Whoops, we can't. It failed yesterday by one vote, 66-34. Sheesh, can't Bill Frist get anything passed anymore?
The constitutional amendment would not have banned flag burning per se, but would have given Congress latitude on anti-flag-desecration matters: "The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States." The intriguing thing would have been the SCOTUS interpretation of how far "desecration" extends, and at what point 28th Amendment laws would interfere with the 1st amendment. (I wonder if all those frayed mini-flags on the antennae of SUVs would be violations? With American flags everywhere, including our clothing, it's sure been a long time since Abbie Hoffman's star-spangled adventures.)
Of course all the instances of flag-burning and desecration we see on TV happen overseas, where conveniently our Constitution doesn't apply. A telling quote of just how terribly dire the flag-desecration situation is here in the states, from Dana Milbank's WaPo column:
"The Citizens Flag Alliance, a group pushing for the Senate this week to pass a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution, just reported an alarming, 33 percent increase in the number of flag-desecration incidents this year. The number has increased to four, from three."
Milbank also makes the good point that a lot of recent incidents of flag-desecration also would fall under existing vandalism statutes.
Good work, Congress: we voters will dutifully reward you in November for all your hard work and dedication to those most-pressing issues of our day!
Bush was in Hungary today, commemorating the heroic 1956 uprising against puppet-rule of the country by an outside invader. While comparing the struggle to Iraq, he forgot to urge the public not to arrive to the comparison's obvious implication.
President Bush praised Hungary's bloody 1956 uprising against communist rule on Thursday and said the country's eventual success in ousting authoritarian rule was a shining example for Iraq to follow.
...
He compared Iraq's struggle to develop into a democracy to Hungary's effort to bring down communist rule 50 years ago and said Iraqis would need the same kind of patience as Hungarians as they try to establish a thriving democracy. [Reuters]
Assuming Bush knows something about the 1956 uprising (yeah, big assumption), he's probably really, really glad that Iraqis aren't doing now what Hungarians were doing 50 years earlier. Direct establishment of workers' councils and regional councils as a basic unit of political and economic power, demands for the occupying country to leave and a desire to align closely with regional neighbors doesn't strike me as something in this Administration's gameplan.
So if in this metaphor, Iraq is Hungary, will we end up being the USSR? Time will tell whether history paints us as liberators, or as a foreign occupying and controlling force that, like the Hungarians of the last century, Iraqis will have to fight against for decades before they win true sovereignty. I'm really hoping it doesn't come to that.
Looks like both Iraqis and Hungarians are good at toppling large moustachioed statues.
Students have been on strike since between 5,000 and 10,000 of them began ransacking the campus on Thursday night, with several hundred police brought in to quell the unrest, according to witnesses and participants. Photos posted on the Internet from Zhengzhou University in Henan province showed an on-campus bank branch, dormitories and cars had been vandalized, while chairs had been torched and bicycles strewn across the grounds. The students, from the university's Shengda Economics, Trade and Management College, said they were protesting because they had been misled into believing they would get diplomas bearing the name of Zhengzhou University. However they were later told they would only get diplomas from the less prestigious college affiliate.
Okay, I'm all for student activism, but is this reason enough to stage a massive rampage? Especially in a country like CHINA, which doesn't have the rosiest history of student-state relations? One student interviewed said that the University had been treating them badly for years, so perhaps this was the final straw? If I spent four years at Harvard and found my degree to say Boston University, I know I'd be pissed as hell, but "rampage" really wouldn't enter my mind. NYT gives us a bit of back story:
Once a magic ticket into the government or business elite, college has become an expensive gamble for millions of cash-short families who find that even the most prestigious degrees cannot guarantee success in a market economy. The number of college graduates has multiplied fivefold in the last seven years, to an estimated 4.1 million this year. But at least 60 percent of that number are having trouble finding jobs, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.
Apparently, students were enticed to fork over their (and their parents') hard-earned dough to go to this subpar college, Shengda, that's linked to a more prestigious school, Zhengzhou, with the promise that the degree would not mention the Shengda at all, just Zhengzhou. Looks like they either want a diploma that says Zhengzhou or their money back. Most of the students that went to Shengda went there because their grades did not get them into Zhengzhou itself -- Shengda said "hey, if you pay us five times their tuition, we'll make sure you get a Zhengzhou diploma!" Problem is, a new law passed in 2003 required schools to list their own names on diplomas -- the students graduating this year entered into the school before that was passed. We'll end with a sobering statistic:
By the government's tally, China's economy, though growing by about 10 percent a year, will add about 1.6 million positions for people with college degrees this year. The country produced 4.1 million new college graduates.
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