Cut It Out

Cut It Out (2001)

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.

[...]

It may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
--James Madison, Federalist 10

There is a cancer on the presidency.
--John Dean

You've got to cut it out...
--Elvis Costello, "Lipstick Vogue"

Please vote.

Unless you prefer fewer rights -- more royal smirks and mandates -- and much more torture and death.

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Tags: photoblog-posts, photoblog, election 2006, torture, bush, james madison