"Cold Cash" Jefferson Convicted
 

First it cost New Orleans' Representative a reelection, now he's convicted of taking bribes.

He can join his former Republican colleagues Duke Cunningham (the role model for the Tom Cruise Top Gun character and convicted of the worst bribery scandal in the history of Congress) currently serving an eight year term in prison and Bob Ney (of Abramoff scandal fame..oh wait, he was released after serving 15 months of a 2 -1/2 sentence).

Corruption is a function of power, not party affiliation, as you seemed to claim at one point.

But beyond that, I am disappointed that you found the time to post this but evidently you still are not ready to defend the failed neo-con policies of the recent past. How much time do you need?

Or defend your assertion that a nation w/o a guaranteed absolute Constitutional right to bear arms is on the slippery slope to geneocide. How does that play out for the new democracy in Iraq, where there is no such Constitutional right?

I prefer to look at the bright side of life, thankfully another Congressman is in prison. We just need to pick up the pace a bit as they seem to get replaced as fast as we can indict them. j/k You two partisans are entertaining though and I encourage you both to maintain the acrimony for the amusement of the center. Sometimes I wish you'd put country before ideology, but I'm a new convert to that way of thinking so I may be missing the plot.

I didn't see anything in UG's post that mentioned party affiliation.

I put partisanship aside IRL...working on public policy issues and with elected officials at all levels.

Forums like the Cellar are my outlet to vent :)

I was referencing earliier exchanges we had that started on the Blago thread:

....One more datum for why people of integrity don't vote for Democrats, and shouldn't vote for Democrats....

At least another Congressional crook is heading for jail. Little steps people, little steps.

Maybe he can get a room with Former State Sen. Vincent Fumo (D) from PA. Or maybe the former Gov. of Alabama Don Siegelman (D).

Crooks in the front of us, crooks to rear of us, crooks on the Right, crooks on the Left.

Fixed it fer ya.

When I need integrity, I just go buy some from a Republican. After all, they've always got plenty of it for sale.

No, dar, you didn't so much fix -- as raise another and fairly cogent point. Well enough done, but for your own sake and clarity of mind, don't call such things "fixing."

As for "failed neocon policies," Redux -- I am unpersuaded that they even are failures, or for that matter that most of them are even really neocon. They haven't really had as much influence as perhaps they should have -- ever heard that? Neocons are pretty goddam thoroughly antitotalitarian, all of which is essentially left of center, being about the enlargement of government vis-à-vis a society, and consequent encroachment into it. I reckon this antitotalitarianism as their saving grace. You seem unwilling to believe they have it.

Actually, every post I've ever written about guns is a defense of that assertion, on this point and that. It informs all my thinking on guns and society. I've read the arguments the JPFO has made on gun rights and how not to have genocide, and their argument persuades me. It is also an argument of which you remain resolutely ignorant, and to be resolutely ignorant of anything is a poor use of a mind. I think were you to stop being resolutely ignorant, their argument would persuade you also. I commend to your attention Simkin, Zelman and Rice, Lethal Laws: "Gun Control" Is The Key To Genocide, which cites the gun control laws (printing them in the original, w/facing pages translating) and the genocides paired with them. My edition was printed before Rwanda.

Turning to Iraq, such a lack doesn't bode well. But at present, Iraqis of all classes are very much armed, and Kurds aren't being gassed by Sunni-fired artillery, nor are Shi'ites getting tromped on by Sunni-piloted helicopters. De facto if not de jure, everybody's got a lot of access to guns, which is in effect gun rights (howsoeverbeit unsatisfactory from a civil liberties viewpoint). Civil ructions, however full of bang-bang-bang, aren't genocides, though no doubt they express one of the JPFO's three genocidal preconditions, that of hatred. But since the targeted parties are shooting back, genocidal wipeouts aren't on the horizon. Not yet, anyway. That's how I see it "play out."

http://www.jpfo.org/ for more. Read and give it thought.

Spud, thanks; that was one point I was making by being tacit.

UG....if it is the study I am thinking of, the past examples cited to draw the conclusion that gun control leads to genocide have no valid comparison to the US, or even Iraq.

Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Pol Pot's Cambodia and even Rwanda, did not have a comparable democratic form of government with a legislative body and a federal judiciary independent of the executive branch (or the ruling power).

In short, the comparisons are bullshit.

....in part, from helicopters that Reagan/Bush secretly sold to Saddam (along with funding for other war materials) ...and who they continued to support even after the gassing.

I would suggest that the jpfo chart makes my point.

http://www.jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/deathgc.htm#chart

Ottoman Turkey, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Red China, Nationalist China, Guatemala, Uganda, Cambodia, Rwanda

A completely bogus argument to compare any of the above to a democratically elected government with a strong central system of separation of powers and checks and balances.

The best safeguard for democracy does not rely on an absolute and unrestricted right to bear arms or any single amendment, but rather on those separation of powers and checks and balances.

It's been quite a while since Merc said anything I agreed with, so I am marking this one here. Politics attracts lots of crooks as well as the occasional honest person. Gotta watch the buggers reeeeaaaal closely.

Hear hear. What we (both US citizens and citizens generally) need isn't the right to firepower - imagine a citizen militia trying to take on the actual US military - but the right to access and disseminate information about the above-mentioned crooks.

Digging through financial records and voting records doesn't capture the imagination like taking your AK-47 out to the range for some target practice. It's dull and boring and lacks the phallic machismo, but it is far more important. What use is a gun if you don't even know who is cheating you?

The pen is mightier than the sword...or an AK-47.