e-Democracy

On the Second Amendment, Don’t Believe Obama!

The presidential primary season is finally over, and it is now time for gun owners to take a careful look at just where apparent nominee Barack Obama stands on issues related to the Second Amendment. During the primaries, Obama tried to hide behind vague statements of support for “sportsmen” or unfounded claims of general support for the right to keep and bear arms. But his real record, based on votes taken, political associations, and long standing positions, shows that Barack Obama is a serious threat to Second Amendment liberties. Don’t listen to his campaign rhetoric! Look instead to what he has said and done during his entire political career.

FACT: Barack Obama voted to allow reckless lawsuits designed to bankrupt the firearms industry. (1)
FACT: Barack Obama wants to re-impose the failed and discredited Clinton Gun Ban. (2)
FACT: Barack Obama voted to ban almost all rifle ammunition commonly used for hunting and sport shooting. (3)
FACT: Barack Obama has endorsed a complete ban on handgun ownership. (2)
FACT: Barack Obama supports local gun bans in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other cities. (4)
FACT: Barack Obama voted to uphold local gun bans and the criminal prosecution of people who use firearms in self-defense. (5)
FACT: Barack Obama supports gun owner licensing and gun registration. (6)
FACT: Barack Obama refused to sign a friend-of-the-court Brief in support of individual Second Amendment rights in the Heller case.
FACT: Barack Obama opposes Right to Carry laws. (7)
FACT: Barack Obama was a member of the Board of Directors of the Joyce Foundation, the leading source of funds for anti-gun organizations and “research.” (8)
FACT: Barack Obama supported a proposal to ban gun stores within 5 miles of a school or park, which would eliminate almost every gun store in America. (9)
FACT: Barack Obama voted not to notify gun owners when the state of Illinois did records searches on them. (10)
FACT: Barack Obama voted against a measure to lower the Firearms Owners Identification card age minimum from 21 to 18, a measure designed to assist young people in the military. (11)
FACT: Barack Obama favors a ban on standard capacity magazines. (12)
FACT: Barack Obama supports mandatory micro-stamping. (13)
FACT: Barack Obama supports mandatory waiting periods. (2)
FACT: Barack Obama supports repeal of the Tiahrt Amendment, which prohibits information on gun traces collected by the BATFE from being used in reckless lawsuits against firearm dealers and manufacturers. (14)
FACT: Barack Obama supports one-gun-a-month sales restrictions. (9)
FACT: Barack Obama supports a ban on inexpensive handguns. (9)
FACT: Barack Obama supports a ban on the resale of police issued firearms, even if the money is going to police departments for replacement equipment. (9)
FACT: Barack Obama supports mandatory firearm training requirements for all gun owners and a ban on gun ownership for persons under the age of 21. (9)

Hi, I've been a reader of OpenDemocracy since I was a student in 2001 but I'm registered with my real name so I've created a new account to post with.

I'm always interested in games that have an educational element as I personally played a lot of such games when I was a teenager and I think I did actually learn something from them.

Holland has now backed down from being one of the early starters in the e-voting field and now we are seeing the UK government similarly realising it's not the way to go; instead they are pushing for e-engagement, which is much more sensible. What are the experiences of our forum users on using web technologies (or technology in general) in the democratic process?

If I get enough responses on this forum, I'll blog it on openDemocracy; maybe in our new deliberative democracy blog:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/dliberation

 Thanks!

 Felix Cohen

Two news stories recently have shown that citizen journalists are increasingly vulnerable to attack from legal avenues. If you are a citizen journalist then how can you protect yourself and the growing group you are part of? 6 months and counting

As a child, in the 1970s, I was given a second hand copy of the ten volume "Children's Encyclop

Hello. I am not sure how much this concept is wideknown, so let me mention the link for new aproach towards politics: www.extremedemocracy.com The book as I know in on-line now: http://akgul.bilkent.edu.tr/extreme-democracy/ Please, if you find some time, read it. It is worths :-) Best regards, Gale

Hello to everyone. As long as there is no too many frequent places on Internet that discuss over open politics, I would like to present new google group: http://groups.google.com/group/top-politics This group gathers about dozen of initiatives "which reside on the TOP (Transparent Open Public) principles of political activities. We share concepts, ideas and suggestions about the Internet as a media, OpenSource as a paradigm and Democracy as the ultimate goal." It is relatively frequent, about 15 posts per day, so if you are interested in this issue, I highly recommend it.

The internet helps with the interchange and discussion of ideas between people regardless of nationality. This will help lay the foundation for the establishment of global democracy. Global government is inevitable and the internet helps us to feel that we all belong to the same global village and have the same rights, freedoms and laws. Once that is firmly established, then empowering global democratic institutions such as the UE, or the UN, becomes easier. Eventually, rather than being run by a unilateral US foreign policy, we will be run by a democratically elected international g

Giovanni Navarria thinks the "big brother" aspects of the digitally equipped state is just the tip of the iceberg. The real danger are the " power and control strategies hidden beneath the dense surface of our everyday life." This Foucaultian view of the hidden structures of power is very attractive: there is quasi-conspiratorial mystery to be unravelled by the fearless social critic. And there is no problem with the view in theory: the general way our lives are organised, and the new forms of organisation that technology and other innovation throw up quite plausibly have an impact on our life-world.

