Democracy in Iraq: A Confidant of Al Dawa Sectarian Party of Maliki said, that orders were issued from the so cold office of the commander in chief of the armed forces, to the commanders in Mosul, Samara and Almuthanna, to execute anyone who raises his voice in the demonstrations, and their corpses will not be delivered to their families.

US Sponsored Sectarian Iraq Regime: Prime Minister Maliki issues Order to Shoot to Kill

By BRussells Tribunal

Global Research, January 03, 2013

BRussells Tribunal,

A Confidant of Al Dawa Sectarian Party of Maliki said, that orders were issued from the so cold office of the commander in chief of the armed forces, to the commanders in Mosul, Samara and Almuthanna, to execute anyone who raises his voice in the demonstrations, and their corpses will not be delivered to their families.

 Many tribes from the South are pouring into Anbar to join the growing protest against Maliki and Iran. All the participating groups are calling for the expulsion of Maliki and all who are part of the political process .

Tens of thousands of Sunni Muslims blocked Iraq’s main trade route to neighboring Syria and Jordan in a fourth day of demonstrations against Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki

On the meantime Saleh Al Mutlaq, the deputy prime minister attempted to go to the platform to talk to the protesters, he was prevented to do so, the protesters threw stones, shoes and full water bottles at him, he was forced to leave, his bodyguards  started shooting directly at the people, some were wounded and one young man was killed, a commemoration will take place in his honor in the rally.

Demonstrations are still going on strongly in Mosul and other parts of Iraq. A huge rally is taking place in Kirkuk where Arabs, Kurds and Turcoman are participating

Another young man, Sardi Dhiab Sardi Aljanabi, a demonstrator,  was executed in Siniyeh, a town, in the district of Biji.

Maliki issues an order to shoot to kill

A Confidant of Al Dawa Sectarian Party of Maliki said, that orders were issued from the so cold office of the commander in chief of the armed forces, to the commanders in Mosul, Samara and Almuthanna, to execute anyone who raises his voice in the demonstrations, and their corpses will not be delivered to their families.

_____________________________________________

ECONOMIST

ON THE last day of 2012, a year after the last American troops left Iraq, ending nearly nine years of military occupation, at least 36 Iraqis perished in a wave of bombings and shootings across the country that targeted policemen, government officials and ordinary people of varied sects. According to Iraq Body Count (IBC), a meticulous mainly American and British monitoring group, the overall toll in deaths of civilians due to political violence last year was 4,471, slightly more than the year before. On average, there were 18 bombings and 53 violent deaths a week. Iraq is hardly a country at peace.

Yet the monthly toll in 2012 fell steadily and markedly after June. The violence was also increasingly concentrated in a few areas: 43% of the deaths counted by the IBC were in two of the country’s 18 provinces, Baghdad and Nineveh, which abuts Syria and has Mosul at its hub. The rest of the country may be more peaceful than at any time since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. Iraq’s main oil-producing areas, in the south, are generally free of trouble, with exports boosted to 2.8m barrels a day, the highest rate for three decades.

Yet few Iraqis are celebrating. That extra money has yet to improve public services or to raise family incomes appreciably. The underlying violence still amounts to what the IBC terms “an entrenched conflict”. Worse, the factors that feed the strife are still at play. In particular, Nuri al-Maliki, the tough Shia Muslim who has been prime minister since 2006, shows increasingly authoritarian, sectarian and democracy-sapping tendencies, ruthlessly ousting or outmanoeuvring rivals, and using underhand methods to impose his will. He is widely viewed as a would-be dictator, tolerant of corruption, reliant on the backing of Iran and willing cynically to stir up strife between Iraq’s minority of Sunni Arabs and its Shia majority, or with Iraq’s fiercely autonomous Kurds in the north, to maintain his grip on power in Baghdad.

A recent wave of protests across the mainly Sunni areas to the north and west of Baghdad, including strikes and sit-ins, has sharpened sectarian strife. Sunnis were particularly outraged last month when the bodyguards of the Sunni finance minister, Rafi al-Issawi, were arrested.

