Free Republic

"The media is kind of weird these day on politics," Mr. Gore told Josh Benson of the New York Observer, who was kind enough to print his remarks. "There are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party. Fox News Network, The Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh — there's a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media. The rest of the media has been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this fifth column in their ranks."

As I wrote on another thread on Daschle's whining, today, following the Thanksgiving Day interview of Limbaugh by Tim Russert, revealing a very reasonable and insightful Rush, Daschle may be regretting his "shrill" accusations.

Speaking of shrill, has Daschle never listened to James Carville, Paul Begala, Bill Press, Eleanor Clift, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and the host of other non-stop and mindless Clinton-controlled DNC spokesmen? There's not a principled thinker among them--just Kool-Aid worshipers at the feet of the former two-for-the-price-of-one Boss Hogg pretenders.

What Daschle has wound up doing is to get people who never would have listened to Rush now paying attention in a brand new way and seeing the shallow whining of the former Senate non-Leader, as well that of the former VP to the pretenders. By the way, does Gore really not "get" how truly ridiculous he appears to most of mainstream America?

Rush Limbaugh has 20 million listeners. If Tom Daschle wants to make progress for his side why doesn't he go on his show and talk to them?

After the Thanksgiving Day interview of Limbaugh by Tim Russert, revealing a very reasonable and insightful Rush, Daschle may be regretting his "shrill" accusations.

Speaking of shrill, has Daschle never listened to James Carville, Paul Begala, Bill Press, Eleanor Clift, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and the host of other non-stop and mindless Clinton-controlled DNC spokesmen? There's not a principled thinker among them--just Kool-Aid worshipers at the feet of the former two-for-the-price-of-one Boss Hogg pretenders.

What Daschle has wound up doing is to get people who never would have listened to Rush now paying attention in a brand new way and seeing the shallow whining of the former Senate non-Leader.

"abortion should be a side issue compared with cutting taxes and strengthening our military."

Would this have something to do with the old quotation that was something like a warning about "gaining the whole world and losing one's soul"....

binky2000 said:

"I can't understand how people that speak so intelligently and rationally on issues of economy and foreign policy can get so wrapped up in religious fervor over abortion.

"I am pro-choice. There is no other way for me to see it. I have to look at it as cold as possible. There are pregnant kids who have NO BUSINESS caring for a child. These children, if allowed to be born, would cause further money drain on our already too socialized country (for the most part). The mothers (for the most part) may also be forced to alter their life plans, and possibly quit their hourly waged jobs and get on the welfare system (in this scenario, the child's husband was a complete waste and spliut town). Who is benefitting from this child's birth? Not me, not the child, not the mother, not the taxpayer, not the country."

Welcome!

You make a good point about our "too socialized country." As a matter of fact, advocates of socialism, knowingly or not, actually devalue the individual's right to the fruits of his own labors (an underlying foundation of our Declaration of Independence), and, as certain Americans have embraced the ideas of socialism, they also have come to devalue the primary idea of that Declaration of Independence, the "self-evident" truth that individuals are "created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Rather than containing ideas that are dangerous to liberty, that Declaration's assertions are the very foundation of the protections our Constitution of 1787 affords.

Given that backdrop of history, is it logical that the right to life is the most basic right of all?

Perhaps children may now be looked upon as a "drain" because we first accepted the premise you identified, and if the individual's right to property produced by his own work is not honored, neither is his/her right to life.

On a more down-to-earth level, there is another idea which always bothers me when I hear discussions about whether what has, in my lifetime, come to be called a "fetus" is, in fact, a human life, separate and apart from the body that houses it, or merely an appendage of the woman. The bothersome and overlooked reality is this:

Whether the "thing" inside the woman's womb is referred to by the woman as a "fetus" or a "baby" relies exclusively on whether she, herself, wants a child. If she wants a child, every time she refers to it, she will call it a "baby." On the other hand, if she does not want to give birth to a child, there are less personal ways by which society has made it acceptable to refer to the womb's contents. If she miscarries in the early weeks of a pregnancy, one never hears a woman say, "I lost my fetus." It is always, "I lost my baby." Perhaps this is merely a matter of semantics, or is it a deeper acknowledgment that there was, in fact, a live little person whose life was at stake? And, why is it that doctors will work hard to save the "life" in the womb of a pregnant accident victim?

