Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Boom Bang A Bang Bang
Poor Medvedev must be a very frightened man indeed. First Miliband and now this.
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
Ramadan: Focusing The Mind
We need to re-learn the value of structured daily prayer, of setting aside one day in seven, of fasting, of almsgiving, of pilgrimage, of the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, of the lesser outward and greater inward struggle, of the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique both of capitalism and of Marxism, of the coherence between faith and reason, and of a consequent integrated view of art and science.
The answer to the challenge of the Sunna is Sacred Tradition. The answer to the challenge of the Imamate is the Petrine Office. And the answer to the challenge of Sufism is our own tradition of mysticism and monasticism.
Liberal Catholics will be the last to see the point.
The answer to the challenge of the Sunna is Sacred Tradition. The answer to the challenge of the Imamate is the Petrine Office. And the answer to the challenge of Sufism is our own tradition of mysticism and monasticism.
Liberal Catholics will be the last to see the point.
Vox Clamantis In Deserto
When not joined with those who have just bought Manchester City Football Club in bankrolling the Clintons and in holding us all to ransom because we refuse to build enough nuclear power stations, re-open our mines and switch to public transport, our friends the Saudis, the people who certainly bombed New York on 9/11 and who undoubtedly funded the bombing of London on 7/7, are paying for and running this country's most important mosque, are bankrolling the Bushes, are owning at least eleven per cent of the American economy, and are being received in great state by the Queen.
Easing The Congestion
Some undergraduate somewhere apparently wrote this year that "railways were invented to ease the congestion on motorways". Well, ha ha, and all that. Though not as good as the one once told to me: "Lady Macbeth is the sort of wife that Othello or Leontes can only dream of."
Anyway, even though it first appeared here on 30th October last year, this, by Peter Hitchens, is so good that I hope nobody will mind my reprinting it in full:
Here's a brief thought on a question that continues to baffle me. Transport, as it is unexcitingly called, is one of the most important responsibilities of government. Run well, it can make a whole country more civilised and more enjoyable. Visit Switzerland if you want to see what I mean. The Zurich trams are so good, reliable, clean, safe, comfortable and swift that businessmen leave their Mercedes at home. Clean, regular, reasonably-priced trains hurry from everywhere to everywhere punctually and at satisfying speeds. Result, pleasanter, cleaner, more spacious cities and a more unspoiled countryside, happier people, more efficient business, plus a general feeling of sociability, missing where everyone is in a private box.
Run badly, it can make the simplest task into a misery, blight whole hours of the day, discourage sociability, and drive millions into bad-tempered rage which all-too-frequently gets taken out on those around them. It can add needless hours to an already long working day. I find it quite amazing that Britain, a rich, compact country, which invented passenger railways and which has been so blessed with superb engineers and builders, should have made such a mess of its roads and railways - and, as a result, of its cities and countryside.
First of all, let us consider the wild frenzy of rail closures that followed Sir Richard Beeching's deeply mistaken report, published in March 1963.
The report was so destructive that even the British government - always a sucker for bad ideas - in the end balked at putting it all into effect. But it withdrew railway services from a huge part of the country, on the daft grounds that smaller, less busy lines were not profitable and were therefore not worth keeping open. Here are a few examples of its results known in detail, personally, to me, because I used long ago to use the lines involved. One is the old LSWR main line from Exeter to Plymouth, a great feat of engineering that curved round the northern edge of Dartmoor. This was closed in the mid-1960s, and is now greatly missed - especially when the sea washes away or swamps the other line to Plymouth, which runs along the coast at Dawlish. The part of the line east of Exeter is still in existence, but is only a single line, so cannot be used to take extra trains when engineering works (which seem to be amazingly frequent) close down the line at Taunton. This line would also come in very handy during the summer months, when the existing services to the South West are so crowded that reservations are compulsory.
