The problem with the NFL plan to crack down on the N-word

By Michael J.W. Stickings

According to Jason LaCanfora at CBS Sports:

John Wooten, head of the Fritz Pollard Alliance that monitors diversity in the NFL, said he expects the league's competition committee to enact a rule at the owner's meeting next month making it an automatic 15-yard penalty if a player uses the N-word on the field, with a second infraction meriting an ejection.

Wooten spoke about his desire to eradicate the word completely from NFL workplaces at the Fritz Pollard event during the combine, wanting it to be fineable and policed throughout team facilities, and received a standing ovation according to those in attendance. Wooten said he will continue being vigilant about this with the NFL office and Commissioner Roger Goodell.

"I will be totally shocked if the competition committee does not uphold us on what we're trying to do," Wooten said. "We want this word to be policed from the parking lot to the equipment room to the locker room. Secretaries, PR people, whoever, we want it eliminated completely and want it policed everywhere."

*****

Wooten said the competition committee will formally decide whether or not to support his measure at the meeting in March, and then present it to owners. Wooten is "extremely hopeful" it will pass.

"I think they're going to do what needs to be done here," he said. "There is too much disrespect in the game."

There certainly is, and while I'm generally concerned about any crackdown on language, because it's often the thin end of the wedge, and while in my view organizations that impose speech restrictions should be viewed with suspicion at the very least, it's hard to object to any effort to rid the NFL of a slur that, one imagines, is far too commonly used.

But is this really the right way to go about it? I mean, "nigger" is bad, of course, but what then? What about gay slurs? Shouldn't, say, "faggot" be eliminated from the NFL? Or how other racial slurs, whether directed at blacks or others? Are there not Latino and Asian slurs, for example, that ought to have no place in civilized society, if that is what the NFL is trying to be? Where exactly does it end?

Read more »

A&E downs the ducks

By Capt. Fogg 

I didn't know who Phil Robertson was until just the other day when I stumbled upon A&E's Duck Dynasty and watched a bit before moving on. I had never watched the show, despite it's immense popularity, despite my fondness for shows about people who live in swamps, tiny towns and remote places -- People who hunt alligators, catch crawfish and run bait shops in towns like Pierre Part (the end of the world as the sign says) or Bayou Pigeon -- their cuisine, their music and culture, so quickly fading in an urbanizing country that still, as it always has, is forcing people into a cash economy, into paying jobs with regular hours while their environment - our country- is cut down, paved over and polluted.

In general I'm comfortable with people who love the 'outdoors,' that odd term we call the actual environment of planet Earth -- people who own fishing gear, snake boots, snowshoes, canoes and all that and still prize the ability to use them in unspoiled country. That's partially because such people are environmentalists although most will carefully explain that "they ain't no treehuggers or hippies."

That love of nature often sets them against entities like Florida's sugar cartel which has done more damage to our formerly vast wilderness than any terrorist could dream of, so you'd think that the rapacious right would despise anyone who didn't support fracking, strip mining, clear-cutting, toxic waste dumping, smoke belching and generally destructive industry, and perhaps you'd expect to hear the voice of the Right raised against such folks, but no. The American Family Association is calling him a New American Hero. now that the network has suspended the release of next season's show.

Read more »

Free Pussy Riot -- all of them

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Today, one member of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was freed, but the convictions of the other two, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, were upheld -- and they'll now spend the rest of their two-year sentences at a prison camp.

And not for hooliganism, as alleged, but for daring to challenge the authoritarian rule of Vladimir Putin:

The case against Pussy Riot, a feminist punk collective formed to challenge the government of Vladimir Putin, has laid bare the crackdown under way as Russia's powerful leader seeks to overcome growing opposition to his rule.

Arrested for singing an anti-Putin "punk prayer" inside a Moscow cathedral that caters to the governing elite, the three members of Pussy Riot maintain they were carrying out a political protest. The prosecution argued that the goal of their February performance was to offend Russian Orthodox believers.

It doesn't matter whether you find the form of the protest appropriate. (And perhaps they could have found a different venue for their protest, but the struggle against authoritarianism often requires such public displays of dissent.) This is about freedom in the face of tyranny.

Pussy Riot deserves our support. And all three deserve to be free.

Videos, protests, and murder: The bigger picture in Libya and beyond

By Ali Ezzatyar

The killing of Ambassador Stevens is still shrouded in some ambiguity. But a media firestorm on the subject, stoked by certain U.S. lawmakers, is missing the point, and that goes for the mainstream media's analysis of recent protests in the Muslim world as well.

