Scott Spiegel

Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

10. Andrew Cuomo – Yes, really.  As I wrote earlier this year, “When Democrats cut spending and refuse to raise taxes, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has—i.e. when they abandon their party’s core philosophy and govern like conservatives—they enjoy skyrocketing popularity ratings and set their constituents on a path to financial solvency.”  Cuomo’s late-career, probably temporary, but remarkable conversion followed the example set by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who also stood up to public sector unions, slashed spending, and held down taxes.

9. Darrell Issa – California Representative Darrell Issa held hearings this summer on the Justice Department’s botched, scandalous Operation Fast and Furious gun-trafficking sting operation, including gripping testimony from ATF officials from Phoenix and Mexico.  Recently Attorney General Eric Holder was forced to admit that Fast and Furious was “flawed in its concept and flawed in its execution”—kind of like his boss’s presidency.  Along with the Treasury Department’s pursuit of the administration’s tainted $535 million loan to solar energy company Solyndra, Issa’s persistent work erased the laughable notion that the corrupt Obama tenure has remained blissfully transgression-free.

8. Peter King – New York Representative Peter King bucked controversy by holding hearings on whether Muslim Americans were becoming radicalized and linking with terrorist groups to plot attacks on home soil.  From my column “Liberals’ Game of Cat-and-Muslim”: “[King] held a hearing on whether al-Qaeda is trying to recruit young Muslims in the U.S. and whether Muslim Americans are sufficiently cooperating with federal officials…  [H]undreds of willfully naïve, politically correct New Yorkers gathered in Times Square, steps from where [Faisal] Shahzad tried to kill hundreds of New Yorkers, to protest King’s hearing as racist and Islamophobic.”

7. Mitch Daniels – Second-term Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels navigated such juvenile obstructions as Democratic legislators walking out to protest Republicans’ agenda, and ultimately got the bulk of long-stalled GOP legislation passed in the state.  Daniels wowed CPAC with a speech on fiscal austerity that included such zingers as “Our morbidly obese federal government needs, not just behavior modification, but bariatric surgery” and his reference to federal debt as “the new red menace.”  One of the only feasible GOP presidential candidates both conservative and articulate, Daniels declined to run this year despite widespread pressure to do so.

6. Pat Toomey – The deficit reduction supercommittee boasted only one reliable fiscal conservative: Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey.  All five other GOP members voted for the boneheaded budget bill in August that unnecessarily raised the debt ceiling.  Without Toomey, Republican supercommittee members might have caved to Democratic pressure to raise tax rates on high-income earners.  The committee failed—which, given Democratic intransigence, is the best outcome we could have hoped for.  Toomey’s first year in office after dispensing with Joe Sestak in hostile blue-state territory in the 2010 midterms was a resounding success.

5. Rick Perry – Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry held the distinction of leading the state that oversaw 40% of all new U.S. jobs created since the recovery began, triple the number of the next-closest competitor New York, with over 1 million added since he took office.  Texas’s jobs boom resulted not just from rising oil prices—private sector industries such as construction, hospitality, and professional services also saw growth—but also Perry’s understanding of the hindrance excessive regulation places on incentives to invest and hire.  Perry offered a more conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, thus helping push the GOP front-runner to the right.

4. Herman Cain – Businessman, radio host, rocket scientist, and presidential candidate Herman Cain spent the year touting his 9-9-9 flat tax plan, which would gut the federal tax code and replace it with a 9% federal income tax, 9% corporate tax, and 9% national sales tax.  Rick Perry produced a copycat plan, and Newt Gingrich revived his old plan, and suddenly the nation began seriously debating the merits of flat tax plans for the first time since Steve Forbes’ last run.  And did you know that, back in the day, as president-elect of the National Restaurant Association, Cain was one of the most vocal critics of Hillarycare?

3. Ann Coulter – The left-wing, Obama-endorsed Occupy Wall Street movement that seeped into the national consciousness like a whiff of raw sewage had no concrete antagonists, just the sorry spectacle of a bunch of hippy retreads and trust fund brats battling hypothermia and body lice in tent cities around the country.  Ann Coulter was the conservative who foretold it best, in her bestseller Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.  From the book jacket: “The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles mobs, publicizes and celebrates mobs—it is the mob.”