Then there is the line between Oxford and Cambridge, one of the very few East-West rail routes in the country, also destroyed in the 1960s. This is not only a loss to the two university cities, which now have no civilised connection between them, only an interminable bus service, a long and unpleasant car journey, or a lengthy rail voyage via London involving a tangle with the Circle Line of the London Tube, a service so unreliable and nebulous that I find it quite hard to believe in at all. It also means that useful goods and passenger link between the old Great Western main line (to Wales, Birmingham and the South West) and the old LMS main line (to the North-West and the West of Scotland) and the old LNER main line (to the North East and the East of Scotland) has been lost. I am sure there are plenty of other examples of such foolish closures known to other readers. These on their own are evidence of the unreasonable and myopic policies of the 1960s, when everyone imagined that the car was king and railways were doomed. Near where I live there are now several substantial towns - Abingdon, Wantage, Cirencester, Farringdon, Witney, Wallingford, Thame - which have no rail service at all. These are not little villages, but proper places, where you now have to have, or use, a car to join the national transport system.
Now, just imagine if somebody (let us call him Dr Richard Botching) was asked to study the profitability of Britain's roads. What would he find? Thousands of suburban Acacia avenues simply don't justify the cost of maintaining them. Hundreds of rural B-roads, not to mention unclassified country roads, likewise make a colossal loss. (Actually, he would find that every inch of road in the country was run at an enormous loss and subsidised heavily by the taxpayer, but let that pass for the moment, I'll get back to it). And then say Dr Botching issued a report recommending that these 'unprofitable' routes were shut, and that people would just have to find their own way to centres where they could join the remaining, truncated road network. Dr Botching would not become Sir Richard Botching, let alone Lord Botching. He would probably be given Care in the Community, and his report hurled into the nearest bin. And yet Dr Botching's logic is exactly the same as Dr Beeching's.
And, as a result of this brilliant businessman's unhinged review of our railway system, the sixties saw the deliberate ripping up of thousands of miles of irreplaceable track - some of it actually built with great foresight so as to link up with a future Channel Tunnel, and carry the wider trains used on the continent. They destroyed hundreds of bridges and tunnels, built at great cost in money, effort and often lives, untold numbers of cuttings and embankments, dug out in Victorian times with enormous effort. Take a country walk in most parts of southern England and you will come upon the relics of this grand absurdity, the grass growing over what could by now be modern, reliable transport links, friendly to the environment and saving who knows how much space, who knows how much noise, who knows how much fuel imported from unstable despotisms.
They threw away land which had been carefully assembled - at a time of much lower land prices - to provide efficient and sensible routes between and through towns and cities. It was amazing how swiftly crucial pieces of such land were sold off and built upon, how rapidly bridges were demolished, so that there was no hope of putting back what had been lost except at unthinkable expense. All this irreplaceable national wealth was trashed in a brief, unreasoning frenzy - in the short time before the world became aware that it could not depend forever on cheap oil and petrol, and before we in this country realised that the American transport solution of more and more, wider and wider superhighways was both impractical and unaffordable in our much smaller landscape. Not that it worked in the USA either.
Now, people are often short-sighted in politics and business, and this doesn't make them left or right wing. But once it is clear that a major mistake has been made, it is up to conservatives to point out that it would have been better to leave things alone, and that what has been destroyed should, where possible, be replaced and repaired. But the role of the Tory Party in this vandalism was to cheer it on at the time, to do nothing effective to reverse or mitigate it, and to make it even worse though rail privatisation. Lady Thatcher spoke at one time of a 'Great Car Economy' and was noted for rarely if ever travelling by train, even when it would have made much more sense to do so. But she had more sense than to privatise British Railways. John Major, a competitor for worst Prime Minister in History on so many grounds, ignored all warnings (and there were many) against his privatisation scheme, which had the effect of making the railways more expensive and worse, and in destroying any central direction which might (for instance) plan a new system of high-speed trains, electrify a major main line or reopen strategic links lost in the 1960s. The taxpayer also has the worst of all possible worlds, paying fat subsidies to the railways but with almost no say in how they are run.