That provoked memories of a similar episode a year ago, when Mr Maliki’s men jailed, tortured and sentenced to death the guards of the vice-president, Tareq al-Hashemi, another leading Sunni, accusing them of being part of a death-squad that was targeting Shias. Mr Hashemi fled to the Iraqi Kurds’ capital, Erbil, and now resides in Turkey. He was later sentenced to death in absentia. A serious illness that has recently befallen Iraq’s mainly ceremonial president, Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who has sometimes acted effectively as a mediator above the sectarian fray, has further jangled Iraqi nerves.

Sunni grievances go deep. Long dominant until Saddam Hussein’s fall (he was executed in 2006) and having suffered the brunt of violence during America’s occupation, Iraq’s Sunni Arabs reckon they are now deliberately marginalised. Addressing a crowd in the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, Mr Issawi complained that Sunnis were being “ghettoised”. Districts where they still predominate in Baghdad had, he said, been turned into “giant prisons ringed by concrete blocks.”

The civil war next door in Syria, with its increasingly bitter sectarian flavour, has not helped. While Iraqi Sunni groups, including some tied to al-Qaeda, lend arms and fighters to Syria’s rebels, Mr Maliki’s government quietly aids Bashar Assad’s embattled regime. Sunni Iraqi insurgents who once attacked Americans are targeting Iraqi Shias and people connected to Mr Maliki’s government. The recent Sunni protests have also gained sympathy from Muqtada al-Sadr, a fiery Shia cleric whose powerful popular movement has grown increasingly critical of Mr Maliki.

Perhaps in an effort to win backing across the Arab sectarian chasm, Mr Maliki has been raising the stakes with the Kurds, who claim areas, including the city of Kirkuk, that have large non-Kurdish populations. The oil ministry in Baghdad fiercely opposes the increasingly successful efforts of the Kurds to persuade foreign companies to exploit oil in their own region.

Iraq is still a violent mess. Its democracy, imposed by the Americans, looks fragile. And the prospect of real harmony between the three main ethnic and sectarian components—Arab Shias, Arab Sunnis and Kurds—looks as distant as ever.

Justice in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave

Plead Guilty or Go to Prison for Life

The stark choice given a medical marijuana grower highlights the injustice of mandatory minimums.

Jacob Sullum | January 2, 2013 REASON

Chris Williams, a Montana medical marijuana grower, faces at least five years in federal prison when he is sentenced on February 1. The penalty seems unduly severe, especially because his business openly supplied marijuana to patients who were allowed to use it under state law.

Yet five years is a cakewalk compared to the sentence Williams originally faced, which would have kept the 38-year-old father behind bars for the rest of his life. The difference is due to an extremely unusual post-conviction agreement that highlights the enormous power prosecutors wield as a result of mandatory minimum sentences so grotesquely unjust that in this case even they had to admit it.

Of more than two dozen Montana medical marijuana providers who were arrested following federal raids in March 2011, Williams is the only one who insisted on his right to a trial. For that he paid a steep price.

Tom Daubert, one of Williams' partners in Montana Cannabis, which had dispensaries in four cities, pleaded guilty to maintaining drug-involved premises and got five years of probation. Another partner, Chris Lindsey, took a similar deal and is expected to receive similar treatment. Both testified against Williams at his trial last September. 

Williams' third partner, Richard Flor, pleaded guilty to the same charge but did not testify against anyone. Flor, a sickly 68-year-old suffering from multiple ailments, died four months into a five-year prison term.

For a while it seemed that Williams, who rejected a plea deal because he did not think he had done anything wrong and because he wanted to challenge federal interference with Montana's medical marijuana law, also was destined to die in prison. Since marijuana is prohibited for all purposes under federal law, he was not allowed even to discuss the nature of his business in front of the jury, so his conviction on the four drug charges he faced, two of which carried five-year mandatory minimums, was more or less inevitable.

Stretching Williams' sentence from mindlessly harsh to mind-bogglingly draconian, each of those marijuana counts was tied to a charge of possessing a firearm during a drug trafficking offense, based on guns at the Helena grow operation that Williams supervised and at Flor's home in Miles City, which doubled as a dispensary. Federal law prescribes a five-year mandatory minimum for the first such offense and 25 years for each subsequent offense, with the sentences to run consecutively.

Consequently, when Williams was convicted on all eight counts, he faced a mandatory minimum sentence of 80 years for the gun charges alone, even though he never handled the firearms cited in his indictment, let alone hurt anyone with them. This result, which federal prosecutors easily could have avoided by bringing different charges, was so absurdly disproportionate that U.S. Attorney Michael Cotter offered Williams a deal.

