DebateGate

Quote

77% of American Jews oppose the Iraq war

This doesn't ring true based on personal interactions. Perhaps you have a link?

I guess that must depend on your circle of friends. In my part of the country, I don't even know a single Republican that supports the war, let alone anyone else.

Quote from: Religious Dick on February 15, 2007, 12:09:25 AM

Let's put it this way - if you lived alone on a desert island, would the concept of "rights" have any meaning?

Yes.

How so?

Quote from: Religious Dick on February 15, 2007, 12:09:25 AM

You may well be free, but your rights to life and property won't protect you from tigers and tsunamis.

Uh, rights do not do protect me now, even though I live with a society of people around me. And no one said they would.

Then what use are they?

Quote from: Religious Dick on February 15, 2007, 12:09:25 AM

"Rights" are a meaningless concept absent agents bound to acknowledge them. In other words, rights are a contract between agents competent to acknowledge them.

I disagree. Laws are meaningless without people around to acknowledge them, but rights are not laws. Humans have rights as humans not as parts of a society, imo. Rights do not require a contract or agreement to exist. If they did, they would be privileges and not rights.

Then I have to ask - how do you define "rights", where do they come from, and how do you know that you have them?

So, in your opinion, rights are merely abstract concepts? I am curious as to how that does not leave rights as merely what society says they are (which, in my opinion, would mean they are privileges and not rights).

Let's put it this way - if you lived alone on a desert island, would the concept of "rights" have any meaning? You may well be free, but your rights to life and property won't protect you from tigers and tsunamis.

"Rights" are a meaningless concept absent agents bound to acknowledge them. In other words, rights are a contract between agents competent to acknowledge them.

The idea that all are equal before the law (as opposed to kings, nobility or clergy having special privileges is not self-ev8ident, either, but it is a good start for a fair society.

I'm not entirely sure I buy the idea that an assumption of equality is necessarily fair, nor that it's a prerequisite for a successful society. It's simply one of our axiomatic assumptions that generally goes unchallenged. For example, take the situation most of us spend the majority of our lives in: work. I'm certainly not the equal to the management or the CEO in terms of privilege or compensation, or the discretion to make decisions. My status is more easily measured from the bottom of the organization than the top. There are rules I have to follow that managers and executives are exempt from. Do I resent that? Of course not. Somebody has to be the sysadmin. I'm good at it and I enjoy it, and while I'm not getting rich, compared to most of my fellow citizens I'm making a very good living. In other words, my contentment with my situation is not contingent on being considered an equal.

And we already do have different laws for different classes of citizens. Take affirmative action. It's basically a tacit acknowledgment to minorities that while society won't treat them equally, it will give them compensation. Apparently, they consider that arrangement acceptable, because no politician dares to challenge it.

Also, you'll live under different laws depending on the jurisdiction you live in. In Illinois, possessing fireworks is illegal. 5 miles down the road in Indiana, they're legal.

Equality before the law is a nice fairy-tale, but who could point to a society where it has ever actually been the case? Seems to me the obsession with "equality" has caused more troubles than it's solved.

http://howtoprankatelemarketer.ytmnd.com/

However, and speaking as a proud member of the Religious Right, he fails the litmus test.

Well, then, it must suck to be you, because it looks like he's not only the favorite as the nominee, he's also the only Republican that out-polls any Democrat in the general.

Either learn to smile when you say "President Rudy", or don't let the door hit ya where the Good Lord split ya!

I'm not.

A Catholic Priest came up with the Big Bang theory. I find "Intelligent Design" to not only be faulty science, but poor theology as well.

I don't want to have public money spent teaching fundamentalist Protestant theology in school. If you want that, send them to a Southern Baptist school (or something similar). A true religious studies course would not teach "intelligent design" either, at least not without teaching a lot of other religious vantage points as well (and offering none of them as "the truth").

I'm perfectly fine with that - with the caveat that if fundamentalist Protestants are forced to send their children to private schools to get the education they deem appropriate, the tax dollars they're being charged to support the public schools are refunded.

After all, they're paying for a "public service" that is totally inadequate to provide for their needs.

  PEGGY NOONAN
He's Got Guts
In praise of Chuck Hagel.

Friday, January 26, 2007 12:01 a.m.

We all complain, and with justice, about the falseness of much that is said in Washington, and the cowardice that leaves a great deal unsaid. But I found myself impressed and grateful for the words of Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, in a meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday. Because his message was not one Republicans or Democrats would find congenial, it may be accidentally dropped down the memory hole, so I'll quote at some length.