In what way is this policy conservative? In what way, come to that, does it serve the free market? Tories often seem to assume that the road network, without which every car in the country would be less useful for transport purposes than an electric lawnmower, just exists. But it doesn't. It is the result of huge amounts of spending by national and local taxpayers, a colossal unacknowledged nationalised industry which would collapse in six months without its subsidies. The Left claim to be pro-railway - it was a left-wing author, David Hare who, in his powerful play 'The Permanent Way' rightly excoriated the idiots who brought us to the low point at the turn of the century, when there seemed to be a crash every few months. But in fact Left-wing governments, in the 1960s, 1970s and now have done little that is imaginative or bold to restore or encourage Britain's railway system. Perhaps it's fear of public opinion. Perhaps they are as devoted to the road lobby as the Tories seem to be, or perhaps they just listen to the Transport Department (which seems to think it is the Department for Motorways). Likewise, in the USA, supposedly the home of free market conservatism, it was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, who wrecked the (unsubsidised) passenger railroads. How? By pretending that the Interstate Highway network (America's motorway system) was necessary for evacuating the cities in the event of a nuclear war, and so securing federal funds for it. Everywhere a taxpayer subsidised motorway was built, passenger rail services rapidly declined. The USA now badly needs high-speed rail services in many areas, but has only one proper fast passenger line, between Boston and Washington DC. The rest of the system is constantly on the edge of closure, despite some very dedicated attempts by the passenger railroad system, Amtrak, to stay alive. But the argument that subsidising railways is somehow unfair and wrong, whereas roads are the land of the free, simply doesn't stand up.
Railways are conservative, in Britain especially, because we invented them and they are ideally suited to our landscape. They are conservative because they help to conserve countryside, and because they are, when well run, a disciplined service requiring loyalty and dedication from their workers, not unlike the armed forces. They are conservative because they can be made to rely on national sources of energy, since electricity can be produced by nuclear reactors, coal or even waves. They are conservative because, by giving a centre to towns and cities, they promote cohesion and discourage shapeless ribbon development and the atomisation of society which follows when everyone relies on the car for transport.
Cars, on the other hand, encourage globalism in culture and economics, force us into dependency on oil states and therefore influence our foreign policy in unconservative directions, radically reshape cities and countryside, marginalise the old who cannot afford to run them, break up established communities by their greed for land and by the way in which modern roads act as impassable barriers.
And I won't even go into the problems of air travel, and the way in which this is subsidised and encouraged at the expense of railways.
People go into politics because they believe that the State should do certain things. When the State delivered education and health care, and ran things like railways and utilities, then it felt no need to introduce ID cards, or to bang people up for six weeks without even so much as charging them, or to keep vast databases on them, or to watch them all the time. For that matter, no such needs were felt when the Police patrolled the streets on foot.
But now, having arbitrarily decided that they will not do such sensible and necessary things as delivering education and health care, or running railways and utilities, or ensuring that the Police patrol the streets on foot, how are the political and administrative classes to occupy their time? Why, by introducing ID cards, and banging people up for six weeks without even so much as charging them, and keeping vast databases on them, and watching them all the time, of course.
That, and waging pointless, unwinnable wars.
Enough.
Public ownership.
Which, of course, means British ownership. How could any conservative possibly be against that? How could any conservative possibly be in favour of the ownership of key national resources by foreign interests? The only way to prevent that under all circumstances is public ownership.
Anyway, even though it first appeared here on 30th October last year, this, by Peter Hitchens, is so good that I hope nobody will mind my reprinting it in full:
Here's a brief thought on a question that continues to baffle me. Transport, as it is unexcitingly called, is one of the most important responsibilities of government. Run well, it can make a whole country more civilised and more enjoyable. Visit Switzerland if you want to see what I mean. The Zurich trams are so good, reliable, clean, safe, comfortable and swift that businessmen leave their Mercedes at home. Clean, regular, reasonably-priced trains hurry from everywhere to everywhere punctually and at satisfying speeds. Result, pleasanter, cleaner, more spacious cities and a more unspoiled countryside, happier people, more efficient business, plus a general feeling of sociability, missing where everyone is in a private box.
Run badly, it can make the simplest task into a misery, blight whole hours of the day, discourage sociability, and drive millions into bad-tempered rage which all-too-frequently gets taken out on those around them. It can add needless hours to an already long working day. I find it quite amazing that Britain, a rich, compact country, which invented passenger railways and which has been so blessed with superb engineers and builders, should have made such a mess of its roads and railways - and, as a result, of its cities and countryside.
