Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona:
Section 1. Title 15, chapter 7, article 1, Arizona Revised Statutes, is amended by adding section 15-701.03, to read:
START_STATUTE15-701.03.
Graduation requirement; constitutional oath
Beginning in the 2013‑2014 school year, In addition to fulfilling the course of study and assessment requirements prescribed in this chapter, before a pupil is allowed to graduate from a public high school in this state, the principal or head teacher of the school shall verify in writing that the pupil has recited the following oath:
I, _________, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge these duties; So help me God.
There are plenty of people working in the media who don't have much use for whistleblowers--and they've been having a field day going after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
This is a good collection of pundit views of Mr. Snowden.While they rail in their hate or love of him I wonder, based on what he and Mr. Greenwald have already stated regarding the amount of material taken and that ONLY non dangerous material will be released, where or what will hapeen to it when this is over? I could say more but Ill wait for this to play out. My best guess now, he won't be back, nor will that missing information. I do suspect his former employer has a better reason to go after him than our government ever will.
Every single day, the U.S. government gathers and stores more than a billion phone calls, emails, text messages, photographs and Internet searches. Just about every form of electronic commu...
Glenn Beck has many character flaws and disturbing characteristics. One that has not been covered at length here is his tendency to come up with conspiracy theories that suit his paranoid style. Previously, Mr. Beck's Crime Inc conspiracy and his Boston bombing conspiracy have been debunked in this Review. Recently, Beck has questioned why the entire media (in a conspiracy) ignores him and ironically argues that it is because they think that he is a conspiracy theorist. (Apparently whiner Glenn Beck is out of touch with conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck. More on Beck's lack of self-awareness in video below.) That could be one reason, but more likely, it is because of Beck's sleazy and deceitful propaganda against progressives and especially against President Obama. ...
"...most people on the left and the right want their beliefs reinforced by the media they consume and most everyone else is too busy to spend that much time getting the truth about a current event, scandal or policy proposal." - The Glenn Beck Review
Boston Globe Democrats' machine gears up for Edward Markey Boston Globe Democratic political operatives say the party's ground game, honed by a steady parade of statewide elections and galvanized by the memory of a special election loss in 2010,...
Independent political organizations, like Tea Party groups, are perfectly free to campaign however they like. They should be considered charitable organizations promoting the social welfare.
Last Monday I was driving back to the cape. As I often do on long trips, I turned on conservative talk radio to see what stories had been skewed to incite the listeners.
Rush Limbaugh was criticizing President Obama’s speech at Ohio State University’s graduation the previous weekend. He was complaining that while the president listed some characteristics that made us Americans, he had not listed ones that Rush would have liked. Not listing everything should be understandable as the president was delivering a speech, not reading the dictionary.
As he usually does, while making sure we understood that he, himself, was not a “libarull”, Rush explained that he knew more about what “libarulls” believed than liberals did.
He announced with moral certitude that “libarulls” did not include self-reliance among those things that made Americans Americans.
I am a Liberal. During my teaching career I began every class on the first day of the school year by having my students copy lines from “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“There comes a time in each man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better or worse as is his portion. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what it is that he can do, nor does he know until he has tried”.
After this I would read the whole essay and explain its meaning.
I did this to set the tone for the year, emphasizing to my students that their futures depended on what each student did to bring about a successful future life without expecting that someone else would do that for them. It was why they needed to take care of their own education and not allow anyone to control what they learned. The worst they could do to other students was to limit their learning, and the worst they could do to themselves was to allow someone else to limit what they learned.
Rush said NO liberal would include self-reliance in American characteristics, nor would any liberal tell others about their need to be self-reliant.
I had mentioned in an earlier blog posting that the surest way to lose an argument was to appeal to absolutes such as “all”, “none”, “never”, “always” to name a few. The reason for the guaranteed loss is that if you based your argument on absolutes, if someone found one exception, your argument crumbles.
