[President Pro-Tempore Activity OSPR Amendment]

President Pro-Tempore Activity OSPR Amendment

Article 2, Section 2 of the Senate Rules, Regulations, and Procedures shall be amended as follow:

3. In the event that the PPT should be absent by reason of having failed to post in the Atlas Forum Atlasia boards  Atlas Fantasy Goverment Board for a period of no less than 5 2 days, or shall have declared a temporary inability to perform his duties without being absent from the Forum, then the powers given by this Resolution to the PPT shall instead be exercised by the Dean of the Senate.

Article 2, Section 3 of the Senate Rules, Regulations, and Procedures shall be amended as follow:

1. If:

i. The Presidency of the Senate is vacant and there is no PPT in office or,
ii. One of these offices is vacant and the other office holder has been inactive on Atlasia boards the Atlas Fantasy Government Board for five two or more days or has a declared absence or,
iii. Both of these office holders have been inactive on Atlasia boards for five two or more days or have declared absences,

Then the Dean of the Senate shall be the Presiding Officer of the Senate, possessing all of the powers and prerogatives of the PPT.

Sponsor Feedback: None Given
Status: A Vote is now open on the above amendment, senators please vote Aye, Nay or Abstain.

[NAY]

NAY

There are risks to be sure, but it might just be worth taking if it brings more people into the game. Not that it matters now though.


This Amendment has enough votes to fail, Seantors have 24 hours to change their votes.

First off at this point I think we should all be very leery of relying on US data and information without significantly factoring in the impact of about ten years of different policies, amongst which has been a much more aggressive funding of infrastructure in our nation and therefore I would be reluctant to take any data straight from RL without first having it washed through the GM and SoIA to account for likely changes resulting from those different changes and higher spending levels. For certain we have invested quite abit in various high speed rail projects and in general infrastructure as a whole.

That said there is most likely a number of deficiencies in certain areas and the proper course for addressing these would be to have the Regions determine where they are most deficient and then set priorities based on those localized situations. The Northeast has set an example obviously, as the Governor has stated, in this regard to be sure and it should be a model for other regions to follow especially when it comes to uniting public and private dollars behind such a common interest as infrastrure. With a plan in place the Regions would then petition the SoIA for any funds that have currently yet to be distributed (I am sure there is such funding), provided such is done within the limits set by those laws from which those moneys are provided. The SoIA can then request any changes that need to be made to such laws to free up money for a specific region to fund its necessary priorities with it, that would then be considered and debated by the Senate. If new funding schemes and even a comprehensive effort, then I think an effort should first be made to identify any leftover funds from previous projects to then be shifted before dipping into the general fund and further lowering of our deficit. The Regional Senators will provide an important role in such an effort and if reelected, I look forward to working with Emperor Sjoyce, my distinguished opponent in this election and any other members of the Legislature to ensure that priorities and contigencies of the IDS are consisted in such discussions.

Of course infrastructure isn't just transportation obviously, it is a complex set of utilities and resources that are provided to service the people of the country. Included in this has to be education and healthcare. I know for instance that there has been discussion in Labor circles if I am not mistaken about rural schools and also health care facilities. In the case of the latter, through my extensive research for the Mental Health Bill, I can say that one of the major problems is lack of access to adequate and modern mental health facilities in some areas and it is my hope that by the time the Mental Health Bill gets finished sometime this millenium, that we will have made some effort to improve this situation.

As for education, during the previous term and start of this one, I had the pleasure of working on another bill that was constantly "Knocking on Heaven's Door" and that was the GET Act. In that I laid out my general approach to improving school quality and the first step on that road was to improve teacher quality. With that at least partially addressed, one of our focuses this summer has to be looking to provide innovative and modern facilities and technology to some of those very same schools, as a means to likewise boost quality. I think at this point our main infrastructure priority should be within the realm of education and helping the regions and improve and maintain schools, specifically those that are in most need of such.

[SECTION I: List of holidays]

SECTION I: List of holidays
1.The list of holidays observed as federal holidays shall include:

• New Year's Day (January 1; shall be observed on Monday should the first fall on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday)
• Inauguration Day (all applicable Atlasian inauguration dates)
• International Women's Day (March 8th)
• Conservation Day (Last Monday in April; a combination of Earth Day and Arbor Day)
• Emancipation Day (April 16)
• Labor Day (May 1st)
• Civil Rights Day (May 17th; observance replacing Martin Luther King Day, falls on the same date the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, commemorates the struggle for Civil Rights for all Atlasians)
• Memorial Day (Final monday in the month of May)
• Independence Day (July 4)
• Immigrants Day (Second Monday in October; replaces Columbus Day; a day of celebration of our immigrant origins as a nation)
• Election Day (All Atlasian election dates that apply)
• Veterans Day (November 11th)
• Thanksgiving Day (Fourth Thursday in November)
• Christmas Eve (December 24)
• Christmas Day (December 25)
• New Year's Eve (December 31)

SECTION II: Holiday pay
1. All persons who work any amount of time on any of the holidays mentioned in Section 2 shall be paid 2x the regular hourly wage.

