[source]
The Seattle Times reported on Rep. Jim McDermott’s (D-WA) rising star in the Democratic Party earlier this week, quoting his specific warnings to young people to be afraid, be very afraid:
He told the students that changes in military combat tours is “an unwritten, sneak draft.” And he said an official draft could be coming soon.
“Everybody in this room who is 17 years old should know that the likelihood of a draft in a second Bush administration is almost a certainty,” McDermott said.
Don’t you think this article ought to have included this slightly relevant fact?:
McDermott Co-Sponsors Legislation to Reinstate the Draft
Now the Democratic Party is beyond just making stuff up and has moved up to sponsoring legislation they can blame on Bush?
[source]
The German government is under growing pressure to hold a referendum on the new European constitution after 30 of the country’s most eminent legal scholars declared that federal law could easily be changed to allow a vote.
Oh, what has Tony Blair wrought!
It’s also worth noting that the lede gets it wrong - it’s not federal law that needs to be changed:
Mr Schröder insists that Germany cannot do so because the country’s post-war constitution expressly forbids extra-parliamentary plebiscites, to make it harder for an extremist party to seize power.
The legal scholars have, however, undermined Mr Schröder’s claims. In a joint statement published last week, 34 professors, led by Hans Herbert von Arnim from the university of Speyer, declared: “A small addition to the text of the [German] constitution could enable the German people to vote in a referendum.” [emphasis added]
I suppose the British writer doesn’t understand the difference between a Constitution and federal law because there isn’t any in the UK. But you’d think a European wouldn’t be so parochial.
Germany’s ban on national referendums was designed to ensure that, unlike its Nazi predecessor, post-war Germany remained anchored in parliamentary democracy.
So it’s all about preventing a descent in to dictatorship? Not quite —
German politicians are still smarting from the disaster in 1996 when a regional referendum on whether to merge the city state of Berlin with the surrounding region of Brandenburg resulted in the proposal being rejected outright despite a vigorous pro campaign by the main political parties.
[…]
Reflecting the prevailing mood in the Berlin chancellery, Michael Muller, the deputy head of the Social Democrats’ parliamentary party, added: “Sometimes the electorate has to be protected from making the wrong decisions.”
And that’s fundamentally different from a dictatorship how?