Insurance Law

Rights? Quite Right!

By George Wallace

Today is Bill of Rights Day, acknowledging the ratification and adoption of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution on December 15, 1791.

Bill of Rights Day was reputedly first proclaimed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, on the Bill's 150th anniversary.  President Obama opted this year for an omnibus proclamation, including Bill of Rights Day in a package with Human Rights Day and Human Rights Week.

Tim Lynch, of the Cato Institute, takes stock and finds many of our enumerated Rights honored more in the breach than in th'observance in these times.  

Google, meanwhile, goes its own way and takes the occasion to honor LL Zamenhof, the deviser of Esperanto, on its home page, drawing the sort of unreasonable ire that only the Internet -- and rights of free expression! in the language of your choice! -- can generate.

The Presidential proclamation urges us all "to mark these observances with appropriate ceremonies and activities."   I recommend that you exercise your unenumerated right -- it is in the penumbra of one or another of The First Ten, I am quite sure -- to take five minutes from your day to observe and to meditate upon this stately, silent, kaleidoscopic and slightly trippy visual tribute, by Philip Bell. 

The Illustrated Bill of Rights from Philip Bell on Vimeo.

[There is a great deal of detail and fine print in this video.  I strongly recommend viewing it in full-screen mode on the fullest screen you have available.]

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Cross-posted to a fool in the forest.

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Full post as published by Declarations and Exclusions on December 15, 2009 (boomark / email).