SECTION III: No sanction for bigotry, slavery, and treason
1. The federal government and any other government or non-profit agency that receives federal funding shall be prohibited from celebrating any holiday that recognizes or celebrates Confederate troops, leaders, or figures. Federal funding shall be withheld from any agency that fails to comply with this requirement.

Sponsor Feedback: Hostile
Status: Withdrawn

SECTION I: List of holidays
1.The list of holidays observed as federal holidays shall include:

    New Year's Day (January 1; shall be observed on Monday should the first fall on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday)
    Inauguration Day (all applicable Atlasian inauguration dates)
    The Monday following the Super Bowl
    International Women's Day (March 8th)
    Conservation Day (Last Monday in April; a combination of Earth Day and Arbor Day)
    Emancipation Day (April 16)
    Labor Day (May 1st)
    Civil Rights Day (May 17th; observance replacing Martin Luther King Day, falls on the same date the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, commemorates the struggle for Civil Rights for all Atlasians)
    Memorial Day (Final monday in the month of May)
    Independence Day (July 4)
    Immigrants Day (Second Monday in October; replaces Columbus Day; a day of celebration of our immigrant origins as a nation)
    Election Day (All Atlasian election dates that apply)
    Veterans Day (November 11th)
    Thanksgiving Day (Fourth Thursday in November)
    Christmas Eve (December 24)
    Christmas Day (December 25)
    New Year's Eve (December 31)


SECTION II: Holiday pay
1. All persons who work any amount of time on any of the holidays mentioned in Section 2 shall be paid 2x the regular hourly wage.

SECTION III: No sanction for bigotry, slavery, and treason
1. The federal government and any other government or non-profit agency that receives federal funding shall be prohibited from celebrating any holiday that recognizes or celebrates Confederate troops, leaders, figures, or concepts. Federal funding shall be withheld from any agency that fails to comply with this requirement.

Sponsor Feedback: Origination
Status: Objections entered by NC Yankee and I think Ben, but his text doesn't show clear intent. Vote to after amendment has been on floor for required 24 hours.

Wrong, you have give people twenty fours to object, Duke.  

The Civil War is the single most important event in American history, so I don't think that singling out celebrations of the Confederacy for censure is inappropriate. We should be ashamed of many parts of our national history, but nothing diminishes our moral stature more than the fact that we built our nation on racial slavery and had to fight a bloody war among ourselves to get rid of it.

This disgrace is compounded by the numerous government-sanctioned celebrations of that rebellion. We don't have states in Atlasia, of course, but in real life nine states celebrate Confederate Memorial Day; in several states this holiday occurs on the birthday of Jefferson Davis. These occasions mark Confederate leaders as heroes to be admired or worshiped rather than as men who embraced, or at least fought to preserve, an evil institution.

You accuse me of taking the side of political correctness, but I believe that I am doing precisely the opposite. The politically correct view is that these holidays are harmless celebrations of national heritage that ought not to be criticized or disrupted. Refusing to take action would be more comfortable and less offensive to some of our sensibilities, but I am not prepared to give up so easily.

The classic sign of a case of political correctness is when someone feels he must alter or ignore the points his critic has made and replace them with his own strawman to beat down.

How many times do I have to repeat myself? I don't care one damn bit abotu the confederace nor do I find it anything less then a complete disgrace to humanity that you or anybody else would like to attest to believing it is. Stop trying to beat a dead horse on something that is not the issue here It is easy to bash up on the confederacy because most sane people share that view thus it is just so damn easy to ignore the praciticalities of what you are doing.