First of all, let us consider the wild frenzy of rail closures that followed Sir Richard Beeching's deeply mistaken report, published in March 1963.
The report was so destructive that even the British government - always a sucker for bad ideas - in the end balked at putting it all into effect. But it withdrew railway services from a huge part of the country, on the daft grounds that smaller, less busy lines were not profitable and were therefore not worth keeping open. Here are a few examples of its results known in detail, personally, to me, because I used long ago to use the lines involved. One is the old LSWR main line from Exeter to Plymouth, a great feat of engineering that curved round the northern edge of Dartmoor. This was closed in the mid-1960s, and is now greatly missed - especially when the sea washes away or swamps the other line to Plymouth, which runs along the coast at Dawlish. The part of the line east of Exeter is still in existence, but is only a single line, so cannot be used to take extra trains when engineering works (which seem to be amazingly frequent) close down the line at Taunton. This line would also come in very handy during the summer months, when the existing services to the South West are so crowded that reservations are compulsory.
Then there is the line between Oxford and Cambridge, one of the very few East-West rail routes in the country, also destroyed in the 1960s. This is not only a loss to the two university cities, which now have no civilised connection between them, only an interminable bus service, a long and unpleasant car journey, or a lengthy rail voyage via London involving a tangle with the Circle Line of the London Tube, a service so unreliable and nebulous that I find it quite hard to believe in at all. It also means that useful goods and passenger link between the old Great Western main line (to Wales, Birmingham and the South West) and the old LMS main line (to the North-West and the West of Scotland) and the old LNER main line (to the North East and the East of Scotland) has been lost. I am sure there are plenty of other examples of such foolish closures known to other readers. These on their own are evidence of the unreasonable and myopic policies of the 1960s, when everyone imagined that the car was king and railways were doomed. Near where I live there are now several substantial towns - Abingdon, Wantage, Cirencester, Farringdon, Witney, Wallingford, Thame - which have no rail service at all. These are not little villages, but proper places, where you now have to have, or use, a car to join the national transport system.
Now, just imagine if somebody (let us call him Dr Richard Botching) was asked to study the profitability of Britain's roads. What would he find? Thousands of suburban Acacia avenues simply don't justify the cost of maintaining them. Hundreds of rural B-roads, not to mention unclassified country roads, likewise make a colossal loss. (Actually, he would find that every inch of road in the country was run at an enormous loss and subsidised heavily by the taxpayer, but let that pass for the moment, I'll get back to it). And then say Dr Botching issued a report recommending that these 'unprofitable' routes were shut, and that people would just have to find their own way to centres where they could join the remaining, truncated road network. Dr Botching would not become Sir Richard Botching, let alone Lord Botching. He would probably be given Care in the Community, and his report hurled into the nearest bin. And yet Dr Botching's logic is exactly the same as Dr Beeching's.
And, as a result of this brilliant businessman's unhinged review of our railway system, the sixties saw the deliberate ripping up of thousands of miles of irreplaceable track - some of it actually built with great foresight so as to link up with a future Channel Tunnel, and carry the wider trains used on the continent. They destroyed hundreds of bridges and tunnels, built at great cost in money, effort and often lives, untold numbers of cuttings and embankments, dug out in Victorian times with enormous effort. Take a country walk in most parts of southern England and you will come upon the relics of this grand absurdity, the grass growing over what could by now be modern, reliable transport links, friendly to the environment and saving who knows how much space, who knows how much noise, who knows how much fuel imported from unstable despotisms.
They threw away land which had been carefully assembled - at a time of much lower land prices - to provide efficient and sensible routes between and through towns and cities. It was amazing how swiftly crucial pieces of such land were sold off and built upon, how rapidly bridges were demolished, so that there was no hope of putting back what had been lost except at unthinkable expense. All this irreplaceable national wealth was trashed in a brief, unreasoning frenzy - in the short time before the world became aware that it could not depend forever on cheap oil and petrol, and before we in this country realised that the American transport solution of more and more, wider and wider superhighways was both impractical and unaffordable in our much smaller landscape. Not that it worked in the USA either.
