Cyranorox, you said a great many things, most of which I do not feel qualified to answer without much study. I myself regard virtually all of the so-called Mainstream Media (print and electronic) as so biased as to be unconscious of its own bias ("A fish don't know it's wet"), with a very definite ideological axe to grind and agenda to advance, and therefore unreliable in nits reporting on any matter pertaining to the advancement or hindrance of that agenda.
For instance, a very big and imprtant part of that agenda is the disarmament of the populace, giving government a complete monopoly on all use of armed force, or almost any force. Therefore, virtually all Mainstream Media reporting pertaining to 2nd Amendment rights is grossly slanted. It has been for decades, generations.
Deliberate disinformation has long been and continues to be pumped out non-stop. See: Josh Sugarmann's 1988 or '89 remarks on the subject.
" The weapons' menacing
looks, coupled with
the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons." --Josh Sugarmann, "Assault Weapons and Accessories in America," 1988
At least 99 percent of the deliberately disinformed public believe "semiautomatic" means "machine gun." (I can probably furnish a more accurate definition if asked.) A similar percentage think the "assault weapons" banned by the 1994-2004 ban were machine guns. Very few people know that so-called "cop-killer" bullets could be best described or defined as "the kind of bullets no cop hs ever been killed with."
By now the "90 percent myth" has been thoroughly debunked and discredited," but no organ of the Mainstream Media has broadcast or printed a correction or retraction, though they know the truth very well by now. On the contrary, the Mainstream Media, and the politicians it willingly shills for, continue to promote the myth with all their might.
As for the argument that the poor cannot be trusted to vote for anything but their own selfish economic interests, the leadership of the American Left commonly expresses condescending astonishment that many among the working/starving class DO NOT strictly vote their pocketbooks -- that they are just too dumb to know which side their bread is buttered on, and instead persist in stubbornly clinging to their God and their guns and their cultural traditions and values.
They are baffled and infuriated when we DON"T repond to their class warfare rhetoric, when they can't buy us off with some benefits program, when we are too stupid to be bribed into abandoning our values -- "the ashes of our fathers and the temples of our gods." (See Footnotes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.) They remind me of "Komarovsky" (the Rod Steiger character) in
Doctor Zhivago bellowing in baffled indignation: "WHO ARE YOU TO REFUSE MY SUGAR?!" Or Mason Verger in
Hannibal snarling, "They should have just taken the chocolate."
They persist in seeing us all through a lens of economic and class Determinism. In their Ivy League classes they were indoctrinated that people are merely Deterministic mechanisms, "clockwork oranges," who can all be programmed, just like computers, to think and act in a predictable, predetermined way. And they always think we just don't understand. They just need to
package their message better -- just dumb it down for us a little more, since their earlier pitch went over our heads.
As Harry Hopkins, right-hand man to FDR is supposed to have said, "The people are just to d*** dumb to understand." As Larry King declared on his show recently, "Somebody's got to think for the masses!"
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I believe I can address the following remarks in a more comprehensive way:
"I read the second amendment to mean that, as long as a militia is needed, citizens may bear arms; such arms, evidently, as are suitable for militia work. This always struck me as the most antiquated and narrow of the Rights, but I encounter people who claim it is the foundation of the rest ..."
Compare the Second Amendment with this grammatically similar or identical statement:
"A well-educated electorate, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books, shall not be infringed."
Now, would you read that to mean that only the well-educated -- say, those holding advanced university degrees -- who are also registered to vote,
may keep and read books? Or that the only reason even those well-educated voters (as opposed to the people as a whole)
may keep and read books is because the government, the State, considers a well-educated electorate to be necessary for its security -- and that, thgerefore, if the State should ever decide that a well-educated electorate is no longer necessary to its security or survival, the State can abolish the right to keep and read books?
My understanding of the Constitution, and particularly the Bill of Rights, is that it does not list or outline what rights and freedoms the government shall allow the people to have and exercise -- what the people
may do, only because the government allows them -- but, rather, it lists and outlines what the
government may do, because the
people allow it.
