Shoukd We "Move On" or Take to the Streets?
 

I look at the stench kicked up by Gore v. Bush 2000 and the SCOTUS Ruling,
the Unlikelyhood of Nebraska Senator (R) Chuck Hagel's 1996 election victory,
And now this latest.....I gotta tell ya, people.....I'm havin' trouble "dumbing down" enough to simply "move on !!!!!!!!!!!!" ...........Any advice ???????

like i said elsewhere, the road to authoritarian rules is prepared socially, through small concessions--terminology here, consent there--when the big ones come, they may not even register as concessions.

what is interesting is the level of organized pressure the right was able to bring to bear as the ohio farce--the problems with which were obvious to anyone who looked--rather the appearance of porblems were obvious to anyone who looked---was unfolding.

rather than something on the order of in the interest of democratic process, such as it is, we should look into the problems/appearances of problems. none of that. instead it was:
move on
sore losers
concede.
capitulate
it's easy. we did it.
we dont even remember when.

What are you doing thinking about political corruption? It's springtime!

Says the politician as he skips through the meadow.

As Terry Prachett would say: things that have a one-in-a-million chance of happening tend to occur nine times out of ten.

And yes, it is the slow erosion of our civil liberties that we need to be most on guard against. Too many people are politically apathetic to affect change it would seem...

Where are today's Woodwards and Bernsteins?

I'm not saying that the report isn't correct on some level, and I tend to stay out of this kind of politics to avoid ruining my shoes, but I still think that the old addage holds true:

There are lies, there are damned lies, and then there are statistics.

Life happens, and people aren't numbers, if they were we wouldn't have elections in the first place because there would be no need for government due to the lack of dissent.

Yup, don't do anything stupid that would result in your meeting somebody like me. It saddens me when I meet professionally some kid who has managed to fuck up his or her life in record time upon turning 18...they don't seem to realize that a criminal record will follow them FOREVER. And it will....

What the hell are you talking about? It's not illegal to have a position against the president. Bush might like it to be, but even he hasn't managed to take that right away from us.

"taking to the streets" implies at least to me some form of breaking of the law.

It is not illegal to protest. That's what taking (it) to the streets means.

I'm havin' trouble "dumbing down" enough to simply "move on !!!!!!!!!!!!" ...........Any advice ???????

one more exclamation point, and one more question mark....yup, that would'a done it.

I believe you are voicing sincere concern, daswig......but it is misplaced for at least two reasons:

1.)It is too late for me to "fuck up my life in record time". I am past 50 years of age and my big moment of protest happened 35 years ago when I refused to register for the draft. I was never issued a draft card. I waited seven years until Jimmy Carter's blanket pardon to get my life back.

Right after 9/11 Ari Fleischer warned all of us to "watch what we say". Is that
the kind of country you want for your child to live in? What is more important than freely exercising my right to speak in protest of possible widespread election fraud in close presidential balloting?
Sorry......Ari......you're wrong, and it is always the right time to publicly label your remarks as un-American, outrageous, and you disgraced yourself !

2.)I wish that you were not so apparently entrenched in a belief system that prohibits you from reacting more like Colin Powell and the patriotic citizens of Ukraine did when they reviewed uncannily similar reports about discrepancies between reported polling results and independent exit polls.

daswig, is there any line to official corruption and hypocrisy that you will not cross? Have you ever given any thought as to your own high limit?

You also have a "right to say" when and where US troops are being deployed on an operational level. That doesn't mean you should, or that you will not be prosecuted for it. you have a "right to say" "We support our troops when they shoot their officers". That doesn't mean you should, or that you will not be prosecuted for it.

I'd hate to think of you spending your "golden years" in a PMITA prison...