Now, people are often short-sighted in politics and business, and this doesn't make them left or right wing. But once it is clear that a major mistake has been made, it is up to conservatives to point out that it would have been better to leave things alone, and that what has been destroyed should, where possible, be replaced and repaired. But the role of the Tory Party in this vandalism was to cheer it on at the time, to do nothing effective to reverse or mitigate it, and to make it even worse though rail privatisation. Lady Thatcher spoke at one time of a 'Great Car Economy' and was noted for rarely if ever travelling by train, even when it would have made much more sense to do so. But she had more sense than to privatise British Railways. John Major, a competitor for worst Prime Minister in History on so many grounds, ignored all warnings (and there were many) against his privatisation scheme, which had the effect of making the railways more expensive and worse, and in destroying any central direction which might (for instance) plan a new system of high-speed trains, electrify a major main line or reopen strategic links lost in the 1960s. The taxpayer also has the worst of all possible worlds, paying fat subsidies to the railways but with almost no say in how they are run.
In what way is this policy conservative? In what way, come to that, does it serve the free market? Tories often seem to assume that the road network, without which every car in the country would be less useful for transport purposes than an electric lawnmower, just exists. But it doesn't. It is the result of huge amounts of spending by national and local taxpayers, a colossal unacknowledged nationalised industry which would collapse in six months without its subsidies. The Left claim to be pro-railway - it was a left-wing author, David Hare who, in his powerful play 'The Permanent Way' rightly excoriated the idiots who brought us to the low point at the turn of the century, when there seemed to be a crash every few months. But in fact Left-wing governments, in the 1960s, 1970s and now have done little that is imaginative or bold to restore or encourage Britain's railway system. Perhaps it's fear of public opinion. Perhaps they are as devoted to the road lobby as the Tories seem to be, or perhaps they just listen to the Transport Department (which seems to think it is the Department for Motorways). Likewise, in the USA, supposedly the home of free market conservatism, it was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, who wrecked the (unsubsidised) passenger railroads. How? By pretending that the Interstate Highway network (America's motorway system) was necessary for evacuating the cities in the event of a nuclear war, and so securing federal funds for it. Everywhere a taxpayer subsidised motorway was built, passenger rail services rapidly declined. The USA now badly needs high-speed rail services in many areas, but has only one proper fast passenger line, between Boston and Washington DC. The rest of the system is constantly on the edge of closure, despite some very dedicated attempts by the passenger railroad system, Amtrak, to stay alive. But the argument that subsidising railways is somehow unfair and wrong, whereas roads are the land of the free, simply doesn't stand up.
Railways are conservative, in Britain especially, because we invented them and they are ideally suited to our landscape. They are conservative because they help to conserve countryside, and because they are, when well run, a disciplined service requiring loyalty and dedication from their workers, not unlike the armed forces. They are conservative because they can be made to rely on national sources of energy, since electricity can be produced by nuclear reactors, coal or even waves. They are conservative because, by giving a centre to towns and cities, they promote cohesion and discourage shapeless ribbon development and the atomisation of society which follows when everyone relies on the car for transport.
Cars, on the other hand, encourage globalism in culture and economics, force us into dependency on oil states and therefore influence our foreign policy in unconservative directions, radically reshape cities and countryside, marginalise the old who cannot afford to run them, break up established communities by their greed for land and by the way in which modern roads act as impassable barriers.
And I won't even go into the problems of air travel, and the way in which this is subsidised and encouraged at the expense of railways.
People go into politics because they believe that the State should do certain things. When the State delivered education and health care, and ran things like railways and utilities, then it felt no need to introduce ID cards, or to bang people up for six weeks without even so much as charging them, or to keep vast databases on them, or to watch them all the time. For that matter, no such needs were felt when the Police patrolled the streets on foot.
But now, having arbitrarily decided that they will not do such sensible and necessary things as delivering education and health care, or running railways and utilities, or ensuring that the Police patrol the streets on foot, how are the political and administrative classes to occupy their time? Why, by introducing ID cards, and banging people up for six weeks without even so much as charging them, and keeping vast databases on them, and watching them all the time, of course.
