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PIRÆUS PICTURE Co. is a fresh video enterprise with the heart of cinema. Piraeus’ first political ad ousted 4 term incumbent, Jim Camblos as the Virginia Commonwealth's Albemarle's Attorney. The ad was commissioned by a local PAC, Crime Victims United of VA. Camblos blamed the ads in his concession speech. ...read more
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"Politics is the art of the possible" - Otto von Bismarck
Glenn Greenwald: An Interview with The Art of the Possible
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The Independent Institute’s Anthony Gregory has a review of Justin Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement over at The American Conservative.
A recent email correspondent challenged a frequent assertion of mine: that one of the most effective weapons we have against corporate power and its intellectual mouthpieces is to demonize the neoliberals in terms of their own professed “free market values,” and show them up for the corporate welfare parasites they really are.
In response, he asked:
Really? Can you show me one shred of evidence that this approach has been effective?
[I wrote this as a comment but I'm changing it into a post]
Downblog, Daniel Koffler wrote:
“At its best, the American revolution was about some pretty great ideals. It’s just very hard to see how the war could have been fought over those ideals, because there’s no obvious sense in which the early American republic realized those ideals better than Hanoverian Britain — nor any obvious sense in which the United States was ever meant to realize them better than Britain.”
As I understand the issue, the British colonists in North America felt they had the same rights as citizens of England. The long (1642-1688) revolutionary struggle in England ended in 1688 with the passage of the English Bill of Rights, and the colonists were under the impression that this bill covered them. Thomas Jefferson makes this view plain in his 1774 “A Summary View of the Rights of British America“:
[Our] complaints which are excited by many unwarrantable encroachments and usurpations, attempted to be made by the legislature of one part of the empire, upon those rights which God and the laws have given equally and independently to all.
As far as I can tell, the British Pariliment was also originally under the impression that The Bill Of Rights covered all subjects of the King. However, in the 1760s there arose a new view which came to dominate Pariliment. In this new view, the rights detailed in The Bill Of Rights were a special set of priviledges that the King had granted those citizens who lived in England. These were no longer universal rights, nor did they come from God. They were gifts given by the King, and therefore the King (or Pariliment, apparently, acting in the King’s name) could take them back at any time. As Thomas Jefferson was to often point out, this was exactly the argument that King Charles had made in 1642, and it was exactly the reason that the English people had rebelled and put King Charles to death.