Sorry, I lived through the Clinton Administration, and didn't reach my limit. Comparatively, Bush 43 is an amateur in the hypocracy and corruption department. Oddly enough, the Democrats didn't seem to have a problem with it then, just as they never had a problem with Robert "KKK" Byrd or Teddy "what'd I forget? Oh, the girl!" Kennedy or Barney "I live with a gay escort service in my basement" Franks

Depending on the nature of the protest, it may well be illegal to protest. It's called "Incitement to riot". Remember Portland? "Less than lethal" munitions are a wonderful thing.

Yes, thank heavens that evil man is gone. Lying to the country in order to start a war against a country that hasn't done anything to us is definitely so much better than getting oral sex.

/sarcasm

Daswig, it is not illegal to protest. A corrupt regime such as the one we have now may try and MAKE it a crime, but the constitution doesn't back them up.

When will the Dems cease blaming the ignorant red state voters, the courts, Diebold, the Christian Right, and all the other usual suspects, and begin blaming themselves for the shitty candidates that they nominate?

Honestly, I hope y'all still refight the last election, just like you refought the 2000 election for four years. It will continue to solidify the Dems rightful place in the minority. So please, keep talking about the bigotry of the Christian Right, keep insulting red staters by claiming that they are on the blue state dole, keep talking about how Diebold stole the election and undermined the greatest democratic experiment this world has seen. Because people are watching, and outside of y'all little liberal enclaves, they're not thrilled with what you're saying.

Keep it up, and TIA

I know this a bit OT but actually, Clinton intervened in Kosovo, Serbia, and Somalia, with him going against the UN to take action in Kosovo. What threats did those three countries pose to us?

The level of intervention of those situations vs. the Iraq War is rather insignificant.

I agree it is off topic and I don't intend to get into a discussion of those events.

Besides, we're supposed to move-on from Clinton. He's an EX president now, so technically we should only remember his greatness and whitewash anything that could be considered displeasureable to consider.

Bush is still President and we're still in Iraq. We can't whitewash him yet.

It's also another amazingly beautiful day here in Colorado, so really, why are we even having this discussion?

daswig -

What are you doing? Do you seriously intend to connect protestation with illegal action? Certainly there are illegal acts - even ones that do not involve protestation. But NOTHING in host's statement connotated anything even approaching illegality.

You have now made 4 posts, some of which included a direct warning of violence, in opposition to PROTEST.

Do you honestly see nothing wrong with such a mentality?

And let's follow through with you assumption that host is advocating illegal action. What do you think it would be if you took up your guns in opposition to the gov't? That is the primary reason you have argued we need to have access to guns, yes? It would be ILLEGAL for you to oppose the gov't with your weapons. So is it only you who gets to decide when the illegality of an action becomes irrelevent in the face of just cause? Nonsense!

Yup, don't do anything stupid that would result in your meeting somebody like me. they don't seem to realize that a criminal record will follow them FOREVER. And it will....

Depending on the nature of the protest, it may well be illegal to protest. It's called "Incitement to riot". Remember Portland? "Less than lethal" munitions are a wonderful thing.

I am glad to see that i am not the only one that finds Daswig's tone threatening and hotheaded. It is this shoot first, ask questions later mentality that prevents us from actualizing our potential as a species. In the current political climate i can't think of any reason for it.

I'm still never sure when daswig is kidding or not. He's got a dark sense of humor, but he also has a bit of an extreemist streak. The line is blurred, daswig. It might be nice to clear it up every once in a while.
Are you speaking of your profession, or of your love of guns? It's hard to tell sometimes.

Isn't democracy wonderful? We get to have these wonderful discussions that make my completely reactionary and then I've got to fill in post space that I shouldn't have used - editted to remove me being an ass.

(off topic) Speaking of taking to the steets, i recently saw footage of the protest of the Bush inauguration where everyone was turning thier back on the president. They showed these plain clothes cops, pretending to be protestors, walking through the demonstration and just randomly maseing people in the face as they walked by. WTF? Talk about erosion of civil liberities.

I'm speaking of my profession, as in "don't do something that will bring you into negative contact with a person with my job description".

