Obama Can Shut Down Internet For 4 Months Under New Emergency Powers

[40hz]

If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? Five? No, calling a tail a leg don't make it a leg.   - Abraham Lincoln

-40hz (June 28, 2010, 04:47 PM)

The quote is kind of right, but it was not said by Lincoln.
(and if he had said it, I imagine he would have used the proper doesn't...)

-Curt (July 14, 2010, 09:42 AM)

@Curt - who said it then? In the form I quoted, it's been commonly attributed to Lincoln. If it appeared elsewhere it's also more than possible Lincoln was borrowing the joke. He prided himself on being well read. It's also extremely likely he had read Uncle Tom's Cabin, since that was the book that generated most of the popular support and rhetoric for the American Civil War.

Also don't be too sure he didn't use the word 'don't' in that context. Modern American English usage is often very different from forms that were popular in the late 1800s.

And even the best educated US politicians frequently resort to using rustic and 'folksy' terms when they want to show they're "jus' plain folks like everybody else." The late Sen. Sam Erwin was a master at using an overdone Carolinian drawl while referring to himself as a "just simple country lawyer." The fact he was a Harvard Law School graduate didn't seem to hurt his 'down home' image one bit with his constituents.

If you get a chance, check out how George W. Bush's language and accent used to get more 'folksy' and 'Lone Star' when he was delivering a speech down south or out west as opposed to when he was speaking in Washington DC or in the mid-Atlantic and New England states. Especially cute was how the word America got pronounced as "America" , "A'merica" or even "Ah-MURK-ah" depending on who he was addressing.

Gotta love our politicos.

 

[Curt]

Lincoln's Collected Works are available at http://www.hti.umich.edu/l/lincoln

The quote was not from Uncle Tom's Cabin, but from Edward Josiah Stearns' book with the full title "Notes On Uncle Tom's Cabin: Being A Logical Answer To Its Allegations And Inferences Against Slavery As An Institution". The quoted words are Mr Stearns' comment on a problem he has with Madame Stowe's apparent opinion.

[40hz]

@Curt - thx for the University of Michigan link above. I already knew about it because I was on a Lincoln binge a few years ago, but it's a great resource nevertheless.

If you're interested in another good source, check out the collection of Lincoln documents at the Library of Congress. Not all of it is digitized, but you can request copies if you need something not available online.

http://memory.loc.go.../alhtml/malhome.html

[dMbTiger]

The Gov't trying to shut down Wikileaks wasn't funny.  Is this the ultimate answer?  In recent years, the government has shown that it is increasingly unresponsive to the people.  Using legitimate means is failing in almost every area.  Who was it that said, "The last resort of free enterprise is crime!"?   These ideas may need to be discussed and moved on before it winds up being to late to try (see link below).

Dan

 https://www.donation....msg211594#msg211594

PS  Freedom is not a matter of semantics.

[dMbTiger]

When you give it some thought, Obama is unlikely to shut down the Internet. Hundreds of thousands of businesses are dependent on the Internet and couldn't function without it. Not only that, but the government-local to national-also depends on the Internet and couldn't function without it.  What's more likely is that the government is likely to set up a monitoring (read spying) and suppression system similar to what China has today (or just borrow theirs) which would make it unsafe for us to read websites that were red flagged, or make what might be considered subversive comments in emails.  The special powers granted to Homeland Security already sets up the ability to override the Constitution in the "interest of national security" (read, whenever they feel like it).  And unless someone leaks it (and providing something like Wikileaks is still around) and it gets on the net, we won't have a clue to what they are doing. Twenty years ago, what I just said would have been dismissed by most people as paranoia.  Today it would just get a 'ho-hum' because we have gone so far into complacency.  Complacency is the father of dictatorship.  Every day I walk through Port Authority in New York and see Military and Police lined up on both sides by the dozens. It scares me to think that they aren't there to protect me (like most people foolishly think).

Dan