The committee was nearing a vote on what was, essentially, an announcement of no confidence in the administration's leadership in Iraq. Specifically it was a nonbinding resolution opposing the increase in troops the president has requested. This was not significant in a concrete way: The president has the power to send more troops, and they are already arriving. But as symbols go, it packed a punch. You couldn't watch it on television or on the Internet and not see that Mr. Hagel was letting it rip. He did not speak from notes or a text but while looking at his fellow senators. There seemed no time lag between thought and word. He was barreling, he was giving it to you straight, and he'd pick up the pieces later.

This is what he said: Congress has duties; in the case of the war, meeting those duties was not convenient; Congress did not meet them.

And so: "The Congress has stood in the shadow of this issue, Iraq, for four years. As [John] Warner noted . . . we have a constitutional responsibility as well as a moral responsibility to this country, to the young men and women we ask to go fight and die and their families. . . . This is not a defeatist resolution, this is not a cut-and-run resolution, we're not talking about cutting off funds, not supporting the troops. This is a very real, responsible addressing of the most divisive issue in this country since Vietnam.

"Sure it's tough. Absolutely. And I think all 100 senators ought to be on the line on this. What do you believe? What are you willing to support? What do you think? Why are you elected? If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes.

"This is a tough business. But is it any tougher, us having to take a tough vote, express ourselves . . . than what we're asking our young men and women to do? I don't think so."

Later: "I don't question the president's sincerity, his motivations in this. I never have. . . . Part of the problem that we have, I think, is because we didn't--we didn't involve the Congress in this when we should have. And I'm to blame. Every senator who's been here the last four years has to take some responsibility for that.

"But I will not sit here in this Congress of the United States at this important time for our country and in the world and not have something to say about this. . . . I don't ever want to look back and have the regret that I didn't have the courage and I didn't do what I could. . . .

"I would go back to where I began, and pick up on a point that Chairman [Richard] Lugar mentioned: coherence of strategy. I don't know how many United States senators believe we have a coherent strategy in Iraq. I don't think we've ever had a coherent strategy. In fact, I would even challenge the administration today to show us the plan that the president talked about the other night. There is no plan. I happen to know Pentagon planners were on their way to the Central Com over the weekend. They haven't even Team B'd this plan. . . . And I want every one of you, every one of us, 100 senators, to look in that camera, and you tell your people back home what you think. Don't hide anymore; none of us.

"That is the essence of our responsibility. And if we're not willing to do it, we're not worthy to be seated right here. We fail our country. If we don't debate this . . . we are not worthy of our country."

Whenever the camera shot broadened to show the other senators, I wondered what they were thinking. For a few it might have been, Well done, Chuck. For others, Hey, righteous indignation is my act. And some would have been thinking, That's good, ol' buddy, and no matter how long I have to wait, I'll get you for putting me on the spot, for making us look bad, for getting on your high horse and charging.

But Mr. Hagel said the most serious thing that has been said in Congress in a long time. This is what we're here for. This is why we're here, to decide, to think it through and take a stand, and if we can't do that, why don't we just leave and give someone else a chance?

Mr. Hagel has shown courage for a long time. He voted for the war resolution in 2002 but soon after began to question how it was being waged. This was before everyone did. He also stood against the war when that was a lonely place to be. Senate Democrats sat back and watched: If the war worked, they'd change the subject; and if it didn't, they'd hang it on President Bush. Republicans did their version of inaction; they supported the president until he was unpopular, and then peeled off. This is almost not to be criticized. It's what politicians do. But it's not what Mr. Hagel did. He had guts.

A note too on John Kerry, who, on the floor of the Senate, also talked about Iraq this week, and said he would not run for president. Clearly he saw the lipstick writing on the wall: This is the year of the woman. He also might have been acting on the sense that this is a time of ongoing and incipient political flux. The major parties seem as played out as they are ruthless, and the arc of political fame is truncated: nobodies become somebodies become has-beens before half the country knows their name. The Democrats have no idea what they stand for, the Republicans only remember what they stood for.

But there was Mr. Kerry, liberated by the death of a dream and for once quite human as he tried to tell it the way he actually saw it. Took the mock right out of me. Good for him, and for Mr. Hagel. I wonder if we are seeing the start of a new seriousness.

http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110009577

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/state/16591107.htm



   Posted on Wed, Jan. 31, 2007   
BREAKING NEWS

Columnist Molly Ivins dies

By JOHN MORITZ
STAR-TELEGRAM AUSTIN BUREAU

AUSTIN — Molly Ivins, whose biting columns mixed liberal populism with an irreverent Texas wit, died at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at her home in Austin after an up-and-down battle with breast cancer she had waged for seven years. She was 62.