2. Scott Walker – From “Wisconsin’s Government Cheese Revolution”: “Governor Scott Walker… proposed a bill that would… prevent [public sector] unions from forcing members to pay dues, require annual secret ballots on whether to remain unionized, and ask members to contribute a pittance toward their lavish pensions and health care plans.”  Walker’s courage in standing his ground in the face of protestors calling him Hitler and Hosni Mubarak, and Democratic legislators fleeing the state to avoid voting on the bill, presaged the guts that mayors around the country didn’t have in dealing with Occupy Wall Street.

1. Michele Bachmann – Minnesota Representative and Tea Party leader Bachmann embodied the best combination of conservative/articulate out of all the 2012 GOP presidential nominees; it’s inexplicable that she isn’t doing better in the polls.  From my column “CDC Prepares for Outbreak of Bachmann Derangement Syndrome”: “Bachmann has labeled herself a ‘constitutional conservative’—precisely the correct label to use in this bizarre era of pay czars, light bulb bans, and trillion-dollar deficits…  Bachmann [took] leadership roles on… repealing [Dodd-Frank] and replacing ObamaCare with free market reforms.”  Here’s hoping she can at least snag the VP slot.

 Print This Post

Related articles

• Is Michele Bachmann Angling to Be Mitt Romney’s Vice President? (swampland.time.com)
• Toomey: Dems had reason to fail (politico.com)
• Ann Coulter Book “Demonic” Predicted Tactics Of OWS… And What’s Next (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on 2012: I’m biased (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)
• Conservatives use Cuomo to counter Obama (timesunion.com)

Image via Wikipedia

The police warned that if protestors didn’t move, force would be used to remove them.  Protestors didn’t move.  Force was used to remove them.

What’s the big deal?

Liberals were aghast at last Friday’s video showing Police Lt. John Pike shooting pepper spray at a row of seated protestors blocking a walkway at the University of California at Davis.  The protestors were barricading the path against officers trying to arrest students who had violated the college’s order prohibiting pitching tents on the quad.

Curiously, the seated protestors had their heads down and eyes covered during the entire 10-second assault.  This may have had something to do with the fact that the sadistic monster Pike had raised his bright-red pepper spray can in the air and shaken it for about five minutes before spraying, in order to warn the protestors about what was coming.  In the video, onlookers can be heard calling out, “Keep your eyes closed!” “Cover your eyes!” and “Protect yourself!” Upon being sprayed, none of the seated protestors appeared to cry out in pain, though it was difficult to hear over the onlookers wailing, “You guys are supposed to protect us!”

One hysterical woman in the video can be heard yowling, “Why are you doing this?  These are children!”—which I guess is supposed to be aurally reminiscent of “It’s for the children!”

For those who don’t belong to the Young Democratic Socialists, pepper spray is a commonly used, non-lethal crowd control agent that is a chemical cousin of mace and other tear gases.  It induces watery eyes, runny nose, and coughing—which can’t be any worse than the symptoms of Zuccotti Lung.

Contrary to occupiers’ claims, the seated protestors were not willing to move out of the way if asked.  Officers can be seen trying to drag protestors away after the pepper spray cans had been pulled out, but the arm-linked protestors refused to move.

The police appear to have carried out their pepper spray raid, not to cruelly inflict distress on the protestors, but to soften them up to make it easier to remove them from the walkway.  As former Baltimore Police Chief Charles Kelly noted, “When you start picking up human bodies, you risk hurting them.  Bodies don’t have handles on them.”  Even after being sprayed, the protestors remained limp, forcing multiple officers to drag them away.

The UC Davis protestors, despite the widespread impression of them as beleaguered innocents set upon by hordes of machine gun-toting Gestapo, far outnumbered the police patrolling them.  UC Davis reports that there were 35 police officers on the scene Friday, compared to 250 protestors and onlookers.

Overwhelming numbers of unhinged protestors in any setting have the potential to wreak havoc, as evidenced by violent Occupy-driven confrontations over the past two months in other U.S. cities.  Even small groups of committed protestors can inflict costly wreckage, as demonstrated by the handful of Occupy protestors in Rome several weeks ago who injured hundreds of people and caused millions of dollars in damage.

