Nuance of Language – by James Madison.

Freedom, not Consent.

When drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 – George Mason put in a sentence regarding the free and secular Government that James Madison improved in a small, but very important way.

The original called for: “the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion.”

Madison rewrote this to: “All men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of religion”

And his argument was this:

Toleration implies those who tolerate: superiors who grant freedom to others. But who can be trusted to pass such judgments, even if the judgment is to live and let live?

[..] No one could be said to allow men to worship as they wished; they worshipped as they wished because it was their right as men. Madison’s language shifted the ground of religious liberty from a tolerant society or state, to human nature, and lifted the Declaration of Rights from an event in Virginia history to a landmark of world intellectual history.

Well done.

Happy 4th at the White House

Source.

Amongst bloggers.

From the Sullivan Dish today

I believe the blogosphere first truly gained traction in America for a good reason. There is something about blogging’s freedom from the constraints of conventional journalism that captures an American ideal: civic engagement totally free of anyone else’s influence. It is an ideal of a fourth estate hostile to authorities public and private, suspicious of conventional wisdom, and, above all, confident, even when confidence seems absurd, in the power of the word and the argument to make a difference … in the end.

A few punches

Happy 4th!

234 years of Independence and freedom.

All the best goes to Moe, Jb, MinnesotaFarmer, Hippieprof, Politicalbooks, the dogpack over at PoliticalDog, CenterSquare, DrugdeRetort, friends at Moe‘s and everyone else.. Happy Birthday!

A chat with George III…

John bows after a brief chat with a slightly disturbed George III – who is the first to “meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power”, since it had “been made and having become inevitable”..

See ya later..

Mideast 2009 review by Khouri in Daily Star

Step back and think about 2009.
The Middle East just got a whole lot worse. First, on Yemen;

we have all the major tension points of the contemporary Middle East converging in a single place – Al-Qaeda versus everyone in the world, Iran versus Arabs, the United States versus Al-Qaeda, Shiites versus Sunnis, rich Arabs versus poor Arabs, and the failing centralized modern Arab security state versus it own tendency to disintegrate into tribal or regional units.

Then, concerning US engagment

The end of 2009 sees the US actively involved in four wars – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. If this is not a wake-up call for Americans, I do not know what is.

In a few months, you might put in Iran and Somalia there as well. Read the full piece here. And look out for 2010.