Category: Academic Freedom – Civil Liberties – Privacy

It’s Called Freedom of Speech

But it’s too much for a university professor to handle, accustomed as he must be to the cozy confines of academic speech codes. I’m thinking of the University of Utah’s David Hailey, whose ill-begotten effort to salvage the Rathergate memos was thoroughly debunked by Paul at Wizbang. Paul’s posts triggered an avalanche of ridicule and e-mail abuse aimed at Hailey. Wired carries a somewhat balanced story by Staci D. Kramer about the whole business:

David Hailey says he didn’t know much about blogs before he flipped on his office computer one late September morning and watched hate mail flood into his inbox.

Author of a report (.pdf) claiming that the controversial CBS News Texas Air National Guard memos could have been produced on a typewriter, the Utah State University associate professor of technical communications didn’t know he had become fodder for vigilant political blogs and discussion boards. To liberals, the report was proof that CBS was in the clear — making it another claim for conservatives to debunk.

But the debunking quickly turned into name-calling, with a guest blogger at Wizbang, a conservative political blog, leading his detailed critique with the since-retracted accusation that Hailey was a “liar, fraud and charlatan.” It escalated as Hailey updated what he calls a work in progress and his critics declared a cover-up.

The result was what Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, calls “a semi-organized swarming.” It is but one of a spate of recent incidents that underscores the power of a rapidly mobilized group online to accomplish a goal — and the potential for harm when online mobs form [like Democrats beating up Republicans at rallies, destroying lawn signs, and damaging Republican offices — only not as bad.]….

“For political figures, it’s fair game,” said Rheingold. “For people expressing political opinions, it’s scary. If some researcher does something you don’t agree with and you go after him personally, that’s scary.”…

At first, Hailey thought it was funny that his type-matching exercise ticked people off enough for them to write. By the second day, he was far from amused. By the end of the week, the tenured academic literally cried in relief when university officials called him to a meeting to express their support; many of them had received numerous e-mails demanding his dismissal and calling him a liar or a fraud [not surprising, given the sloppiness of Hailey’s work].

“It’s one thing to go to a university and point out that there are these problems,” Hailey said. “It’s another thing to start character assassination.”

Wizbang owner Kevin Aylward says that was never the intention but admits the language used in postings got out of hand.

“People are trying to make this into ‘we’re out to get him,'” Aylward said. “We were out to discredit the report.”

The guest blogger on Wizbang was spurred by a post on another blog suggesting that the Boston Globe was working on a story; the thread is called “Fact Checking the Boston Globe in Advance.”

Aylward apologized for the name-calling, which he retracted from his guest blogger’s post.

“It was a bad idea to use those words, they didn’t further the story. They were opinion, not news.” Still, he asked, “don’t you think when you inject yourself into that debate you’re stepping onto a national stage?”

He points to a Sept. 16 message from Hailey at liberal weblog Take Back the Media linking to the post. Hailey, a Democrat who contributed $250 to Kerry’s campaign, also posted a link at Democrats.com.

Asked if he hoped as a Democrat to redeem the memos, Hailey replied, “I’m a complete person. I’m a liberal. I’m a Democrat. I felt Dan Rather was being totally abused … [so he tried, ineptly, to salvage the forged memos] but mostly it’s like a crossword puzzle.”…

For Aylward, the matter’s already moved to the back burner. He shut the comments down in the main Hailey thread. Guest blogger Paul wrote a coda, expressing dismay about the personal attacks that followed his first post.

“I was admittedly rude with my first post. With the benefit of hindsight, it was not my finest hour,” he wrote. “But some of the things you people are doing is just beyond the pale.”

Utah State Counsel Craig Simper, who has been monitoring Hailey’s situation for the university, was struck by leaps to conspiracy theories and assumptions that a downed server meant Hailey was being fired.

“One of the bloggers claimed it’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up. This conspiratorial mentality is absolutely scary. It’s incredible,” Simper said, adding, “It’s very chilling.” [not like being shot at]…

Hailey credits the questions from Wizbang and others for spurring him to make the report stronger and encouraging him to mark works in progress as drafts. He’s even enthralled by the possibility of blogs.

But he’s still feeling the effects of the last few days.

“It doesn’t matter if you vindicate yourself, you’re stained,” he said. “(The university) can support me and that stain won’t rub off. I can sue the pants off these guys…. That doesn’t change anything because everybody else only sees what is out on the internet.”

If you can’t stand the consequences of true academic freedom, perhaps you shouldn’t be an academic. The Wired story omits two critical facts: Wizbang‘s Paul was absolutely on target in his debunking of Hailey’s work. And that debunking has been underscored by Joseph Newcomer, a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University. Newcomer’s detailed and devastating review of Hailey’s work is here, and Newcomer’s resume is here. Hailey should have sought expert peer review before exposing his half-baked and perhaps politically motivated work to the wonderful world of the web.

