Wingnuts redact the Bill of Rights, free speech

The First Amendment packs a lot of power. On freedom of speech, wingers act as though it says:

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.

Yep, they leave all the content of the free speech clause on the cutting room floor.

"Dr." Laura believes her First Amendment rights were "usurped" (removed from the throne like a dingleberry!) because Congress some government official her sponsors and affiliates in the private sector outlawed her saying "n*****" charged her with a crime got upset and deprived her of the right to speak radio talk show leverage from happy sponsors to renew her contract.

Because every right wing lunatic has a god-given right to be as ugly as she wanna be on hate radio... And, and, and, they get to say whatever the hell comes into their fevered brains, and no one is allowed to express a contrary opinion.

Sorta the way they view freedom of religion.

Outrage, fine

... but no censorship. Google shouldn't be picking and choosing what we can see, and they already allow each of us to choose to exclude offensive images.

"The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results," it says.

The American answer to offensive speech is more speech.

"I am absolutely disgusted by this picture, but the Internet has thousands and thousands of offensive images. Should Google get rid of all of them? Where do you draw the line?" [Jerry Wright of Hoboken, New Jersey,] ... said by phone.

Other countries have different answers.

"There is no way to defend this heinous incident," Alheli Picazo of Calgary, Canada, told CNN by phone. "People often claim their right to free speech to mask blatant racism and insulting bigotry, and always seem to get away with it. When it comes to issues of discrimination, hiding behind free speech just doesn't cut it."

I greatly prefer our ironclad First Amendment guarantees.

Update (11/26): Clarity in the first paragraph.

Give voice to the billyclub

What's Bob Greene's gig at CNN? To give sympathetic interviews to reactionaries.

Look, being a Marxist, much less being a war protester with no revolutionary impulses, is not sufficient reason to have your skull bashed for the "crime" of free speech. Taunting comedically doesn't deserve assault. It's not even illegal to be an asshole, as some of the protesters surely were. Look, these cops getting back together is definitely not a reunion of the Waffen SS. I'm sure most of the cops had long and honorable careers. But they're not heroes for their police riot.

The cops weren't in the right in August 1968. Never mind whether one or two of them now "remember" that they opposed the Vietnam War, they brutally defended the existing pro-war Establishment order. Greene says that their defense of their riot here in 2009 was only attention-getting. Oh bullshit.

The reason there's no healing from this is that journalists like Greene continue to help with the rationalization of brutality. In forty years, someone will take this role to excuse the Constitutional crimes of the Bushist regime.

The lesson: As long as there is no accountability, there's no learning, no progress, no resolution.

War of sound-bytes

John Kerry remains for me a frustrating politician. Despite a lifetime in politics, he often reaches uncomfortably for oratory and nearly every time goes off the rails.

In his speech yesterday morning in Hudson, he told the story of a recent emergency helicopter landing in an unsecured LZ in Afghanistan. The rhetorical purpose was to introduce a self-deprecating joke about the phrase he would be remembered by had the chopper gone down:

Don't tase me, bro!

It's not even his line, of course. And he spoiled the helicopter story by painting the accompanying military officer as so nervous he launched into his briefing, which implicitly contrasted with his calm. Though he would have been a much better President than a second term for Duhbya, this captured some of his flaws as a candidate.

The painful truth is that Kerry's epigram would be:

I actually voted for it before I voted against it.

I suppose that's too bitter a memory even for self-deprecation. Reaching back to past glory, there would also be:

How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

In those days, Kerry spoke frankly, and that hurt him to some degree thirty years later in 2004. He had to lose to Duhbya to become frank again - to escape the myth of collegiality with the Republicans - but frankness is not his nature either.

The oddest thing is that the man can actually ad lib. There was an old poster of the gubernatorial ticket of Mike Dukakis and Kerry from 1978, and Kerry extemporized a funny story about how the photographer made Dukakis look bigger than Kerry, despite the very different reality.

So, in spite of my frustrations with him, I still sympathize with Kerry. On my way into Hudson, I saw a bumper sticker on a street sign:

United we stood. Bush divided us.