What the
government may do is explicitly limited and circumscribed. Certain rights and liberties of the people are explicitly placed off-limits to any sort of majority. That is, no one is allowed to vote certain rights away or into irrelevance.
This is not even supposed to be a pure democracy, which is nothing but majority rule. In a pure democracy, five people adrift in a lifeboat could vote to kill and eat the other four. Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have said, "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to havefor diner. Liberty is a well armed sheep contesting the vote."
The First Amendment states flatly that "Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"; the Second Amendment states flatly that the right of the people to keep and bear arms "
shall not be infringed." It doesn't say it may be infringed when whatever politicians happen to currently be in power decide in their infinite wisdom that the right is no longer necessary or meaningful or useful to the State or the ruling class.
The rights of the people enumerated and implied therein are not
created by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but
assumed by it. The rights of the people -- not just people who went to Ivy League schools, not just people in uniform, not just people on the government's payroll, but the people as a whole -- are not granted to them by the government. On the contrary, they are
endowed by their Creator with those rights. There's some Supreme Court rulling about that, but I can't quote it off the top of my head. I'd need to look it up.
Footnote 1. [Chris] WALLACE: Governor [Howard Dean], you'll be happy to know we're going to move on to another subject now. I want to ask you about a line you use in your regular stump speech. Take a listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
[Howard] DEAN:
I am tired of coming to the South and fighting elections on guns, God and gays. We're going to fight this election on our turf, which is going to be jobs, education and health care.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: What do you mean by that, when you say that you don't want to talk about guns, God and gays?
DEAN: What the Republicans have been doing since 1968 was actually the subject of a speech I'm about to give in a couple of hours here in South Carolina, is dividing us along racial lines by talking about quotas, dividing us about abortion or guns or other issues like that.
Well, let me tell you something about South Carolina. There's 102,000 children here with no health insurance. Most of those kids are white.
White people and black people in the South have a common interest.
Their jobs are going offshore. They haven't had a raise because health-insurance premiums have eaten up all their money. They need -- $70 million was cut, got cut out of public health insurance -- public education here, because the president's economic program has been such a disaster.
Everybody deserves a break -- not just in the South, but everybody else. And
working people, no matter what color they are, need to vote together, because their economic interests are not served by the Republicans. And I think that's why the election needs to be about health insurance, economic opportunity and jobs, and better educational opportunities for everybody.WALLACE: Governor, I don't think anybody would deny that those are very important issues, but why take the others -- abortion, guns, God, gays -- off the table? I mean, it sounds like you're uncomfortable talking about values.
DEAN: I'm very comfortable talking about values, but we're never going to agree on some of these issues. I actually have a more conservative positions on guns than many Democrats, although I do support the assault-weapons ban and background checks and all that. But...
WALLACE: But aren't those legitimate issues, whether it's a woman's right to choose versus right to life, whether there should a national ban on assault weapons, gay rights?
I mean, aren't those issues -- I have to say, I remember back in 1988, because I was covering the campaign, when Michael Dukakis said that the campaign is about competence, not ideology, and the Republicans killed him on that.
Don't American voters care about values?
DEAN: They care about values. And there are a lot of different kinds of values. My attitude is, each state's going to make their own kinds of decisions about these difficult issues that we're -- you know, the social issues that divide us.
My question is, what we have in common is what we ought to look at. This president ran as a uniter, not a divider, and that was a complete falsehood. What he has done is use words like "quota" to send race-coded words to folks, talking about
scaring them into thinking somebody from a minority community is going to take their jobs. On and on it goes.
What about what we have in common? What we have in common is we need better education for everybody. We need health care, health insurance for everybody. Every industrialized country in the world has health insurance except for us. We don't have to have a complicated government-run system. But we ought to have it, like we do, for the most part, in Vermont, at least for all our kids.
So why can't we talk about jobs, health care and education, which is what we all have in common, instead of allowing the Republicans to consistently divide us by talking about guns, God, gays, abortion and all this controversial social stuff that we're not going to come to an agreement on?