Gotcha. Just making sure. Takign to the streets can also mean look for a job. I think the way host intended it was to take some kind of reasonable action. I don't think he meant go break the law.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but didn't Host state that as a form of protest, he broke the law by refusing to register for the draft and had to be pardoned by Carter? Did he end up in a PMITA prison? Nope. But now he's talking about "protesting" again. It's no longer the 1960's, and that kind of conduct is taken MUCH more seriously now.

As for my opposing the Government, would you care to wager on who cuts my check every month? I'm no longer legally a member of the U.S militia spoken of in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution, because I'm a member of an exempt class due to my job description. That doesn't mean that the reasons for the militia have changed.

It can also mean "Man the barricades", as in conjunction with a "Red Terror". He's already admitted to criminal activity and having to be pardoned by Carter for it as a form of "protest". Given that, I don't think it's even remotely unreasonable to question the legality of his future "protests".

You are not wrong. However, considering host informed us of that protestation AFTER you had already made two posts warning him about illegal activities, I fail to see the relevance. Add onto that the hardly shocking, significant or severe form of illegal activity that host later described, I fail to see any retroactive relevance for your warning of violence or significant long-term detrimental affects.

So my point remains: What do you think you are doing? You have warned and threatened someone who suggests making a protest.
I have absolutely no idea what you do - nor do I care. Nor does your job have anything to do with what I pointed out: that one of your main purposes for supporting the right to own guns is for protection from gov't. In other words, illegal activity. You want guns to provide you a means of protesting gov't to the degree of illegal activity - but in this thread you jump at someone who suggests simple protestation. And now you try to present not registering for the draft as some type of "serious" crime while apparently approving of the notion of taking up arms against the government.

The language Host used sounded to me like he was preparing to possibly commit criminal activity in the form of "taking to the streets". Based upon that, I warned him of the repercussions of committing a criminal act as a protest. Host then informed us that he did in fact in the past, as an act of protest, commit a crime and was eventually pardoned by Jimmy Carter. This validates my interpretation of what he said, because he admits to committing a crime in the past as a protest. As the saying goes: "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time." Warning him of the possible legal repercussions of an illegal act (getting shot with rubber bullets as happened in Portland or going to jail) doesn't strike me as a threat...it strikes me as a warning not to break the law because of the repercussions of his actions.

If somebody says "I'm thinking about starting to deal in crack cocaine", and somebody else says "that's illegal, and PWID carries a sentence of X", has the person threatened the wannabe crack dealer? In my book, no. On the other hand, if somebody sees that and says "dealing crack cocaine is legal and high-profit, and you should do it!" the person saying that may do well to read up on the legal definitions of "conspiracy" and "accessory before the fact".

NOW THAT WE HAVE CLEARED IT UP....Should we move on and forget about all this, or should we take an active, legal role in trying to keep America a democratic state?

Not even close.

The title of this thread was inspired by these words, at the bottom of the last qutoe box, in my last post:
The last time that I was was faced with the perception that my government
was engaged in a massive and criminal course of deception, crimes against the constitution, and in the planning and ordering of war crimes at the level of the federal executive branch, I was much younger and more idealistic, and I faced a deadline to decide whether to voluntarily make myself available to
the government as a complying candidate for participation in the war.
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317910/</a> is the link to information about the movie, the Fog of War, an excellent film in the way it examines Robert Macnamara's views of the morality of war. He was the secretary of defense who was most responsible officials in the decision making and in the prosecution of the Vietnam war.

The bottom line is that in response to what I perceived to be signifigant crimes committed by the U.S. government, I refused to participate, and I lived an "underground" life for over seven years to avoid arrest and prosecution of a felony punishable by 5 years in federal prison. Hindsight has demonstrated that I probably made the correct moral choice; I had to live with myself then, as I do now. The war was wrong, Nixon was a criminal president on many fronts, as was his atty general John Mitchell, and Nixon's two top assistants, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman, all three convicted of felonies and served time in federal prison. NS Advisor and later Sec'ty of State Henry Kissinger is to this day regarded as a war criminal, unable to be accepted as Bush's appointment as chair of the 9/11 commission.