I hope Kerry saw it on the way to the event we both attended. He could use the validation - and the lesson in rhetorical simplicity.

Show us your tits

Mobs form easily in the presence of alcohol and idiots. The New York Times reports:

Another guard later said they were not permitted to do anything about the chants at Gate D because of free speech laws. Yet when a reporter tried to interview two security guards after halftime, he was detained in a holding room, threatened with arrest and asked to hand over his tape recorder.

The appropriate response of a reporter in this situation is to be arrested or call the bluff. And, when writing the story, to tell readers what happened.

But that's not the most important thing missing here. Free speech rights protect one testosterone-soaked moron shouting, "Show us your tits." Four hundred morons is a public disturbance not protected by the First Amendment.

If someone shouted, "Moon us," to a bunch of hairy-assed Jets fans, do you think the security guards wouldn't escort him from the building?

Standards of evidence

Conservative voices in today's media environment assume that they deserve a double standard in evidence:

• If it's possible that what conservatives claim is true, however likely to be false, the media are entitled, even obligated, to treat it as true.
• If it's possible that what liberals claim is false, however likely to be true, the media are entitled, even obligated to treat it as false.

The media could make an even-handed attempt to discern falsehoods and say so, but they don't. They've been infected by he-said-she-said-knowing-shrug - the Time Magazine approach to journalism that put me off ever reading it again in the 1970s, fer chrissake.

This double standard replicates one enforced in commercial speech. A corporation may make an ad that claims all sorts of nonsense, and it's not false advertising unless there's definitive proof that the ad is a knowing lie. They can ruthlessly cherry-pick data - "three quarters of surveys show Ford is better", but maybe they discarded a dozen other surveys that didn't fit. This is the conservative "truth".

Yet another corporation that wants to criticize another company's product must have definitive proof. This is what conservatives expect of liberals and, since the media accept the double standard as part of the game, what the media expect, too.

Update: Just when I need an example, I find a pointer from Atrios to this Media Matters piece.

Appetite for Muzak

Repressive regimes one and all suppress music that they find arousing rather than sedating. The state mercantilists of the P.R.C. want all the dulcet sounds in their economic elevator to be nicey-nice. The once and future Soviets could never stand rock or jazz - too "decadent".

Conservatives and Constitutional "originalists" sometimes suggest that the freedom of speech ensconced in the First Amendment pertains only to political speech. Over and over again, authoritarians have shown that the edgy speech of artists (and charlatan pretenders, too) is something they rightly fear and is vital to human freedom, including political freedom. Protecting that is the essential job of the free speech clause.

American conservatives, like the communists before them, love to attack Hollywood. Their reasons are similar.

Sign codes

The next time David Horowitz blows smoke about speech codes on campus, I'm sure he won't mention this. But some wingnut somewhere will probably decry the rudeness of the sign-makers. I mean, it's taboo to say anything mean about clergy, officers, or Duhbya, isn't it?

Fox's poison pen

Welcome Fox trolls!

Fox "News" is a propaganda outfit, as everyone knows. The wingnutosphere denies it because Fox presents them the world as they want it to be, without the confirmed liberal bias that facts bring. But the wingnuts continue to lap up Fox's slant as avidly as addicts.

Here is a case in point. The "reporter" uses the classic Fox "some say" technique - keep the focus on the liberals, not on their conservative critics. They hold Columbia as a whole responsible for an inconsistency between the university administration and the CPU, a student-run political discussion group. They bury President Lee Bollinger's list of issues with which he will confront Ahmadinejad in his introduction. And they helpfully send their frothing readership to fill up the CPU's blog with a whole raft of semi-distinguishable, often semi-literate ditto-head comments.

All that said, someone at Columbia should get Gilchrist on campus for an event and assure that he does not get shouted down. Then the only people suppressing speech will be the Fox dead-enders.

Update: Read and learn. How many of the liberals at Columbia agreed with Ahmadinejad? Looks like ... zero.