I am happy to announce that even if there are no others, I am a Liberal who not only explained, but emphasized self-reliance to the equivalent of two generations of American public school students, and that by virtue of this I can proudly point out that Rush is wrong. And, if he is wrong in this absolute statement, he is, most likely, wrong in many m
Frank Luntz, the media-friendly Republican consultant and word wiz, told a group of college students this week that Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio are "problematic" for the GOP and partly responsible for the stark polarization within the nation's political discourse. He only dared to speak so candidly about Limbaugh and other conservative hosts off the record. A secretly recorded video, though, captured Luntz's remark.
On April 22, Luntz was holding a talk at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, and providing his essential take on political communication: "It's not what you say that matters. It's what people hear." At this event sponsored by College Republicans, Luntz (class of '84) cracked a joke about Nancy Pelosi and face-lifts and acknowledged his party needs to interact more effectively with a wider swath of Americans: "We can't talk to 51 percent of America. It just doesn't work." And, he emphasized, words matter. (In 2009, Luntz urged GOPers to decry President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal as a "government takeover" in order to defeat it.) Voters, Luntz told the students, respond more positively when a politician refers to "hardworking taxpayers" than to "the middle class." He warned that if his party did not resolve its internal divides, it could lose the House of Representatives next year.
He's doing it again. As if playing politics with White House tours wasn't enough, the Obama Administration is now doing the same thing with airline travel.
The Federal Aviation Administration is now planning to furlough 47,000 workers throughout the rest of the fiscal year. According to Nicholas Calio, president of Airlines for America, this plan "is illegal, irresponsible and damaging. Most of all, it's totally unnecessary."
The absence of these workers could delay flights in major airports 3 1/2 hours, and will create massive problems for travelers and shippers this summer.
There are a number of ways the FAA can reduce costs and meet government cutbacks without creating problems for travelers, but once again this Administration, it's all politics, all the time.
Obama is looking for ways to point the finger at Republicans over the sequester, and pressuring the FAA into cuts that have the greatest impact on the traveling public is the latest attempt to do so.
Contribute $25, $50, $100, or whatever you can today to send a strong message that we will not stand idly by and watch this President unnecessarily wreak havoc on air travelers.
Reince Priebus Chairman, Republican National Committee
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate on Wednesday rejected a bipartisan plan to expand background checks for gun buyers, dealing a sharp blow to President Barack Obama's campaign to curb gun violence after...
But just as the conversation the Pentagon Papers promoted was ultimately far more significant than the personality of Daniel Ellsberg, the conversation Edward Snowden has begun is far more important than any defects - or heroic qualities - he may possess.
Political scientists talk about a "perceptual screen" through which many voters view the world, tending to support certain policy stances based on where their party stands.
The National Security Agency's program to mine electronic data from America's biggest internet companies is mind-boggling in scope. The top-secret effort — code-named PRISM — is reportedly aimed at cross-checking emails and other information exchanged by foreign targets to head off potential threats against the U.S. (Read our helpful primer on PRISM here.) Just how much of an intelligence goldmine is PRISM to analysts trying to foil terrorist plots, and how deeply did they delve into Americans' private information? Here, a look at PRISM's reach, by the numbers:
9 Internet companies whose servers the NSA allegedly tapped, according to documents leaked to The Washington Post and The Guardian. The tech giants affected are reportedly Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple.
7 Companies on the list whose executives say they never knowingly gave the NSA access to their servers...
Dark Money, the anonymous donation of funds to campaigns is one of the most heinous affronts to democracy. The GOP in Montana says it's got to go -- just as Party Recon does!
"Ted Cruz is very smart, very able and he's got political guts," Cox said. Later, taking the stage in black cowboy boots, Cruz showed he could also be a crowd-pleaser.
"Politicians often say things so surprising that it is tempting to wonder what they might be thinking. What is the factual basis that informs each politician’s stance on the issues? Here are some questions to pose to political candidates to assess what they know about important issues, basic facts about our world, citizenship, and the rules of logic."