The Illogic of Knee-Jerk Privacy Advocates

There’s much ado about a bill now before the Senate that would, in the words of Ryan Singel at Wired News,

let government counter-terrorist investigators instantly query a massive system of interconnected commercial and government databases that hold billions of records on Americans.

Some background (from the article):

The proposed network is based on the Markle Foundation Task Force’s December 2003 report, which envisioned a system that would allow FBI and CIA agents, as well as police officers and some companies, to quickly search intelligence, criminal and commercial databases. The proposal is so radical, the bill allocates $50 million just to fund the system’s specifications and privacy policies.

However,

[t]o prevent abuses of the system, the Markle task force recommended anonymized technology, graduated levels of permission-based access and automated auditing software constantly hunting for abuses.

An appendix to the report went so far as to suggest that the system should “identify known associates of the terrorist suspect, within 30 seconds, using shared addressees, records of phone calls to and from the suspect’s phone, e-mails to and from the suspect’s accounts, financial transactions, travel history and reservations, and common memberships in organizations, including (with appropriate safeguards) religious and expressive organizations.”

But task force member James X. Dempsey, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, says the commercial records involved are more limited public records, such as home ownership data, not information about what mosque someone belongs to.

He said he believes it’s “absurd” to prohibit the FBI from using a commercial database like ChoicePoint to find a suspected terrorist’s home address (though the FBI currently can and does do this). On the other hand, he asked, “Should they be able to go to ChoicePoint and ask for all the subscribers to Gun Owners Monthly? No, I don’t think so.”

The proposed network would not look for patterns in data warehouses to attempt to detect terrorist activities, Dempsey said. Instead, an investigator would start with a name and the system would try to see what information is known about that person.

Seems to me that’s in keeping with the letter and spirit of the Constitution. But

critics say the Senate is moving too fast and the network could infringe on civil liberties. Lawmakers are taking a “boil the ocean” approach, according to Robert Griffin, president of Knowledge Computing. His company runs Coplink, a widely used system for linking law enforcement databases. Despite being a supporter of increased information sharing, Griffin criticized the proposal for trying too much too soon and relying too heavily on commercial data.

“The next Mohammed Atta is not going to be found in commercial databases,” Griffin said, referring to the tactical leader of the 9/11 attacks. “We are going to stop him running a red light somewhere, and we are going to run relationships associations with this guy and we are going to say, gee, you have things in common with guys on watch lists. That’s how you are going to find the guy — not because he has bad credit.”

Civil liberties lawyer Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation accused Congress of “institutional laziness” for not holding hearings on the proposal to hear the perspectives of advocates for consumers or battered women. Tien also argued that a widespread lack of privacy and due process protections would make data sharing dangerous.

“If someone transfers your credit report or medical history, you have no way of knowing,” Tien said. “The natural feedback we expect in the physical world just doesn’t work in the area of information. You have to be careful.”

Tien is not alone in his concern. On Monday, more than 40 organizations, ranging from the American Association of Law Libraries to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, signed on to an open letter (.pdf) to Congress asking members to include adequate civil liberties safeguards in the pending legislation.

However,

technology professor Dave Farber said that his work on the task force convinced him the task force’s model was a “critical” tool in the fight against terrorists.

“A lot of (task force members) were very uncomfortable about data sharing,” Farber said. “But all of us at the end felt confident that if the recommendations were followed, it was as good as it was going to get relative to privacy protections.”

Let’s get this right, folks. We don’t know how the next Mohammed Atta will be found (if he is) before he commits an atrocity. How in the hell do you know, a priori, how you’re going to find him?

We’re talking about public records, right? If you don’t want to create a public record, don’t drive a car, own a house, open a public library account, borrow money from a regulated financial institution, and on and on. Look, do you think the government is going to slam you in jail because you live in Detroit, read Popular Mechanics, and give money to the Green Party? That’s a big waste of time. What the government needs is a better insight into the goings on of people who might, for other reasons, be suspected of implication in terrorist plots. It’s called “process of elimination”.

Get a grip on yourselves, folks. If 1984 is coming, it’s coming at your local university, where you can’t call say anything that might be construed as offensive to anyone who isn’t a white, Christian male.

Here are my questions for the hysterical, knee-jerk opponents of government data-mining: Are you (a) completely in favor of letting terrorists operate with impunity, (b) completely devoid of concern for the fate of your fellow Americans, (c) completely paranoid, (d) just waiting for a Democrat administration to propose the same legislation, when you’ll be for it, or (e) all of the above?

If you really think the proposal is a threat to your privacy and civil liberties, consider Dave Farber’s credentials. The man is a walking, talking, fire-breathing civil libertarian and Democrat. If he can live with, why can’t the rest of you?

The Meaning of "Hate Speech"

The left is fond of saying that those who challenge the veracity and virtue of leftists, leftism, and leftism’s lapdogs are guilty of “hate speech.”

I wondered how it could be hateful to say, truthfully, that John Kerry consistently voted against programs that would help the armed forces of the United States deter and defeat our enemies. Yet, Democrats strove mightily to portray Sen. Zell Miller’s righteous anger about Kerry’s voting record as hatred.

