On This Day

The Flushing Remonstrance was signed on 27 December 1657 in Flushing, New Netherland (now Flushing, Queens). At the time, there as an established church, the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk) in the Netherlands and that expression of Christianity was the only one allowed in the Dutch colonies. A group of residents, none of them members of the Society of Friends, petioned Director-General of New Netherland Peter Stuyvesant to request an exemption to his ban on Quaker worship. This document paved the way for the Bill of Rights, many years later.

Homeland Security Enlists Clergy to Quell Public Unrest

KSLA-TV, SHREVEPORT, LA:

Homeland Security Enlists Clergy to Quell Public Unrest if Martial Law Ever Declared

VIDEO REPORT

COMMENT: The vid & reports are about religious selling out to authority. No thanks. I'd rather listen to the prophetic voices of Dorothy Day, ++Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., ++Desmond Tutu, or Joan Chittister.

"The secret government has no constitution."

Bush&Co's shenanigans are not an abberation. Check out Bill Moyer's The Secret Government ... The Constitution in Crisis now on Google after 20 years. Moyers made it in 1987. This system of greed and power has been going on since WWII.

Happy Birthday Bill of Rights!

On December 15, 1791, the U.S. adopted the Bill of Rights. Phone, write, e-mail -remind your elected officials not to erode them anymore than they have already!

From Britannica Blog - Eternal Merry-Go-Round?

And from Balkinization - Who's Next? -
[This essay, on the beginnings of the Jose Padilla case, originally appeared in the Hartford Courant on June 20, 2002. Over the next several days I will be republishing some op-eds and pieces I wrote in the first year after 9/11 on civil liberties issues.

It is worth remembering the extreme claims of power that led to Padilla's original imprisonment. Before the Hamdi decision, the Bush Administration took the view that it could seize anyone, anywhere-- including U.S. citizens-- that it claimed was associated with terrorism and hold that person indefinitely without any rights. Furthermore, it claimed that the President's designation that a person was an enemy of the state was unreviewable by the courts, or at the very least should be upheld if there was *any* evidence supporting it, including, for example, a self-serving affidavit from an executive branch official.

Five years later, Padilla is still in prison without ever having been convicted of any crime, and, if reports are to believed, has become unhinged from the treatment he received at the hands of his own government.

It has often been said that it can't happen here. But it already has happened. And it is still happening.

Five years after 9/11, we should remember the road we have traveled.]