Another thought: I've never heard an advocate of what is called "a woman's right to choose" declare with confidence, "The world would have been a better place if my mother had ended the pregnancy that resulted in me." Does this mean that our nation's law is based on an "everyone else but me" premise?

As citizens of America and of the world, we are faced with great problems which beg for solutions if the cause of liberty is to survive for future generations. All of which brings me to another troubling question:

If, over the last few decades, our nation's law possibly has been wrong on the abortion question, how many potentially brilliant minds and gifted leaders may we have extinguished--men and women who might have developed solutions to the problems we face? I suppose this approach questions whether, for the society, a full-term human being is a potential "drain" or a potential blessing, remembering that some of history's most prominent leaders have come from circumstances of abject poverty.

Email your friends and family in Florida and remind them to vota against this guy.

BTTT.

Reminder on ousting Anstead. Freepers, help!!!

jwalsh07 said: "It's my wish that when I'm long gone and my grandkids are my age, Clintonism will be a bad memory relegated to the history books."

Perhaps that history book story on the presidency of Bill Clinton will contain sections headed:

"How An American President Weakened America's Defenses;"

"The 1993-2000 Infiltration of America by Terrorist Cells;"

"Clintons/McAuliff Take Over Democratic Party, Undermining Election Process;" and,

"Clintons/McAuliff Ousted by Traditional Democrats After Worst Losses Ever in 2002 and 2004."

Email your friends and family in Florida and remind them to vote against this guy.

This message needs to get coverage by talk show hosts through election day!

It has been done as a public service by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication for more than 20 years. Details of the survey are available from the school.

Considering that Wellstone got his leftist political background from UNC-Chapel Hill and that the school has a long history of spawning such philosophy, perhaps this so-called "poll" is merely a push to spur Democrats to work harder to get out the vote for the Democrats.

Other polls are showing the race much closer, and the Republicans may regret the day they shunned truly conservative candidates in order to run Bob Dole's wife as a replacement for the "grand old man" of conservatism. Let's hope not, but they've taken a real chance which may cost conservatives big time.

As far as Mondale goes, please someone . . . do an intervention on those eyeglasses. Talk about Stuck in the Seventies!

He looks like an owl--a very ugly owl.

Actually, they match those worn by Erskine Bowles in North Carolina, and he had the gall to do a TV commercial which had a child say something to him like, "...you sure wear ugly glasses!"

Maybe the 70's crowd sees this as a nostalgia thing and will put Hillary back in her eyeglasses, no makeup and hair-parted-in-the-middle style (see early pics of her in Arkansas) when she runs for President.

You responded to my comment: America's Founders would be astounded to find that many of today's defense lawyers believe it to be their constitutional duty to help guilty persons avoid the consequences of their acts. Their actions are in direct opposition to the Founders' understanding of justice (meaning that each person is equal before the law and should receive that which is due him--no more, no less).

Your words: "Absolutely wrong. The Founders came from the same kind of adversarial legal system we have today, a system that predates the Constitution."

You missed my point. Of course, the Founders advocated an adversarial system as the best protection for liberty. The key clause in my statement was: "today's defense lawyers believe it to be their constitutional duty to help guilty persons avoid the consequences of their acts." It is that aspect of today's system, I believe, that the Founders would find disturbing and opposing their concept of justice.

Quote for me any one of the Founders who believed that justice demanded that a defense attorney should assist in freeing a guilty person.

While even a guilty person should be afforded counsel and rights to a jury trial before his/her peers, they believed, the Founders, IMHO, would never approve of the misuse and abuse of the adversarial system which is practiced today (witness the O. J. case and other equally bizarre miscarriages of justice).

He's got to because we all know that the next dem that occupies the WH is going to be more corrupt than the last one.

How could that be?

With the co-presidency of the Arkansas wannabees, we had two for one, a double dose of classless, sleazy pretenders who would stop at nothing to possess power and control over the lives of others.

