vacation, Big Brother will be able to monitor you because the new passport will be embedded with a "smart" chip. The new passport rule is being phased in, those who are required to have a passport are US citizens who are returning by air, and beginning in 2008, all American citizens who enter the country by land or sea are required to have one.
The argument can be made that most people ought to have a passport because they are considered to be useful other than being used for traveling, such as an alternative for proof of identity. However, this is not just a simple requirement; this is just one more efforts by the Bush Administration to politicize the so-called war on terror and another attempt to erode our civil liberties.
For years, Canadian and US citizens unfairly have crossed the northern border using documents such as driver's licenses or birth certificates or in some cases without showing any documentation. And in the southern, only US citizens are allowed to re-enter the US from Mexico the same way, while Mexican citizens are required to present a valid visa and passport for admission to the US.
I hope that John Cornyn faces significant opposition when he tries to keep his U.S. Senate seat in 2008.
It's bad enough that he's been nothing but a rubber stamp for George W. Bush throughout his first term in the Senate. What makes Cornyn even scarier than your average senator is how much contempt he has displayed toward our civil liberties.
More below.