The U.S. Government, and the State Department in particular, are being criticized for not disclosing the nature of the attack on Mr. Stevens' safehouse. The notion underlying this criticism is that the State Department might have known that it was a planned hit, and not the result of an uncontrollable, angry mob. Still deeper, the mainstream media is emphasizing that Al Qaeda's involvement in the attack is still either unknown or undisclosed.

It is true that if this was a planned assassination, it is worth knowing, but mostly for logistical reasons. There was a security failure and that needs to be addressed. It resulted in the loss of a courageous public servant. But the media's desire to paint a coherent picture about the causes and motivations for the killing -- a picture that does not exist -- is detrimental to understanding the broader problem.

Let's acknowledge that there are individuals in all Muslim countries that make it a priority to kill high-profile Americans. I fail to see how we can still be so wedded to the Al Qaeda vernacular. It is totally disingenuous to say things like "Al Qaeda-linked group," and still worse, "Al Qaeda-inspired." Virtually every Muslim extremist group, with the exception of a minority of Shiite ones, is Al Qaeda-inspired. Certainly every one of these groups in North Africa is. These groups have no link to the Al Qaeda America first waged war on in 2001, or even before in Tanzania. They are not the organization some still insist on imagining them to be. If we are being intellectually honest, there is nothing to hide about Al Qaeda, even if the murderer from Benghazi has a picture of Bin Laden in his wallet.

Whether or not these angry mobs or these killing squads consider themselves part of a larger structure is irrelevant. The real issue is how they manage to be brought out into the streets by their preachers. It is not a video about their prophet that is the proximate cause of the violence. It is a general frustration with the West, its policies in the region, coupled with a mental atrophy that allows them to attribute the actions of one person to an entire nation. To address the former, we need to support the positive elements in Muslim society which make up the vast majority. For decades, we sometimes supported the authoritarian minority. To address the latter, we need to engage the majority and the minority, through our diplomacy, through our culture of acceptance and openness, and through our support for civil society.

I think one of the most unfortunate developments last week was the handful of speeches given by leaders of majority Muslim countries at the U.N. The basic gist of all of them was that we should not accept blasphemy of religion as freedom of speech. Yes, we should. Any other logic applied to freedom of speech is a slippery slope. It is difficult to assess to what extent such words are designed to placate respective constituencies -- yes, they do that in other countries as well. Either way, one can hope that these new, democratically elected leaders will either turn out to be, or be succeeded by, courageous thinkers who both understand what free society entails and are wedded to its establishment.

The protests in the Muslim world relating to that online video are indicative of so many things. Much of the publicity about these events have focused on backlash and anger at the video's content. In reality, this is the least important factor to consider in the entire ordeal. It is more fundamental to recognize that the Muslim world is frustrated with the West generally, that there remains a fundamental disagreement about what democracy entails, and finally, that divisions among Muslims themselves are being exposed by these new democratic openings in society. Particularly with respect to the last point, there is a splendor in the debate that is taking place within the Muslim world today; what Ambassador Stevens' life work represented is the most honorable and appropriate of spokes that drives the wheel moving the Middle East into modernity.

Gagging the Web

By Capt. Fogg

What's a COICA? Not an anatomical term, but yet another government-sponsored acronym for the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. According to some, it's needed to protect intellectual property, a term which often provokes cynicism regarding the intellectual properties of some intellectual property, but I'll save that for another post.

According to others, like Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, quoted at Raw Story this morning, it's 

almost like using a bunker-busting cluster bomb, when what you need is a precision-guided missile. 

As I read it, if any state AG finds something you wrote last year was insufficiently attributed or a thought or picture that belonged to someone else -- you're off the air along with everything else you've written. Is it just me, or does that sound as if it had been designed for misuse? Will any website critical of government or government officials or members of the same party as a state attorney general be sifted for some infraction that can justify it's obliteration or postpone publication indefinitely? Is this bill far too broad to be safe? Were we all born yesterday?

The Senate Judiciary Committee passed this bit of poorly digested legislation yesterday. (There's a metaphor here. Look for it.) It was passed unanimously and yet it won't be hanging over the heads of bloggers like some bloody sword just yet and we owe it to Wyden who used his senatorial option to place holds on pending legislation to force proponents to re-introduce the bill in the next session. I hope that by then the opposition will have made its case and shed enough light on the potential for politically-based government censorship.

Ron Wyden is a Democrat, but Democrats should perhaps avoid crowing about being the defenders of freedom of the press since the bill was co-sponsored by Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, who described it as a bipartisan effort to protect property rights. Obviously there's no lack of support for putting such things above freedom of speech by Democratic senators.