That, and waging pointless, unwinnable wars.
Enough.
Public ownership.
Which, of course, means British ownership. How could any conservative possibly be against that? How could any conservative possibly be in favour of the ownership of key national resources by foreign interests? The only way to prevent that under all circumstances is public ownership.
The Employee Free Choice Act: The New New Deal
Thanks to Right Democrat for this:
A poll by Global Strategies Group this month found that 68 percent of middle-class Americans support the Employee Free Choice Act. Polls also indicate that tens of millions would join a union if they had the choice.
The bill passed the House 241-185 but was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate. It’s a party-line split in the Senate (except for support from Republican Senator Arlen Specter). So the bill would need a Democratic president and something close to 59 Democrats in the Senate in order to pass.
This law would probably change Americans’ lives more than any legislation since the New Deal brought us Social Security. The political influence of millions of new union members would also bring us closer to such basic reforms as universal health care. It’s all long overdue.
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy.
You know what you have to do. The Republicans have proved that they will never enact any pro-life or seriously pro-family legislation. Which, in fact, this is.
A poll by Global Strategies Group this month found that 68 percent of middle-class Americans support the Employee Free Choice Act. Polls also indicate that tens of millions would join a union if they had the choice.
The bill passed the House 241-185 but was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate. It’s a party-line split in the Senate (except for support from Republican Senator Arlen Specter). So the bill would need a Democratic president and something close to 59 Democrats in the Senate in order to pass.
This law would probably change Americans’ lives more than any legislation since the New Deal brought us Social Security. The political influence of millions of new union members would also bring us closer to such basic reforms as universal health care. It’s all long overdue.
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy.
You know what you have to do. The Republicans have proved that they will never enact any pro-life or seriously pro-family legislation. Which, in fact, this is.
Obama No Threat To The Second Amendment
Thanks to Right Democrat for this, too:
A leading defender of the Second Amendment, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) says that a Barack Obama Presidency will not threaten the rights of gun owners.
The National Rifle Association has launched a campaign targeting Obama for his support of gun control measures but Tester disagrees with the powerful lobby.
Montana's Flathead Beacon http://www.flatheadbeacon.com reports Tester stating:
"I've got to tell you, I've talked to Barack. I think he understands the issue much better than before," Tester said in a conference call with reporters from Denver. "I am one of those guys who likes my guns, to be honest with you."
"Tester said that Obama was very clear with him."
"He told me flat out, 'I'm not taking your guns away and don't let anybody tell you that I will,'" Tester recalled. "This campaign does not need to be about fear, this guy is not going to take away your guns."
"Tester also said that Obama has an edge over McCain with hunters because the Democrat will do a better job of protecting public lands and open space."
Some influential Democrats are taking the lead on matters of concern to sportsmen. The National Journal Online www.nationaljournal.com
reports:
Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., and Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., spoke at a National Wildlife Federation briefing Wednesday afternoon, pushing efforts to expand conservation areas for hunting and fishing grounds as well as better protection of the environment for sportsmen.
"Sportsmen have been stereotyped as concerned with one issue: guns. But if you listen to sportsmen as I have over the years ... we hear a different story," said Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation.
The goal is to allow Democrats to play at least a little on the offense on an issue that party leaders will not bring up because of fear of major political repercussions to its members by the powerful National Rifle Association. Top Democrats are still reeling from NRA-led defeats in 1994 of their members who voted for the Brady Bill and legislation to ban some assault weapons. Others say the issue likely cost Gore a win in West Virginia in 2000 that would have put him in the White House.
Dingell said hunting and fishing areas need better environmental protection, specifically citing that enforcement of the Clean Water Act needs to be beefed up to protect those lands. "These have not been a good eight years," said Dingell, a stalwart NRA member. Lincoln cited the increasing loss of public hunting areas that threaten the opportunities for families to go shooting or fishing, like hers will do in a few weeks at a dove hunt in Maryland.
"Democrats are all about conservation. They are all about preservation. I think that's a huge opportunity," Lincoln said.