I really believe that states ought to have a role. My gun policy basically is let's keep the federal laws, let's enforce them with great vigor, and then let's let every state make additional laws if they want to. You're going to have states that want gun control making more, and you're going to have states like my state saying, look, we'll enforce the federal laws and leave it at that.
Why can't we take that kind of an approach to these issues and stop getting exercised about them? That's what cost this election. Why can't we look at what we have in common: economic opportunity, educational opportunity, health insurance? Those are the things that I think are value-driven.
And I think that's where this administration falls short on values. They don't seem to care about ordinary people. They'll do everything for corporations. They give $26,000 in tax cuts to the top 1 percent. The rest of the people get $304 and a big property-tax increase, big health-insurance increases and big college-tuition increases.
That's where I think that the battle about values is in this country and in this election. (From a December 2003 TV interview)
Footnote 2. (Coming soon.)
April 13, 2008 12:25AM
Obama: 'They cling to guns or religion'
Barack Obama is backtracking on remarks he made about working-class voters.
Sarah Pulliam
A political storm is brewing over Sen. Barack Obama's recent statements. Last Sunday,
Obama was explaining his difficulty with winning over working-class voters in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, saying they have become frustrated with economic conditions:
"And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," Obama said.
The comments were posted Friday on The Huffington Post, creating a wave of criticism from Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. John McCain, and other politicians as the April 22 Pennsylvania primary draws near.
“The people of faith I know don’t ‘cling to’ religion because they’re bitter. People embrace faith not because they are materially poor, but because they are spiritually rich,” Clinton said at a rally in Indianapolis.
Now, Obama is spending time explaining his remarks.
“Obviously, if I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that,” Obama said in a phone interview on Saturday with the Winston-Salem Journal. “But the underlying truth of what I said remains, which is simply that people who have seen their way of life upended because of economic distress are frustrated and rightfully so.”
He continued, "People feel like Washington’s not listening to them, and as a consequence, they find that they can only rely on the traditions and the things that have been important to them for generation after generation. Faith. Family. Traditions like hunting. And they get frustrated.”
For a candidate who has been outspoken about faith, religion has created hurdles for his campaign. Just a few months ago, he was squelching rumors about whether he was a Muslim and in March, he was defending his pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It'll be interesting to see whether he addresses these recent remarks at Sunday's Compassion Forum at Messiah College.
The audio of his Sunday statement is available below:'
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliv ... _clin.html Footnote 3. (Coming soon.) “The hard-right, which still believes in
traditional values.. strong foreign policy.. all that’s over." -- Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY)
http://seeingredaz.wordpress.com/2009/0 ... hats-over/ Footnote 4. (Coming soon.)
http://nicedeb.wordpress.com/2009/04/08 ... an-nation/http://www.theminorityreportblog.com/st ... y_are_over Footnote 5. (Coming soon.)
United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 551 (1876)
[Cruikshank and others were tried under the Civil Rights Act of 1870 for lynching two blacks. The Act barred people for conspiracy to "prevent or hinder [a person's] free exercise and enjoyment of any right or privilege granted or secured to him by the constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having exercised the same." The charges included, among other things, that the defendants conspired to interfere with the victims' rights to peaceably assemble and to keep and bear arms. The Court threw out the indictment, saying:]
The first and ninth counts state the intent of the defendants to have been to hinder and prevent the citizens named in the free exercise and enjoyment of their "lawful right and privilege to peaceably assemble together with each other and with other citizens of the United States for a peaceful and lawful purpose." . In fact, it is, and always has been, one of the attributes of citizenship under a free government.
The right of the people peaceably to assemble for lawful purposes existed long before the adoption of the Constitution of the United States It "derives its source," to use the language of Chief Justice Marshall, in Gibbons v. Ogden, "from those laws whose authority is acknowledged by civilized man throughout the world." It is found wherever civilization exists. It was not, therefore, a right granted to the people by the Constitution. The government of the United States when established found it in existence, with the obligation on the part of the States to afford it protection. As no direct power over it was granted to Congress, it remains, according to the ruling in Gibbons v. Ogden, subject to State jurisdiction. Only such existing rights were committed by the people to the protection of Congress as came within the general scope of the authority granted to the national government.
