TheWorx

I love protests. If I had been allowed to protest homework and other indignities, I would have turned out a much better person. I had to wait until college to start expressing my 1st Amendment rights--then, against the Vietnam War. That is why it struck a dissonant chord with me when President Obama said that although Kaepernick was within his Constitutional rights to protest, the veteran was hurt by it and he, the President, could understand why. I beg to differ with the President. Unless you are part of the club--properly initiated--you cannot empathize with the other members of the group.When I condemn the doctor or the lawyer for greed, I cannot relate to their hurt feelings. When I condemn the teacher or policeman for union excesses, what do I know how they feel. When I condemn the rich man or the legislator, how can I know the hurt? Likewise, the President cannot know what it is like to sleight the government that sends a man to war unless he has gone through all the initiatio...

Protests are powerful forces, but only an armed movement can accomplish things if they remain small. Unarmed resistance must be large to get the job done. I see the present movement--called by such names as Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening--as lacking in numbers. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, via their celebrity status, help bring attention to the movement. That's great. Love it. However, how do we increase the numbers? As a B12 shot in the arm, the movements have turned to peaceful rebellion in the form of voluntary arrests, but with minimal or even negative mainstream media coverage it is unlikely that the numbers would go anywhere but down. The Capitol Police are very diligent when it comes to following through with their orders but no one on the force would like to spend resources on defending themselves against lawsuits--especially if it can really be helped. At this point, I'd like to point out a very significant difference between celebrities and your ave...

In this The Guardian article we learn how our police got to be so militarized. To my way of thinking, this is just a circumvention of the Third Amendment prohibiting boots on U.S. soil for if you can't bring in the soldier, you make soldiers of the cops by arming them to the hilt. What a creative way for the MICC to stay in business, though, "Oh, Congress. We gave our stuff to the municipalities. We need to replenish, please," and Congress dutifully replenishes for there is no auditing when it comes to the Departments of Defense or Homeland Security. Not only do we the taxpayers have to pay double for weapons and equipment but we are faced with militarized police to help us deal with those who would like to exercise their First Amendment rights. Which is why, incidentally, I support the Tea Party when it grandstands in Congress; it shows that the First Amendment is alive and well, if not in the streets, then in those hallowed halls where no one gets sent to jail for mo...

The Supreme Court recently struck down laws that prevented corporations from campaigning for political candidates. That the Supreme Court can view corporations as citizens speaks of the blinders that too often guide these nine people down a road to ill-conceived or misguided justice. It is almost as if they were saying, "We are tired of your First Amendment lawsuits. We are going to take free speech and wrap you up in it so tightly that it will suffocate you." Now that corporations have freedom of speech, what else can we bestow on them? Shall we give corporations the right to vote? Shall we banish them to a desert in Arizona when they are found guilty of a crime? If a corporation is an entity with unalienable rights, what about other entities? Do we welcome the Vatican and the rich Muslims into our political arena? I can see why the justices are confused for we bail out and subsidize the corporations like they were relatives. We baptize them into being and dissolve them at ...

This is the text of the decision made by Judge Sotomayor and two other judges that trounced a student's first amendment rights. My comments are in bold. Some sections were underlined. I am not a lawyer but I can see through the smoke and mirrors of Sotomayor's decision. She's smart--just as much as Douglas and Frankfurter were when they helped the government put 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry behind barbed wire. This is just one girl's quagmire but we all are at risk if Sotomayor doesn't start respecting our constitutional rights. I hope she gets asked about this decision because if she still believes in it, I don't believe she has any right on the Supreme Court. Being chronically unemployed, I now have the time to address these matters. If I had been unemployed at the time of Alito or Scalia, some of their decisions would have received similar treatment. It's not hard to look at legal arguments and see the bull. I strongly recommend that public schools...