A blogger for the pro-gun rights Amendment II Democrats had this to say about Obama and his stand on the right to keep and bear arms:
Obama spoke of the gun debate in the same vein as he did abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and immigration in terms of trying to establish common ground between both sides of the debate in classic Hegelian fashion. He cannot be faulted for trying. But his choice of words on the gun issue left much to be desired.
Page 48 of the 2008 Democratic platform explicitly calls for "reinstating the assault weapons ban, so that guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals." This implies, of course, that if you wish to own a rifle with a pistol grip, our party platform has just likened you to the enemies of the public good. Obama's running mate is Senator Joe Biden, who has made banning semi-automatics a top legislative priority and shows no sign of backing away from said legislation now that he's on the ticket.
Despite the increasing presence of Democrats such as Brian Schweitzer, Russ Feingold, Jim Webb, and Bill Richardson who are embracing our Second Amendment rights, it seems that gun policy for the Democratic Party is still being dictated by the likes of the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center instead of by Democrats themselves.
Isn't it time our party found its own voice on gun legislation?
Doesn't our party deserve better than to be snared by the pitfalls of the past?
Standing at that podium, Obama could have made one small change to his acceptance speech without compromising his own core values: "Don't tell me we can't guarantee the right of law-abiding Americans to own AK-47s while keeping them out of the hands of criminals." A small change in wording, true, but one that would have added a new dimension of clarity to Obama's gun policy. And brought in votes from old-school Republicans and independents who can't stand John McCain.
Most important of all, that small change would have demonstrated that Democrats are truly tolerant of other people's choices.
Since the semi-auto ban was passed in 1994, Democrats have been wandering in the wilderness. In 2006, we managed to catch a glimpse of where we needed to be all along.
So my exhortation to Brarack Obama and all my fellow Democrats is for us to find our own voice, shake the dust from our feet, shoulder up our guns, and come on home at last.
http://blog.myspace.com/a2dems
My take: Obama's support for ban on semi-automatic weapons is a bad idea and will no doubt hurt him in November as it will alarm gun owners that envision a slippery slope toward a total confiscation of all firearms. Gun rights supporters should continue to defend their rights but need to look at the big picture rather than being single issue voters. After all, the U.S. Supreme Court has just affirmed the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. With a significant number of pro-gun rights Democrats in Congress, it is going to very difficult for Obama to pass the semi-automatic weapons ban if he wins the general election.
A leading defender of the Second Amendment, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) says that a Barack Obama Presidency will not threaten the rights of gun owners.
The National Rifle Association has launched a campaign targeting Obama for his support of gun control measures but Tester disagrees with the powerful lobby.
Montana's Flathead Beacon http://www.flatheadbeacon.com reports Tester stating:
"I've got to tell you, I've talked to Barack. I think he understands the issue much better than before," Tester said in a conference call with reporters from Denver. "I am one of those guys who likes my guns, to be honest with you."
"Tester said that Obama was very clear with him."
"He told me flat out, 'I'm not taking your guns away and don't let anybody tell you that I will,'" Tester recalled. "This campaign does not need to be about fear, this guy is not going to take away your guns."
"Tester also said that Obama has an edge over McCain with hunters because the Democrat will do a better job of protecting public lands and open space."
Some influential Democrats are taking the lead on matters of concern to sportsmen. The National Journal Online www.nationaljournal.com
reports:
Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., and Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., spoke at a National Wildlife Federation briefing Wednesday afternoon, pushing efforts to expand conservation areas for hunting and fishing grounds as well as better protection of the environment for sportsmen.
"Sportsmen have been stereotyped as concerned with one issue: guns. But if you listen to sportsmen as I have over the years ... we hear a different story," said Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation.
The goal is to allow Democrats to play at least a little on the offense on an issue that party leaders will not bring up because of fear of major political repercussions to its members by the powerful National Rifle Association. Top Democrats are still reeling from NRA-led defeats in 1994 of their members who voted for the Brady Bill and legislation to ban some assault weapons. Others say the issue likely cost Gore a win in West Virginia in 2000 that would have put him in the White House.