The Occupy protestors have no concern for the well-being or safety of police officers, i.e. individuals in a dangerous profession who otherwise protect protestors in their daily lives.  As one commenter at the website Boing Boing ordered, “[D]on’t pepper spray non-violent protester [sic] you intent [sic] to arrest.  Just arrest them and move on.  If you get hurt, so be it.  You are a police officer.  Your job is inherntly [sic] dangerous.”  Yes, their job is inherently dangerous, due to chaos-instigating criminals like Occupy protestors and the people who sympathize with them.

There are numerous ways of hindering police work besides pushing back against cops or throwing bottles, urine, and feces at them (though the Occupy protestors have tried all of those methods!).  Even passive forms of resistance such as building human chains or walls to prevent police from getting by, or sprawling out on the ground and refusing to move, can justify retaliatory force.

Perhaps the cops could have “stepped over” or “brushed past” the protestors, as some Occupy apologists have glibly suggested.  The protestors sob that they were seated and non-violent when they were sprayed.  Boo-hoo.  They aligned themselves with an anarchic, violent mob, and they telegraphed their intention not to comply with police.  Maybe they would have let themselves be peacefully pushed aside had it come to that.  But the police don’t have time to administer a psychological evaluation to each rally participant to determine his or her propensity for causing mayhem under stress.

When cops say move, you move—even if you’re curled in a fetal position on the ground with flowers in your hair listening to Cat Stevens and nursing orphaned kittens.

The UC Davis police could have acted a lot more brutally, including prodding or beating protestors with batons.  The occupiers should consider themselves warned: Trust fund brat refuses to move, trust fund brat gets spray tanned.

Protestors in the UC Davis videos can be heard chanting “Shame on you!” at police after the incident.  Actually, shame on patsy mayors like Michael Bloomberg and Jean Quan for not empowering police to clear out these animals ages ago.

 Print This Post

Related articles

• UC Davis Students’ Eerie, Powerful Protest Against Pepper-Spray Chancellor [Video] (gawker.com)
• So Unbelievably Horrible And Wrong: Police Officer Pepper-Sprays Non-Violent Occupy UC Davis Protestors. (perezhilton.com)
• UC Davis Police Pepper Spray Student Occupy Protestors, University Investigating Incident (mediaite.com)
• UC Davis Pepper Spraying: Protesters Call for Chancellor’s Resignation (abcnews.go.com)
• UC Davis Protestors Arrested on Campus (pdalbury.wordpress.com)

Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

Last summer, during the debt ceiling standoff, Congressional Republicans and Democrats came to a dubious—no, wait: stupid—deal to set up a bipartisan “supercommittee” to negotiate $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade.

The committee comprised three Republicans and three Democrats from the House, and three each from the Senate.  The committee would make spending cut recommendations by November 23, and Congress would vote on them by December 24.  If the committee failed to agree to cuts that can pass in Congress, automatic cuts of $450 billion from defense spending, $450 billion from domestic programs, and $300 billion from reduced interest payments would kick in on January 1, 2013.

What could possibly go wrong?

For starters, there are six Democrats on the panel and only six Republicans.  Since spending bills originate in the House, which Republicans control, why is this a 50-50 proposition?  Would gloating Democrats have been so sporting if this process had unfolded in 2007 or 2009?

The Republicans on the committee aren’t nearly as conservative as the Democrats are liberal.  Only one Republican could be called a consistent, genuine fiscal conservative: newly elected Senator, Club for Growth President, and godsend Pat Toomey.  Republican committee chair Rep. Jeb Hensarling, Sen. Jon Kyl, and Reps. Rob Portman, Dave Camp, and Fred Upton, whatever their virtues, all voted to increase the debt ceiling in August, and thus cannot be trusted.

In contrast, three Democrats on the committee—Reps. James Clyburn, Chris Van Hollen, and Xavier Becerra—bucked the majority of House Democrats and voted not to extend the Bush-era tax cuts last December.

In other words, the GOP appointed moderate-right members, while Democrats appointed members of the Socialist Workers Party.

Then there’s the matter of negotiating strength.  Sen. Max Baucus, a Democratic committee member and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, infamously rammed ObamaCare through the Senate without a single GOP vote.  Whatever you think of his policies, the firmness of Baucus’s past negotiating stances has been solidly demonstrated.