Similarly, Democrats strive mightily to portray those who favor self-reliance, free markets, and property rights as “haters” because they don’t believe in the redistribution of income and wealth.

Thinking about all of that has led me to this insight: If the left hates what you say, it’s “hate speech.”

Some Will Yell "Censorship"

George Mason University — a State university in northern Virginia — has cancelled a speaking engagement by Michael Moore, according to The Washington Post:

GMU Disinvites Moore

Speech, $35,000 Fee Drew Criticism

By Amy Argetsinger and Lisa Rein

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, October 1, 2004; Page A01

George Mason University canceled a scheduled speaking engagement by liberal filmmaker Michael Moore yesterday after two conservative state legislators and others complained that public money should not support an overtly political event.

Moore, the outspoken director of the movie “Fahrenheit 9/11,” was to have received about $35,000 for his Oct. 28 speech at the Patriot Center on the Fairfax campus — an event that university officials had arranged a week ago and had not begun to publicize.

Word spread quickly, and after complaints from the legislators and some members of the community reached the office of President Alan G. Merten this week, the school announced that the event, coming so close to the presidential election, would be “an inappropriate use of state resources.”….

It is the second time in recent weeks that a public university has canceled an appearance by Moore, currently on a 20-state “Slacker Uprising Tour” of college campuses that has drawn sellout crowds as well as heated criticism at almost every stop. The president of California State University-San Marcos, near San Diego, canceled a $37,000 campus appearance by Moore….

Del. Vincent F. Callahan Jr. (R-Fairfax), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and considered a moderate on many issues, called Moore “a sleazebag of the first order.”

“They should have Democrats and Republicans speak, but not somebody whose living is libel and slander. . . . That’s not appropriate for a first-class university,” Callahan said….

The same goes for Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, James Carville, Paul Begala and any number of similarly vicious idiots out there — left and right — who have nothing to add to the sum of human knowledge. The citizens of Virginia (and I was one of them for most of 40 years) shouldn’t pay one red cent to support the gaseous emissions of the lunatic fringe.

Advice to GMU: Take the $35,000 and buy 7,000 pocket copies of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States from the Cato Institute. (Maybe Cato would throw in a few more thousand copies for such a large order.) Spread the copies all over campus. The contents would be an eye-opener for most students. They’d learn something about the wisdom of the system that Moore and company are busily trying to tear down.

More on the Legality of Discrimination

Yesterday, I wrote about the distinction between state-sponsored racial discrimination and private racial discrimination in “Is There Such a Thing as Legal Discrimination?“. There I spelled out my theory that collective agreement on an issue (e.g., racial discrimination) isn’t tantamount to state action. I argued that

regardless of how many citizens agree on a particular subject, that agreement is not tantamount to state action if the subject lies outside the power granted the state. Enforcement of an extra-constitutional collective agreement rests on the voluntary submission of citizens to that agreement. The same citizens who entered the collective agreement may dissolve it piecemeal by abandoning it, one or a few at a time, whereas they cannot similarly revoke a power specifically granted the state.

I conclude that the state has no business telling its citizens how they may or may not carry their racial attitudes into the conduct of their affairs, as long as that conduct is passive — that is, as long as it takes such forms as not buying from, hiring, or otherwise associating with members of certain groups. I say that not out of bigotry — I long ago outgrew the attitudes of my native State — but because we have gone far beyond the abolition of slavery and the granting of equal civil rights. We have practically repudiated freedom of association, we have severely undermined property rights, and — more lately with speech codes and hate-crime laws — we have entered an early stage of thought policing.

In sum, liberty is being vanquished in the name of liberty. It wouldn’t be happening if collective agreements were, indeed, tantamount to state action.

My post was prompted by two recent posts written by Tim Sandefur of Freespace. Sandefur has replied at length, and constructively, here. You should read all of it. I’m just going to touch on some of the points salient to my argument.

Sandefur notes that I took him “a bit more strongly” than he intended on the subject of collective agreement as a form of state action. He says:

First, I’m not trying to make an “argument,” since I’ve tried to make clear that I don’t really know what I think on this issue. My only point is that I’m troubled by the too-easy distinction between state-action discrimination (bad) and everyone-in-society-agreeing-privately discrimination (perfectly okay). One reason I am troubled by that is because I think if everyone in society agrees to something, the distinction between that and state action becomes illusory….So there’s no “argument”…just a qualm, and [the author of Liberty Corner] has done nothing to ease my concern.

Fair enough. Sandefur still has a qualm where I have none.

Sandefur goes on, in an aside, to question an antecedent argument to the conclusion I restated above, namely, that

the collective agreement that creates the state doesn’t give the state unlimited power of action. In fact it specifically limits the state’s power of action. The citizens of the state may — and do — withhold certain powers from the state, for the private exercise of citizens.

