Yeah.. sometimes I can yearn for a couple weeks spent back in the Ike years.. not much to worry about 'cept maybe McCarthy fingerin ya? or Ike's final speech - tryin to warn about that there military-industrial complex. (Getting a bit senile then? - as we see: no such animal! It morphed to the Corp-Congress Complex, replacing the original CCC (which performed actual work!)).

(See, basically I'm a conservative; want to conserve the Good stuff and jettison the Awful stuff - romanticize None of the stuff. Put expiration dates for re-vote on All of the New stuff. QED)

{sigh} I actually do see (some of) your points, wish too that the I-word (er integrity) had not been retired from disuse.. so that I *might* er trust 'Government' to represent something other than Bizness - via overt purchase from unlimited funds, employed without any semblance of the I-word.

So that's where we diverge - you believe in the math of Econ, and (apparently) trust Bizness! to be the Trusted-Key, capable of supplanting Govt. (with its warts + a few Good Wo/Men: the best of the career folk).

I OTOH deem the Biznessfolk as having been adequately characterized by George Babbitt (especially those at the top: given the amount of lying, spin and bestial behavior, ever to arrive there).

I'll take an educated career Govt. employee over any (OK - with very few exceptions) Biz-Ad MBA. I've watched their faces in seminars as the Billys of the world come to lecture on: unlimited funds, out there to Get - by any means you can devise. But please to call this process Success!. No, I call it - leveraging matters so that a very few profit greatly from the labors of all - with allegiance to none but selves. Employees [today] are overtly described as liabilities, not assets. Noticed?

As to trusting either group.. to sorta 'modify' some of the Bill of Rights.. sorta? you have to be kidding. Yes, it may allow for some rotten claims, too close to call with confidence - but we actual conservatives support the Constitutional theme:

Better that some escape punishment than any innocent person be punished.

This *especially* in a time when all are trying to recover from the recent Tulip Craze wherein - any 20+ year old 'oughtta' be worth $50M by age 30, if he's doing his web page right.. uhhh - get us a min-wage janitor, willya Kevin?

Nope.. in the time of a deathly-ill I-word: Leave that Amendment wide open to max coverage. How long? Until Billy n'Bally (n'Scott n' ___) are actually serving time somewhere. Then we can talk about a few minor exceptions.


Cheers,

A.

I will join you in eschewing, excoriating, polemicizing into a quivering mass of rancid Jello:

most any case ~ where dishonest application of (once) meaningful words is lawyered into an abomination. Offhand though: I can't think of a single nameable 'group' - wherein the murder of language is not at least occasionally tolerated, as the essential means for advancement, leaving us with the cognitive dissonance -

The person you *want* for President ought to be .. only someone dragged kicking and screaming - like GW (no, not That GW: Washington.)

Pledges / oaths may not be coerced however; a coerced oath is invalid on its face - the core of the inanity of the McCarthy era and its demand for such, merely to work / eat.

In marketing/bizness: the murder of language is the explicit means to the end of selling the unnecessary to the weak-willed. What more need be said? Let their extinction be accelerated.

{sigh}

But back to Amendment in same spirit: it's the duty of the Judge to ferret out* the frivolous, duplicitous and just plain obscenely obtuse 'claim' and apply suitable decision.

* I misplaced link to that Wonderful case involving a 'maritime' claim of stunning duplicity: the Judge said so in pure Monty Pythonese. That is how it should be.

I don't think that any number of micro-laws can make it possible for dumb people to judge well; believe also that the wiser Judge needs the least number of laws. This will never approach being a 'science': we have to settle for it's being an art - and take our chances. Improve those by educating away from dumbth and towards a 'liberal education' (what that has always connoted) + discrimination to choose the better - between the old and the newly proposed. More we cannot 'do' IMhO. (I've never heard the phrase, a conservative education. You?)

Sorry - back to 2001. Fat chance: language has Anthrax.



Ashton
whose mistrust knows no bounds, while I remain in mere human form.