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The Supreme Court has become the US five person democracy. Yay!
Kochpublican Kongressional Konference has a certain ring to it doesn't it?
Thom - I think you're indirectly making the Conservative argument against the Department of Education, Common Core, and any sort of nation-wide educational system. The reason other states buy Texas' textbooks is because all states have similar curriculums. But with no connection between school districts at the federal level, as far as curriculum goes (and funding too, while we're at it), there would be little need for one state to use the textbooks printed by and for another state. Particularly at the high school level, where the trend now is to not even have physical textbooks, but e-readers. With those, pages can be added or taken out with ease, based on the desires of a particular school district.
That way, if Texas wants its textbooks to, say, us the term "forced integration" rather than "desegregation", both of which are factual descriptions of the same thing, other states wouldn't have to go along with it.
If the good citizens of Washington State wanted an entire unit on the benefits of hemp and marijuana, they should be able to do that too. Local control is good.
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Conservatives don't want to remove government from society, only the democratic character of it. They want to remove any power or influence of it from "we the people". They don't want the people's government having an influence on society or the economy.
They absurdly conflate a government that is democratic and thus serves the people, establishing many programs and services that help people in the U.S., with Soviet dictatorship.
Economic powers, e.g., business, are really political powers that are not really separable or distinguishable from government as they would have no efficacy or influence without the backing of government. Government is indispensible to the control of society by business.
Government's definition and enforcement of property rights and economic propriety makes business the authority controlling society. Their collaboration makes them one. Thus removal of the democratic character of government and leaving only its function of enforcing property rights and contract law makes for tyranny.
Having said all that, Kend's not the worst guy in the world nor is he stupid if not very formally educated - and that shouldn't bother us, elitism should be antithetical to proressiveness (even if progressives are often guilty of it) - and I don't hate him. I actually feel kinda friendly toward him. He's just fulla shit.
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KIPOPP RE #30 of Feb 10, 2015 -- Where do the blogs go when they roll off the first page? It used to be the would go on to the next page. The second page now has archives without blog messages.
kippopp -- One thing we both strongly agree on is that number on the debt clock has no meaning. I have some comments on your last blog on the feb 10 topic. Let me know if your want them.
we the people? representing the people? on earth?
FDR warned us...." The first truth is that liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of Koch Industries, to where it becomes stonger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence, is fascism....ownership of government/supreme court by a group or any other controlling power."
The very first thing the Kochublican party did when they finally gained a majority in the Senate was to pass Kochstone pipeline legislation.....So with the potential end of life on earth as we know it, why do we continue to tolerate the growth of this complete madness? I'll tell you why.....corpse media has deemed the god almighty dollar has far more value than the god almighty truth.
I think a big pile of crap should be spread over Texas, sooner the better, but not by another pipeline mortgage.
But too late -The Kochs have already been served as theirs was Phase One to Wood River to Hardisty Terminal in Canada.
"The Keystone Pipeline (Phase I), delivering oil from Hardisty, Alberta 3,456-kilometre (2,147 mi) to the junction at Steele City, Nebraska and on to Wood River Refinery in Roxana, Illinois and Patoka Oil Terminal Hub (tank farm) north of Patoka, Illinois, completed in June 2010.[2]"
Since petroleum refining means taking out everything that doesn't fuel a car, a big pile of crap from the Keystone pipeline has to be spread over a big part of Texas to the benefit of Canada and the Koch Machine.
TJ's worst nightmare is the Federal Reserve.
The Op-ed does not say Keystone PL will be "game over for the climate." Hansen specifically said that Obama said no matter what we do or don't do, Canada will continue to pursue their climate-destroying activities.
So did anyone actually read this Op-ed?
Which actually says, "GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”
"If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing( i.e. no KPL) , it will be game over for the climate."
So God Save the Queen and British Petroleum. Why our detrimental never-severed counting house relationships with England are not revealed to the American Commoners by our liberal media is a great surprise. Perhaps that is why Americans fail to recognize the influence of Germany, Switzerland, England, and Italy on our Supreme Court.
Perhaps even liberal media gets paid to avoid certain topics or plant red-herrings. No one is above corruption in the marketplace.
For example, I am an environmental scientist. When I was attending State land-grant universities there were many subjects Professors were forbidden to teach, such as the story of the environmental destruction of Florida. They were not allowed to name banks, companies, or railroad executives. We were only taught the state was destroyed, not that the 1917 Florida Legislature ordered that the Everglades be drained. They then passed a law which required residents of the state to pay for it.
Good information is not easy to come by.
