Driving to work this morning and heard a new one.

Cheryl Crow, a huge acolyte for the Bhagwan Gore Rashneesh's Global Warming scare offensive, is telling us all that we should limit our toilet paper use to one square at a time. Maybe two or three if it's an emergency. She wants to save trees. Sport a skid mark for the rain forest, is her impassioned plea. It occurs to me that these folks who've drunk the cool-aid (in the popular analogy), have a lot in common with an earlier group of believers.

Back in the 1830s and 40s, there was a new religious fervor spreading in America. In the textbooks we call it the Second Great Awakening. They'd printed the new testament in English in the 1600s, and German and everything else. When it was made available to the public, and when they were given enough time to read it and parse out the sexy bits (all the fire and brimstone), the great unwashed out there (and a lot of well meaning people) decided that the end of the world was nigh. Lots of folks came up with their own way of preparing for the end. Some sat in quiet contemplation, while others danced with snakes.

One guy, a farmer from New York state named William Miller, looked at his Bible very carefully. He read the ages of the various figures and came up with a date on which he claimed the second coming of Christ would occur. He publicized his date, and followers began to prepare for the end. They sold all their possessions, gathered in open places and waited for the rapture.

Of course, nothing happened. Miller went back to his Bible and announced to the nervous followers that he had made an error in his calculations. He set another date, and the followers once again prepared themselves for the second coming. Guess what happened? Nothing. Nichivo. Nada... is what happened. They picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and went about their business, deciding after all that God's will was too mysterious for mere humans to discern. They went on to become famous as flagellants during the great depression of the 1840s (1839 to 43), going from town to town, beating themselves bloody to atone for the sins of the world. They continue to prepare today. Some of the modern day descendants of Millerites are the 7Th Day Adventists.

The Branch Davidians, who held out for so long and then immolated themselves and their babies in the dramatic end of the Waco standoff, were a modern fundamentalist branch of the Adventists. All these different chords rang in my head today when I heard a radio commentator refer to Al Gore as the David Koresh of the environmental movement. It occurs to me that in the movement, whatever movement it is, for people to follow all the way they have to put blinders on, shutting off common sense, and "drink the cool-aid", all the way back.

Maybe we should update the first amendment to add pseudo religions like Global Warming to the list of faiths separated from public policy makers and the government purse by the "high wall of separation"? What do you think?

For the difinitive word, In my opinion, on the Don Imus, Al Sharpton cat fight/melodrama...

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I think the oldest diplomatic notion is "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Lets hope it works.

Lets hope our new pacifist congress gives it a chance to work.

So, has the recent weather caused you to think again?

Here's a British documentary on Global Warming that has some folks all a twitter. Judge for yourself. It lasts about an hour and sixteen minutes, so grab some popcorn, but if you're a sceptic you'll love it, I promise.

Checkin' my home page, I found an interesting little bit of slander; an article by a history prof and huge fan of U.S. v. Miller (1939).

Go here and read his article. He thinks that the new Parker decision is bad law, and that it unjustifiably overturns 70 years of legal doctrine viewing the second amendment protections as a collective right, asserting in stead that it is an individual right. I welcome you to register over at the History News Network and leave a few comments. I did.

I won't belabour you with the whole comment stream. You can look at it and read it for yourself. By the time I got there, several pro gun types (were everywhere) had left critical comments. One defender of the author then chimed in, saying that it's silly to assert that the framers wanted people to be armed so that they would be able to defend themselves against their own government.

He's commenting on a previous commenter's point, that without an armed citizenry, "...there is no counterweight to Federal military might." He responds...

Yes there is. It's called the Congress's power to declare war and fund and raise and army versus the president as commander in chief. Read your Constitution.

The 2nd Amendment is there because Americans had traditionally feared standing armies, meaning the British army. Thus the basis of our national defense was the militia. It has nothing to do with being a counter to the federal government.

And then I chime in...

"Please, the congress WAS the national government in the 1790s when the bill was drafted. The executive was a glorified clerk, and congress was our parliament, and we had just fought a long and very bloody war against a parliament. The people of the states had been able to do that because they were armed. In the light of this, it seems obvious that the founders understood this to be a basic right of any free people. How could they use arms to overthrow a government and then assert that only a branch of government, a national army (made up of state militias), should be allowed to bear arms? They wanted to be able to retain the ability in their local settings, to protect themselves from the possible (they believed probable) misuse of government power, as well as desiring the right to defend themselves in a nation with NO POLICE OR STANDING ARMY. Why is it so hard to understand? People today who own guns, including assault rifles, don't see themselves as a problem. The problem is Liberal lawyers and gun control advocates who read the exact same words ("The right of the people")in the first, second and fourth amendments, and magically decide that in the one case of the second amendment, the words weren't meant to protect the rights of individual people. That's very convenient logic, if your desire is to empower the national government and restrict peoples rights."

So what do you think about all this.? You know I'm a gun nut, but I have an open mind. Can you find a way to convince me that I should turn in my Kalashnikovs? I dare ya. I double dare ya. I tripple dog dare ya.

So, do we really have a "right" to vote in America?