In response to that proposition Sandefur says:

First, it is true that the social compact doesn’t give the state unlimited power, but we ought to carefully distinguish between the moral and the constitutional limits on the state. The social compact is only limited by moral constraints—-that is, the people may write any social compact they wish so long as it gives the state no power that exceeds their moral authority. Constitutional limits then come on top of those limits. It is in the realm of Constitutional limits that the people withhold powers from the state for the private exercise of citizens (or to vest those powers in a different sovereign). At the level of moral limits on the social compact, the people do not withhold powers for their own private exercise, because they have no right to exercise those powers which are withheld. In other words, the people in forming the social compact are limited only by moral constraints-—they can’t steal, can’t murder, and can’t make a government that does these things. They don’t withhold these powers for their own private exercise.

There are subtleties in that statement which I don’t grasp, such as the distinction between moral and constitutional constraints, and whence moral constraints flow. Nevertheless, the statement seems to imply something like this: The state can’t have the power to allow slaveholding because slaveholding is an immoral power that the people themselves cannot exercise. But, as Sandefur says elsewhere in his post,

Many slaveowners prior to the [Civil W]ar pointed out that there just weren’t any laws that created slavery. It was closer to everyone-in-society-agreeing-privately discrimination than it was to state-action discrimination.

So, it seems to me that the people can exercise moral authority (or, in this case, immoral authority) that’s outside the scope of the state’s power. Before the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment the (Southern white) people reserved the power to hold slaves and the state didn’t have the power to deprive them of slaves. (If I have this wrong, I’m sure I’ll hear promptly from Sandefur. And I’ll gladly correct it.)

Now Sandefur comes to my point that a collective agreement is not tantamount to state action if the subject of the agreement lies outside the power granted the state. Sandefur says:

Perhaps. But…sometimes that line [between a private, collective agreement and state action] is not so obvious. Or, my favorite conundrum, the situation of tenant farmers in Mississippi, whose white landlords would immediately evict them if they dared register to vote. Now, this attitude was unanimous among the white landlords….[I]s [the author of Liberty Corner] willing to say that he has no problem with such a practice?

I do have a serious problem with such a practice. As far as I’m concerned it was an extortionate denial of a civil liberty granted under the Fourteenth Amendment. But the extortionate denial of the right to vote is a particular manifestation of racial discrimination, which the people (I believe) had empowered the state to deal with through the Fourteenth Amendment. That the state didn’t deal with it until the 1960s was due a failure on the part of the state to exercise a granted power, not to a lack of power.

But racial discrimination, in its broader manifestations (e.g., refusal to live near blacks) is neither an action of the state nor an action that the state can prohibit, per se. The state can be — and has been — empowered to deal with specific manifestations of racial discrimination, manifestations that deprive blacks of the constitutional rights conferred on them by the Thirteenth and Fourteen Amendments, among them the right to vote.

Sandefur concludes by saying,

I’m not trying to offer a systematic (or even coherent!) theoretical* defense of government intervention to correct racist outcomes. I just think that even in the absence of an explicit agreement…private action can be tantamount to state action. That’s why the Civil Rights Acts strike down “patterns and practices” as well as explicit policies.

*-I would definitely offer a systematic constitutional defense of such intervention. I think Harlan’s 13th Amendment argument regarding slavery and badges of servitude is absolutely right and that attacks on Jim Crow should have been made under that Amendment, or perhaps the privileges or immunities clause of the 14th amendment, and not under the commerce clause.

There’s the crux of the issue. Sandefur believes private action can be tantamount to state action. I disagree, for the reasons I have spelled out in my previous post on the subject and in this one. I further disagree with the validity of Harlan’s Thirteenth Amendment argument, and with the striking down of “patterns and practices” of racial discrimination. The use of such broad terms as “badges of servitude” and “patterns and practices” gives the state license to butt into private affairs at will.

Favorite Posts: Affirmative Action and Race

Speaking of Discrimination…

…a story at The Washington Times says:

Discrimination against white male found

By George Archibald

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

An English professor at the University of North Carolina illegally subjected a student to “intentional discrimination and harassment” because he was “a white, heterosexual Christian male” who expressed disapproval of homosexuality, the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights has ruled.

Professor Elyse Crystall violated student Timothy R. Mertes’ civil rights, the agency said, by improperly accusing him of “hate speech” in an e-mail sent to students after a class discussion in which Mr. Mertes said he was a Christian and felt “disgusted, not threatened” by homosexual behavior.

“The e-mail message not only subjected the student to intentional discrimination and harassment, but also discouraged the robust exchange of ideas that is intrinsic to higher education and is at the very heart of the Constitution’s protection of free speech,” Alice B. Wender, the Education Department’s southern regional director of civil rights concluded in a letter to UNC Chancellor James Moeser on Wednesday.

It’s about time.

Is There Such a Thing as Legal Discrimination?