Oh, well, for eight years they told us that honesty didn't matter as long as a person just "does his job." Now, those same talking heads have discovered that if the dishonest person just happens to be CEO of a major corporation, personal honesty really does matter after all.

Only an ignorant and uniformed electorate could have elected such a morally bankrupt person to head the executive branch, and we are now reaping just the beginning of the harvest of our ignorance.

Perhaps all of us might benefit from a review of a Russell Kirk essay on the concept of justice understood by America's Founders which can be found at http://www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/kirk/kirk457.html.

Could you give an example of a "procedural straw?"

Oops...guess I was too quick to use a non-legal term for what I perceive to be nit-picking by over-zealous defense attorneys, more concerned with winning than with "doing justice." With your knowledge of the law, however, I do believe you know exactly what was meant by my equally "over-zealous" criticism. I'll let you review some cases and arrive at my meaning.

All of us who are devoted to the principles of our Declaration and Constitution must realize that Cicero, Blackstone, and our Founders would never envision justice as including a provision for enabling criminals to prey upon the innocent.

StoneMountain said: One is innocent until proved guilty. If the system is not able to prove someone is guilty, then he is innocent. No, "if the system is not able to prove someone is guilty, then he is not "innocent," he may simply have escaped punishment (witness O. J.). He may be innocent.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "subversion." In an adversarial system, any lawyer who doesn't use all of the tools at his disposal to defend his client is guilty of malpractice. If a lawyer sees a legal way to advocate for his client, he MUST do so.

Pardon me, but this is precisely the premise which has brought us to where we are today and threatens to undermine the concept of justice well understood by the founding generation when they instituted our constitutional protections. It is the faulty premise promulgated by law schools and the Dershowitz's of the world, and it has nothing to do with doing justice or preserving the principles of our constitution.

It deals more with deception, distortion, and an "anything goes if it gets my client off" attitude, including inciting racial emotions, grasping at procedural straws that have nothing to do with guilt or innocence, and everything to do with putting "notches" on the defense attorney's gun for the greatest number of "wins" (call that "losses" for the society who must have these guilty criminals living in its midst).

SpinyNorman said: Lawyers are only supposed to preserve the rights and legal protections that a client (host) has coming to him/her, not create a situation that obscures or bypasses their guilt. Helping a criminal (to escape punishment*), admitted or guilty by reason of evidence, makes you an accessory to the crime in my opinion. *My edit.

He is right. America's Founders would be astounded to find that many of today's defense lawyers believe it to be their constitutional duty to help guilty persons avoid the consequences of their acts. Their actions are in direct opposition to the Founders' understanding of justice (meaning that each person is equal before the law and should receive that which is due him--no more, no less).

Alleged criminals are entitled to have their day in court, with competent counsel, to present facts which may show them to be innocent of the charges against them.

Those law schools, law professors, and lawyers who use the American justice system to do injustice to their fellow citizens are perverting the system and wreaking havoc on the society (witness the Avila "acquittal" which allowed a monster to prey upon the precious Samantha).

One could never wish it, but if such monsters preyed upon the children of defense attorneys, we might see a change in some attitudes.

the 12 jurors who share a slice of responsiblity for the death of Samantha.

Don't forget the defense lawyers who twist and turn facts in order to "win" (translation = free guilty people) and the judges who don't appropriately instruct jurors.

BTTT!

Let's not let this one continue to be ignored by the media. Liberal defense lawyers and judges who work hard to turn these people loose on the women and children of our society must be spotlighted and held accountable!

Unfortunately, it's cheaper to keep them in prison the rest of their lives.

Not if the defense lawyers and liberal judges will stop enriching themselves by stringing out the appeals process.

This case should be given the same degree of media coverage as the Smart and Runnion cases.

American women and children are the victims of defense lawyers and liberal judges who send these animals out to prey upon the society.

American citizens must insist that the Founders' concept of legal justice be re-examined and re-instituted as the basis of our court system.

Dr. Russell Kirk's writings, which a decade or so ago were so important to understanding conservative thought, dealt with historical philosophical foundations of justice and that concept which was present at the time of the formation of the American constitution. For a sample of his writings, consult http://www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/kirk/kirk457.html.

There is no excuse for what defense lawyers and liberal judges have loosed upon us today!