Actually, I had wanted to comment on the segment, "Progressives Shaped America, Why Republicans Want to Change History Books," but this all fits in with explaining our situation today. The Clinton New Dems made extraordinary use of the media marketed to libs, effectively re-writing history, reshaping America itself into an ongoing pep rally for the better off, those still in the middle class. They play the key role in deeply pitting the middle class against the poor, workers against the jobless, wiping out nearly a century of progress. Had we paid attention to history, we would have known why the greatest danger to our form of govt/society is that of creating a significant "sub-population" of people who no longer have anything left to hope for, anything left to lose. And I think more and more of the middle class gets it. As the US grew increasingly brutal to our poor, survival itself brings the poor together to organize as much as possible, with as many people being armed as possible. This is the generation that made the abuses, beatings, and killings of the very poor, by police and citizens alike, fairly routine. As more middle classers are, on some level, becoming aware of this, more of them become armed. This, folks, is what class warfare comes down to.
I use a celll phone; it doesn't work without a cell tower.
I started a business; it doesn't work without a government.
Ayn Rand was an idiot.
Greenthumb, you're new here. I used to talk like you. You'll find out why we do what we do.
I used to be convinced Kend was a paid PR shill for big business. He is a shill but for himself. He is big business and has a lot personally invested in things like tar sands oil and Keystone XL.
I used to think he only played dumb as subterfuge - so I played along with him - now I'm not so sure. In any case, I think you'll find him willfully obtuse.
Kend, if teachers did have a debate in class about taxpayer money used for private school tuition you'd accuse them of rigging the debate and trying to brainwash the kids. And there is no debate on global warming - just like there's no debate on evolution, in science, anyway. Why do you always demonstrate the need for some authoritative standards for education? ;^)
Here's a real good article on school vouchers http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/20/whats-wro...
Conservatives try to "serve two masters" and try to get the "camel to pass through the needle's eye" but the way is too narrow for both them and all their worldly enticements. That's what happens when authority and big, mighty institutions try to coopt religion.
Most religions started out as and are most fittingly left to remain underground insurgencies of the mind and heart, quite opposie from being established authority or externally dominating power in society.
Economic powers, e.g., business, are really political powers that are not really separable or distinguishable from government as they would have no efficacy or influence without the backing of government. Government is indispensible to the control of society by business. Government's definition and enforcement of property rights and economic propriety makes business the authority controlling society. Their collaboration makes them one.
ezwriter, Franklin's definition of "democracy" is what socialists call "bourgeouis democracy", i.e., a not very democratic form of democracy that ignores or glosses over the power imbalances between rich and poor.
"Conservatives" like to claim that they "believe in God", "believe in the Ten Commandments", etc. But their actions speak louder than than words: they clearly have "no god but money." Nearly every position that they promote violates the love-your-neighbor-as-yourself principle which was the basis for ALL of the teachings of Jesus Christ (Matt 22:37-40). They also place very narrow limits on their definition of "neighbor"--a sin which Jesus Christ ridiculed in his Good Samaritan parabel.
Alfred wasn't king of England until 871, so he was not "before" the Heptarchy that Jefferson talked about, as Judge Moore claims.
Did you know, ezwriter, that the senses of "republic" and "democracy" have evolved in the last 200 years? In modern parlance, a republic has an elected executive, and a democracy has an elected legislature. Acting as if the prototypes are the only legitimate uses of the terms annoys me.
The people in the Roman Republic elected exactly 2 officials--the consuls. The legislature worked the same as it had under the Roman Kingdom (in which one person--the king--was elected for life by the senate and the curiae). The Senate was unelected, and the people (only those within the city itself) were represented by 30 curiae, each of which had one vote. By the way, the USSR was a republic (that's what the 'R' stands for), but it didn't have anything like representation of the popular will. Nor did Saddam's Republic of Iraq or Kaddafi's Republic of Libya.
The Athenian form of democracy can be fitted into the definition I gave above. Due to the small scale of that nation, a citizen with certain qualifications could elected himself as one of 6,000 representatives of the entire populace in something like a proportional representation system (each qualified citizen being a different party).
Would you mind giving the name of the law you cite, instead of just calling it "the Act"?
Greenthumb: ``I only spent about 20 minutes (obviously not finishing), going along question by question and found, in my opinion, that it was not an easy test. It required a rather high level of reading comprehension just to be able to answer the questions. Could this be the real problem? - that someone (even like me, who thinks she has been well educated) might feel too challenged, maybe even threatened, by how much harder it was than the tests we took in years past?''
It is, after all, called Advanced Placement. Not all HS students are going to take these classes. (They were around back when I was in HS but our school didn't, to my knowledge, offer them. We did have `advanced' classes, though, and I was in that level for many classes.) My daughters took a lot of the AP classes and they had to work their tails off to do well. Those of us who only took the standard level history classes would probably find some of the topics covered, um, a bit over our heads. At least at first.