Posted on 04/29/2006 8:04:53 PM PDT by SDGOP
"He [Michael Graham] also mentioned my abridgement of First Amendment rights, i.e. talking about campaign finance reform....I know that money corrupts....I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I'd rather have the clean government."
(Excerpt) Read more at redstate.com ...
And because McCain doesn't think we can have (or deserve) both, is exactly the reason I'll never vote for him.
A very good question.
Personally, I don't consider 'corporations' to be 'people', no.
But in the context of this conversation, does it really matter?
Should not confederations of people deserve to exercise their free speech rights? Do we not also guarantee the right to free association?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
After all, this conversation is about the First Amendment, after all.
Do you believe that Exxon, or should I say its multiple investors, have no First Amendment rights?
I'm still looking for that $50 an hour job he promised working in the fields.
And no, I don't think our right to petition for redress of grievances, and Exxon paying $1000 per committee vote (double for chairmen, half for absentions), are quite exactly equivalent.
On proposals to stop the one without infringing the other, I am all ears. Propose away. I agree CFR as currently legislated doesn't work or help. I don't agree there is no problem, or that we can't do anything about it, or any of the excuse factory dodges.
Our representatives are systematically corrupted by out and out bribes paid directly for particular votes. It is not exceptional, it is not clandestine. It is known by absolutely everybody, highly stylized, there are going rates for particular items, etc. And it is a national scandal that we need to fix yesterday.
Any and all reasonable expedients proposed on the subject, I'm all ears. Boil them all in oil, I'd consider in the absence of something more practical. But pretending it isn't happening or is as American as apple pie, or that nothing can be done about it without murdering puppies, won't fly.
bump
I am in complete agreement. Three terms for a President, two terms for a Senator, six terms for a Representative, twelve years for a Supreme Court Justice and twelve years for anyone else working for the Feds. That would help clean out the State Department and C.I.A. from time to time.
The Military would be exempt as their primary role is defense of the nation....not feeding at the trough.
Thanks for the ping. We have got to convince our friends in Arizona to rid us of this moron.
Sounds like you know more than the average bear, actually. Perhaps you should elaborate.
Mcinsane was taken prisoner in Nam, but he quickly let them know that his daddy was a senator. He got preferential treatment, while his pals were tortured and killed.
He is insane.
Are you sure McCain is a Republican?
Just another blind politician.
(assuming this quote is accurate)
Well, then, Mr. McInsane, I'd rather you have a hole in your head than have the keys to the xecutive mansion.
I don't think you can have one without the other.
Right!
Empty space - hot air, once the 'wrappings' are off!
I'd rather he left government and shut up forever.
John McCain, the second term Republican senator from Arizona and former Navy pilot captured and held prisoner during the Vietnam War, is a fraud, collaborator, and danger to the security of the United States.
McCain, who claims he was brutally tortured by the communist Vietnamese, ironically emerged, as early as 1986, as Hanoi's leading advocate for normalized relations with the United States.
McCain's high-profile and unrelenting support for a government that brutally tortured and murdered his fellow POWs has caused POW/MIA family members and fellow Vietnam veterans to question the senator and his motivations.
They ask what drives McCain, who owes his public life to the tag "former POW," to work so hard for Hanoi and so diligently to discredit any possibility, in fact the probability, that Hanoi held back live U.S. prisoners of war after the 1973 prisoner release.
The POW/MIA families point out that they worked hard during the Vietnam War to secure POW McCain's freedom when he was being held by the communists and the families want to know why he is now betraying them today in their efforts to get answers about their missing loved ones.
From the first days of McCain's captivity, he seriously violated the military Code of Conduct, which outlines the basic responsibilities and obligations of members of the Armed Forces of the United States who have been captured by the enemy.
According to documentation obtained by the U.S. Veteran Dispatch, not only did POW McCain promise to give the communists "military information" in exchange for special hospital care not ordinarily available to U.S. prisoners, but he also made numerous antiwar radio broadcasts.
Article V of the Code of Conduct is very specific in declaring that U.S. military personnel are required to avoid answering questions to the utmost of their ability and to make no oral or written statements disloyal to the United States and its allies or harmful to their cause. Any violation of this code is considered collaborating with the enemy.
The following is McCain's own admission of collaboration in an article he wrote, printed May 14, 1973 in U.S. News and World Report:
"I think it was on the fourth day [after being shot down] that two guards came in, instead of one. One of them pulled back the blanket to show the other guard my injury. I looked at my knee. It was about the size, shape and color of a football. I remembered that when I was a flying instructor a fellow had ejected from his plane and broken his thigh. He had gone into shock, the blood had pooled in his leg, and he died, which came as quite a surprise to usa man dying of a broken leg.