Is it undemocratic to take over somebody's blog and as such interfere with his/her right to express himself, and his/her freedom of speech ? I posted this online on my own blog mistwereld.blogspot.com and many people here in Belgium or at least some say that it is not undemocratic, that it is ok and they can do it, yet if the same happens in china it is said to be undemocratic. And is identity theft and taking over a blog, by getting access to peoples computers by hacking there computers, aren't that crimes ? I'm asking because I live in Belgium a democratic country, yet something that I have read to be undemocratic in other country's are said not to be here, by some, and I find that a worrying thing. Because if they start measuring with 2 different weights, so to speak, can bring a democracy of course, and that would not be a good thing.

Having given up on several fora on Climate Change because of the level of intelligence and forebearance shown by all the active participants, I am increasingly of the opinion that there should be some sort of knowledge test that people should pass before they are allowed to speak on a subject. Of course, this flies in the face of centuries of people throwing themselves under carriages to gain the right to a voice, but the internet has given everyone (accepting that access to the internet is far from universal - that is another issue) a voice. There are people speaking who do so without knowing, thinking or understanding anything about the subject on which they claim the right to have an opinion.

Vision The current political order has many dysfunctions which put it further away form the ideals of democracy. The order does not put the same level of responsibility on each political decision maker, encouraging misuse of authorities against the society itself. And instead of having the best and most responsible ones in the political process, we have at the top of the process the most competent and merciless manipulators. The people who are giving the legitimacy to the government in the pseudo democratic system, due to the restricted access to information and real image of the political reality, do not actually have the possibility to elect the best, but, instead, are doomed to make decisions based on deceptive, media shaped senses, and not on common sense and knowledge.

The Democratic Underground, or DU, a megasite basically US and Canadian based, with 70,000 members and 40,000 participants A DAY, have started a new activist corps. They are looking for 1000 committed authentic progressive activists who will engage in actions regularly -- day after day, albeit small, but a few times or maybe more each week. Each particular action is voluntary (eg if you disagree) but mainly these are things more or less generically appealing to progressives (which in the US is pretty broad!). Of course, if you are from outside North America you should let the people running it know -- but most actions probably would not require any connexion to the US and no doubt there are already people in it (800 have signed up so far -- its so fresh it's from the future, like the pizza commercial) so get in on history-making on the ground floor, and then maybe a parrallel organization could start at the EU of progressives!!!!!!!

The Right to information Bill has been passed in India recently. It now has the assent of the Parliament and the President. But what is missing is the right system to aid the Government and its employees, in the absence of which, the bill will more be an instrument on paper than in reality. The Right to Information Act was passed in 7 States of India, a few years ago. But this has not changed, the mindset of the Government and has not beneitted the citizens in a big way. To obviate this problem, an online communication tracking tool, for total transparency and accountability in governments and government organizations is essential.

An ID card scheme sounds fine in principle, until you look at some of the claims made and the logistics required to make it work: Terrorism - most terrorists do not have a criminal record, and are hence unknown to security agencies and absent from 'watch lists' (which are themselves out of date and mismanaged), so an ID card won't help here. Benefit fraud - I agree that the £ value is in claiming too much, rather than bogus claims from non-existent folk. However, this can be tied into the general idea of ID theft and terrorism, when you think about enrolment into such a scheme. If you have fake paperwork and can enter the ID card scheme, then you can get a 'legitimate' ID card.

is China wrong to protect its people from some of the material on the internet? Westerners can proclaim the BBC to be the light of Democracy but surely it is as ethnocentric as any other broadcaster and the Chinese government are the only ones who should make the decsion about what is broadcast to the Chinese people. It is possible to suggest that the individual should be the one who choices what should be censored but such censorship happens everywhere around the world in other media (such as film) and is the line of democratic and undemocratic drawn by a western hand?

I would like to make a few points on ID Cards. The UK propose ID Cards for certain reasons like prevention of ID Theft, illegal immigration and terrorism. Swedish ID cards have evolved and are governed by its unique set of rules which are different to those proposed in UK or other countries in the world. ID Cards is a loose term to name any national card that identify their citizens. ID cards work differently in the hands of Swedish Premiers as compared to ID cards in the hands of other politicians or dictators. So just because ID Cards is working quite well in Sweden with its safeguards - doesn't mean that an ID card in UK or other countries will work the same way - because other Prime Ministers might have different agendas.

I think elections are one of the few human activities not suited to be handled by computers.

The basis of this statement is not technical but theoretical: anonymous data (beeing the term anonymous relative to the object of the information, not to its source, like in "anonymous letters") cannot be verified to be correct.

Being anonymous, data has no references to external entities we could check with, thus we have to trust any anonymous data.

Just as an example let's suppose to have some data telling that a certain person is 20 years old. Obviuosly we could check such info only if we had a reference to the person, but if data were anonymous we could'nt check it (since we wouldn't know who is he/she).

It matters not whether we write, telephone, e-mail or send a carrier pigeon to our revered(?) leader - or indeed almost any other top government chappy. The chances of the person concerned ever actually reading the message are just about nil. So it is not surprising if most people do not bother. We are supposed to use the good offices of our local MP. but if he or she is pretty useless then where does that leave our so called democracy ? More and more people are saying that democracy must be built from the bottom up and are advocating more local autonomy, with delegates sent forward to the higher levels.

It seems that roughly the same idea is coming up from many places in the World, independently. Political avant-garde is here! So, it seems that the time has come to start acting politically. To create political force on the World level that will make the new politics replace todays PR system of plutocracy. Are you ready for the next step?