The Tyranny of Suffrage

[Plane]

  You are in the territory they want to control.

   Do you know what the Koran says on that subject?

[Xavier_Onassis]

Muslims imposing their beliefs on Americans, that I oppose. We should oppose that actively.

But Americans spreading their religious beliefs in Arabia is asking for trouble, so I oppose that. We can give their protesters asylum, we can say we oppose it on principle, but our opposition should be limited to words spoken here in the US, not proselytizing in their country.

[Plane]

  Yes , we should fight defensively only and never aggressively or proactively.

  There is no reason to defend freedom anywhere but here.


     By here of course I mean Houston County Georgia.

    Florida is pretty much a lost cause.

     On the other hand we could defend our ideals on the frontiers of our ideals.

    The dichotomy is expansion or contraction, we will choose one we can't choose anything else.

[Xavier_Onassis]

So you think that the US should send troops to Saudi Arabia every time they have beheadings for apostasy and witchcraft?

Of course, that means we would get harassed by the Swedish Army every time we execute someone.

[Plane]

  Perhaps not every time , but certainly not never.

    Priorities are set like triage, higher urgency where the effort will be effective than where it would be wasted.

     The British shut down the international slave trade with a century of effort and a lot of expense.
 
     They could have minded their own business, but they were making it a better world.

      Isn't there good reason to make the world better?
     Safe for democracy?
     Abolish slavery?

       Or is it better to wait for the Caliphate to make the world better?

[kimba1]

I had the impression the main cause for ERA to be voted down is because women found it too broad and not solely advantageous to women. Notice afterwards more female centric laws

[Xavier_Onassis]

The EPA was voted down because insurance companies and a huge number of employers who paid women less contributed vast amounts of money to congresscritters who agreed to vote against it.

[Plane]

The vote wouldn't be in Congress.

It was in all of the statehouses.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Most people have nary a clue who represents them in their state legislatures. The candidates never state their positions,often they do not even state their party affiliations. The Florida Legislature sucks bigtime. It is the largest assembly of scoundrels in the state.

[Plane]

Most people have nary a clue who represents them in their state legislatures. The candidates never state their positions,often they do not even state their party affiliations. The Florida Legislature sucks bigtime. It is the largest assembly of scoundrels in the state.

I wish this were not so .

But very largely it is, if you care about the local government and the statehouse , you are probably and old Republican or a very old Democrat.

But that is where the power to ratify a constitutional amendment is actually located.
The intent was to put the power as near the people as possible.

[Xavier_Onassis]

The state legislatures are certainly not as near to the people as their congressmen or senators.
I doubt that one in twenty Americans could name even one of their state reps or senators.
Maybe that was the way it worked in 1790, but the fact it that state legislatures are the very least sympathetic to the people of all the various branches of government. They are less useful now with term limits than they used to be. Now the lobbyists write a lot of the bills, because the legislators are new to the job and don't understand much.  Some of them have inherited the aides of their predecessors or are the former ais=des, and they are the most effective. But the FL legislature is dominated by teaparty dolts from the "pork chop" counties.

[Plane]

  The Tea party is the people.

   What the Tea party has done any and all of the people can do.

     That they don't, is the fault of who exactly?

[Xavier_Onassis]

The Tea Party is a group of ignoramuses started by Tom Delay and funded by  Big Oil and others that serves no real purpose, other than to provide a place for morons to spew their hatred of immigrants and the government.  They elect corrupt two bit lawyers to the legislature who support crap like private prisons, fracking, for-profit entities running low quality charter schools, and depriving people in the larger cities of FL of voting without waiting for hours to do so.