Reading a volume of Albert J. Nocks essays, The Disadvantages of Being Educated, I came upon a footnote in one article, A Study in Manners (1925), in which Nock echoed my own impatient frustration with the promiscuous — indeed, slatternly — usage of the term democracy.

I wish to complain against the common and culpable use of the term democracy as a synonym for republicanism. Time and again one hears persons who should know better, talk about democracy in this country, for example, as if something like it really existed here. They discuss democracy on trial, democracys weakness, and so on, when it is perfectly clear that they refer only to the political system known properly as republicanism. The fact is that republicanism, which is a system theoretically based on the right of individual self-expression in politics, has as yet done but little for democracy, and that democracy is less developed in some republican countries, as France and the United States, than in some others, like Denmark, whose political system is nominally non-republican.*

Later, in a 1926 essay, Nock makes the piquant observation:

Those who speak of the United States as a democracyare misusing language most ludicrously, for it is no such thing, never was, and was never intended to be. The Fathers of the Republic were well aware of the difference between a republic and a democracy, and it is no credit to the intelligence of their descendents that the two are now almost invariably confused.**

Full article at CAPITALISM MAGAZINE

Video – Forms of government explained:

She almost had us fooled, but then she began to feel the heat.

She ignored a reporter’s uncomfortable question, then looked the other way while one of her toadies knocked him to the ground. And she’s our top law enforcement officer? Please.

She asked us to believe that Brown, who has two daughters, is totally callous to the trauma of rape. How scurrilous.

She told us to look at Brown and see George W. Bush. Really? Should we then look at her, a product of the entrenched Beacon Hill establishment, and see Dianne Wilkerson, Marian Walsh or Sal DiMasi? Would that not be just as reasonable?

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They’re already writing her obituary in Boston.

Racist

“I think investors who are nervous about the dictatorship of the Pelosi proletariat will feel at ease, and we could have a gigantic rally off a Coakley loss and a Brown win,” said Cramer on Friday’s “Mad Money.”

“It will be a signal that a more pro-business, less pro-labor government could be in front of us.”

via CNBC’s Jim Cramer: Brown Win Tuesday Causes Huge Stock Rally As Investors Celebrate ‘Pelosi Politburo Emasculation’ | NewsBusters.org.

I have to call bullshit on this. It seems to me that the current rally is a bubble about to burst.

Republican Scott Brown charged Saturday that a Democratic mailing against his U.S. Senate campaign violates a Massachusetts law prohibiting false statements against a political candidate.

The cover of a four-page mailer sent by the Massachusetts Democratic Party says, “1,736 women were raped in Massachusetts in 2008. Scott Brown wants hospitals to turn them all away.”

Brown is a state senator, and in 2005 he filed an amendment that would have allowed workers at religious hospitals or with firmly held religious beliefs to avoid giving emergency contraception to rape victims. The amendment failed, and Brown voted in favor of a bill allowing the contraception. He also voted to override a veto issued by his fellow Republican, then-Gov. Mitt Romney.