As a matter of morals, ethics and political philosophy, I support gay marriage. But as an ardent proponent of separation of Church and State, I would prefer civil unions, in which homosexual couples have identical rights and obligations as married heterosexual couples. I'm certain of only one thing; this distinction will be will be too subtle for both the fervent supporters and opponents of gay marriage.
When the smoke clears from the obfuscating rhetoric, gay union speaks solely to constitutionally guaranteed rights of gay couples to enjoy the benefits accorded to married heterosexual couples. Gay marriage, on the other hand, opens a discussion of how deeply we should allow religious beliefs to color our civil discourse. For the opponents of gay marriage, it is simple. Their religious beliefs trump constitutional and…
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"Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty" - Albert Einstein.
I grew up in the Bronx where the public school system, with a few exceptions, was at best second-class. We who were fortunate enough to be born Irish, Italian, German, Polish and Hispanic Catholics were sent by our parents to "parochial school." The nickels, dimes and quarters thrown into the Sunday collection were used to build a parish school next to virtually every church -- just as the Emperor Charlemagne, the putative founder of public education, had once commanded. As a group, we eschewed public funding in order to ensure the proper education of our children.
The Irish priests and nuns of my youth dedicated themselves to ensuring that…
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What a waste, spewing valuable carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere.
The wonders we could create with this fundamental building block of life. Worse still, government bureaucrats with their limited intellectual toolbox want to treat this incredibly useful natural material as a harmful pollutant and tax it. Imagination, have we American's lost our capacity to think and innovate? Have we become mindless automatons who only see gloom and doom and ignore the opportunities right in front of our eyes? Carbon dioxide (CO2) doesn't have to be a tax on society; there are countless ways it could be turned into useful products for the betterment of mankind. Let's examine a few:
Back to basics -it's sophomore year in high school and it's the biology class that environmental scientists seem to have slept through…
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"A man younger than 30 who's not a liberal has no heart and a man older than 30 who's not a conservative has no brain" - Winston Churchill.
Spending his formative years in Paris and then returning to complete college and graduate school at the American University of Paris, my son became deeply steeped in French cradle-to -grave socialism, never failing to extol its virtues. A self proclaimed "caviar socialist", my caviar - his socialism, lamented how hardened we fiscally conservative "old people" had become to the wishes of the "people". The mean spirited American ideal of education, hard work and opportunity for all was just a bromide invented by the American bourgeoisie in a nefarious plot to stifle the true wishes of the "people".
"Ah, for those carefree days, when my…
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"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
The right to bear arms, like the right of free speech, is a limited right and not an unalienable (absolute) right such as life, liberty and property.
In striking down the District of Columbia's law banning handgun possession (
Columbia ET AL. v. Heller) even the most conservative of the justices had to concede: "Like most rights, the
Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose." In his opinion Justice
Scalia reaffirmed Cruikshank (1894): "The second amendment ... means no more than that it shall…
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Obamanomics - a "Bush" league plan for job creation. Job creation was tepid during the Bush years and it is likely to be even less robust in the Obama years.
The respected
Blue Chip economic forecasters, expect the unemployment rate, which surged to 8.5% last month, to peak at 9.6% in first quarter 2010. For the unemployment rate to fall, we must not only increase the number of
jobs, but that increase must exceed the expected increase in the size of the
labor force. In other words, merely increasing the number of Americans working will not necessarily decrease the unemployment rate. Today there are
154 million Americans in the labor force and just to maintain the
status quo, 2.0 million new jobs must be created annually…
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No institution, including city and state governments, should be permitted to grant a new
defined-benefit pension. A defined benefit plan is a plan in which the benefit on retirement is determined by a set formula, rather than depending on investment returns. We do not have Nostradamus's ability to prognosticate and we can't know if today's iconic companies will be mere shells when those pensions come due 30 years hence. Do we need to be reminded of those great icons of the Airline industry like TWA, Pan Am and Eastern to understand how empty those pension promises can become?
Yesterday it was the Airline industry today it is the Automotive industry. GM's pension system had a $20 billion shortfall as of Nov. 30, 2008, based on numbers the company provided the…
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Women have the natural, and unalienable right to control their own fecundity. The notion that a woman can be forced to have a child against her will defies the basic precept of an unalienable right. "
Unalienable rights" means those rights which belong to individuals as part of nature, and which every person is entitled to enjoy. The rights of personal security, of personal liberty, and private property do not depend upon the U.S. Constitution or any law for their existence. The philosopher
John Locke, who provided the intellectual inspiration for Thomas Jefferson's "unalienable rights" assertion in the Declaration of Independence, expressed it this way: "No one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions."
Abortion
Admittedly there is a tension created between the "rights" of the mother…
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It was all about the battery, they will say, while viewing the Chevrolet Volt on its prominent display stand -- diagonally across from the Edsel in some car museum of the future.
Obama Motors (OM), formally known as General Motors (GM) has reiterated its commitment to deliver the green
Chevrolet Volt, plug-in electric car to showrooms in November 2010 as planned. This despite the fact that President Obama's own
task force concluded that the Volt would be too expensive to be commercially viable. Industry analysts estimate the cost of the Volt will be around $40,000. As a comparison, the
price of proven green fuel-efficient vehicles such as the Prius ranges from $22,000 to $24,270 for the base model and the recently introduced, Honda Motor Co.'s Insight hybrid, $19,800…
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In a recent
New York Times Op-Ed piece advocating specialized health courts, author Philip K. Howard asserted, "Waste in the health care system costs America upwards of $1 trillion per year. Much of this waste is generated or justified by the fear of legal consequences that infects almost every health care encounter..... The legal system terrorizes doctors. Fear of possible claims leads medical professionals to squander billions in unnecessary tests and procedures. "Defensive medicine" is so prevalent that it has become part of standard protocol."
In the United States we spend more per capita on health care than any other country in the world. We spent $7,421 per capita as compared to about $3,500 countries with universal
national health care systems such as France and Germany. We don't receive…
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