A group calling itself Demand Progress is circulating a petition it hopes will make a difference, and now that we have a brief reprieve, perhaps it will. Perhaps you will agree.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

An unbalanced truth

By Capt. Fogg

Seems like yesterday when criticizing George Bush was close enough to treason that the police would get involved. I remember people walking out of a Jon Lovitz stand-up routine when he made some mild crack about Bush's garbled English. I remember tirades on TV when Streisand aired her opinions of the president. I remember grumbling in the movie theater lobby after a showing of "W" about how "you shouldn't criticize a president like that." There were the Dixie Chicks, and there were the Radio bloviators out there bashing liberals as though freedom of speech were some Marxist plot. The word treason, the accusation of "emboldening" and giving aid and comfort to some amorphous enemy was given enough air time to warm the climate for real.

I remember audiences for Bush's town hall meetings being vetted to make sure flattering questions were the only ones asked. I remember protesters being herded into "free speech" zones behind barbed wire and miles from anywhere the President might be. I remember people being escorted from the premises by armed policemen simply because of a bumper sticker on the car they arrived in.

Many people persist in telling us that such things are common on "both sides" yet I do not remember anyone being escorted away from the current president for carrying signs advocating killing "his ugly wife and stupid children" nor for carrying guns. It's perhaps the most false of the false equivalences that constitute political dialogue today.

Of course if you want to tell me the courts share the blame, I'll agree. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the US Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal of two Colorado residents who were excluded unwillingly from a speech by President Bush in 2005 because White House aides saw them arrive in a car with a bumper sticker that proclaimed: “No More Blood For Oil.”

Do we attribute this slap in the face for the First amendment to the Bush Police State? Certainly it wasn't the only one, but Bush is gone and the highest court seems to think we won't care that they don't care enough to hear the case.

So is it now that the freedom to have a bumper sticker on your car -- that is the freedom to criticize the government, to petition the government, to print your opinions for all to read can simply be washed away by a government that can't be bothered to listen to it? Stare decisis?

I don't know about you, but no matter how conservative, libertarian or just plain ornery you are, I don't see a way to pin this one on Obama or to try to pull a fast one with the "both sides do it so its not so bad" sidestep. If you agree that this kind of presidential power is inappropriate, you'll have to agree that getting away with it because the courts don't care is worse. So can we shut up about "liberal active courts" and recognize that this one at least has come down on the side of the police state and the Liberals had nothing to do with it?

So where's the anger? where's the admission that yes, we supported this administration and its policies and WE WERE WRONG!

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Supreme Court strikes down law banning depictions of extreme animal cruelty

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I'm all for free speech -- in fact, I consider myself a firm civil libertarian in this regard -- but some "speech" isn't really speech and shouldn't be free.

Take, for example, the case of videos depicting extreme cruelty to animals:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday forcefully struck down a federal law aimed at banning depictions of dog fighting and other violence against animals, saying it violated constitutional guarantees of free speech and created a "criminal prohibition of alarming breadth."

The 8 to 1 ruling, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., was a ringing endorsement of the First Amendment's protection of even distasteful expression. Roberts called "startling and dangerous" the government's argument that the value of certain categories of speech should be weighed against their societal costs when protecting free speech. 

Again, I'm all for the First Amendment, but, to me, animal cruelty videos should be considered akin to child pornography:

The law was enacted in 1999 to forbid sales of so-called crush videos. They appeal to a certain sexual fetish by depicting the torture of animals -- cats, dogs, monkeys, mice and hamsters, according to Congress -- or showing them being crushed to death by women wearing stiletto heels or with their bare feet. While dog-fighting and other forms of animal cruelty are already illegal, Congress said the legislation was necessary to stop the production of videos for commercial gain.

What was Roberts' objection?

Roberts' opinion said the court was not passing judgment about whether a narrower statute limited just to crush videos and "other depictions of extreme animal cruelty" might be constitutional.

But the court said the legislation passed by Congress was far too broad. Anyone who "creates, sells or possesses a depiction of animal cruelty" for commercial gain can be imprisoned for up to five years. A depiction of cruelty was defined as one in which "a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded or killed."

Roberts wrote that the definition was so loose that it could include all depictions of wounding or killing animals, even hunting videos or magazines. He said the law's exemption for works of "serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical or artistic value" was not enough protection, and the court was not reassured by the government's argument that prosecutions were rare.

That's just silly. The law in question is clearly aimed at depictions of extreme animal cruelty, not depections of hunting (which I consider cruel but certainly not at the level of what is depicted in these "crush" videos). And so I actually find myself in agreement with Justice Alito, the lone dissenter:

He said the law was enacted "not to suppress speech, but to prevent horrific acts of animal cruelty." He said that the entire law need not be found unconstitutional, and that the "practical effect" of the ruling would be to spur production of crush videos, which opponents such as the Humane Society of the United States said had decreased with passage of the 1999 law.

