(from Zealot; The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan. . . )
". . . It was around this time that a new and far more fearsome group of bandits arose in Galilee, led by a magnetic teacher and revolutionary known as Judas the Galilean. The traditions say that Judas was the son of the famed bandit chief Hezekiah, the failed messiah whom Herod had captured and beheaded forty years earlier as part of his campaign to clear the countryside of the bandit menace. After Herod's death, Judas the Galilean joined forces with a mysterious Pharisee named Zaddok to launch a wholly new independence movement that Josephus terms the "Fourth Philosophy," so as to differentiate it from the other three "philosophies": the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. What set the member of the Fourth Philosophy apart from the rest was their unshakable commitment to freeing Israel from foreign rule and their fervent insistence, even unto death, that they would serve no lord save the One God. There was a well-defined term for this type of belief, one that all pious Jews, regardless of their political stance, would have recognized and proudly claimed for themselves: zeal. . . "
Mother always told us it's not nice to hate
She'd been practicing that golden rule for years
If we'd only treat each other how we want to be ourselves
God will love us
God will love us
When I first met you I was quite impressed
So much more than pretty face among the crowd
And it didn't happen overnight but the curtain slowly fell
And the colors of your rainbow were revealed
You are the tribis hippocriticus
You are the tribis hippocriticus
You are the tribis hippocriticus
We don't like you
Just trying to be honest
From your position of authority
You looked down and not across our great divide
With a smile upon your face and hands placed firm on the controls
You're so artistic
You're so artistic
Expertise portrayed for all appearances
Pure professional facade to face the crowd
But just beneath that thick veneer reside reality
The truth is evident and there for
You are the tribis hippocriticus
You are the tribis hippocriticus
You are the tribis hippocriticus
We don't like you
Just trying to be honest
'Cause that's the way we all should be
We're not islands
We're not stones
And just what will it take
To make you see this truth
Let me make it crystal clear how strongly that I feel
'Bout the way you take advantage for yourself
If you took the power devoted to your cold conniving ways
And you turned it
And you turned it totally around
Direct it to another place
Try to do what you have done unto yourself
Just a little understanding there are others here with you
This revolving's not designed for only you
You are the tribis hippocriticus
You are the tribis hippocriticus
You are the tribis hippocriticus
We don't like you
Just trying to be honest
(By binaryloop, at http://libertycrier.com/forum/congress-quietly-repeals-insider-trading-ban/)
While Congress might be stuck in a deadlock on just about every issue imaginable, there’s one piece of legislation that both Democrats and Republicans hate unanimously: the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, a law passed last year designed to prevent insider trading among lawmakers and government officials by requiring them to post disclosures of their financial transactions online.
Both parties and both houses of Congress hated the disclosure portion of the law so much that it was repealed last Friday (4/12/13) without debate—the measure was sent to the President by unanimous consent. The ordeal took about 10 seconds in the Senate and 14 seconds in the House, according to official records.
The STOCK Act would have required members of Congress, their aides, and other federal employees making more than $119,554 a year to disclose their financial dealings in an online database. It was supposed to prevent government officials from using insider knowledge about policy-making to profit from stock trades and other investments.
Upon the signing of the bill into law last year (pictured above), President Barack Obama said, “The idea that everybody plays by the same rules is one of our most cherished American values. It’s the notion that the powerful shouldn’t get to create one set of rules for themselves and another set of rules for everybody else, and if we expect that to apply to our biggest corporations and to our most successful citizens, it certainly should apply to our elected officials—especially at a time when there is a deficit of trust between this city and the rest of the country.” The White House has not said whether the President will sign the repeal.
Despite the repeal, government officials will still have to file disclosures of securities trades over $1,000 within 45 days, but they no longer have to file them in a searchable database that was to be easily accessible to the public.
Congress and the President had delayed the online posting portion of the act from going into effect 3 times already, but the ultimate repeal came after the National Academy of Public Administration, a nonprofit group, found that publishing the information would create an “unwarranted risk to national security and law enforcement, as well as threaten agency missions, individual safety and privacy,” in a report delivered last month. The group suggested that the online posting requirements should be suspended indefinitely.
Lisa Rosenberg of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit group advocating for government transparency, said that the repeal “sets an extraordinarily dangerous precedent suggesting that any risks stem not from information being public but from public information being online.“
Rules were made to be broken. Constitutions were written at specific points in historical time when specific circumstances existed. Many circumstances that existed at that time have CHANGED. That's why females can now vote. That's why slavery no longer exists.
(from Thom Hartmann, Truthout | News Analysis)
". . . The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."
It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.
Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, "Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller." There were exemptions so "men in critical professions" like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work. Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 - including physicians and ministers - had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.
And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.
By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.
If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband - or even move out of the state - those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether.
These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves) and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (who opposed slavery on principle, but also opposed freeing slaves).
Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves.
This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces. "Liberty to Slaves" was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps. During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington's army. . . "
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It post-election cheating that causes more problems. . .
(from http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2012/10/05/no-mitt-romney-did-not-bring-cheat-notes-to-the-debate)
". . . The Commission on Presidential Debates, which runs the debate logistics, did not release its contract of rules to the public this year. And it has not responded to request for comment on the 2012 debate rules. But a copy of the 2004 contract of rules reads: "No props, notes, charts, diagrams, or other writings or other tangible things may be brought into the debate by any candidate." The candidate can take notes, but only on a pad provided by commission staff.
As far as the rule on "tangible things," hankies appear to be an exception.
A forensic video analyst, who did not wish to be named because of pending state and federal cases he’s working on, says he also believes the white object was just a handkerchief.
“The size, thickness, and overall dimensionality when he first walks up to the podium is consistent with a handkerchief, and not with a single note card,” he tells Whispers. “The elemental movement and mechanics [later on in the video] also suggest it’s absolutely a handkerchief he picks up around his face.”
A number of commenters (sic) have pointed to a later part in the video, when Romney collects sheets of paper from the podium at the end of the debate instead of leaving them behind. It’s worth noting that candidates do receive paper from the commission to take notes on, so it was likely those papers Romney was collecting. . . "
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