According to an Encarta article about Detroit, the Motor City’s population peaked at 1,850,000 in 1950. Its black population at the time was 16 percent of the total, that is, about 300,000. Detroit’s population in 2000 was about 950,000, of which 81.6 percent — about 776,000 — were black. Thus the non-black population of Detroit dropped by almost 90 percent in 50 years. The “white flight” from Detroit made property there much cheaper than in the nearby suburbs to which whites were fleeing. And so, as low-income blacks filled much of the space left by whites, Detroit’s black population increased by more than 250 percent during the same 50 years.

The white-flight phenomenon leads me to ask two questions: Was the desertion of Detroit (and other large Northern cities) by non-blacks a form of discrimination? If so, was that discrimination legal? I ask because Tim Sandefur in two recent posts at Freespace (here and here), has left me wondering whether there is any legal scope for widespread acts of racial discrimination.

It’s clear to me that non-blacks were discriminatory in leaving Detroit. I grew up in Michigan. I can vouch for its combination of Northern charm and Southern racial attitudes. Detroit’s whites might have rationalized their flight as a response to the greater prevalence of crime and drugs in the black community, but white flight stemmed from a visceral dislike on the part of most whites for living near blacks. (Detroit is, of course, only emblematic of racial attitudes and their consequences throughout the North.) The greater prevalence of crime and drug use among blacks gave whites an excuse for fleeing Detroit, but the underlying cause of white flight was old-fashioned bigotry.

Now the question is whether white flight was legal. Actually, I have no doubt that it was perfectly legal for the vast majority of Detroit’s white citizens to abandon that city and practically ghetto-ize it. Each departing household simply made a voluntary decision to leave and each arriving household simply made a voluntary decision to move in. But Sandefur’s posts lead me to wonder at what point it becomes illegal for the majority of citizens to act similarly out of racial prejudice. Here’s Sandefur, writing about the refusal of most Southern whites to trade with Southern blacks in the days of legal segregation:

If everyone in the state makes an agreement (even sub silentio) not to engage in trade with blacks, even if they don’t stamp that agreement with the state’s imprimatur, it is still a social compact, which means that it can’t pretend not to be state action….

[A] person has the right to discriminate in almost all cases, but when that discrimination reaches such a massive collective agreement, it becomes state action, I think, and subject to the same objections as state discrimination.

These statements are consistent with an earlier post, in which Sandefur says:

As Frederick Douglass pointed out in his speech on the Civil Rights Cases, what sense does it make that we say “the state may not do X, if we say all of the citizens may do X”?

Thus, if I’ve followed Sandefur’s reasoning correctly, it seems to be this:

1. A collective agreement amounts to state action.

2. The state cannot act to deny an explicit constitutional right or any other fundamental right, say, the right to engage in commerce.

3. Therefore, the widespread refusal of whites to refuse to engage in commerce with blacks is an unlawful state action.

The linchpin of Sandefur’s argument is his conflation of collective agreements and state action, a conflation that he traces to Frederick Douglass. Sandefur’s argument collapses if not all collective agreements amount to state action. Well, his argument collapses because:

1. It’s true that the state arises out a collective agreement of its citizens (or their chosen representatives).

2. But the collective agreement that creates the state doesn’t give the state unlimited power of action. In fact it specifically limits the state’s power of action. The citizens of the state may — and do — withhold certain powers from the state, for the private exercise of citizens.

3. Therefore, regardless of how many citizens agree on a particular subject, that agreement is not tantamount to state action if the subject lies outside the power granted the state. Enforcement of an extra-constitutional collective agreement rests on the voluntary submission of citizens to that agreement. The same citizens who entered the collective agreement may dissolve it piecemeal by abandoning it, one or a few at a time, whereas they cannot similarly revoke a power specifically granted the state.

I conclude that the state has no business telling its citizens how they may or may not carry their racial attitudes into the conduct of their affairs, as long as that conduct is passive — that is, as long as it takes such forms as not buying from, hiring, or otherwise associating with members of certain groups. I say that not out of bigotry — I long ago outgrew the attitudes of my native State — but because we have gone far beyond the abolition of slavery and the granting of equal civil rights. We have practically repudiated freedom of association, we have severely undermined property rights, and — more lately with speech codes and hate-crime laws — we have entered an early stage of thought policing.

In sum, liberty is being vanquished in the name of liberty. It wouldn’t be happening if collective agreements were, indeed, tantamount to state action.

Favorite Posts: Affirmative Action and Race

Isn’t Chicago a "Liberal" Stronghold?

Not according to this story at NYTimes.com:

Chicago Moving to ‘Smart’ Surveillance Cameras

By STEPHEN KINZER
Published: September 21, 2004

CHICAGO, Sept. 20 – A highly advanced system of video surveillance that Chicago officials plan to install by 2006 will make people here some of the most closely observed in the world. Mayor Richard M. Daley [a Democrat] says it will also make them much safer….

Police specialists here can already monitor live footage from about 2,000 surveillance cameras around the city, so the addition of 250 cameras under the mayor’s new plan is not a great jump. The way these cameras will be used, however, is an extraordinary technological leap.