First, go to this site and read the article fully. Come on, I know he's the big hucksters boy, and kind of a commie jackass, but I've seen him on C-Span talking about this issue, and I think, to a degree, he makes a very good point. Now, lets allow the Rantasaurus Rex to heave himself up on his haunches and give you his understanding of things.

Our political heritage begins in England, about 300 or 400 years ago, where voting was originally considered a privilege. It was a privilege of birth, property and social status. The government also required religious affiliation, thinking that they needed to promote the "true faith" and keep "heretics" from corrupting the society. The right to vote was thought to be so important that it had to be limited to men with property, from the right faith, who had something to lose if political instability developed. It couldn't be left to the poor, because they would shake up the system, out vote every other group in the population, and vote for the first demagogue to offer them a sandwich and a sturdy roof over their head. So, voting standards have always been set up partly to protect the vested interests of one group of people, the establishment, and reformers have always been trying to widen the voting standard to see that those privileges are extended to their group of people. So the fight over voting has spanned the history of Democracy itself.

In this country, huge changes began to happen in the 1800s, when the right to vote began to be extended to poor men. Our system was set up with each state allowed to make the determination for itself. The British colonies had always had their own voting standards for electing local colonial officials, and after the revolution, some newly independent states allowed free Blacks to vote, and one (New Jersey) granted women with property the right to vote when they ratified their original state constitution in 1777. Ben Franklin proposed a universal, national voting standard in the constitutional convention in Philly in 1787, but the States couldn't agree on a common standard. States like Virginia, which still had extensive property qualifications, refused to give them up, and the others refused to accept limits on their more open systems, so the delegates agreed to leave it to the individual states to decide. That's the magic of Federalism; each state doing it's own thing, to a degree. The religious standards of the old days were banished by the first amendment to the national bill of rights, adopted in the 1790s.

So, the system we have now is based on the practice of allowing each state to decide their own voting standard, which allowed each new state, like Tennessee or Kentucky (set up in the 1790s) to open up their standard by getting rid of property qualifications, leaving them with gender, race, residence and age (21 was the age of adulthood everywhere). Of course, it was mostly poor people who went west, and they got rid of property qualifications as they went, reestablishing old institutions on more democratic lines as time went by. Eventually, as the political parties were established, the eastern states were pressured to adopt the more open systems of the west. That's how things went. Different standards led to the adoption of wider standards.

When the political parties began to be set up in the early 1800s, the parties had a vested interest in seeing to it that a level of rights existed to allow them to get as many voters to the polls as they could round up. As poor white men steadily became the dominant voting block, the system changed to reflect their interests and prejudices. Politics went from being a realm of rich men to being a populist game of kissing babies and shaking hands. Rich men had always wanted people in power to be reluctant to have it, so they looked for the ideal of the statesman. This is a major reason why Washington was so revered. But by the 1820s or 30s, guys like Andrew Jackson were the ideal; self made men who had risen up from poverty to become rich land owners and Indian fighters. Poor men looked up to that ideal, and wanted rich guys like Jackson to stand in the muddy street with them, toe to toe, look them eye to eye and embrace them as political equals. people like Jackson, who had no problem doing that, rose to the top. The Federalists couldn't adjust themselves to this changing reality, viewing it as appealing to the passions of the mob, so they slowly became more and more marginalized in the country until they almost completely ceased to exist. The Democrats embraced the change, and steadily turned into the dominant faction/party in the nation.

By the time of the Civil War, the unofficial voting standard in the nation had developed into "universal adult white male suffrage". Black men could still vote in a few New England states, but New Jersey had abolished the right to vote for woman by state statute in about 1787 or 88. Anyone who got in the way of poor white men running everything was disenfranchised or outnumbered and rendered harmless through some official mechanism. Then, in the wake of the war, the 14th and 15th amendments are drafted and passed, granting each citizen at the state level a protection for the privileges and/or immunities of national citizenship, including voting, and an equal protection of the laws of the United States (the due process provision was nullified in a supreme court decision in the 1870s). These protections were originally designed to protect former slaves (now referred to as "Freedmen") from the restriction of their rights by their state governments. But the 20th century will see them extended to all American citizens regardless of "previous condition of servitude", and the late 18th century concept that "the constitution follows the flag" will see them extended to anyone else who falls into our hands (debate still rages on that one).

During Radical Reconstruction, Black men were allowed to register and vote in the south, but there were loopholes in these provisions that allowed states to still control voter registration systems. So eventually, as the Reconstruction system broke down, states could use these loopholes to begin to restrict voting rights by restricting who had the right to register to vote. Grandfather clauses, literacy tests, poll taxes, and other provisions are set up to allow local majorities to protect their own power by restricting other peoples rights to register to vote, and the KKK was always there to deal with anyone who was too persistent in trying. The next time there was a significant challenge to the control Democrats had over southern states came in 1892, when farmers and urban workers joined to set up a third party called the Peoples Party. More people were lynched in the south in that year than in any other year in American history, and miraculously, the Democratic candidate won the national election for President.