Drop your appeal, Cotter said, and we'll drop enough charges so that you might serve "as little as 10 years." No dice, said Williams, still determined to challenge the Obama administration's assault on medical marijuana providers. But when Cotter came back with a better offer, involving a five-year mandatory minimum, Williams took it, having recognized the toll his legal struggle was taking on his 16-year-old son, a freshman at Montana State University.

"I think everyone in the federal system realizes that these mandatory minimum sentences are unjust," Williams tells me during a call from the Missoula County Detention Facility. But for prosecutors they serve an important function: "They were basically leveraging this really extreme sentence against something that was so light because they wanted to force me into taking a plea deal." Nine out of 10 federal criminal cases end in guilty pleas.

The efficient transformation of defendants into prisoners cannot be the standard by which we assess our criminal justice system. If the possibility of sending someone like Chris Williams to prison for the rest of his life is so obviously unfair, why does the law allow it, let alone mandate it?

We hear that Christianity is collapsing in the Middle East, largely as a result of the Arab Spring, but what is happening to Christianity in the West?

REACHING AND REASONING CHRISTIANITY _ BLOGSPOT

The Decline of Christian Europe

INTRODUCTION

            The influence of Christianity in Europe is hard to deny. With its beautiful monasteries, cathedrals and religious history European culture is surrounded by memories of a past lifetime and pious society. Yet things have changed in the last generation or so rapidly towards a post-Christian Europe. But what has caused this dramatic shift away from veneration, reverence and adoration for God?

            In this essay I intend to explore four causes that have lent themselves to the decline of Christianity in Europe. First we will look into the influence of the Enlightenment, particularly at the work of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Next we shall delve into the idea of syncretism and how this has shaped the religious milieu of the continent. Next we will survey the changing social and family structure particularly the size of families and the role of inheritance in strategic powers of Europe chiefly Germany. Finally we will briefly cover the influences of the “New Atheist” and how this is shaping the landscape of European morality and life.

The Influx of Reason^[1]

            Christianity in the eighteenth century began to face some new challenges that would rock the landscape of European thought. Beginning in the late seventeenth century the rationalist, those whose attitudes could be typified by an interest in the world and conviction in the strength of reason, began to influence the way people in Europe thought and how they came to an epistemic stance.^[2] However following the initial rationalist incursion came a bright skeptic of the rationalist position.

David Hume employed his own method of experience and knowledge that shaped the thoughts of his day. Truth, as Hume saw it, is not that we see an apple, rather that we perceive its attributes such as size, color, flavor and so on.^[3] Hume also struck at the core of Christian belief by asserting that belief in God, most notably the Christian God, is not something that comes from a pure love of the truth but rather out of an anxiety, a desire for joy, pleasure or a fear of death.^[4] Naturally this sort of “experience skepticism” could have a profound impact on any who would read his work, and at this time with the aid of the printing press, was easier to access than ever.

Following Hume came, considered by many one the most notable philosophers of all time, Immanuel Kant. Kant, who had been awakened from his “dogmatic slumber” by reviewing the work of Hume, expounded upon this idea of reasonable knowledge in his work Critique of Pure Reason.^[5] Kant makes a distinction in this work between phenomenon that are spatiotemporal objects, and noumena which are neither spatial nor temporal, thus these two worlds are separate.^[6] God falls into the realm of noumena that Kant claims we cannot have intuition nor experience of. This means we can’t even begin to have knowledge of God let alone be able to describe his attributes.

Though claims made by Kant and Hume are not certain facts, what is certain is that their thoughts still impact an ever increasingly secular Europe. This impact thus requires a response from philosophers and theologians in the defense of knowledge and God to help turn the cultural tides back in the favor of theism.

Syncretism: The Harmful Ecumenical Movement

            When a culture that is largely dominated by one religion, as was the case in Europe’s past, encounters other religious traditions or sees an influx of foreign people to their lands change is inevitable. In this instance, the change we are speaking of is that of syncretism. Syncretism is the idea that as new influences on society are introduced, most principally religious views of immigrating peoples, they begin to borrow and adapt traits from one another until you have a religion that is not what the founders would have intended it. For example, if you have a stream of Hindus in England you may find the Anglican Church laity adapting the same respect of cows as do the Hindus and thus a blending of cultures would have taken place.