Sophisticated new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it. Images of those people will be highlighted in color at the city’s central monitoring station, allowing dispatchers to send police officers to the scene immediately….

Many cities have installed large numbers of surveillance cameras along streets and near important buildings, but as the number of these cameras has grown, it has become impossible to monitor all of them. The software that will be central to Chicago’s surveillance system is designed to direct specialists to screens that show anything unusual happening….

When the system is in place,…video images will be instantly available to dispatchers at the city’s 911 emergency center, which receives about 18,000 calls each day. Dispatchers will be able to tilt or zoom the cameras, some of which magnify images up to 400 times, in order to watch suspicious people and follow them from one camera’s range to another’s.

A spokesman for the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Edwin C. Yohnka, said the new system was “really a huge expansion of the city’s surveillance program.”

“With the aggressive way these types of surveillance equipment are being marketed and implemented,” Mr. Yohnka said, “it really does raise questions about what kind of society do we ultimately want, and how intrusive we want law enforcement officials to be in all of our lives.”…

One community organizer who works in a high-crime neighborhood, Ernest R. Jenkins, chairman of the West Side Association for Community Action, said the 2,000 cameras now in place had reduced crime and were “having an impact, no if’s, and’s or but’s about it.” Nonetheless, Mr. Jenkins said, some people in Chicago believed the city was trying to “infiltrate people’s privacy in the name of terrorist attacks.”

“I just personally think that it’s an invasion of people’s privacy,” Mr. Jenkins said of the new video surveillance project. “A large increase in the utilization of these cameras would oversaturate the market.”

City officials counter that the cameras will monitor only public spaces. Rather than curb the system’s future expansion, they have raised the possibility of placing cameras in commuter and rapid transit cars and on the city’s street-sweeping vehicles.

“We’re not inside your home or your business,” Mayor Daley said. “The city owns the sidewalks. We own the streets and we own the alleys.”

You may have noticed that that the local ACLU outlet seems to be taking it rather calmly. Must be they trust Democrats more than Republicans. Not that they should, they just do.

I’m inclined to give Mayor Daley the benefit of the doubt. Not that I think that his surveillance system will do that much good. It sort of defeats the purpose to publicize it. But as long as it only monitors public places, I’m not going to get all excited about it.

Austin’s "Humor" Columnist at Work

UPDATED BELOW

The Austin American-Statesman carries the brainwaves of one John Kelso, the paper’s alleged humor columnist. In a recent column, “Hey old man, step away from the camera,” Kelso pokes fun at an incident in which a 71-year old amateur photographer and Austin resident was questioned by police for photographing the city’s tallest building, the Frost Bank Tower. Here’s some of what passes for “humor” in Kelso’s mind:

Something tells me Bill W… wouldn’t have gotten off so easy if he’d been wearing Arab garb and hollering “God is great” out the car window when he took photos of the Frost Bank Tower.

“I just hope Congress doesn’t pass a law making it illegal to own a camera,” the Austin retiree wrote in an e-mail about the situation. But he adds that the Austin cop who questioned him to see if he was a terrorist taking pictures of the Austin skyline was nice about it.

Bill looks at the situation as a sign of our unreasonably edgy times.

“He was very polite, and I think he was kind of embarrassed,” said Bill, 71, an amateur photographer who lives in Northwest Austin. “I didn’t fault him at all ’cause I know they have to respond to any calls that they get along those lines. I guess it’s just an indication of the public mind-set, to see a terrorist behind every shadow.”

[H]e decided to try out his new toy — a set of Meade binoculars equipped with a built-in digital camera.

“That Frost Bank Tower is a real challenge to take a picture of. It dominates the skyline.”…

Bill’s stepson had told him about a great place to shoot a photo of the Austin skyline — on the northbound frontage road of Interstate 35, a block or two south of Riverside Drive. So that’s where Bill headed. He parked in an office building parking lot. Then he got out the binoculars/camera, rolled down the driver’s side window, and started shooting out the window.

Moments later, here came the law. He’d only had time to fire off four or five shots before the cop pulled up and started asking questions.

“What he told me was that somebody had called in and reported somebody was taking pictures of downtown, and he wanted to know if that was what I was doing,” Bill recalled. “And I was very cooperative, and said yes.”

I figure if Bill had been an architect and had had a set of building plans on the front seat, he’d be in an orange jumpsuit.

“He saw that I was a senior citizen, and I didn’t fit the profile of a young, suicidal terrorist or anything like that.” But he says the cop did take down some information on him, including his driver’s license number.

“I’m probably on some database, don’t you think?” Bill asked.

Yes, Bill, you’ll be taking off your shoes at the airport for the rest of your life.

Kevin Buchman, an Austin police spokesman, says there’s no set policy on dealing with people taking photos of such things as the Frost Bank Tower. But he says the cops are glad to get calls from folks when they see suspicious activity.

