"Lately I have been having issues with the term “Founders” or “Founding Fathers” because it’s pretty nebulous and undefined. There’s Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who signed the Declaration of Independence but had no involvement in the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison did a lot of the heavy lifting in drafting the Constitution but neither signed the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense and worked for the Continental Congress but pretty soon became a persona non grata thanks to his religious views. Patrick Henry gave the famous “Liberty or Death” speech but was also one of the most articulate voices against adopting the Constitution. Which of these are “Founders”? All of them? None?
Even if we accept all of these men as “Founding Fathers” (which I think most would), to say that they disagreed on fundamental political principles is the height of understatement. And an attempt to put together the varying strains of conservative thought under the same “Founders” rubric is overly simplistic and misguided," -Alex Knapp, Outside the Beltway.
I think the Founding Fathers would have agreed with this...
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Something Someone Else Said
Friday, January 21, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Your Tax Dollars At Work: Drug Warriors
Imagine if this was your home these men came to:
That is how quickly lives are lost in the war on drugs. When police invade private homes in search of drugs, anything and everything can go wrong, and even the slightest misunderstanding becomes a matter of life and death. The victim in this case, Todd Blair, brandished a golf club in terror as armed men stormed his home in the night. We'll never know for sure if he realized they were police. But we do know that only a small amount of drugs were found in the raid that took his life.Warning: you're about to watch a man get shot to death by his own government because he wanted to decide for himself what he could put into his own body:
That drugs and violence often go hand in hand isn't a mystery to many among us – the bloodshed gripping Mexico is old news by now – but this is a very different kind of drug war violence than the infamous turf wars of the cartels. This is a rare glimpse into the unbelievable level of force our own public servants unleash routinely in order to protect us from ourselves. This man was just a drug user. Whether he ever sold drugs is in dispute, but there's no question that he lived and died in poverty, and not from drugs, but from police who gunned him down in his own home.
Your tax dollars funded this man's death, and they pay the salaries of every politician in Washington who votes to continue their tragically unsuccessful War on Drugs against the American public.
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Sunday, January 16, 2011
NASA: The Frontier Is Everywhere
A stirring endorsement of the capacity for good within the human race, our collective drive to seek out the great unknown and the media-challenged governmental agency that will someday take us there:
Would I come off as too big of a nerd if I admitted that I already have the official NASA app on my iPad? Yeah? Well I don't care...
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