Ms. Ivins, the Star-Telegram’s political columnist for nine years ending in 2001, had written for the New York Times, the Dallas Times-Herald and Time magazine and had long been a sought-after pundit on the television talk-show circuit to provide a Texas slant on issues ranging from President Bush’s pedigree to the culture wars rooted in the 1960s.

"She was magical in her writing," said Mike Blackman, a former Star-Telegram executive editor who hired Ms. Ivins at the newspaper’s Austin bureau in 1992, a few months after the Times-Herald ceased publication. "She could turn a phrase in such a way that a pretty hard-hitting point didn’t hurt so bad."

A California native who moved to Houston as a young child with her family, Ms. Ivins was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. Two years later after enduring a radical mastectomy and rounds of chemotherapy, Ms. Ivins was given a 70 percent chance of remaining cancer-free for five years. At the time, she said she liked the odds.

But the cancer recurred in 2003, and again last year. In recent weeks, she had suspended her twice-weekly syndicated column, allowing guest writers to use the space while she underwent further treatment. She made a brief return to writing in mid-January, urging readers to resist President Bush’s plan to increase the number of U.S. troops deployed to Iraq. She likened her call to an old-fashioned "newspaper crusade."

"We are the people who run this country," Ms Ivins said in the column published in the Jan. 14 edition of the Star-Telegram. "We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.

"Raise hell," she continued. "Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and are trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge."

She ended the piece by endorsing the peace march in Washington scheduled for Saturday. 01-27 "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!' " she wrote.

The spice of Texas

Born Mary Tyler Ivins on Aug. 30, 1944, in Monterey, Calif., Ms. Ivins was raised in the upscale River Oaks section of Houston. She earned her journalism degree at elite Smith College in Massachusetts in 1965. From there she ventured to Minnesota, taking a job as a police reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune.

Growing weary of the winters in the Upper Great Lakes and missing the spice of Texas food and its politics, Ms. Ivins moved to Austin to become co-editor of the Texas Observer, long considered the state’s liberal conscience.

Nadine Eckhardt, the former wife of the late Texas novelist Billy Lee Bramer and who later married former U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt of Houston, said Ivins soon made herself a fixture in the Austin political and cocktail party scene in the early 1970s.

"That’s where she became the Molly Ivins as we’ve come to know her," said Eckhardt, an Ivins friend for nearly four decades. "The Observer had such wonderful writers doing such wonderful stories at the time, and Molly was always right in the middle of everything."

Her writing flair caught the attention of the New York Times, which hired her to cover city hall, then later moved her to the statehouse bureau in Albany. Later, she was assigned to the Times’ Rocky Mountain bureau in Denver.

Even though she wrote the Times’ obituary for Elvis Presley in 1977, Ms. Ivins said later that she and the sometimes stodgy Times proved to be a mismatch. In a 2002 interview with the Star-Telegram, Ms. Ivins recalled that she would write about something that "squawked like a $2 fiddle" only to have a Times editor rewrite it to say "as an inexpensive instrument." Ms Ivins said she would mention a "beer belly" and The Times would substitute "a protuberant abdomen.”

So Ms. Ivins returned to Austin in 1982 to become a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald and reconnecting with such political figures as Ann Richards, who would later become governor, and Bob Bullock, then the hard-drinking state comptroller who later wielded great power as lieutenant governor.

Trademark language

The column provided Ms. Ivins the freedom to express her views with the colorful language that would become her trademark. She called such figures as Ross Perot, former U.S. Sen. John Tower and ex-Gov. Bill Clements "runts with attitudes." As a candidate for governor, George W. Bush became "Shrub," a nicknamed she never tired of using.

Surprised became "womperjawed." A visibly angry person would "throw a walleyed fit."

Ms. Ivins, who was single and had no children, told readers about her first bout with cancer in a matter-of-fact afterword in an otherwise ordinary column.

"I have contracted an outstanding case of breast cancer, from which I fully intend to recover," she wrote on Dec. 14, 1999. "I don’t need get-well cards, but I would like the beloved women readers to do something for me: Go. Get. The. Damn. Mammogram. Done."

Ms. Ivins authored three books and co-authored a fourth. She was a three-time finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and had served on Amnesty International’s Journalism Network, but the iconoclastic writer often said that her two highest honors were being banned from the conservative campus of Texas A&M University and having the Minneapolis police name their mascot pig after her when she covered the department as a reporter during one of her first jobs in the newspaper business.

Funeral arrangements were pending.

John Moritz, 512-476-4294

jmoritz@star-telegram.com



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