Dingell said hunting and fishing areas need better environmental protection, specifically citing that enforcement of the Clean Water Act needs to be beefed up to protect those lands. "These have not been a good eight years," said Dingell, a stalwart NRA member. Lincoln cited the increasing loss of public hunting areas that threaten the opportunities for families to go shooting or fishing, like hers will do in a few weeks at a dove hunt in Maryland.
"Democrats are all about conservation. They are all about preservation. I think that's a huge opportunity," Lincoln said.
A blogger for the pro-gun rights Amendment II Democrats had this to say about Obama and his stand on the right to keep and bear arms:
Obama spoke of the gun debate in the same vein as he did abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and immigration in terms of trying to establish common ground between both sides of the debate in classic Hegelian fashion. He cannot be faulted for trying. But his choice of words on the gun issue left much to be desired.
Page 48 of the 2008 Democratic platform explicitly calls for "reinstating the assault weapons ban, so that guns do not fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals." This implies, of course, that if you wish to own a rifle with a pistol grip, our party platform has just likened you to the enemies of the public good. Obama's running mate is Senator Joe Biden, who has made banning semi-automatics a top legislative priority and shows no sign of backing away from said legislation now that he's on the ticket.
Despite the increasing presence of Democrats such as Brian Schweitzer, Russ Feingold, Jim Webb, and Bill Richardson who are embracing our Second Amendment rights, it seems that gun policy for the Democratic Party is still being dictated by the likes of the Brady Campaign and the Violence Policy Center instead of by Democrats themselves.
Isn't it time our party found its own voice on gun legislation?
Doesn't our party deserve better than to be snared by the pitfalls of the past?
Standing at that podium, Obama could have made one small change to his acceptance speech without compromising his own core values: "Don't tell me we can't guarantee the right of law-abiding Americans to own AK-47s while keeping them out of the hands of criminals." A small change in wording, true, but one that would have added a new dimension of clarity to Obama's gun policy. And brought in votes from old-school Republicans and independents who can't stand John McCain.
Most important of all, that small change would have demonstrated that Democrats are truly tolerant of other people's choices.
Since the semi-auto ban was passed in 1994, Democrats have been wandering in the wilderness. In 2006, we managed to catch a glimpse of where we needed to be all along.
So my exhortation to Brarack Obama and all my fellow Democrats is for us to find our own voice, shake the dust from our feet, shoulder up our guns, and come on home at last.
http://blog.myspace.com/a2dems
My take: Obama's support for ban on semi-automatic weapons is a bad idea and will no doubt hurt him in November as it will alarm gun owners that envision a slippery slope toward a total confiscation of all firearms. Gun rights supporters should continue to defend their rights but need to look at the big picture rather than being single issue voters. After all, the U.S. Supreme Court has just affirmed the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. With a significant number of pro-gun rights Democrats in Congress, it is going to very difficult for Obama to pass the semi-automatic weapons ban if he wins the general election.
They Come Over Here...
...buying up our Premiership football clubs.
Yes, the EU is a threat to our sovereignty. Yes, so is American military-industrial hegemony. But so too is a heavy reliance on imports to feed our people. So too is the importation of goods that could be made here, and thus the exportation of the jobs of those who could be doing that work. And so too is the ownership of great swathes of our economy by foreigners or by notionally British people who refuse to pay tax here.
Nadir is reached when foreign states, as such, own our assets. The attention to Manchester City, in itself a trivial matter as football clubs are, might at last begin the process of the shedding of some light on this very, very, very dangerous development.
You can have capitalism or you can have any really good and conservative thing, including national sovereignty. But you can never have both.
Yes, the EU is a threat to our sovereignty. Yes, so is American military-industrial hegemony. But so too is a heavy reliance on imports to feed our people. So too is the importation of goods that could be made here, and thus the exportation of the jobs of those who could be doing that work. And so too is the ownership of great swathes of our economy by foreigners or by notionally British people who refuse to pay tax here.
Nadir is reached when foreign states, as such, own our assets. The attention to Manchester City, in itself a trivial matter as football clubs are, might at last begin the process of the shedding of some light on this very, very, very dangerous development.
You can have capitalism or you can have any really good and conservative thing, including national sovereignty. But you can never have both.
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