In contrast, Republicans consistently fail to stand up for their side in negotiations with Democrats, always caving in when the accusation of being meanies gets to them.  Already Hensarling is making the rounds telling reporters that tax increases are “a reality” when you’re dealing with Democrats.

There’s also the fact that any agreed upon spending cuts are not binding, and can be weakened or eliminated by future Congresses—which means that any cuts that don’t take effect in the next ten minutes are basically meaningless.  Even the “automatic” cuts slated for 2013 can be “unautomatized” by Congress next year.  As Toomey notes, in the event of failure to reach a deal, “[I]t’s very likely that Congress would reconsider the configuration” of automatic cuts.

Also, the Defense Department says it cannot sustain $450 billion in cuts.  As for the $450 billion to be cut from domestic programs, Congress still has to wrangle over which agencies to target, which means that the supercommittee isn’t really deciding anything, just kicking the can down the road.

Also, other committees are trying to use the supercommittee to slip by Congress unpalatable bills on things like agricultural subsidies for farmers who don’t farm, by capitalizing on its behind-closed-doors nature and refusal to disclose its discussions to the public.

The secretive supercommittee, whose final product will be sent straight to Congress for a vote, with no opportunity for revision or amendment, finds itself just eight days away from the deadline with no resolution in sight.  (This, despite President Obama’s helpfully calling the committee every five minutes to nag them from his courtside seat in Hawaii last week.)

Even within their party, Democrats can’t agree on which job-killing tax increases and illusory spending cuts to propose.  For example, Democrats haven’t decided whether to try to claim that the $700 billion we might not be spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may count as 58% of their spending cut target.

Recently Republicans on the committee agreed to a tax increase that would reform the overall tax code, lower the top marginal rate, and broaden the tax base to incorporate the 47% of the population that pays no federal income taxes (and sponges off the rest of us).  Naturally, Democrats resoundingly defeated that proposal.  At least Republicans were savvy enough to start with a negotiating point that involved cutting taxes for high income earners, so that the final compromise would likely be closer to no tax increases for this group.

Although it’s been said many times, many ways, it bears repeating: All of this chaos is entirely the fault of Congressional Democrats, who have refused to pass or even propose a budget for over two years, thus necessitating all of these recent, panicky, last-minute showdowns.  (Quick: Google “Democrats haven’t…” and see what autocomplete suggests for you.)

The most important lesson conservatives should learn from this farce is one that cannot be stated too often: Never negotiate with Democrats.



 Print This Post

Related articles

• Congress May Try To Prevent Automatic Cuts If SuperCommittee Fails (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Republicans Mull Tax Increases (businessweek.com)
• Supercommittee Making Little Progress, Lawmakers Warn (huffingtonpost.com)
• GOP wobbles on no-new-taxes vow (thehill.com)
• Congressional “supercommittee” punts on taxes (cbsnews.com)

Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

Iran’s leadership is working feverishly to develop nuclear weapons, and has been doing so for the past two decades.  President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei have repeatedly pledged to use whatever means they have at their disposal to wipe Israel off the map.

Just about everyone except Israel’s right-wing politicians and John McCain has been denying, distorting, or downplaying these hard truths for years.  Even though the U.S. State Department has listed Iran as the biggest state sponsor of terror for decades, and even though evidence has been piling up that Iran is working to acquire weapons, President George W. Bush did nothing to encourage military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities during his eight years in office, even after the attacks on 9/11.  President Barack Obama is not likely to deviate from this course.

Israel has been undermining Iran’s progress via indirect channels, including deploying the sophisticated Stuxnet worm, which sabotaged Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges and set their capabilities back a year or two; and authorizing a covert assassination program to take out top Iranian nuclear scientists.  These strategies have been helpful, but they only buy so much time.  They are not enough to prevent Iran from succeeding at its ultimate goal.  Economic sanctions are also not enough to halt Iran’s work.

The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is about to release its most detailed report yet documenting Iran’s secret nuclear weapon development at a site near Tehran called Parchin, its uranium enrichment at a facility in Natanz, and its installation of centrifuges at Qom.  All of this activity has been going on, despite Iran’s lies that its technology will be used only to generate electricity.

