Posted on 06/23/2005 7:30:08 AM PDT by Helmholtz
the boiling frog was served an hour ago...
these are a bunch of NEW frogs being added to the pot...
see if they jump.
It says for "public use". Giving it to a hotel is private use.
LOL. What do you think a code or ordinance is if it's not a law? Does your city have an ordinance regarding open container on public streets? If so, get yourself and beer and walk past a cop on the sidewalk. As he's toting you to jail, please tell him the city ordinance is "unenforceable" and then report back to me his response.
Perfect quote.
"While, I like the idea that there is no judicial review in your constitution, France has something far worse---Brussels review."
There isn't really Brussels review.
In the past, practically all policies of the EU were approved of - if not initiated by - France, so the issue didn't come up of a serious tension between Paris and Brussels.
That seems to be about to change.
And if it does there is no question that French sovereignty will remain intact.
We saw this in the British beef issue.
The government simply did not accept that British beef was safe from mad cow disease, in spite of rulings to the contrary. Regardless of what anybody said, that British beef was not going to get into the country. And it did not.
Of course, given corruption, there were cattle smuggled across from England, etc., and there is mad cow in France now as well. But that was not "Brussels review" at work.
I can hardly pretend that France is perfect!
It is far, far from it, with so many problems one does not know where to begin.
It is when I focus on the particular things that are causing such incredible political strains in America, and always have, that I see the problem as the structure of the American government, with the Supreme Court of the US holding the ultimate power.
By my view, the Supreme Court literally caused the US Civil War, by ending political compromise with the Dred Scott decision.
And then, when the Civil War resolved the issue of slavery and the US Constitution was amended to give blacks the rights of citizens and to vote, it was the Supreme Court that reversed all of that and took it all away, in Plessy v. Ferguson.
When some rational state regulation of labor started to happen, it was the Supreme Court that completely ended that with its Lochner decision...only to reverse itself and go so far as to prohibit farmers from growing food on their own land for their own use in the 1930s.
Americans give great credit to the US Supreme Court for desgregation, but it seems to me that all the Brown decision was was the reversal of the Supreme Court's own Plessy ruling the ignored the US Constitution and allowed segregation in the first instance.
The abortion decision Roe v. Wade was abominable. Surely such an issue should be determined by the people.
It just seems to me that there is a maldistribution of power in the US system, and that the lack of any effective check on the US Supreme Court has rendered much of the most important US law completely undemocratic. It is almost as though the US Congress or states decide all of the small, unimportant things, but that anything really important in America is taken away from the democracy and decided only by the Supreme Court.
It does seem a very rare thing these days when freedom actually expands rather than is compromised. Bringing back the 70MPH speed limit and sunset of the assault weapon ban are the only two that come to mind in the last 15 years or so. But it seems that trend is towards a command style political and economic system.
Then we might as well stop playing, we were beat a long, long time ago.
btt
Yo brayn, private property can not be taken by the state to sell as private property. There's a difference between eminent domain and imminent doom.
To answer your question, let me put it this way. It is not 'unconstitutional' to murder your neighbor. However, this is different from you having a 'constitutional right' to murder your neighbor - something you do not have.
The founding fathers were most worried about the courts stealing freedom. Their worst fears have happened.
You are right, the areas in my town that might be call "blighted" are also the areas where the low cost housing is. Older homes yes, the kind starting families and the lower income people buy.
You're right. But it's not just the robed masters. Congress should be able to do something about misconduct in the Judicial branch, but they have chosen not to. The idea that they would even consider passing Campaign Finance Reform is obscene.
This is truly not the country we grew up in.
The key word is "was". Remember where it says that the Feds cannot usurp states rights? I do intend to start paying more attention to what's going on in my backyard though.
Good on ya! Raving here is fine but if we don't let our reps know how raving po'd we are, it is wasted energy. I've called all my reps, state and federal. I live just 30 miles north of New London.
Maybe we could. This isn't a so much partisan issue, as a commoner vs. oligarch thing.
But I don't know what anyone could do. You can't really push for a constitutional amendment, since there already was a constitutional amendment, which the Court chose to ignore.
This decision, this legacy of Roosevelt will be the undoing of a society of free men.
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