This is a restriction that is being applied to every level of government, as I have established and will deny to them the right to spend their own taxpayer's money as they see fit and as their representatives determine for no other reason then because the gov't in Nyman has made a determination one way or another on the matter. Local governments will not take the risk with the funding for schools and highways and will thus abandon not only what you want trashed but numerous other celebrations of historical significance the minute a lawyer or a Nyman bureaucrat comes sniffing around. A concern you have completely ignored once again in favor of beating the dead horse yet once again. And then you wonder I am labelling this as a politically correct effort. This is not the RL US as you say and thus we don't have states trying to claim in textbooks that blacks fought for the Confederacy or any of the other stupidity in VA, TX or wherever. So why is it necessary to pursue federal policies as if such was the case? Why does this have to be dictated in such a manner to lower levels of Govermnet? It doesn't. I say it is political correctness because you are using the justified righteous indignation towards the Confederacy to justify an unnecessary dictate by the Federal Goverment to the Regions and to local goverments, and ignoring some very reasonable concerns in the process. The end result of this will be the centralization of all celebratory occassions, since no local or Regional Gov't will dare risk the funding and thus they will retreat from these altogether as lawyers and subsequent amendments expand its scope, covered events and figures.

And what the hell does "concepts" mean? If it wasn't bad enough, now we are throwing some added vagueness into text as well.

Damn, I can't start a vote yet b/c of 24 hour debate time.


Senator, would you care to opine on the rest of the amendment as either friendly or hostile in the remaining hours. Not that it matters because we have objections lodged.

Duke, be sure to count that vote once it gets done and change the thread title.

[Atlasia-Canada Common Market Agreement]

To hell with it, you have been give too much time as it is.

Atlasia-Canada Common Market Agreement
    b. Atlasian citizens living in Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia shall be considered as citizens of the Imperial Dirty South Southeast Region for limited jurisdictional and regional/federal electoral purposes.

Sponsor Feedback: None Given
Status: A vote is now open on the above amendment, please vote Aye, Nay or Abstain.

The amendment damn it, can't you see it up there?

That last post had three more paragraphs removed for purposes of concission.

Perhaps I've been a bit abrasive about this. (For that, I apologize.) Yankee is correct that the issue of Confederate holidays is peripheral to the primary focus of this legislation. If the amendment fails, I'll reintroduce it without Section 3.

Nevertheless, I couldn't disagree with defenders of these holidays more strongly. All that Section 3 would accomplish would be to prevent organizations that receive federal funding from spending money celebrating the legacy of the Confederacy. I don't think that's an unacceptable limit on freedom of speech; if you want to celebrate the slavers' rebellion, you are, of course, free to do so on your own dime. The idea that this mild restriction would be met with "violence," as Jbrase insinuates, is extremely disturbing.

Atlasia has an interest in preventing these celebrations because romanticizing the leaders of the Confederacy is dangerous and insensitive. Lee, Longstreet, and the rest were the leaders of a rebellion of slaveholders against our country. Whatever else they might have done in their lives, whatever their personal character, none of it can outweigh that shame. Willful self-deception may be a popular tradition, but there's no reason for us to sanction it.

Yankee, the anonymous Tennessee farmer whom you describe is a tragic figure; he deserves to be remembered on Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and, more generally, whenever we recall the horrible costs of war. Associating our remembrance of him with nostalgia for the awful cause for which he fought is both improper and disrespectful.

But that is not what your amendment does. It speficially calls out a specific event and group for being so horrible as to demand exclusion. Meaning they can't be included by an agency or a region in those broader holiday's either lest they be risking their education budgets or whatever.

What about the troops that fought in the Mexican war? That was a war of expansion to gain territory for the purposes of increasing the number of slaves states. What about he War of 1812, started as an imperial land grab against Canada, with other legitimate motivations of course like seizing ships of course, but they wanted Canada and tried to get it during the war. Or the troops that fought down in Cuba in the Spanish American War?

Nix, you can't address this issue by denying funding. The only reason you deny funding is to keep taxpayer dollars from going to something they might not want them going towards. If that is the case, then my offer in the previous post solves. If the IDS wants to do the same, it can pass the same prohitibition on tax dollars being used for such thing, but that is their choice and not to be dictated by the Federal Gov't, which your present wording does with "any government..." coming after "The federal Gov't", and cosnidered in conjunction with the supremacy clause. Unless of course your term limits on the court get adopted and one of the Justices is running for the IDS Senate seat and the other for Emperor, then such things become more flexible obviously.

Why not rephrase it to prevent the use of Federal funding for such recognition? That way if the IDS wants to spend its own money on such, that is up for its people and their representatives to decide and tax payers from other parts of the country won't be funding it.

That makes more sense then putting a whole region's education funding at stake or its whole highway funding, simply because a single town has a statue where an elaborate ceremony is held that may or may not be considered offensive by some bureaucrat in Nyman.