            Certainly there are good things that can come from blending of cultures such as the sharing of spices or the advancement of technologies not seen in the existing population. However, when you begin to allow other cultures, particularly religious cultures, into a society dominated by one sect it is likely things will shift and a decline of the dominant faith can be expected. Nonetheless, the case in Europe is a bit more troubling for Christians. It has been recognized that cultures and religions, particularly Islam, who had no defined historical heritage in Europe are now being integrated into the continent with a certain degree of success.^[7] This success is at the expense of Christianity and the reaction to regain the landscape in Europe for Christians has been ineffective.

A Cultural Identity and the Shrinking Family

            Another of the main issues in the decline of Christian Europe is the changing social structure of religion. In times past the religion of the home, in this case Christianity, was passed on from father to son and so on. This in no way ensured the salvation of the son, however the cultural trait of sharing the family’s faith was a major part of the development of the church as a whole. If your parents were Christian there was a greater probability that you too would hold this same religious affiliation. According to Hans Joas, there is a decline in the practice of handing down faith within families, although he notes the effectiveness of highly religious families to succeed in this practices, nonetheless the actual population of such highly religious groups is also shrinking.^[8]

            In addition to the lessening impact of family religious heritage in Christian Europe, there is also another trend that may be affecting this transmission of faith. The average size of European families are shrinking and most notably since the turn of the millennium. The birth rate in Germany for example has been in sharp decline since 2000 and though it has recovered somewhat in 2010 and 2011 the recovery is still far short of the birthrate a decade previous.^[9]  What all of this is telling us is when you combine a falling birth rate with a declining tendency towards families to pass on their Christian heritage the end result is a decline in the overall cultural impact and population of Christian believers.

            A last point on the culture of Christians in decline, it may appear that some numbers do not actually show the results of Christianity declining, however this may be explained when you look at the cultural identity of Europeans. It has been a joke for sometime that atheists in Northern Ireland are identified with Christianity; they are either Catholic or Protestant Atheist.^[10] This cultural tag allows some to be lulled into thinking Christianity is alive and well in Europe but the post-modern culture screams otherwise.

The New Atheists

            Since 9-11 and the rise of Islamaphobia in the West there has been a revival of atheism. However this is not the atheism of yesteryear, that of Bertrand Russell and even Antony Flew (the author is aware that Flew has recently accepted theism). This type of atheist, lead by the four horsemen Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, are a more belligerent type of atheist one who is bent on attacking Christianity in the private sphere. Their arguments are typically recycled rhetoric from the past and they dismiss many claims from professional Christian philosophers with an uniformed bravado. However their audience, who are less concerned with scholarship and more concerned with one living their own life of cultural and moral relativity, have latched on to such elementary arguments in support of their position.

            In order to gain a respectable footing Dawkins for instance espouses his own form of a moral ethic. In his work The God Delusion he declares that compassion and generosity are “noble emotions.”^[11] He rails against the doctrine of original sin claiming it to be “morally obnoxious” and Dawkins even goes so far as to declare his own Ten Commandments.^[12]

All of these efforts to show that one does not have to hold to theism, particularly Christian theism, in order to live a fulfilled and morally ethical life. This type of atheism is becoming more and more attractive to a culture that has fallen asleep at the wheel in reference to the piety of their past. This is yet another reason for the decline of Christendom in the once robust European social structure.

CONCLUSION

            From the various influences on the culture in Europe the trend towards a decline in Christianity is unmistaken. The Enlightenment thinkers who placed doubt on experience and knowledge rocked the very core of thought for centuries to come. As thoughts were beginning to grow so to was the culture of syncretism in Europe which helped to drown out the Christian culture. Contributing to the cultural changes were the downslide in birth rates and the influence of families on their children to carry the torch of Christianity to the next generation. Lastly the New Atheist with their rhetoric and attempt at ethical living in the face of a relativist milieu has gained quite more than just a cult following. The thoughts, habits and traditions of Europe are shifting farther and farther from the heritage that was once steeped in piety. As the secularization of Europe continues one cannot help but ponder when the final sun will go down on Christianity in the continent that saw its largest growth.

POSTED BY A STUDENT AT LIBERTY UNIVERSITY ONLINE, SCHOOL OF RELIGION

Did we just witness a tempest in a tea pot? This interview with Ron Paul was made a few days before the tea pot calmed:

The vote was 257-167, with 85 Republicans joining Democrats to put the bill over the top, and 150 Republicans opposed.