“We encourage that from the community,” he said. “They’re our eyes and ears.”

Then again, what’s suspicious? I’ll betcha right now tourists from, say, Abilene, are taking snapshots of the Capitol. I wonder if I should turn them in?

Questions I asked myself when I finished reading Kelso’s “humor” column: (1) Funny, right? (2) Shouldn’t citizens ignore stuff like that, what’s suspicious about it? (3) Shouldn’t cops refuse to respond? (4) Shouldn’t cops take notes about stuff they respond to? (5) Isn’t it stupid to be edgy about terrorists?

Answers: (1) Not funny…just lame…too stupid to laugh at…didn’t even crack a smile. (2) Someone who parks on a frontage road a good distance from a building seems furtive, unlike a group of tourists from Abilene who stand in front of a building when they they photograph it. Citizens should “ignore” furtive activity the same way the passengers on United flight 93 “ignored” the hijackers and forced them to fly the plane into the ground. (3) Cops should respond to stuff like that because you never know when it’s the real thing. Who’s to know it’s a self-important 71-year old who thinks that cops are supposed to know that he’s not a terrorist even before they’ve laid eyes on him? (4) And, as a matter of prudence, it’s just as well to let him know that his presence has been noted. (5) Taking note of suspicious activity isn’t being edgy, it’s being prudent, and it doesn’t mean that everyone is walking around all day with a case of nerves. A lot of us can walk, chew gum, tell a joke, and keep our eyes open all at the same time. But maybe all of that’s too hard for Kelso.

Bonus observation: Kelso obviously dislikes profiling; check his lede. But if he dislikes profiling why should he object when the furtive behavior of a 71-year old white man is questioned? Oh, I forgot, in the liberal mindset terrorists aren’t a threat until they’ve actually struck. But you can bet that Kelso would be on the Austin cops’ case in a heartbeat if they had questioned and turned loose a suspicious character who then drove a truck bomb into the lobby of the Frost Bank Tower.

UPDATE
Kelso’s most recent column displays his knee-jerk dislike of Austin’s once-dominant high-tech types:

It must be rutting season for the species Yuppius North Austintatious. Like a mother bear separated from her cubs, these critters become upset by waits in the doughnut drive-through line.

Though rarely known to lock horns, the males, when even slightly inconvenienced, are known to screech like a peacock and stamp their tasseled loafers….

The trouble started when a guy driving a silver sedan got his Dockers in a wad because a guy in front of him in a white Jeep Cherokee was taking too much time ordering his doughnuts. “I could have sworn I heard the guy order, then change his mind, then order something again, then change his mind and then ask for a recommendation,” Christy [a tipster] recalled….

“They’re both out of the car, but they never leave the opening of the car on the driver’s side,” Christy said. “So they’re pointing at each other. But they don’t even take a step towards each other. They’re pretty chicken.”

The squabble ended with the guy in the silver sedan, still in full huff, getting in his car, slamming the door and peeling out — still with no doughnuts. “He’s still yelling while he’s sitting,” Christy said. She figures the whole thing occurred because the two males were members of a subspecies known as Internetus downsizerooni.

“It’s those crazy high-tech people — introverted, full of rage,” she theorized. “They’re angry that their stock options are under water.”

Wasn’t that another uproariously funny column?

I’m not crazy about yuppies myself — but what I don’t like about them is the way they drive. How much they make and how they make it is their business. And I don’t gloat at their misfortune. But then I’m not into class warfare like old John Kelso, who’s sort of a watered-down Michael Moore:

Say goodbye to the nice folks, John. I’m not going to bore them with any more of your carping crap — unless it’s especially outrageous.

More Suppression of Dissent

We expect CBS to be a bit touchy about criticism of Dan Rather. Apparently the touchiness is rolling downhill to CBS affiliates, according to this AP story:

Host Says Rather Criticism Got Him Fired

Sat Sep 18, 9:33 PM ET

By PEGGY ANDERSEN, Associated Press Writer

SEATTLE – A radio talk-show host said Saturday he has been fired for criticizing CBS newsman Dan Rather’s handling of challenges to the authenticity of memos about President Bush (news – web sites)’s National Guard service.

“On the talk show that I host, or hosted, I said I felt Rather should either retire or be forced out over this,” said Brian Maloney, whose weekly “The Brian Maloney Show” aired for three years on KIRO-AM Radio, a CBS affiliate here.

Maloney says he made that statement on his Sept. 12 program. He was fired Friday, he said.

“What they have expressed is essentially that my show went in a direction they’re not comfortable with,” Maloney said….

Only in John Ashcroft’s America.

P.S. I posted this immediately after I read the AP story and before I saw InstaPundit‘s almost-identical post.

Time to Regulate the Blogosphere?

That thought must have crossed the minds of some highly placed Democrat sympathizers in the “mainstream” media when the blogosphere started shredding the threadbare remnants of Dan Rather’s reputation for honest reporting. But the blogosphere is protected by the First Amendment, isn’t it?

