Thursday, July 07, 2005

Jamie LaFollette: "Greensboro...is so divided racially and economically; It's like two separate cities in one." 7:04:49 PM   permalink   comment []

Guilford County GOP chairman Marcus Kindley: "The ten amendments to the cosntitution (sic) was in fact definitions of the rights given by the MAJORITY...These were the rights the majority wanted to insure would remain a part of the law. There was no consideration of the minority...God grants us no rights of a political nature." (emphasis added) Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." (emphasis added) US Senate guide to the Constitution: "For over two centuries the Constitution has remained in force because its framers successfully separated and balanced governmental powers to safeguard the interests of majority rule and minority rights." As the Preamble to the Bill of Rights puts it, the amendments were added to the Constitution "in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers." That is to say, to constrain the government put in place by a majority. UPDATE: See also Federalist #10, by James Madison, regarding checks on the "schemes of oppression" by a majority; this essay, "James Madison and the Bill of Rights," discusses the Founders' concerns about a tyranny of the majority, and the importance of the Bill of Rights as a bulwark against that threat. In the words of Stanford professor Jack Rakove, "James Madison went to the Federal Convention of 1787 convinced that it faced no greater challenge than finding some means of checking 'the aggressions of interested majorities on the rights of minorities and individuals.'" Kindley, the chairman of the Guilford County GOP, has some interesting ideas about American democracy. UPDATE: Kindley, the chairman of the Guilford County Republican Party, seems to have removed his post, and the comments, without explanation. UPDATE: Kindley says the post was lost due to a power outage at work. That would be highly unusual, since his blog is hosted on a service-provider's computer, not his own, and neither the previous nor subsequent posts were erased. 5:46:21 PM   permalink   comment []

Truth & Rec commissioners: What is Reconciliation? As previously stated, it is the real mission of this project. If this whole thing is going to work, the commissioners will have to look hard at the harm done by all parties, including those who planned the march. And they will have to be careful in determining the truth of what they are told -- from what I hear, they are being told some pretty outrageous stuff. 4:58:55 PM   permalink   comment []

I'm getting the same spam as Dvorak -- and I'm equally uninterested in shelling out big bux for a web conference. Hey, why not come to a nice free conference instead? If you do go to Web 2.0, make sure you don't get stuck in one of the rooms at the Argent without broadband access. 4:40:29 PM   permalink   comment []

WSJ round-up of London attack coverage. 3:48:51 PM   permalink   comment []

Pop the Cap, capped. Oh well, I tend to drink liquor and wine anyway, and when I do want a beer I like the lighter ones...but this just bugs me as a nanny-state issue. 1:43:00 PM   permalink   comment []

I'm a few days late in linking to Sunday's Doonesbury...but that's OK, since Garry Trudeau is a couple of years late with this trite take on blogging. 10:37:53 AM   permalink   comment []

Round up of London bombing reports at Instapundit. 8:28:09 AM   permalink   comment []

Spinners assume everyone else is spinning. In Slate, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg describes the reaction of Heritage Foundation researchers to a scientific study on teen sexuality: "They seem to believe that the two sociologists have a predetermined conclusion in mind and will hack and knead the data as necessary to support it. In other words, in a failure of imagination, they see their fellow authors as versions of themselves." 8:20:21 AM   permalink   comment []

General Wallace Gregson, commander  of Marine forces in the Pacific, says "war on terror" is a dangerous misnomer. In a speech to the Naval War College, excerpted by Eric Umansky, Gregson said: "This war has a popular label and a political label, but it's not accurate...Terrorism is a means of power projection, it's a weapon, it's a tool of war. Think of it as our enemy's stealth bomber. This is no more a war on terrorism than World War II was a war on submarines. It's not just semantics...Words have meaning. And these words are leading us down to the wrong concept." 7:51:03 AM   permalink   comment []