Letters to the Editor
Fraud Guy
Published Letters: 337
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Enumeration
[Read the article: The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]kdwmson said:
But isn't the way to recognize those unspecified rights protected by the Ninth Amendment through legislation rather than by having judges cherry-pick their pet issues based on their own preferences?
From my reading of the ninth, the way to trample on those rights is through legislation. I think a good percentage of jurisprudence regarding state power has been slicing off the unenumerated rights or allowing the expansion of enumerated government power into those rights by legislation. Once you tell someone they can do something, there will be someone else telling them they can't.
Kind of like the tyranny of the commons. I can't put a fence on part of my land because it would interfere with federally regulated wetlands, but a corporation nearby can dig up a wetland area to put down a building so long as they put a retention pond on the property (which retains oh so many of the characteristics of wetlands).
I should just be able to put up a fence.
(Ditto consenting adults in their own room).
(I have seen elsewhere that no one wants to fight legislation on the grounds of the 9th or 10th because there are no specifics there--but that's the point. Rights are indeterminate until you start delimiting them, and then they can be lost. Facesiously, "Do we have the right to breathe?" It's not enumerated, so I must have legislation proving I can.)
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Tempus
[Read the article: The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Packing the court has been tried, by FDR during the New Deal. His own party backed down on it. Part of the issue is that, if we pack it now, they can overpack it later, and then we can overover pack it, and so on....
It would be like being in the middle of a baseball game, and having a manager decide that it takes two strikes to get an out, and five balls for a walk while his team is pitching. The problem is (and has been noted here many times before) that the other team gets their turn at bat with the same rules. Or their own rules. Calvinball is fun, but not conducive to the rule of law.
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Camping
[Read the article: The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I just had a discussion the other day with a widow of a WWII vet. He had been a POW for about a year, and after his release, he was in a unit that helped liberate one of the other camps.
He said that the only difference was the fact that the other camp had the ovens. The other facilities, and the conditions of the inhabitants, was almost exactly the same. For the rest of his life, he never wanted to be cold or dirty again, having not had a blanket, or privacy, or the ability to get clean.
And as the widow spoke of her husband's POW conditions, I thought about the descriptions of our own camps, and prisons, and our rendered allies' locations that have been well described in the press outside of the US. And there's not much difference.
Sad, isn't it. 60 years later, and the inhumans still bring out the inhumane.
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kdwmson
[Read the article: The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Retail. With enough history in banking and corporations to known that they should both be added to the quote on sausage and law.
The 9th and 10th are for people who can believe and doubt. They would have liked to pet Schrodinger's Cat, because no matter how hard you try to decide otherwise, there will always be uncertainty in life.
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Devolution
[Read the article: Have Bill Frist and right-wing bloggers plagiarized their new Iraq plan?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We've gone from strategy papers to talking points.
Debates to quiz shows.
Sound bites to sound bits.
Do they start grunting, next?
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Unregulated markets (the OT side of this thread)
[Read the article: Brit Hume is a "journalist"; Keith Olbermann is "partisan"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Leave out the FDA, FTC, and the unfettered glory that is the web.
There is one truly unregulated, unfettered market out there right now.
Fraud.
There are black market sites on the web where you can buy credit cards, identities, hacking tools, botnet use, freight forwarding services; i.e., anything you need to rip off other people.
Generally, you need to be sponsored to get on, then have to prove your fraud credentials to get significant rights out there. About as free and self regulating a market as you can find, really. It exists completely outside of government control, too. And its only purpose is to take money from other people.
Some of the players hijack other player's control and identities. Others rip them off through fraudster to fraudster scams. If you really want to see what happens to a market that does not have external monitoring, enforcement, and control, go there.
Granted, the entire basis of the market is criminal activity, but to some libertarians, any government is the same. But without watchdogs, any market can become a company of wolves.
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This seems familiar...
[Read the article: Neocons' rejection of the rule of law extends to the personal level]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have seen similar behavior before in the corporate world. The executive behaves as if the business was a personal fief (which in some cases includes droight de seigneur). They feel that they are entitled to the benefits (read Black's defense statements in the news for examples). However, there is no noblesse oblige.
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Ingsoc
[Read the article: Neocons' rejection of the rule of law extends to the personal level]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The last line of your quote stands out:
"To the extent that the Confederacy worked at all, it worked through extra-legal emergency measures."
Why does that sound familiar?
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RealName
[Read the article: Neocons' rejection of the rule of law extends to the personal level]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think part of the issue, here, is that no one wants to live in that kind of society in the United States, and that we are worried that the neocon vision wants to head down that path. One man, one party, one nation. A uniter, not a divider. (Of course, if you don't want to be united behind him, you could also be subtracted from the picture.)
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Another analogy
[Read the article: All you need to know about the Beltway journalist mind]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Versailles is the court. But I am also reminded of late Elizabethan England. Elizabeth's political maneuvering left her childless to help her retain power, so many in the court were apprehensive that when the throne shifted to the Stuart line, their power would be lessened or dissolved altogether. Considering the political/journalistic/lobby investment in the status quo at court, it seems that any "outsider" will be heaped with fearful scorn (ala Gravel and Paul). It will be an Augean task to clean it out.