As Wayne Pacelle, the head of The Humane Society of the United States, wrote at HuffPo, "[t]he Court got hung up in a stream of hypothetical scenarios, imagining that the law as worded might sweep up the sellers of hunting, bullfighting, and other videos that the federal lawmakers never intended to address." Furthermore:

Justice Samuel Alito dissented, noting that the majority has struck down "a valuable statute that was enacted not to suppress speech, but to prevent horrific acts of animal cruelty -- in particular, the creation and commercial exploitation of crush videos, a form of depraved entertainment that has no social value." Justice Alito explained that "the animals used in crush videos are living creatures that experience excruciating pain. Our society has long banned such cruelty, which is illegal throughout the country."

With the Court issuing a disappointing albeit carefully crafted decision, it seems that Congress can step in and write a more narrowly tailored federal statute to prohibit the commercial sale of videos depicting extreme and illegal acts of cruelty. Clearly, it should not be legal to stage a dogfight in your basement and then sell the video of this criminal action. It is illegal to molest a child and sell a video of this sort of child pornography, and the same should be true for the most extreme and widely criminalized acts of animal cruelty.

With this ruling, a narrower statute is certainly necessary and ought to be enacted as soon as possible. Surely even ardent civil libertarians could get behind that.

And I would add this: While depictions of such animal cruelty ought to be banned, those who inflict the cruelty and those who party to it ought to face significant punishment under the law. There are laws in place, yes, but they are not nearly strong enough, and we ought to take the welfare of animals far more seriously than we do.

As for these disgusting "crush" videos, which I had no idea even existed before learning of this case, Alito is right, they are "a form of depraved entertainment that has no social value." But who are the utterly depraved individuals who make them, and who enjoy them? I realize that there is extraordinary depravity out there, and I realize that depravity is a matter of perspective (consider those ignorant bigots who think that homosexuality is depraved, for example), but surely there is a line than can be drawn. It is one then when consenting adults engage in certain activities with each other, quite another when children or animals or even adults who are in no position to consent are abused, tortured, and, in this case, killed.

There should be zero tolerance for such abhorrent behaviour.

Stuff to Read (3/24/10): North Korean cuisine and Canadian hate-speech laws

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Check these out:

-- Slate: "Kingdom Kim's Culinary Outposts," by Sebastian Strangio.

A fascinating look at North Korea's Pyongyang restaurant chain in Asia, open to the public but ruled over by Kim's state-run surveillance apparatus. The restaurants are apparently quite popular with South Koreans, with entertainment provided by "group[s] of pretty North Korean-born waitresses, who perform music and dance routines complete with tightly synchronized choreography reminiscent of North Korea's annual Mass Games." And what exactly do they serve? "Unlike North Korea proper, which is wracked by economic sanctions and constant famines, the food here is fresh and abundant. The menu features specialties such as Pyongyang 'cold noodle' (served encrusted with ice), barbecued cuttlefish, stringy dangogi (dog meat) soup, and countless variations on the kimchi theme, all served with glutinous white rice. Also available for sale are a series of North Korean products, including ginseng wine and some nameless bear 'product' promised to increase sexual virility." How do you say "Yum-O!" in Korean?

-- Salon: "The creepy tyranny of Canada's hate speech laws," by Glenn Greenwald.

Glenn rightly objects to Canada's objectionable (and wholly subjective) hate-speech laws, as I do (it's one thing about my country I really don't like), focusing on Ann Coulter's invitation to speak at the University of Ottawa, which essentially threatened her with legal action if she crossed the subjective line. "I think threatening someone with criminal prosecution for the political views they might express is quite 'hateful.' So, too, is anointing oneself the arbiter of what is and is not sufficiently 'civilized discussion' to the point of using the force of criminal law to enforce it... The hubris required to believe that you can declare certain views so objectively hateful that they should be criminalized is astronomical; in so many eras, views that were most scorned by majorities ended up emerging as truth." Be careful what you wish for, in other words, as the situation could reverse, the hunter become the hunted, the prosecutor become the prosecuted. (For more on Coulter's appearance in Ottawa yesterday, see Capt. Fogg.)

Jesus laughed

By Capt. Fogg

"How dangerous it is in sensible things to use metaphorical expressions unto the people, and what absurd conceits they will swallow in their literals."

-Thomas Browne - Pseudoxia Epidemica-

_______

Making sense out of someone else's religion is a bit like looking at a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces don't all fit and some are taped in place or hidden under others. Take the Mary and Joseph story. We're supposed to believe that since Joseph was too old to have sex with his obscenely young bride Mary, her pregnancy was a bit of a surprise - until of course she told him that God, in the form of a bird, did the deed. The subsequent pregnancies resulting in brothers and sisters might have been harder to explain, unless the bird left some blue pills for the old man -- or unless we ignore old Occam: "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" which means don't make shit up just so people won't laugh at your bogus story.

That of course would have Jesus' brother Jacob the true heir to the throne of David, making him the Messiah; because after all, Joseph, from whose family the title was inherited, wasn't his real father. OK, so we don't ask and we just tape that piece in place and ignore what is underneath.

Anyway, one can choose to treat the alleged divinity of Jesus as a metaphor, which makes sense, or literally, which makes absolutely none. If you're of the latter persuasion, which didn't approach universality for many centuries into the Christian Era, (if it ever really did) the flimsiness of your construction is likely to make you touchy and humorless if not aggressively pugnacious. Imagine the fundamentalist's reaction to a poster showing A young Joseph in bed with a frustrated looking Mary and titled "Poor Joseph, God was a hard act to follow."



The Church that put up the billboard in Aukland, New Zealand simply wished to point out the absurd conceit of swallowing this literal fundamentalist interpretation. Archdeacon Glynn Cardy of The St Matthew-in-the-City Anglican church said he wanted to inspire people to talk about the Christmas story: to challenge a fundamentalist interpretation that's obviously pasted together from pieces torn from other religions, rather than swallowing the cocktail.

"What we're trying to do is to get people to think more about what Christmas is all about. Is it about a spiritual male God sending down sperm so a child would be born, or is it about the power of love in our midst as seen in Jesus?"

Predictably, it wasn't well received by those who demand that everyone else swallow the same mind numbing potion and within hours an irate man was trying to paint over the image. Local Catholic spokesmen were up in arms and a "conservative" group called Family First was calling the whole thing irresponsible. It's nice to know that "conservatives" despise religious freedom in New Zealand as much as they do here. I mean it's one thing to be able to speak out against secular authority, but suggesting that God's own sacred chicken doesn't make half breed, wholly God children with young girls who somehow remain virginal throughout multiple pregnancies and births! What fools these mortals be!

If only I could claim such protection against people who disagree with me.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Just sayin'...

By Mustang Bobby

CBS golf analyst David Feherty speculates about the mindset and intentions of "any U.S. soldier" towards the Democratic leadership in Congress.

From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this, though: despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.

It's no secret that Mr. Feherty thinks that George W. Bush is the best president evah and that all of the troubles in Iraq and the rest of the world are the fault of Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid.

Of course Mr. Feherty is entitled to his opinion, as is the magazine that published his article. Chances are that he knew what he was doing and that he knew that he would set off the discussion about his interesting points of view -- as he has. Aside from the fact that what he wrote assumes that all soldiers think like he does and that even joking about killing the Speaker of the House -- third in line of presidential succession -- and the Senate Majority Leader might get the attention of the United States Secret Service, Mr. Feherty demonstrates the smug arrogance of someone who thinks he's the only one out there with the guts to "tell it like it is" (channeling the late Howard Cosell), critics be damned. So there.

Chances are that Mr. Feherty will get a phone call from the folks at CBS and under the threat of his contract he will issue a non-apology apology along the lines of "I'm sorry if I offended," putting the burden on those who were offended, and then cash in on the whining circuit of right-wing talk-radio guest shots about how the P.C. crowd has made him a martyr to the cause of free speech, and can't anyone take a joke anymore? Yeah, well, when it's all about you, nothing else matters.

The point is that the people who complain the most about their restrictions of free speech rights are the ones who both abuse the right and have no compunction about restricting it for other people. They also don't get the basic concept of taking responsibility for your own actions. The right of free speech includes the responsibility for using the judgment to know when to not say something that might come back and bite you in the ass. A mature and responsible person would know that and not blame the consequences on someone else.

There's more to the right of freedom of speech than just saying something.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Step by step

By Capt. Fogg

It wouldn't be Christmas if we didn't have the mindless, botox-faced zombies at Fox yelping about the insult to religion. Of course, it wouldn't be a free country if we weren't allowed to express our objections to anything or were forced to make religious oaths and follow religious practices. Oh, wait a minute -- we are. It isn't; at least not yet.

Lyin' Bill says he expects "they" (Jews, Atheists, Muslims) will try next to remove the national holiday (what, he called it a holiday?) on the premise that we can't have a holiday based on religion. Of course we can have a holiday based on the fact that nobody would come to work anyway, but that's inconvenient to his scenario and it annoys him that in fact, nobody seems to object to a day off for any reason.

It's my constitutional right to insult your religion, I'm proud to say, and it's only fair since your religion in and of itself insults mine and several others. In fact I take offense at some aspect of every religion I've yet heard of. It's good to live in a free country.

Apparently the sense of relief at being newly out from under the bootheel of religious tyrants seems to be spreading. Newsweek has a very objective over story on the empty bigotry of the war against gay marriage; one that I think couldn't have got past the editors before the election. Keith Olbermann came out last night and condemed Lyin' Bill's comic opera about Christians under siege as the step-child of xenophobia and anti-Semitism.

It's not as if freedom is breaking out all over, but I sense a weakening of the old guard; the passing of an old, worn out tyranny and again, I'm no longer ashamed to be proud of being an American: not because I think we're the best, but because we're not as ashamed to admit our faults and more likely to do something about it.

Merry Christmas.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Palin and the First Amendment: Give me a friggin' break

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This... is... simply... ridiculous:

In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.

Right, so she's allowed to say whatever she wants, but the media aren't allowed to criticize her. Got it?

She's not attacking Obama with her smears, just asking questions, but the media are attacking her and seeking to shut her up. Got it?

Bull... fucking... shit.

This isn't about free speech -- no one is talking about taking her rights away from her, and there's no threat to the future of the country in this regard -- it's about running a vicious and dirty campaign, about lying, about seeking to deceive the American people.

If Palin is so worried about the First Amendment -- and you know she isn't; this is just more of the usual media-bashing and scapegoating, a common right-wing tactic -- maybe she should take a look at her own party and its record on civil liberties.

**********

UPDATE: Read Greenwald:

If anything, Palin has this exactly backwards, since one thing that the First Amendment does actually guarantee is a free press. Thus, when the press criticizes a political candidate and a Governor such as Palin, that is a classic example of First Amendment rights being exercised, not abridged.

This isn't only about profound ignorance regarding our basic liberties, though it is obviously that. Palin here is also giving voice to the standard right-wing grievance instinct: that it's inherently unfair when they're criticized. And now, apparently, it's even unconstitutional.

Well argued, as always.

Can I get an "Amen," brothers and sisters?

By Carl

One could only hope for this:

SHOULD Barack Obama win the presidency and Democrats take full control of Congress, next year will see a real legislative attempt to bring back the Fairness Doctrine - and to diminish conservatives' influence on broadcast radio, the one medium they dominate.

Yes, the Obama campaign said some months back that the candidate doesn't seek to re-impose this regulation, which, until Ronald Reagan's FCC phased it out in the 1980s, required TV and radio broadcasters to give balanced airtime to opposing viewpoints or face steep fines or even loss of license. But most Democrats - including party elders Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and Al Gore - strongly support the idea of mandating "fairness."

It's funny. I never really noticed how much I missed the disclaimer that my local television stations had to broadcast.

See, when some moron, say, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, would wrangle a moment of air time from the local television outlet, a) he was forced to keep his comments factual and polite, and b) the station was forced to "provide free air time for responsible spokespeople of opposing views."

In 1980, sensing an opening, the broadcast media, owned and operated in many instances by stridently right wing corporatists with an agenda (think Richard Mellon Scaife) prevailed upon Ronald Reagan's FCC to do away with the Fairness Doctrine, thus eliminating reasoned discourse presented for the public enlightenment.

The Fairness Doctrine was introduced in 1949 by the FCC, but until 1969 was usually applied on a case-by-case basis.

In 1969, journalist Fred Cook was torn to shreds on the radio program of the Rev. Billy James Hargis. Attacked personally for writing a book about Barry Goldwater, Cook argued before the Supreme Court that the FCC doctrine implied the right to free and equal time to respond to the scandalous (and nearly slanderous) charges levelled.

At first blush, it may seem that this was not a matter for the Courts to decide, free enterprise, First Amendment and all, but the SCOTUS took note of the fact that the airwaves were a public trust overseen by the Congress and therefore were actually public domain. As a public trust, there was no reason the government couldn't require such a doctrine and upheld Cook's complaint.

(The other thing the Fairness Doctrine required was programming "in the public interest" which is why your rock or hip-hop station broadcasts those bizarre programs really early on Sunday morning, like herbal medicine shows or community affairs programming.)

When the Reagan administration effectively eviscerated the Fairness Doctrine, it created Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Monica Crowley, Michael Savage and any number of right wing knuckleheads whose only claim to fame is being potty-mouthed and willing to be paid for it.

It also created Stephanie Miller, Air America Radio, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann.

I apply the Fairness Doctrine to my columns, you see... ;-)

This deregulation of the broadcast market, along with the consolidation of power amongst five mammoth content distributors, created the hugely right wing media goliath that we have today.

It is no secret the agenda that General Electric, Disney, and the others have established: entertain at the expense of informing. Don't tell the truth, tell a masking of truth. Put lipstick on a pig and trot it out as a beauty queen. Tout American Idol rather than America's failures in Iraq.

In short, cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war on the people of the United States. Beat us into submission until we no longer care, and never EVER let a responsible spokesperson with an opposing point of view have any air time whatsoever, except in a context where he can be edited and mocked into submission.

Mr. Anderson's article, as panicked as it is (after all, he works for Rupert Murdoch, who made his life's fortune on being a strident partisan and suppressing rational discussion), points out the enormous success lying on the radio has had.

It's about time it stopped. He cites the First Amendment, but as anyone with a speck of understanding can see, the First Amendment is under more savage attacks without the Fairness Doctrine than with.

What Anderson is more concerned with (and his article amply demonstrates) is comfort. The comfort of not having one's views challenged substantively. The comfort of being truly elitist because one is truly ignorant. The comfort of being, in short, an idiot.

So "amen" to the Fairness Doctrine, and long may she oversee the dialogue of this great nation.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Damned lies and religion

By Capt. Fogg

The idea that the freedom of Christians to peaceably practice their religion is undermined by the law and by unbelievers and heretics is perhaps the most egregious lie in current circulation in the United States. This lie is the fulcrum for the lever being used to establish a distinctively American and militant Christian variant as not only an official creed, but as the basis for government, law and justice.

"I'm all about freedom of speech," says South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer.

That's why he helped push legislation allowing automobile license plates to become a platform for advertising the owner's Christianity. A measure to permit "I BELIEVE" license tags with Christian symbols failed recently in Florida, but South Carolina already allows special plates for any cause with a minimum prepaid order of 400 or a $4000 deposit. The legislation was thus largely redundant and the SC Governor passed it without signature, but its purpose was not only to allow government assistance in evangelistic pursuits, but to promote the idea that Christianity is being persecuted.

Bauer states that he is willing to put up the deposit (and be reimbursed of course) so that the oppressed believers of South Carolina could thumb their noses at secular drivers by displaying a cross, a stained glass window and a credo along with their registration number. Sometimes, those little chrome fish aren't enough.

"People who support Judeo-Christian values are ever under fire now," Bauer said to AP News.

"It's like they expect folks who are believers just to roll over because they're scared of the ACLU."

I'm sure Bauer will soon issue an encyclical explaining away the antithetical nature of Christianity and Judaism, but of course nobody is expecting anyone to roll in holy or unholy fashion -- only to stop sticking their beliefs in everyone else's face, trying to impose their taboos and forcing everyone to pay for it. Frankly I don't care whether the guy I'm following on the road is following some higher or lower father -- or whether he's Cuckoo for Cocoa Pops. I do care whether the government I pay for gives him special treatment and privileges in his mission. I do care that there might be more freedom of speech for those who see magic apparitions in their morning toast than there is for me and I don't appreciate having to keep my beliefs secret in that State for fear of being shot and left for dead on some dirt road in South Carolina.

Anyone riding with me on my recent road trip can attest that Indiana drivers whose plates proclaim that "we" trust some unspecified god are just as incompetent and perhaps more likely to be viciously aggressive than others. They would have had ample experience of being put in danger by people with Jesus fish on their SUV's. They would have been regularly reminded that "HELL IS REAL" by countless billboards and moralized at by endless displays of tendentiously edited versions of Jewish covenants. The coins they dropped into toll booth bins would have a religious message on them. They never would have been out of radio range of at least half a dozen evangelical radio stations and they never have been or will be told by the ACLU what to believe or disbelieve or display on their cars, their homes or as a frontlet between their eyes.

Religious freedom is alive and well in the United States of America but it's the power of the Clergy, the power of Christian leaders to force their doctrines on all of us we need to be afraid of and if this were not true, they wouldn't have to lie -- now would they?

Fear of Mahmoud

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Allow me to comment briefly on the Ahmadinejad in New York controversy:

So what?

Which is to say, so what that he's in New York? So what that he spoke at Columbia? So what that he's addressing the U.N.? So what that he wanted to visit Ground Zero?

Ahmadinejad is an appalling and reprehensible man. Columbia President Lee Bollinger got it mostly right: He's "a petty and cruel dictator" -- I say mostly because while he is both petty and cruel he is not entirely a dictator, not with a "supreme leader" above him, not with the Assembly of Experts, not with relatively powerful legislative and judicial branches in Iran. Ahmadinejad is a thug, and a tyrant, but not an autocrat.

Which, again, is not defend him in any way. Consider his denial of the Holocaust, his hatred of Israel, his position on women and gays. He said this, presumably with a straight face, at Columbia: "Women in Iran enjoy the highest levels of freedom." -- and -- "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country." To which one must reply: No, they don't. You oppress them. -- Yes, you do. You execute them. And there was so much more, so much ludicrousness, but Bollinger was impressive, attacking Ahmadinejad's views with blistering sobriety, defending the event, the decision to invite Ahmadinejad to speak, the primacy of free speech.

Much has already been written on the controversy (see Memeorandum), but I want to single out Ezra Klein:

I genuinely don't understand the quaking fear over Ahmadinejad's interview at Columbia. When did America become so weak, so insecure, that we mistrust our capacity to converse with potentially hostile world leaders? Do we really believe the president of Columbia is so doltish as to be outsmarted by a former traffic engineer from Tehran? Do we really see no utility in publicly grilling prominent liars in such a way that their denials lose credibility? What do we have to lose from a foreign leader, even a hostile one, somberly laying a wreath at the site of a tragedy? When did we become so afraid? And for all the conservative talk that a loss in Iraq will diminish our reputation for strength and thus harm our security, how must it look when some three-foot tall Iranian firebrand keeps trying to dialogue with us and we keep dodging his calls?

To be fair, maybe Ahmadinejad isn't serious about "dialogue," at not of the constructive kind. Still, why not at least listen to what he has to say? Why not do what Bollinger did? Isn't that far more effective than calling him evil and calling it a day -- or planning for war?

Why not engage him -- and rip him to pieces?

Pissing on the First

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Capt. Fogg commented earlier on the Supreme Court's "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" ruling. For more on that ruling, see the The Washington Post, which calls it "[the Court's] most significant ruling on student speech in almost two decades". John Cole is right to refer to the nanny state: "I guess we will just let the strict constructionists explain their position on this one. Apparently the founders were in favor of every kind of speech except those that got in the way of government aims."

But pissing on the First Amendment was not all the Roberts Court got up to yesterday. Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog looks at the Court's other terrible rulings, which included weakening endangered species protections and campaign finance restrictions, and protecting Bush's faith-based initiatives program (more pissing on the First). See also The Carpetbagger Report, where Steve Benen sums up the rulings and offers this overview of what happened:

Ultimately, the high court sided with conservative interests across the board. In each instance, the ruling was 5 to 4, and the minority was made up of the same four left-leaning justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter, and Stevens). Alito wrote two of the opinions, and Roberts wrote the other two.

Had Kerry won Ohio in 2004, the right probably would have lost in each of these cases. I guess it’s one of those elections-have-consequences moments, isn't it?

Yes, sadly, it is. But it isn't just Kerry in '04, it's Gore in '00 -- he won, didn't he? And so we're stuck not just with an ongoing war in Iraq and the obliteration of American credibility and leadership around the world but a right-wing Supreme Court that will continue to soil the Constitution long after Bush has left office in disgrace.

Makes you feel all warm 'n' fuzzy, eh?

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

By Capt. Fogg

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceable to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

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If you're one of those who doesn't know the names of anyone on the Supreme Court, much less the name of the chief justice, perhaps it's time you learned. Perhaps you might wish to reflect on another loss for America to the forces of the Right. You voted for these people, you'd better learn to like what you got because we're stuck with them for a long, long time.

In the words of a TV judge from Texas, "what part of abridge didn't you understand?" Chief Justice Roberts probably knows what it means to "abridge." It means to cut short or to curtail, which is exactly what has just been done by the Supreme Court ruling today concerning the constitutional right of Joseph Frederick to fly a banner expressing a somewhat enigmatic statement he claims he got from a bumper sticker: Bong Hits 4 Jesus. The courts sided with a disciplinarian high school principal who suspended him for ten days for doing it and another five for quoting Thomas Jefferson as saying "speech limited is speech lost."

Jefferson was right, the constitution is explicit and the judges appointed by our activist President have taken another step toward creating the sort of government Jefferson thought it would take the blood of patriots to overturn. I hope he isn't right again, but if the supreme court will allow someone to be punished for expressing an opinion in the public streets, they have today joined the ranks of the enemies of freedom and further established the illegitimacy of our current government.

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)

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Update: For more, see The Garlic's Bong Hits 4 Roberts. -- MJWS