Lawmakers observed that world financial markets were closely watching how the House responded to the fiscal cliff, and that the standing of America’s economy was on the line. Economists had warned that the US economy would slide into recession if the fiscal cliff tax hikes and spending cuts were allowed to take effect. Also at stake was the reputation of Congress as an institution, numerous speakers remarked on the House floor.

Some lawmakers said they were hopeful the tax deal — which also delays $110 billion in automatic spending cuts for two months — would lay the groundwork for comprehensive, bipartisan tax and spending overhauls later in the year. But with another debate over the nation’s debt ceiling looming in February, those issues are likely to be contentiously fought.

“Americans may be politically divided, but they are united in their desire to see their leaders in Washington work together to achieve results,’’ said Representative David Dreier, a moderate Republican from California giving his last speech as a member of Congress.

The measure – which President Obama is expected to sign quickly — returns income taxes back to Bush-era levels for more than 98 percent of Americans, while allowing them to remain at higher levels for individuals earning more than $400,000 and married couples making more than $450,000.

While the measure passed the Senate early Tuesday morning with overwhelming Republican and Democratic support, 89 to 8, it landed with a thud in the House hours later. Republicans said it did not contain needed spending cuts to balance out the tax increases it would impose on the wealthy.

Opposition came not just from rank-and-file conservatives, but also from a high level: Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the number two Republican in the House.

‘‘I do not support the bill,’’ Cantor told reporters after a closed-door meeting of GOP members.

But the realities of the fiscal cliff loomed large. Driving home the consequences of not acting, the Internal Revenue Service marked the passing of the New Year’s Eve deadline by instructing employers to begin extracting more tax withholdings from employee paychecks “as soon as possible.’’

Now those instructions will be torn up, except as they relate to people in the top tax bracket, whose marginal rate will rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.

MORE from BOSTON.COM

The Constitution is the law. If it can be selectively ignored or disobeyed, it is not. Ultimately, law is whatever who holds the guns says it is.

HERE IS A SMALL CLIP SHOWING THE SMALL PROFESSOR FOR WHO HE IS:

Georgetown University law professor Louis Michael Seidman writes that disobedience of the Constitution should be seriously considered.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR NY TIMES

Let’s Give Up on the Constitution

By LOUIS MICHAEL SEIDMAN

Published: December 30, 2012

AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

Consider, for example, the assertion by the Senate minority leader last week that the House could not take up a plan by Senate Democrats to extend tax cuts on households making $250,000 or less because the Constitution requires that revenue measures originate in the lower chamber. Why should anyone care? Why should a lame-duck House, 27 members of which were defeated for re-election, have a stranglehold on our economy? Why does a grotesquely malapportioned Senate get to decide the nation’s fate?

Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.

As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

Constitutional disobedience may seem radical, but it is as old as the Republic. In fact, the Constitution itself was born of constitutional disobedience. When George Washington and the other framers went to Philadelphia in 1787, they were instructed to suggest amendments to the Articles of Confederation, which would have had to be ratified by the legislatures of all 13 states. Instead, in violation of their mandate, they abandoned the Articles, wrote a new Constitution and provided that it would take effect after ratification by only nine states, and by conventions in those states rather than the state legislatures.

No sooner was the Constitution in place than our leaders began ignoring it. John Adams supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Thomas Jefferson thought every constitution should expire after a single generation. He believed the most consequential act of his presidency — the purchase of the Louisiana Territory — exceeded his constitutional powers.

Before the Civil War, abolitionists like Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison conceded that the Constitution protected slavery, but denounced it as a pact with the devil that should be ignored. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation — 150 years ago tomorrow — he justified it as a military necessity under his power as commander in chief. Eventually, though, he embraced the freeing of slaves as a central war aim, though nearly everyone conceded that the federal government lacked the constitutional power to disrupt slavery where it already existed. Moreover, when the law finally caught up with the facts on the ground through passage of the 13th Amendment, ratification was achieved in a manner at odds with constitutional requirements. (The Southern states were denied representation in Congress on the theory that they had left the Union, yet their reconstructed legislatures later provided the crucial votes to ratify the amendment.)