"What domain of knowledge do we expect politicians to be familiar with? Politicians often launch into issues and take positions ahead of establishing a grounding in basic facts about our world. Also, politicians seem to adopt positions that seem based on contradictory facts. So perhaps we can help politicians put first things first by encouraging them to research some basic facts about the world we live in, and, make public their findings."
The communication of ideas in our world takes place primarily through language—both written and spoken. Over time, language inevitably changes, either intentionally or accidentally. Words assume alternate and sometimes unrelated meanings. In no other area of society is this distortion of language both as profound and as unnoticed as in the realm of politics.
From the thinking of philosophers to the tinkering of public officials, from party platforms to campaign speeches, the amazing abilities of language cannot be overestimated. Rulers and those seeking to rule can convey passion and patriotism; they can deceive their countrymen and lead entire populations to dark places they never knew existed. A totalitarian’s most frequently used means of control, wrote F.A. Hayek, include “the complete perversion of language,” and “the change of the meaning of words.”
One of the grossest language perversions has been the besmirchment of the word “liberal.” Especially in the United States, “liberal” now possesses a meaning entirely different than—and in many ways, diametrically opposed to—its meaning of an earlier time. In Liberalism, Ludwig von Mises, a self-described liberal, demonstrated that the entire liberal school of thought is extrapolated from the notion of private property rights.
Even the most enthusiastic sharia supporters still favor religious freedom for people of other faiths, in part because they believe it should apply only to Muslims. That explains how 84% of Muslims in Pakistan want to enshrine sharia law, but three in four say non-Muslims are free to practice their faith.
Many Muslims want religious leaders to have some -- even large -- influence political matters: 53% in Afghanistan, 41% in Malaysia and 37% in Jordan, the research finds.
Similarly, many Muslims see no incompatibility with democracy, said Farid Senzai, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, at Santa Clara University, another adviser to the Pew Muslim research. "You can have a democracy and yet also have strong support for Islam to play a role in politics."
The motivation behind the world-wide economic con of austerity has been discovered. And, the source is none other than Pete Peterson – the debt-obsessed billionaire who stands to make billions off the privatization of our social safety net.
After months of nervous anticipation, federal workers begin the first major round of furloughs this week, even as much uncertainty remains at some agencies about how much time, if any, employees will lose from their jobs because of mandated spending cuts.
About 17,000 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency also face furloughs beginning this week, as do 480 employees of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget....
Do you enjoy being forced to choose between one of two candidates?
Now, you may say, “There are other candidates on the ballot.” But you are unlikely to vote for any of them. Why? Because you don’t want to throw your vote away. Why do you feel like you’re throwing your vote away by voting for one of these other candidates? The main reason has nothing to do with money, TV exposure, a conspiracy, or anything of the kind. It has to do with one thing only: the fact that you are legally required to vote for one candidate and one candidate only.
Like two candidates? Go ahead and try voting for both of them—your vote will be thrown out. It will be considered “spoiled,” an “overvote.” And this small law, enshrined in the legal code of every state in the US, is the primary reason why we have a de facto two-party system at every level of US politics, from the town to Federal level.... more
Introducing other voices into government will produce the fastest possible fixes to everything that ails our nation. That said, the other method of voting not suggested hear is called the Single Transferable Vote system. Let's say you really like and wish to vote for a third party candidate, but you are afraid that like conventional wisdom says, you will be throwing away your vote. Under this system, you would put a '1' next to the third party candidate's name, and a '2' next to the name of your next choice, a '3" next to the name of your third choice. If your first choice does not win a majority, that vote is changed to your 2nd choice candidate, and so on until a majority is reached. If no one reaches a majority, you would enter a run-off election with anyone receiving over 20% of first choice votes. This would give people the courage to vote for third party candidates without worrying about throwing their vote away. Just a thought.
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