The IAEA’s report includes evidence that Iran is in the final stages of assembling and deploying nuclear weapons, including developing an atomic bomb trigger device, altering long-range missile warheads to fit nuclear payloads, setting off test explosions, and running computer simulations of nuclear explosions.  All of these experiments are, of course, just essential for the benign task of keeping Tehran’s hairdryers operating.

The IAEA’s unequivocal evidence incorporates satellite photographs and detailed plans obtained by U.S. spy services revealing technological expertise offered by nuclear states hostile to the U.S., including Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.  Iran has repeatedly denied UN requests to inspect Parchin to verify Iran’s putatively peaceful intentions and to interview Iran’s top nuclear scientists.

Despite the impending release of the IAEA’s report, the otherwise useless and softheaded agency is not expected to condemn Iran for its activities or directly accuse Iran of developing nuclear weapons.  China and Russia, as permanent members of the UN’s Security Council, are likely to oppose new sanctions against Iran, never mind military strikes.

Recently Israel has been hinting at its intention to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.  Any sane person who doesn’t want the craziest, most dangerous regime on the planet to have the most powerful, destructive weapons in the world in its arsenal should be cheering Israel’s attempt to prevent this Armageddon from arriving.  Instead, most of the free nations of the world—to say nothing of its dictatorships, quasi-dictatorships, and communist states who loathe Israel and the U.S.—will likely scream hysterically if Israel launches so much as a spitball into Iran.

Liberals at home and abroad will cry that Iran is another Iraq, that Iran’s nuclear program is as apocryphal as Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of WMDs.  Regardless of the fact that there were legitimate reasons to go to war with Iraq besides weapons of mass destruction, the evidence of weapons development is much stronger for Iran than it was for Iraq.  In addition, Iraq is a small fry compared to Iran, which has been channeling millions of dollars to terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza for decades.

Obama is not likely to do anything to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.  Certain Republican presidential candidates—i.e. Ron Paul—seem positively giddy over the possibility of Iran acquiring the means of defending itself against big, bad bullies like Israel.  The U.S. must elect a candidate in 2012 who understands the threat Iran poses and is willing to say so repeatedly, unprompted, in interviews and debates.

In the meantime, Israel remains the U.S.’s front line in the war on terror.  This means that Israel may fight some of our common enemies before these foes advance to our terrain—and that if we support Israel, we may spare ourselves American casualties.

But the longer this charade goes on of pretending Iran means what it says when it’s convenient—that they seek only peaceful uses for nuclear power—and doesn’t mean what it says when it’s inconvenient—that it doesn’t really want to destroy Israel—the more difficult it will be to destroy its nuclear facilities, and the more collateral damage will be racked up when the task is finally accomplished.  Iran’s position strengthens the longer we wait.  Iran’s mullahs are hoping to run out the clock.

The U.S., if it doesn’t have the will to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, should at least provide any help it can—military, monetary, and moral—to Israel in its attempt to do so.  This is an existential crisis that affects Israel’s ability to remain a viable state in the short-term—and the U.S.’s ability to remain a credible world power in the long-term.



 Print This Post

Related articles

• Iran: Heading toward a nuclear show-down? (bbc.co.uk)
• Russia issues stark warning against Iran attack (msnbc.msn.com)
• Israel vs Iran: One step closer to ‘the irreversible’? (rt.com)
• Report: IAEA to say Iran nearing nuclear capability – Ynetnews (ynetnews.com)
• Iran said to be capable of making nuclear bomb in months (cbc.ca)

Image by Scott Spiegel via Flickr

On Tuesday the Mississippi electorate will vote on a controversial amendment to the state constitution declaring that “the term ‘person’ [is] defined to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the equivalent thereof.”  The Mississippi Personhood Amendment, as it is known, is echoed by similar ballot measures in a half dozen other states.

Since it is illegal to murder a person in all states, and all states have laws dispensing jail time or even the death penalty for murder, the logical conclusion from these referenda is that they will instantly reclassify a broad swath of society as felons.  Have pro-life advocates prepared state corrections officials for the flood of recently pregnant women, abortion doctors, and “morning after” pill consumers they’ll be sending to the pen or the gas chamber?

Mississippi’s law, the most extreme state personhood referendum on the ballot this year, would ban all abortions, some forms of birth control, and all embryonic stem cell research.

Jessica Valenti notes that Proposition 26 would “prioritize the rights of fertilized eggs over the rights of the women carrying them.”  Passage of the law would lead to the absurdity of proclaiming fertilized but unused eggs in a Petri dish to be persons and outlawing in vitro fertilization.

Pro-life conservatives have been crowing about the recent spate of stealth victories their movement has won on the state level.  In The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes explains that this progress has been possible largely because gay marriage has become the more visible social issue in recent years and has detracted attention from continuing behind-the-scenes efforts to restrict abortion.  Such advances are supported, Barnes argues, by technological breakthroughs in sonogram quality, which have made fetuses seem more developed and autonomous than imagined.

Never mind that the reason new abortion restrictions have passed in multiple states is that Republicans took control of 26 state legislatures in 2010 by campaigning against Congressional Democrats’ stimulus spending and health care plan, and that the GOP did not receive some special mandate to start outlawing abortion.  In the minds of the religious right, the momentum is on their side, and they are becoming increasingly bold in their attacks on abortion rights.  As Barnes approvingly notes, anti-abortion crusaders have become “almost wildly ambitious, and more relentless than ever.”

To give a taste of the recently radicalized movement’s fervor, a pro-personhood newsletter in Mississippi assures voters that, while extreme, Initiative #26 would not criminalize miscarriage.  Oh—well, that’s a relief, then.

Meanwhile, go back in time to January of 2010, when the left was enraged because the Supreme Court had ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations, not-for-profit organizations, and unions have the same rights as citizens to spend money to express their political views by endorsing candidates or parties in the final months and days leading up to elections.

Justice Antonin Scalia ripped into Justice John Paul Stevens’ flimsy dissent, noting, “It never shows why ‘the freedom of speech’ that was the right of Englishmen did not include the freedom to speak in association with other individuals, including association in the corporate form.”  Organizations from the Heritage Foundation to the American Civil Liberties Union supported the decision.

Democrats Charles Schumer and Chris Van Hollen subsequently sponsored the DISCLOSE Act to try to squelch the free speech Citizens United had unleashed, but the bill failed to pass in the Senate.

No, of course corporations aren’t literally persons, or at least single persons.  They are considered “legal persons” under the law, not “natural persons.”  But they are made up of persons, and persons run them and act on their behalf.  Persons own the resources they wield.  Persons control how they are configured and operated to provide products and services that keep the corporations—and their employees’ jobs—in existence.

Why are liberals upset that corporations can exert political influence, when the persons that make up corporations can exert political influence?  How is a 1,000-employee corporation that exerts political influence different from 1,000 employees doing the same?

How is a corporation’s power more offensive than a single billionaire such as George Soros virtually controlling the operations of one of the country’s two major political parties?

Because the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, which Citizens United overturned, contained an exception for media corporations, I suppose Democrats would have us believe that corporations aren’t persons, but newspapers are.

But back to Mississippi.  Despite the claims of the recently ascendant “personhood movement,” a fetus simply is not a person.  It is biologically attached to and dependent on its mother, who is a person.  A newborn baby is incapable of surviving for long on its own; a fetus is even less so.  Unlike a physically-separate baby disconnected from its mother and beginning to move about and explore the outside world, a fetus is passive and lacks agency—the ability to act on its environment to pursue life-sustaining goals.

The Citizens United decision was proper, because it correctly identified the link between an individual’s agency in influencing the political process and the agency of a collection of organized individuals influencing the political process.

The Mississippi referendum falsely attributes agency and personhood to a fetus.  It should be soundly rejected.

 Print This Post

Related articles

• When is a Person a Person? If Mississippi gets their Way it would be at Conception (ferrellgummit.wordpress.com)
• Mississippi’s Choice: Personhood and the Rights of Zygotes (time.com)
• Saying No in Mississippi: No to Forced Personhood, No to Voter Restrictions (my.firedoglake.com)
• Mississippi Voters May Change Abortion Debate (usnews.com)
• Colorado’s Failed Life-At-Fertilization ‘Personhood’ Initiative Lives On In Mississippi (huffingtonpost.com)