Clear and Present Danger By Hank Silverberg I am troubled. Some of our basic rights are being threatened, and no one seems to notice or care. Our founding fathers took more than 25 years to create a system in this country which, with a few amendments, has held up very well over the last 200 years. It took more than ten years to dump the loosely written concepts of the Articles of Confederation and formulate a system of checks and balances for our government that became the U-S Constitution in 1789. That document set up how we choose our leaders and how much power they have. But that was not enough for men like John Jay, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. They also knew that a centralized government needed to be checked and that the rights of individual citizens needed to be p