Then I realized that a very similar thing was happening to me.
"When I saw it, I said to the guard, `O.K., get the officer.'
"An officer came in after a few minutes. It was the man that we came to know very well as `The Bug.' He was a psychotic torturer, one of the worst fiends that we had to deal with. I said, `O.K., I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital.'"
McCain claims it was only a coincidence that, about the same time he was begging to be taken to a hospital, the Vietnamese learned his father was Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., commander of all U.S. forces in Europe and soontobe commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, including Vietnam.
McCain has admitted that he survived only because the Vietnamese learned who his father was and rushed him to a hospital where his wounds were eagerly treated. He has also conceded that the Vietnamese repeatedly threatened to withhold much needed operations unless he would give them information.
The former POW admitted in the U.S. News and World Report article that the Vietnamese usually left other U.S. prisoners with similar wounds to die, not wishing to waste medication on them. McCain pointed out "there were hardly any amputees among the prisoners who came back because the North Vietnamese just would not give medical treatment to someone who was badly injured. They weren't going to waste their time."
The communists figured that because POW McCain's father was of such high military rank, McCain was of royalty and the governing circle. They bragged that they had captured "the crown prince" and treated him as a "special prisoner." 
"Dr. Fernando Barral, a Spanish psychiatrist residing in Cuba, returned from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam . . . he brought back some journalistic news: an interview with a North American pilot captured in the DRV after bombing Hanoi on 26 October 1967. The meeting between him and the pilot took place in an office of the Committee for Foreign Cultural Relations in Hanoi. The pilot interviewed is Lt Cmdr John Sidney McCain [left], son and grandson of American Navy Admirals.
"In the course of the interview, on various occasions he showed that knowledge of the language, saying some words, dates, and so forth in Spanish, or [using it] when he thought the interpreter was seeking the corresponding French word.
"Naturally, from the beginning this established a more direct communication between us, and more than one question or my response was made directly in Spanish." Havana Granma January 24, 1970
U.S. Veteran Dispatch Editor's note: In case you missed it, McCain's meeting with the Cuban "took place in an office of the Committee for Foreign Cultural Relations in Hanoi" away from the POW camp.
When Col. Bui Tin, a former Senior Colonel in the North Vietnamese Army (he had actually interrogated McCain and other U.S. prisoners) testified before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs in 1992, McCain did not display that same "pit bull" inclination to attack as he did when the POW/MIA families and activists were testifiying.
During a break in the hearing, Sen. McCain moved to where Col. Bui Tin was seated and warmly embraced him as if he were a long lost brother.
Sen. John McCain (left) warmly greeted Vietnam Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet (right) during a 1992 visit to Hanoi. Kiet was a ranking communist party member of the secret Central Committee of the former National Liberation Front (Viet Cong), and was part of the elite clique responsible for setting policies and directing the communist war waged against the prodemocracy Vietnamese as well as U.S. forces in South Vietnam.
As a senior Central Committee member, Kiet ordered American POWs to be punished by execution and helped formulate the Vietnamese communist policy which resulted in the murder of thousands of proU.S. South Vietnamese in Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Communist Party henchmen executed over 5,000 men, women, and children, burying many of them alive in mass graves during the brief time North Vietnamese troops held that historic ancient Vietnamese city. 
July 11, 1995 Sen. Jonh McCain, R-Ariz., (right), and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., (center), gave President Bill Clinton, (left), the valuable political cover he needed to remove the U.S. imposed trade embargo against communist Vietnam. All major U.S. veterans organizations, the two POW/MIA family groups, and the majority of VietnameseAmericans in this country opposed Clinton's lifting of the embargo.
Senator McCain (left) is pictured above embracing Mai Van On in Hanoi, November 13, 1996. On identified himself as one of the Vietnamese who pulled McCain from Hanoi's Truc Bach Lake, where McCain parachuted in 1967 after his bomber was shot down. McCain has said, many times, that, after pulling him from the lake, the Vietnamese brutally beat him and stabbed him with a bayonet.
Maybe I am feeling cynical today but isn't the first amendment what showed that "Straight Talk" McCain was as dirty as they come?
Is that the reason he is so anti-freedom of speech?
You heard it first, here on FreeRepublic!
I like your plan. The details on mine would be 12 years tops in Congress - total. That means if you're in the House and want to be in the Senate, your total service could not total more than 12 years. Then add the 2 terms for President and nobody could ever spend more than 20 years in elected Federal office. SCOTUS should simply be a 20 year appointment staggered at intervals to insure that one 8 term president could only change 5 Justices. I think you are spot on about Federal jobs, too, but only for management.
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