A quiz on sovereignty rights

Welcome to “Quiz Time” President Bush, Sen. McCain, Sen. Obama and Burlington eighth-graders. You may use the eighth-grade textbook and the Internet for your answers. Warning! These answers may not include emotional propaganda methods such as fear appeal, David and Goliath appeal, glittering words, atrocity appeal, the strawman argument, out-of-context examples or tired ole political rhetoric. Take your time and answer using complete sentences.

• When a region within a sovereign nation wishes to separate or secede from that sovereign nation and form its own sovereign nation for whatever “justified” reason, when should outside nations interfere? Explain.

• Should the U.S. have interfered with Mexico’s right to keep separatist Texas within its sovereign nation in 1836? Explain.

• Did the separatist extremists in Texas (most of whom were illegal immigrants) have the right to ask the U.S. to annex them in 1844 for protection? Explain.

• Did the U.S. have the right to invade Mexico in support of the separatist extremists in Texas? Explain.

• Did Georgia have the right to prevent South Ossetia and Abkhazia from seceding from that sovereign nation by invading them? Explain.

• Is Georgia concerned that the separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia will ask Russia to annex them for protection? Explain.

• Did Russia have the right to use military action to aid the separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia like the U.S. did in Mexico? Explain.

• Bonus Question: Did President Abraham Lincoln have the right to attack and bring back into the Union the separatist Confederate States of America (which included Texas) when they chose to secede in 1861? Explain.

Let us stop here for today. Next week’s topic: “When is invasion a wonderful thing?”

Jim Sargent
eighth-grade history teacher
Lucille Umbarger School
Burlington


Americans drink up nonsense

We have everything we need to become energy independent, yet our politicians have concluded that we must trash it all to save the planet. I have news for you, this planet will be here after we are gone. However you slice it, we are to be taxed into submission by any and all means. We are already doomed by layers of bureaucrats and laws, all sucking us dry with every scheme they can imagine.

While whining about Big Oil, or big anything, subsidies are being given to all the alternates. Those, dear deluded, are taxes taken right out of our pockets so we can pay more for the lunacy they decree, making all we need costlier by the day. This lunacy is designed by choice and ignorance, which will impoverish America in ways some of us never thought of in saner times.

Double-digit inflation is predicted next year. Fuel and electricity has doubled, and food prices for many things have increased even more. I note that $2.50 corn not long ago was almost $6.50 today, a fact as predictable as the sunrise and taxes.

You can thank the greenies and Gore-ites for this and much more to come. Remember those who warned of dire results if we drilled and built a pipeline in Alaska, and they still do? The reindeer and bears would go mad or perish and the area would be destroyed.

Well, dear deluded, I have a picture of a huge black bear walking merrily along  atop the pipeline with some reindeer lying nearby as others wander around — a whole herd of them within a hundred feet of this oil complex. It is this kind of mindless ignorance that is plaguing America and ruining our economy, not global warming.

Saving the planet while destroying the people is nonsense, The first is beyond our “pay grade”; the latter is very possible.

John Hammons
Anacortes