By the 1870s, women were gaining the right to vote on a state by state basis. Having been shut out of the 14th and 15th amendments, they began working for their own inclusion, and the "Suffragette" movement got rolling. The new national standards or the 14th and 15th amendments didn't mean that the standards couldn't be expanded. By the time the 19th amendment was ratified in 1920, women had been granted the right to vote in about 6 or 8 western states, including in Texas, where women got the right in 1918.

The next change comes, of course in the Civil Rights Era in the 1950s and 60s. The 24th amendment got rid of the poll tax in 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 got rid of the other shenanigans that were set up to prohibit the right to register from being exercised. Then, due to Vietnam and the hope that the kids out there would all vote for McGovern in 1972, the Democrats pushed through an amendment lowering the minimum age to 18. Turns out most of the kids didn't bother to vote (and still don't), and those that did mostly voted for Nixon, like their parents. Each state still establishes voting registration requirements, but the feds oversee them and can intervene if the states try to set something up that looks like it's designed to infringe on peoples rights. So, today you do have a "right to vote" so long as you live up to the registration qualifications laid out in your state, overseen by the national government. After all this history, and all these changes, the system is now set up to allow the vast majority of people to go ahead and vote, and yet many of those who are qualified don't even register. Voting has gone from a privilege, to a right, to an option that many people completely blow off.

The points Jackson makes about individual election irregularities are quite valid. Irregularities still take place, and both sides still try to rig things in their favor from time to time, trying to protect what they have or ensure their people a leg up. Elections are human things, and we know what human beings are like. Jackson makes valid points, but what he wants is basically to establish a national standard that says people have a "right" to vote regardless of state provisions. He wants the system of Federalism to be set aside and a centralized national system set up to force every citizen to get a chance to cast a ballot and have every ballot counted, no matter what. So, if you showed up to vote a day after the polls close, they'd have to reopen them so you could vote, because you have a "right" to and they can't stop you from exercising it.

So, elections would never end, or take months and months to decide, as Jackson and his minions go out in buses to round up unregistered homeless, poor or elderly people who have no idea who to vote for, other than who Jackson's people will tell them to vote for. He wants a purely majoritarian system, where all the poor people in the cities and countryside will theoretically join in a new majority to out vote the rest of us, and create his idea of a true democracy. Thing is, He'll need the votes of the rest of us to get it passed, and it ain't happenin'. A purely majoritarian system is NOT what our constitution provides for. They debated such a system in Philly in 1787, and they decided against it. Too much fear of the "mob", and what they might do if empowered. Today, he's got to show me how my life will be bettered by such a change, and I don't think he can.

Personally, I have NO PROBLEM with the idea of keeping the hordes of the unwashed and their ever expanding sense of entitlement from getting their hands fully on our government and tax structure. As a person who regularly votes and pays a good deal of taxes, I can't see why it is that others find it hard to register, or make the trip to the voting booth on time, or fill out their ballot correctly. I don't feel our system is somehow diminished because people who are ether too stupid, too lazy, or too politically cynical to show up and cast their vote don't like the results they get. That's how the system works. Democracy doesn't promise good government, but only the odds of maybe having a better government through the right to participate. Those who participate the most, or the most intelligently, get the most out of it. So, if you can find the line for the government hand-out, don't try to tell me that you can't find the line at the voting booth.

As far as not having an expressly stated "right" to vote is concerned, it's perfectly true. It doesn't say it clearly in there anywhere. We don't have an expressly stated right to privacy ether, but that doesn't stop us from exercising it. Don't tell abortion rights activists we don't have it. They'll tell you otherwise. It doesn't say "one person, one vote" in there anywhere ether, or "separation of church and state". It turns out that much of the constitution is written ambiguously, and that a lot of our rights (or our perceptions of what our rights are) are based on some judges interpretations of the grey areas in the document, rather than clearly written provisions. That's the way it always been, and there's no getting away from it. I guess we could have a new constitutional convention, but the last time we did that (1787) the delegates closed themselves off from the public and produced a radically different document than the one everyone was expecting. Do you trust our current leaders to do that?

Personally, I'd like to see various new qualifications set up for voting, like a new literacy test, or maybe a higher age requirement. Voting SHOULD be a privilege of citizenship, and people SHOULD have to qualify for it somehow. You have to take a test to drive, for Christs sake. But then, I also think people should have to take a test to qualify to have babies. The last thing we need is to allow the teaming masses to get their hands on our wallets. It's bad enough that we've built our modern political system based on welfare dependency, and that every segment of our society has drunk the Kool Aid and developed it's own sense of entitlement for the benefits it gets (especially the middle-class). It's another thing to down the whole jug of Kool Aid and turn our constitution over to the people who know and care the least about it, or who only care about the system so long as it gives them what they want. Of course, mine is not the popular view, but there you go.

Found a very interesting blog out there.

Go to this site and check this guy out. He's got an amazing little video for you to watch, "Living With Snipers", if you scroll down a bit.



You would also do well to go to American Citizen Soldier and read this. Enjoy. And just for jollys, go to the astronomy site and click on this cool little video of the moon crossing in front of the sun.

You know, I love the hell out of C-SPAN.

I watch it all the time, but I've never seen it this funny. Enjoy.



File it under... Yep, people are assholes.