In his Constitution Day speech in 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt professed devotion to the document, but as a statement of aspirations rather than obligations. This reading no doubt contributed to his willingness to extend federal power beyond anything the framers imagined, and to threaten the Supreme Court when it stood in the way of his New Deal legislation. In 1954, when the court decided Brown v. Board of Education, Justice Robert H. Jackson said he was voting for it as a moral and political necessity although he thought it had no basis in the Constitution. The list goes on and on.

The fact that dissenting justices regularly, publicly and vociferously assert that their colleagues have ignored the Constitution — in landmark cases from Miranda v. Arizona to Roe v. Wade to Romer v. Evans to Bush v. Gore — should give us pause. The two main rival interpretive methods, “originalism” (divining the framers’ intent) and “living constitutionalism” (reinterpreting the text in light of modern demands), cannot be reconciled. Some decisions have been grounded in one school of thought, and some in the other. Whichever your philosophy, many of the results — by definition — must be wrong.

IN the face of this long history of disobedience, it is hard to take seriously the claim by the Constitution’s defenders that we would be reduced to a Hobbesian state of nature if we asserted our freedom from this ancient text. Our sometimes flagrant disregard of the Constitution has not produced chaos or totalitarianism; on the contrary, it has helped us to grow and prosper.

This is not to say that we should disobey all constitutional commands. Freedom of speech and religion, equal protection of the laws and protections against governmental deprivation of life, liberty or property are important, whether or not they are in the Constitution. We should continue to follow those requirements out of respect, not obligation.

Nor should we have a debate about, for instance, how long the president’s term should last or whether Congress should consist of two houses. Some matters are better left settled, even if not in exactly the way we favor. Nor, finally, should we have an all-powerful president free to do whatever he wants. Even without constitutional fealty, the president would still be checked by Congress and by the states. There is even something to be said for an elite body like the Supreme Court with the power to impose its views of political morality on the country.

What would change is not the existence of these institutions, but the basis on which they claim legitimacy. The president would have to justify military action against Iran solely on the merits, without shutting down the debate with a claim of unchallengeable constitutional power as commander in chief. Congress might well retain the power of the purse, but this power would have to be defended on contemporary policy grounds, not abstruse constitutional doctrine. The Supreme Court could stop pretending that its decisions protecting same-sex intimacy or limiting affirmative action were rooted in constitutional text.

The deep-seated fear that such disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity. And as we see now, the failure of the Congress and the White House to agree has already destabilized the country. Countries like Britain and New Zealand have systems of parliamentary supremacy and no written constitution, but are held together by longstanding traditions, accepted modes of procedure and engaged citizens. We, too, could draw on these resources.

What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences. No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation, and I harbor no illusions that any of this will happen soon. But even if we can’t kick our constitutional-law addiction, we can soften the habit.

If we acknowledged what should be obvious — that much constitutional language is broad enough to encompass an almost infinitely wide range of positions — we might have a very different attitude about the obligation to obey. It would become apparent that people who disagree with us about the Constitution are not violating a sacred text or our core commitments. Instead, we are all invoking a common vocabulary to express aspirations that, at the broadest level, everyone can embrace. Of course, that does not mean that people agree at the ground level. If we are not to abandon constitutionalism entirely, then we might at least understand it as a place for discussion, a demand that we make a good-faith effort to understand the views of others, rather than as a tool to force others to give up their moral and political judgments.

If even this change is impossible, perhaps the dream of a country ruled by “We the people” is impossibly utopian. If so, we have to give up on the claim that we are a self-governing people who can settle our disagreements through mature and tolerant debate. But before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance.

--------------------------------------------

Standing up for freedom under the law, to the inconvenience of those that want to change it and ignore it as they see fit:

We'll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne. And surely you’ll buy your pint cup ! and surely I’ll buy mine !

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and old lang syne ?

CHORUS:

For auld lang syne, my dear,

for auld lang syne,

we'll take a cup of kindness yet,

for auld lang syne.

And surely you’ll buy your pint cup !
and surely I’ll buy mine !
And we'll take a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine ;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine† ;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand my trusty friend !
And give us a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are close to a deal to cancel historic tax hikes for most Americans. But they are still hung up on spending, with Democrats resisting a GOP proposal to delay automatic spending cuts for just three months. President Obama to deliver remarks about the “fiscal cliff” at 1:30 p.m.