SOPA 'shelved' until consensus is found

Having a legal way for the population to defend themselves against bad (purchased) laws does not in any way imply that you would immediately turn into a theocracy. Switzerland has had them for hundreds of years and is still sane.

On the other hand, having a opaque 2-party dictatorship like the US has no does not somehow prevent religion to have a major influence on politics and laws. You have it on your money (in god we trust), you have it in your schools (one nation united under god), you have it in your courtrooms and presidential inaugurations (so help me god), etc.

Introducting a switzerland-like mechanism for more checks and balances wouldnt change much, it would just make it easier to prevent autocratic decisions like SOPA, Iraq war, etc.

Most of those accounts assert that a significant fraction of CA's spending is mandated by referendum and that CA legislature shouldn't take referendums into account when it does a budget. (The latter is how you get to "referendums are responsible for CA's deficit.")

Both of those assertions are wrong, no matter how often they're stated.

I say, regardless of whether or not anything passes this year, we find one of the weaker sponsors of SOPA/PIPA who's up for re-election this year and make them pay.

Special interests, as the history of tariffs reminds us, can think of the most ingenious reasons why they should be the objects of special solicitude. Their spokesmen present a plan in their favor; and it seems at first so absurd that disinterested writers do not trouble to expose it. But the special interests keep on insisting on the scheme. Its enactment would make so much difference to their own immediate welfare that they can afford to hire trained economists and "public relations experts" to propagate it in their behalf. The public hears the argument so often repeated, and accompanied by such a wealth of imposing statistics, charts, curves and pie-slices, that it is soon taken in. When at last disinterested writers recognize that the danger of the scheme's enactment is real, they are usually too late. They cannot in a few weeks acquaint themselves with the subject as thoroughly as the hired brains who have been devoting their full time to it for years; they are accused of being uniformed ,and they have the air of men who presume to dispute axioms.

http://www.fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/#0....

The whole book is available at the URL, it's quite a good read.

The Administration strongly objects to the military custody provision of section 1032, which would appear to mandate military custody for a certain class of terrorism suspects. This unnecessary, untested, and legally controversial restriction of the President's authority to defend the Nation from terrorist threats would tie the hands of our intelligence and law enforcement professionals. Moreover, applying this military custody requirement to individuals inside the United States, as some Members of Congress have suggested is their intention, would raise serious and unsettled legal questions and would be inconsistent with the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets. We have spent ten years since September 11, 2001, breaking down the walls between intelligence, military, and law enforcement professionals; Congress should not now rebuild those walls and unnecessarily make the job of preventing terrorist attacks more difficult. Specifically, the provision would limit the flexibility of our national security professionals to choose, based on the evidence and the facts and circumstances of each case, which tool for incapacitating dangerous terrorists best serves our national security interests. The waiver provision fails to address these concerns, particularly in time-sensitive operations in which law enforcement personnel have traditionally played the leading role. These problems are all the more acute because the section defines the category of individuals who would be subject to mandatory military custody by substituting new and untested legislative criteria for the criteria the Executive and Judicial branches are currently using for detention under the AUMF in both habeas litigation and military operations. Such confusion threatens our ability to act swiftly and decisively to capture, detain, and interrogate terrorism suspects, and could disrupt the collection of vital intelligence about threats to the American people.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislativ...