By david wayne osedach

July 4, 2009 5:53 PM | Link to this

19th century = Great Britain.

20th century = US

21st century = China

By reality

July 4, 2009 2:03 PM | Link to this

We had been a nation 177 years, when we imitated and followed the Brits into Iran. They promised us a share of oil profits and taught us how to sneak & sabotage? Mossadegh was a revered scholar who admired America, who had come here and was Times’ Man of the Year. The Shah’s father had been a Nazi supporter. Iranians had kicked out the whole monarchy. We woke up the Shah in France, and brought him to Iran & put him back on the Peacock Throne, and kept him there for 26 years. And gee, what was TR doing in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Phillipines…? Venezuela has oil, and we had no secret underhanded operations going on there back in the “Cold War” days? I remember Nixon being mobbed-why? I think I just heard Ken Burns say 4 million people were owned by other people just before our Civil War. One lynching a day was the average from the end of that war to WWII. I sure hope we’re evolving, but whoever wrote this editorial seems to have what Jon Stewart calls “Ballsheimer’s disease”.

By frances snoot

July 4, 2009 11:28 AM | Link to this

“In Iran, a group of clerics clings to power against a tidal push for change. The Islamic Revolution of just 30 years ago has begun to rot because it has become something of personalities, not principles. It seeks to sustain itself not by encouraging new ideas but by repressing them, violently if necessary.”

This is what the media is parroting now concerning Iran: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2009/06iranstrategy/06iranstrategy.pdf

“Because the Iranian regime is widely disliked by many Iranians, the most obvious and pal- atable method of bringing about its demise would be to help foster a popular revolution along the lines of the “velvet revolutions” that toppled many communist governments in eastern Europe beginning in 1989…This is the foundational belief of those Americans who support regime change, and their hope is that the United States can provide whatever the Iranian people need to believe that another revolution is feasible… The true objective of this policy option is to over- throw the clerical regime in Tehran and see it replaced, hopefully, by one whose views would be more compatible with U.S. interests in the region. The policy does, in its own way, seek a change in Iranian behavior, but by eliminating the government that is responsible for that behavior…”

The media is supporting a clerical regime change in Iran for the reasons understated in the above paper published by Brookings: “…to over- throw the clerical regime in Tehran and see it replaced, hopefully, by one whose views would be more compatible with U.S. interests in the region.”

To put the push for regime change in Iran in an essay concerning American freedom on the 4th of July is the height of hypocrisy.

By frances snoot

July 4, 2009 11:00 AM | Link to this

“In contrast, the beauty of the United States Constitution produced, in Mr. Ellis’ words, “an argument without end.” It did not treat black Americans and American Indians fairly. A civil war had to settle the slavery issue. But the Constitution turned a revolution into an evolution.”

The Constitution cannot treat people one way or another. The Constitution is a legal document which is ignored by those who would profit off the productivity of the weak or the poor.

The Bill of Rights settled the question of states rights vs. federal rights in [Amendment X] “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” How did the Constitution create evolution? If the writers of this newspaper believe that the Constitution should evolve to fit our collective values, as Obama has indicated, then the Constitution is as legally meaningful as a post-dated ticket to the carnival. Beware the ideas which would separate the people of the United States from their basic rights secured by the Constitution: values are personal, not a shared experience.