enerations to come. In other words, the Founders designed the amendment process to make us all wear the hat of a Founding Father. But when the Court simply redefines the existing words to mean whatever the majority wants, the Constitution is not longer about precommitting future generations to agreed-upon rules, it’s about rank power in the here and now. You may not weep over the fact that this nullifies our ancestors efforts to set the rules of the game. But I hope it bothers you that the rules of the game are still being changed and you have almost no say in what kind of Constitution your descendents will live under. That is unless your name is Sandra Day O’Connor. In that case, you deserve to be congratulated because you’re the Founding Mother of my child’s Constitution.[标签:标题] In his piece on Liberia, Ted Galen Carpenter argued that should President Bush intervene in Liberia, he would be violating a campaign 2000 pledge to conduct such interventions only when vital national interests are at stake. He further stated, “There is not even a peripheral, much less a vital, national interest at stake in Liberia.” He went on to say that there is far greater misery in “such places as the Congo, Cuba, Myanmar, North Korea and the Sudan” than there is in Liberia, and that “from a moral standpoint, how can the Bush administration justify intervening in Liberia while declining to use force in those other cases?” Carpenter is correct on all accounts. And yet he has reached the wrong conclusions. The United States should intervene in Liberia — and consider the others, too. In 1994, I stood in an aircraft hanger in Stuttgart, Germany, loading ammunition into my weapon’s magazines, conducting communications rehearsals,tomsoutletsaleonlinecheap.com, and incorporating the latest intelligence data into our plan. The mission: to send a special-forces unit to Rwanda to seize the national airport, secure American citizens and foreign nationals, and prepare the area for follow-on forces that would attempt to stabilize the situation. Despite the danger of landing in a country that was in the process of slaughtering over a half million of its citizens, we were ready and committed — and we all believed in the importance of stopping the genocide at the potential cost of our lives. Imagine, then, the twisting feelings in the pits of our stomachs when the mission was scratched,Toms Shoes Outlet Store Sale. I still remember the tension that I felt going home to watch the news reports filtering in to CNN International — the bodies floating down the river, the corpses stacked up in the churches. I was not alone. We all felt it. So now, faced with a decision of whether or not to intervene in the crisis in Liberia and not wanting to feel like I did on that day in 1994, I say we go. And here is why. First of all, it is a human-rights imperative. Liberia stands on the edge of a humanitarian crisis, and it is clear that it will not dig itself out. The regional African nations are unable to mount an effective effort to end the crisis and our European allies are unwilling to go it alone. U.S. leadership is required to end the bloodshed and suffering. Second, the introduction of U.S. troops and the removal of the current president of Liberia Charles Taylor will promote regional stability. Taylor, who has just been indicted for War Crimes relating to Sierra Leone, has sponsored rebel groups in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast. Removing Taylor from power and fostering good government in Liberia will go a long way towards reducing instability in West Africa. Third, the timing is right. The U.N., Britain, France, and several West African nations support U.S. intervention. Additionally, the two rebel factions that are closing in on Monrovia — the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) — agree that a U.S.-led intervention would be welcome. And based on Taylor’s recent military demise, one can argue that Libya’s Khadafi must no longer be offering support to Monrovia, isolating the government and providing Related articles: http://st.mintcafe.com/2009/12/post-3.html#comments http://pubescence.cn/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=1196983 http://bbs.cn-kjfw.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=991866