••can ye pass the acid test?••

ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it.

& defeat it ye must, for only then can we begin to realize liberty & justice for all.

time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?

or just a blog crying in the wilderness, trying to make sense of it all, terror-fried by hate radio and FOX, the number of whose name is 666??? (coincidence?)

Thursday, December 09, 2010


every now and then i hear someone say we have a republic, not a democracy. they don't seem to listen when i say that in today's world there's no real difference. here's wikipedia's take on it:

In the United States, James Madison defined republic in terms of representative democracy as opposed to direct democracy, and this usage is still employed by many viewing themselves as "democrats". Montesquieu included both democracies, where all the people have a share in rule, and aristocracies or oligarchies, where only some of the people rule, as republican forms of government. In modern political science, republicanism refers to a specific ideology that is based on civic virtue and is considered distinct from ideologies such as liberalism.

Most often a republic is a sovereign country, but there are also subnational entities that are referred to as republics, or which have governments that are described as "republican" in nature. For instance, Article IV of the Constitution of the United States "guarantee[s] to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government." The Soviet Union was a single nation composed of distinct and nominally sovereign Soviet Socialist Republics.

Niccolò Machiavelli described the governance and foundation of the ideal republic in his work Discourses on Livy. These writings, as well as those of his contemporaries such as Leonardo Bruni, are the foundation of the ideology political scientists call republicanism.
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madison's version is in federalist 10.

i sometimes wonder if a federal court might find that california's extensive use of ballot measures strays beyond what article iv calls "a republican form...."

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