Gaga’s nat’l anthem defiling is reprehensible. She & all who cheer her should apologize 2 all serving & retired members of the Armed Forces.
— Allen West (@AllenWest) July 1, 2013
As our colleagues David Kirkpatrick, Kareem Fahim and Ben Hubbard report, the head of the Egyptian military, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, gave President Mohamed Morsi 48 hours “to respond to the people’s demands” or the armed forces would move to impose its “own road map for the future.”
Reaction to the general’s warning, in a statement read aloud on state television, was swift, both online and on the streets of the capital, Cairo, where supporters and opponents of the president were still massed, one day after huge protests.
Intactivists, including representatives from Intact America, will gather in the New York City Pride March to SPREAD THE WORD that EVERY person has the right to an intact body. Intact America is proud to honor those in the gay rights movement who stand with us in the fight to end the brutality of circumcision.Progress!
A FAMILIAR face appeared in many of the protests taking place in scores of cities on three continents this week: a Guy Fawkes mask with a roguish smile and a pencil-thin moustache. The mask belongs to “V”, a character in a graphic novel from the 1980s who became the symbol for a group of computer hackers called Anonymous. His contempt for government resonates with people all over the world.Actually, most of these protests are against leftists and Islamists. If there's going to be a revolution it should be towards decency and good government. Lord knows there's a dearth of that right now, not least of which in the United States, where foreskin equality protesters have taken to the streets in recent days.
The protests have many different origins. In Brazil people rose up against bus fares, in Turkey against a building project. Indonesians have rejected higher fuel prices, Bulgarians the government’s cronyism. In the euro zone they march against austerity, and the Arab spring has become a perma-protest against pretty much everything. Each angry demonstration is angry in its own way.
Yet just as in 1848, 1968 and 1989, when people also found a collective voice, the demonstrators have much in common. Over the past few weeks, in one country after another, protesters have risen up with bewildering speed. They have been more active in democracies than dictatorships. They tend to be ordinary, middle-class people, not lobbies with lists of demands. Their mix of revelry and rage condemns the corruption, inefficiency and arrogance of the folk in charge.
Nobody can know how 2013 will change the world—if at all. In 1989 the Soviet empire teetered and fell. But Marx’s belief that 1848 was the first wave of a proletarian revolution was confounded by decades of flourishing capitalism and 1968, which felt so pleasurably radical at the time, did more to change sex than politics. Even now, though, the inchoate significance of 2013 is discernible. And for politicians who want to peddle the same old stuff, the news is not good.
Marriage in California has now died for lack of a defense.Continue reading.
Most of us would consider such actions cynical, shameful and despicable. Clearly, they undermine public confidence in the legitimacy of the legal system. Yet Kamala Harris tells us that, "it's a great day" because, "it means those people who want to deny same-sex couples the benefits of equal protection and due process under the United States constitution cannot do so simply because they don't like the notion."
In other words, the more than 7 million Californians who exercised their sovereign right to amend their state constitution — an act that the California Supreme Court ruled overwhelmingly was a proper and legal use of the constitutional amendment process — don't matter because she, Kamala Harris, has determined that it was the wrong thing to do and she was not going to let them get away with this "notion." In the world of Kamala Harris, we are banished to the sidelines, not even fit to participate in civil discourse.
The preamble of our Constitution tells us that its purpose is to secure the “blessings of liberty.”
What is a blessing? The first definition in my Webster’s New World Dictionary says that a blessing is “a statement of divine favor”.
How can we secure divine favor in a nation for which the divine is unconstitutional? A prideful nation by definition must be a nation that rejects the idea of a blessing.
In the pride that precedes destruction in America of 2013, we reject that there are truths that don’t come out of a laboratory. We reject that that there are truths that parents get from their parents and pass on to their children.
We reject that there are truths that, when children learn them from their parents, and embrace them and become responsible for them, they become adults.
So now we live in society in which there is nothing that distinguishes a child from an adult, that distinguishes responsible from irresponsible.
Who suffers the most?
First and foremost, children. Because they are deprived from learning and taking seriously the very rules of life’s road that are critical to live successfully.
Even more so, children from minority families....
Let there be no doubt that same-sex marriage is about much more than marriage. It is a deliberate and conscious assault on religion and all traditional values.
We have only two options. Turn back to where we belong or watch the continuing collapse of our country.
The Hunt family continued their campaign to make their 18-year-old daughter America’s Most Famous Sex Offender™ by taking her to New York for Sunday’s 44th annual Gay Pride Parade. Because defending Kate’s right to have gay sex with 14-year-olds isn’t all about lawyers and petitions, you know. It’s also about marching in parades and sightseeing in Manhattan and riding around in limousines.You go, Kate! Statutory rape equality now!
LOS ANGELES — Even as gay-rights advocates in California spent the weekend celebrating the U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing the resumption of same-sex weddings in the state, activists and government experts across the political spectrum were raising concerns the ruling weakens the power of voters to make law through the state's ballot-initiative process.Crocodile tears.
"You'd be hard pressed to find someone more enthusiastic about the outcome of the Supreme Court decision," California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom said in an interview Friday. As mayor of San Francisco, Mr. Newsom oversaw an administration that married thousands of gay couples in 2004—marriages ruled void by the state Supreme Court later that year. "But I do think the decision raises legitimate questions that are very problematic in the future," said Mr. Newsom, a Democrat.
Proposition 8, a ballot initiative approved by California voters in 2008, banned gay marriage in the state. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that its proponents weren't able to defend the law in court because they lacked the legal standing. Chief Justice John Roberts said that under federal precedents, the initiative sponsors were merely "bystanders" with no standing to appear in court.