The first amendment to the Constitution prohibits Congress from abridging "the right of the people to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." This, like the other amendments proposed and adopted at the same time, was not intended to limit the powers of the State governments in respect to their own citizens, but to operate upon the National government alone. It is now too late to question the correctness of this construction. As was said by the late Chief Justice, in Twitchell v. The Commonwealth, "the scope and application of these amendments are no longer subjects of discussion here." They left the authority of the States just where they found it, and added nothing to the already existing powers of the United States.
The particular amendment now under consideration
assumes the existence of the right of the people to assemble for lawful purposes, and protects it against encroachment by Congress.
The right was not created by the amendment; neither was its continuance guaranteed, except as against congressional interference. For their protection in its enjoyment, therefore, the people must look to the States. The power for that purpose was originally placed there, and it has never been surrendered to the United States.
The right of the people peaceably to assemble for the purpose of petitioning Congress for a redress of grievances, or for any thing else connected with the powers or the duties of the national government, is an attribute of national citizenship, and, as such, under the protection of, and guaranteed by, the United States. The very idea of a government, republican in form, implies a right on the part of its citizens to meet peaceably for consultation in respect to public affairs and to petition for a redress of grievances. If it had been alleged in these counts that the object of the defendants was to prevent a meeting for such a purpose, the case would have been within the statute, and within the scope of the sovereignty of the United States. Such, however, is not the case. The offence, as stated in the indictment, will be made out, if it be shown that the object of the conspiracy was to prevent a meeting for any lawful purpose whatever.
The second and tenth counts are equally defective. The right there specified is that of "bearing arms for a lawful purpose." This is not a right
granted by the Constitution.
Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed; but this, as has been seen, means no more than that it shall not be infringed by Congress.
This is one of the amendments that has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government, leaving the people to look for their protection against any violation by their fellow-citizens of the rights it recognizes, to what is called, in The City of New York v. Miln, the "powers which relate to merely municipal legislation, or what was, perhaps, more properly called internal police," "not surrendered or restrained" by the Constitution of the United States.
http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/2amteach ... .HTM#TOC13 Footnote 6. (Coming soon.) ' On February 1, 1993, The Washington Post got into a heap of PR trouble after reporter Michael Weisskopf wrote in a news story that followers of the Christian Right are "largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command."
On Sunday, Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Michael Kinsley revisits that infamous quotation, but gets it wrong. Kinsley first confuses "followers of the Christian Right" with "evangelical Christians" (they are not interchangable) and then gives the quote (twice, and in quotation marks, no less) as "poor, undereducated and easily led." '
http://www.nationalcenter.org/2005/07/p ... mmand.html Of course, a great deal depends on how "education" is defined. The "anti-intellectualism" -- the problem with "education" many on the ideological Right are so often accused of -- stems not from any objection to knowledge and learning per se. The question we have is,
what are they teaching in the schools these days? To us, a lot of what passes for "education" now is just indoctrination, propaganda, nearly all of it anti-American and anti-Western and anti-Christian.
Much of it is informed or saturated by a denial of the validity and even existence of human reason, and even a denial of the existence of any sort of objective reality at all, much less any absolute truth or moral absolutes. "Two-plus-two-equals-five, if the Party says so"-kind of stuff. "Don't confuse us with mere facts. Facts, reason, truth, reality -- those are all outmoded patriarchal concepts, clung to now only by embittered racist-sexist-homophobes and xenophobes."
I'll bet they still think the only problem we of what Schumer calls the "hard Right" had with (Bill) Clinton was that Monica Lewinsky business. I'll bet they all think we'd be fine with everything Obama is doing or proposing to do, if only he were a white guy.
Yeah, that's why we elected for Al Gore and John Kerry (not).
Well, if they want to believe we little people are stupid, simple, easily swayed, led, and bought off, maybe it is to our advantage to let them go on thinking so. As Mephistopheles said to Dr. Faustus, when Faustus said he thought Hell as a fable: "Aye, think so still, till experience change thy mind." (I refer here to the 1590s Christopher Marlowe play, not the Goethe novel, which I have not read.)
DWM