Congressional Reform, Part Five

"If we degrade and deprave their minds by servility, it will be absurd to expect, that they who are creeping and abject towards us, will ever be bold and incorruptible assertors of our freedom, against the most seducing and the most formidible of all powers. (p216)"

". . . if we do not permit our members to act upon a very enlarged view of things; we shall at length infallibly degrade our national representation into a confused and scuffling bustle of local agency."

Edmund Burke
Guildhall Speech

Congressional Reform, Part Four

"Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative, to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But, his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
Edmund Burke
Speech to the Electors of Bristol p 54-55.

Congressional Reform, Part Three

"In legal construction, the sense of the people of England is to be collected from the House of Commons; and, though I do not deny the possibility of an abuse of this trust as well as any other, yet I think, without the most weighty reasons, and in the most urgent exigencies, it is highly dangerous to suppose that the House speaks any thing contrary to the sense of the people, or that the representative is silent when the sense of the constituent strongly, decidedly, and upon long deliberation, speaks audibly upon any topic of moment. If there is a doubt whether the House of Commons represents perfectly the whole Commons of Great Britain, (I think there is none) there can be no question but that Lords and the Commons represent the sense of the whole people to the Crown, and to the world. Thus it is, when we speak legally and constitutionally. In a great measure, it is equally true, when we speak prudentially, but I do not pretend to assert, that there are no other principles to guide discretion than those which are or can be fixed by some law, or some constitution; yet before the legally presumed sense of the people should be superseded by a supposition of one more real (as in all cases, where a legal presumption is to be ascertained) some strong proofs ought to exist of a contrary disposition in the people at large, and some decisive indications of their desire upon this subject."
Edmund Burke
Letters on a Regicide Peace p236-37.

Congressional Reform, Part Two

"'Tis not therefore for Kent or Sussex, Lewis or Maidstone, but for the whole nation, that the members chosen in these places are sent to serve in Parliament: and tho it be fit for them as friends and neighbors (so far as may be) to hearken to the opinions of the electors for the information of their judgments, and to the end that what they shall say may be of more weight, when everyone is known not to speak his own thoughts only, but those of a great number of men; yet they are not strictly and properly obliged to give account of their actions to any, unless the whole body of the nation for they serve, and who are equally concerned in their resolutions could be assembled."
Algernon Sidney
Discourses on Government, p 565.

Lex Misericordia

"Sir, there is no human enactment which is just that is not a re-enactment of the law of God."
William Henry Seward
Higher Law Speech

Laws Lean on One Another, Part Two

"Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex and sooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them."

Edmund Burke
Letters on a Regicide Peace, p 126.

Obama Now Selling Judgeships for Health Care Votes?

Obama Now Selling Judgeships for Health Care Votes?

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The Strange Death of Humor, Part Two

This is directed to those of you who write what passes for comedy in 2010. Down's Syndrome is not a hoot. Have you traded in your humanity? What is wrong with you? Do other people's problems make you feel like laughing? Oh, it's your politics. So it is all right to make fun of diseases, so long as it advances your political position. It's vivisection morality again. THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION, WHILE THE WORST ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY.

Things Reversed

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The Falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION, WHILE THE WORST
ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

W.B. Yeats
"The Second Coming"

Laws Lean On One Another

"[S]uch traditions should neither be designated laws nor left unformulated. They are the mortises of a constitution, the connecting links between all the enactments already reduced to writing, and preserved by it, and those yet to be recorded, a true corpus of ancestral and primitive tradition which, rightly instituted and duly followed in practice, will serve as a sure shield for all the statutes hitherto committed to writing, while if they swerve from the right bounds, it is as when a builder's supports give and subside under his edifice; the result is a general collapse of one part upon another, substructure and all that has been so admirably built upon it alike, when once the original supports have fallen."
Plato
Laws, Book Seven, p 176
(A.E. Taylor trans.)

Endorsements

No one really cares about what candidates Estase picks for Illinois's Republican primary, but here goes anyway.

Governor- Dan Proft. He seems to be a solid conservative who might help purify the cloaca maxima of Springfield. No Republican is likely to become governor anyway,but my money is on Proft.

Senator- Patrick Hughes. He is what I think of when I think of a Republican--someone with genuinely conservative social values. What's more, the only other conservative in the race carries some nasty birther baggage. Therefore, I'm going with Hughes to replace the big Dick who is our current Senator.

Typical Squishys

Mark Kirk--someone who calls himself a fiscal conservative, because no one would call him any other kind of conservative. Why is it that the Illinois GOP continues to offer us Durbin-lite instead of a real choice?

Enough Already!

The Night of the Big Wind in Ireland was an incident in the 1840's where hurricane force winds tore the roofs of of thousands of Irish cottages right before temperatures dropped precipitously and snow fell. Many thousands of people died as a result. Yesterday's earthquake in Haiti raises the question once again--why do horrible things happen to countries that have already suffered enough?

Vivisection Morality

"The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community-- which may dispose of it as an expirimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb."

This example of Saul Alinsky type morals comes from Darkness at Noon, page 127, by Arthur Koestler.

From Sinai's Height

I always thought that pro-choice meant being free to choose whether or not to be involved with abortion. That abortion is not about choice is shown by events at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where nurse Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo, a Catholic nurse, was forced to participate in a non-emergency abortion on a 22-week pregnancy. The details can be found at www.hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2009/12/12/pro-life-nurse-forced-to-assist-an-abortion.

BEAR TO THE RIGHT

BEAR TO THE RIGHT
I have an idea-- announce a moratorium on building settlements in Judea and Samaria that commences when Iran abandons all its nuclear program. It would be really nice if our government were as tough on Iran as it is on Israel.

The Catholic Key Blog: Bishop John Wester Challenges Senate, Obama to Allow Undocumented Immigrants Health Coverage

The Catholic Key Blog: Bishop John Wester Challenges Senate, Obama to Allow Undocumented Immigrants Health Coverage
I wish Bishop Wester's ilk cared as much about abortion as they do about inflating our deficit to pay for illegals to get free health care.

Rinky Dink Reading Lists, Rated X

Anyone looking for a real gross-out that won't make you feel like eating for a few days should go to FirstThings.com. They have a very disturbing story about the recommended reading list that Kevin Jennings's organization created for children to read. It includes fun books about first grade boys having sex, wholesome stuff for kids to read. What kind of a psycho thinks that Kevin Jennings has any business being allowed near a school, let alone being made the man in charge of making them safe? How entangled with the promotion of homosexuality is President Obama?

Freedom of Speech

"A freedom of raillery, a liberty in decent language to question everything, and an allowance of unravelling or refuting any argument, without offense to the arguer, are the only terms which can render such speculative conversations in any way agreeable(p 49)."

A.A. Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury)
Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times

An Observation

The difference between a statesman and a politician is the difference between Susan Boyle and Britney Spears. The statesman looks unimpressive and performs well, and the politician is slick and, well, does not perform well. See also Plato's Gorgias, where the philosopher is compared to the physician and the rhetor is compared to the chef.