I intended this thread to evolve into a discussion of when is "enough is enough"? Do we wait until a third presidential election is stolen? Were the last two elections stolen?

daswig seems to be throwing his "weight" around, here. Judge for yourself whether he is communicating a friendly warning because he "knows what he knows" about "big brother's" possible reaction to a discussion like this, because of his position as an "insider" in a state dept. of justice.

Anyway.......whatever his intent, he has achieved the effect of influencing me to "watch what I say", and I think that you know how I feel about that.

Post your thoughts if you think that my disclosed background disqualifies me from initiating a discussion about when the right time might be to decide whether the federal executive branch "fixed" it's election, and if it did, what the average citizen should do in response. Shouldn't the Bush administration be held to the same standard that it held the Ukranians to, last December? Should we demand nothing less than the type of investigation that Powell demanded of the Ukraine, and if the Bush administration refuses, then what?

The challenge is the same one that the founding fathers faced. Now seems to be the time for massive, non-violent protests that demand a transparent, non-partisan investigation of last november's vote in Ohio and in Florida, as a start. Protests in the form of hunger strikes, boycotts of products and services of corporations that signifigantly supported Bush Cheney 2004, and a
media campaign to advertise the inconsistancy of the Bush admin. response to exit poll disparity in the Ukraine, vs. the non-response to the same phenomena in the U.S.

Our founding fathers intended government to be always intimidated by the citizenry, not as daswig seems to project, the other way around.

It seems to me that we must have this discussion to be credible, responsible, measured, patriots.

Excuse me for being sceptical. But because one man shows through statistics (without showing math) that the election was stolen we should throw him out?

The simple truth is election polling can never be shown as reliable because A) it's voluntary, B) it's not blind (I.E. the pollers "randomly" decide who to ask), and C) the ranges from community to community varies so much you cant just hit 3 in a city and claim that's how they voted.

Sure you can look into it, but polling will NEVER hold grounds for any type of recount/lawsuite.

Feh. On edit: Why bother?

So let me see if I've got this right...there's a guy who says he committed a felony, and then spent seven years living as a fugitive from justice, who thinks he did the right thing, and is encouraging others to do the same. Then there's another guy who says "breaking the law is bad", so he's the bad guy here. Does that about sum it up?

What are these war crimes that Bush has done?

Rest Assured, I blame us for the shitty candidate we put forward. A corpse should have been able to beat Bush in the last election. That it was even close I blame Kerry and the "liberal" media's circus over Dean's enthusiastic holler for. However, close does not mean lost, and they are saying what I pretty much thought about the exit polls all along. If the people who cared about the constitution were half as committed as those who only seem to care about the bible, we would have ourselves a Ukraine situation here.

Don't think it will happen now, but you never know. Be interesting to watch for.

Class 2
John M. Thayer (R) 1867-1871
Phineas W. Hitchcock (R) 1871-1877
Alvin Saunders (R) 1877-1883
Charles F. Manderson (R) 1883-1895
John M. Thurston (R) 1895-1901
Joseph H. Millard (R) 1901-1907
Norris Brown (R) 1907-1913
George W. Norris (R,I) 1913-1943
Kenneth S. Wherry (R) 1943-1951
Frederick A. Seaton (R) 1951-1952
Dwight P. Griswold (R) 1952-1954
Eva K. Bowring (R) 1954-1954
Hazel H. Abel (R) 1954-1954
Carl T. Curtis (R) 1955-1979
J. J. Exon (D) 1979-1997
Chuck Hagel (R) 1997---

Yep, the unlikely Hagel took the senate seat back for the Repuplicans from the only Democrat to have held it for 130 years. I love figures, and the way they can be twisted. Them's a whole lotta "R"s, I don't give a damn how you try to paint it. Nebraska loves Republicans. Hagel is a Republican. What's so unlikely about that?

Nebraska is in the conservative heartland.

Republicans tend to do well there.