The state's top officials, Gov. Jerry Brown and Attorney General Kamala Harris, both Democrats, had declined to defend Proposition 8, arguing it was unconstitutional.
Some proponents of the ballot-initiative process—a central if often troublesome element of California's political system—say they worry that the decision undercuts ballot initiatives' purpose: giving voters power to circumvent state officials and make laws directly.
Others argue that it is the judiciary's job to keep the legislative process in check—and to stop laws that are unconstitutional, even if they are supported by a majority of voters.
"Nobody ever imagined that the people on their own could pass any sort of legislation without some sort of judicial review," said Rick Jacobs, founder of the Courage Campaign, a progressive political-advocacy group in the state. "All the Supreme Court did was underscore that."
But some advocates of the proposition system argued that the Supreme Court, by refusing to grant the backers of Proposition 8 the standing to defend the law, effectively gave state officials veto power over voter-backed initiatives if they are challenged in federal court, simply by declining to defend those initiatives.
"It's troubling because often initiatives are passed for the very reason that the state legislature or governor don't support a particular law," said Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine. Mr. Hasen, like some others worried about the implications for the state's ballot initiative system, said he supports gay marriage.
"On a personal basis I'm glad Kamala and Jerry didn't support Prop 8," said Charles Moran, chairman of the California Log Cabin Republicans and an openly gay political consultant based in Los Angeles. "But I'm not happy it set a bad precedent. This could have some long-term impacts on elective politics.…Anytime somebody has a statewide ballot initiative I think there's a new question that has to be asked: Will this pass the smell test of the attorney general and the governor?"
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 28% believe the Supreme Court is doing a good or an excellent job. At the same time, 30% rate its performance as poor. That’s the highest-ever poor rating. It’s also the first time ever that the poor ratings have topped the positive assessments. Thirty-nine percent (39%) give the court middling reviews and rate its performance as fair....Via Althouse.
Overall, 39% of voters now believe the court is too liberal, while 24% believe it is too conservative.
The Civil War was in its third year when Abraham Lincoln was invited to deliver his "few appropriate remarks" at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg. For most of those three years, the war had not gone well for the Union he had been elected to lead as president. A breakaway Confederacy of 11 Southern states had seceded, playing on their declared right to self-determination and fighting off every effort by Union forces to subdue their uprising.Continue reading.
Lincoln understood that their appeal to self-determination was dubious at best. The self-determination the Confederate states desired was the freedom to protect the legalized slavery of 3.9 million black people, purely on the basis of their race, in defiance of what the Declaration of Independence had to say about equality.
And having taken that step away from equality, the Confederacy had kept moving further and further away until its entire life came to resemble a European aristocracy. The Confederacy established an internal passport system for all persons, levied a steeply graduated income tax, appropriated private property for military use, and nationalized Southern industries—iron-making, clothing for military uniforms and even railroads. Even among whites, a disdainful hierarchy of thousand-bale cotton planters and poor white sandhillers emerged.
"The admiration for monarchical institutions on the English model, for privileged classes, and for a landed aristocracy and gentry, is undisguised and apparently genuine," marveled the British journalist William Howard Russell in 1861. King Leopold I of Belgium, in 1863, hoped that the Civil War would "raise a barrier against the United States and provide a support for the monarchical-aristocratic principle in the Southern states."
No wonder, then, that Lincoln exulted when the Confederate army under Robert E. Lee met with a climactic defeat by Union forces at the small Pennsylvania crossroads town of Gettysburg in July 1863. In Lincoln's mind, there was a symbolic coincidence in receiving the news of the Gettysburg victory on the Fourth of July. It was, he told a crowd of well-wishers in Washington, as though a bright line had been drawn between "the first time" in 1776 that "a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self evident truth that all men are created equal," and 1863, when "the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal" had "turned tail" and run.
CAIRO—Egyptians took to the streets on Sunday for nationwide protests against President Mohammed Morsi, presenting a massive popular opposition that rivaled the size of demonstrations that toppled President Hosni Mubarak more than two years ago.Continue reading.
By early evening, legions of protesters had crowded into Cairo's Tahrir Square and filled several city blocks in front of Ittihadiya Palace, the president's main residence, demanding that Mr. Morsi step down and call early elections.
In most protest areas, the atmosphere was ebullient. Families walked with children in tow, some with their faces painted, munching on snacks and waving Egyptian flags. Passing motorists honked their horns, lending a festival aspect to the marches despite weeks of concern over the potential for violence.
Parts of the capital that would normally be starting a workday Sunday were largely quiet. Protesters marched through streets that were almost empty of cars. Shops and restaurants in Cairo remained closed.
Although the main protests remained peaceful, the nation's Health Ministry said five people were killed and more than 400 injured around the country, the Associated Press reported.
Meanwhile, Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo were set ablaze. People inside the building were seen firing at protesters.
Demonstrations of comparable size were reported throughout the country, with streams of Egyptians flooding streets in the coastal city of Alexandria, southern Egypt and the heavily populated Nile Delta region. Smaller protests were held by Egyptian expatriates in Sydney, Paris, Washington and other capitals.
The size of the demonstrations—with the numbers of protesters estimated from hundreds of thousands into the millions—exceeded any of the protests that have taken place since Mr. Mubarak stepped down in February 2011. The massive turnout stood alongside Mr. Morsi's repeated claims that most Egyptians stood behind the country's first-ever elected president.