That is why inserting the political correctness is the worst possible way to combat ignorance, it is just sanctioning an abridged version of the events satisfactory to the political leanings of the day. It is the other side of the same coin of ignorance. If we truly want to avoid repeating the events of the past, then my philosophy is give it completely and by the facts as best as we know them. Every human being in the world is flawed, that is where slavery came from and that is where the Civil War came from. Unless people learn to recognize their own dark sides, then we will see the same stories being repeated over and over again and you will not achieve that kind of awareness by hiding from it. It must be acknowledged, accepted as it is and learned from.

I know what your intent is but this is perhaps the worst possible way to pursue it. A kneejerk politically correct demand to follow an arbitrary line, on penalty of loss of all Federal funding for everything if they fail to comply. Too often, it will be the case that agencies, and local governments will just avoid it period as to not take the risk and then you will lose any rememberance of Washington (slave owner), Lincoln (racist), TR (Imperialism), FDR (Japanese Internment) and Truman (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Fairly soon, you don't have a history anymore, then you have the perfect breeding ground for oppression and intollerance.

I find this section of the amendment far more dangerous if you ask me.

This poll is for all likely IDS voters and will run for three days.

If it is this bad here, then just wait until people start voting in the General poll I just created for the Mideast. It will be all kinds of crazy.

This poll is for all like Mideast Voters and will run for three days. Please select one from each grouping and please don't f**k this up because the names are randomized.

That may be true, but the aim of this is to get the opinion of Mideast Federalists, hence why I specified the matter.

I might do a three set as well like the was done already but that is messy to compose.

This poll is for all likely voters and will run for three days.

It is now all in order I trust.

This poll is only for Mideast Federalists and will run for three days.

This poll is for all Pacific likely voters and will run for three days.

This poll is for all likely voters and will run for three days.

There was a time when that wouldn't have mattered and that is why "popular war hero" isn't enough to explain 1952. Granted World War II was a much bigger affair and US forces commanded by Ike were far more numerous then previous such examples. One such example would be none other than John C. Fremont, being a war hero who was born in the south, though probably slightly more alligned of course. Allignment firmness was also irrelevant in past elections and thus if you were a Republican, you were the Devil. That is why no distinction was made between Lincoln and say Seward or Chase. He was a Republican and that was that.

That is why the complexities beyond just his war record resulting popularity must be considered.

Nix, where the hell is that feedback? Don't you make me have to start a vote here?

[President Pro-Tempore Activity OSPR Amendment]

President Pro-Tempore Activity OSPR Amendment

Article 2, Section 2 of the Senate Rules, Regulations, and Procedures shall be amended as follow:

3. In the event that the PPT should be absent by reason of having failed to post in the Atlas Forum Atlasia boards  Atlas Fantasy Goverment Board for a period of no less than 5 2 days, or shall have declared a temporary inability to perform his duties without being absent from the Forum, then the powers given by this Resolution to the PPT shall instead be exercised by the Dean of the Senate.

Article 2, Section 3 of the Senate Rules, Regulations, and Procedures shall be amended as follow:

1. If:

i. The Presidency of the Senate is vacant and there is no PPT in office or,
ii. One of these offices is vacant and the other office holder has been inactive on Atlasia boards the Atlas Fantasy Government Board for five two or more days or has a declared absence or,
iii. Both of these office holders have been inactive on Atlasia boards for five two or more days or have declared absences,

Then the Dean of the Senate shall be the Presiding Officer of the Senate, possessing all of the powers and prerogatives of the PPT.

Sponsor Feedback: None Given
Status: Vote by tomorrow if no feedback has been given

[President Pro-Tempore Activity OSPR Amendment]

President Pro-Tempore Activity OSPR Amendment

Article 2, Section 2 of the Senate Rules, Regulations, and Procedures shall be amended as follow:

3. In the event that the PPT should be absent by reason of having failed to post in the Atlas Forum Atlasia boards  Atlas Fantasy Goverment Board for a period of no less than 5 2 days, or shall have declared a temporary inability to perform his duties without being absent from the Forum, then the powers given by this Resolution to the PPT shall instead be exercised by the Dean of the Senate.

Article 2, Section 3 of the Senate Rules, Regulations, and Procedures shall be amended as follow:

1. If:

i. The Presidency of the Senate is vacant and there is no PPT in office or,
ii. One of these offices is vacant and the other office holder has been inactive on Atlasia boards the Atlas Fantasy Government Board for five two or more days or has a declared absence or,
iii. Both of these office holders have been inactive on Atlasia boards for five two or more days or have declared absences,

Then the Dean of the Senate shall be the Presiding Officer of the Senate, possessing all of the powers and prerogatives of the PPT.