There’s stark evidence that the blogosphere can be regulated, if the feds want to do it. Look at the airwaves, which the feds seized long ago, and which the feds censor by intimidation. Look at the ever-tightening federal control of political speech, which has brought us to McCain-Feingold. It’s all in the name of protecting us, of course.

Here’s how the blogosphere might come under the “protection” of a regulatory body: Major blogging service providers (Blogspot, TypePad, etc.) and major internet service providers (SBC, AT&T, etc.) become the targets of a class-action lawsuit brought by the “victims” of a blogospheric assault — a group of persons more savory than Bill Burkett (suspected author of the forged National Guard documents used by Rather). The targets cut a deal with the FCC — protection in return for regulation. The FCC justifies the regulation of content on the same grounds that it justifies the regulation of the content of radio and TV transmissions — the transmissions are a “commodity” in interstate commerce, not “speech”. The FCC then begins monitoring blogospheric emissions (random monitoring would be sufficiently chilling) and entertaining complaints from offended readers of blogs (lefties who don’t like what righties write, and vice versa). You can guess the rest.

Of course, it might not happen with Congress and the White House in Republican hands. But look at who was in charge when McCain-Feingold became law.

Favorite Posts: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech

Here’s What a Real Nazi Does

For the benefit of those who glibly call Bush a Nazi, here’s what a real Nazi does:

Hitler Signs an Order Authorizing Involuntary Euthanasia in Germany, October 1939

Germany had been the site of an increasing number of measures taken in the name of “racial purity” since the Nazis assumed power in 1933, including forced sterilization of those with physical and/or mental handicaps, and the murder of infants with similar handicaps (in both cases, the primary targets were not Jews, but so-called “Aryans,” or non-Jewish Germans). Now in 1939, under the cover of war, the program was to be expanded to include murdering handicapped adults. Since Hitler would issue no law legalizing such forced “euthanasia,” and since physicians would hesitate or refuse to take part in the killing unless they had written protection from later prosecution, Hitler was persuaded to sign this document on his personal stationery (German-language version also available) instructing his assistants Philipp Bouhler and Dr. Karl Brandt to initiate the program. The document was signed in October 1939, but backdated to 1 September, the date of the beginning of World War II. For further information, see Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 67.

ADOLF HITLER

Berlin, 1 September 1939

Reichsleiter Bouhler and
Dr. med. Brandt

are instructed to broaden the powers of physicians designated by name, who will decide whether those who have – as far as can be humanly determined – incurable illnesses can, after the most careful evaluation, be granted a mercy death.

/signed/ Adolf Hitler

That’s Nazism for you.

(Thanks to my son for the link.)

A Bit of Sense and a Lot of Nonsense from Austin

Here’s economist James K. Galbraith — who professes at The University of Texas at Austin — writing in today’s Austin American-Statesman about his profession:

…Economics suffers today from high formalism, rigid orthodoxy and tribal exclusiveness in professional journals; real-world scholarship is not prized and not easily published. But fortunately, with the Internet the costs of publication are falling. New journals are springing up that can peer-review effectively at low cost, and this will one day cause the breakdown of our ossified system.

In a world of virtual journals and electronic working papers, scholarly engagement has a better chance. Let’s hope that quality will still be distinguishable from junk…

Oops — can’t trust the uninitiated to sort it out for themselves, can we? Well economists can’t agree about much, so why does it matter what the uninitiated make of what economists write? Back to Galbraith:

Finally, for the engaged scholar, there is always the tricky issue of the role of values and politics. Some scholarship is intrinsically apolitical, but social scholarship can’t be. The policies I support grow from my ethical and political beliefs, to which my expertise (such as it is) merely adds an element of engineering.

In other words, he doesn’t know how to separate scholarship from values. Hmmm…

And yet, of course, a professor is not a missionary. A profound obligation is to respect the ideas and views of students who come in with different values.

My approach to that is to declare my own politics frankly — I’m a liberal Keynesian Democrat, in case you didn’t know.

Why is it necessary to declare one’s politics frankly, in the classroom, and how is doing it consistent with what he says next?

But I try to preserve my classroom as a space for respectful discourse with all points of view.

And, sometimes, you pull it off.

Some years ago, a student wrote these words on my confidential end-of-semester evaluation: “It pains me to say this, but you are the best professor I’ve had here — even though you are a communist.”…

Yeah, sometimes his non-liberal, non-Keynesian, non-Democrat students aren’t cowed by his frankly declared politics. How often? Once? At least that student saw him for what he is. (No, I’m not calling Galbraith names. He’s a liberal, so he mustn’t mind being called a communist; he’s open-minded.)

Now for Galbraith’s op-ed page companion, the re-doubtable Molly Ivins — an Austin-based, syndicated columnist (as the American-Statesman likes to remind us) — whose “good old gal” shtick has become more of a shrill whine. Molly is inveighing against the “old boy” network of rich Texans that undoubtedly arranged for GWB to do his Vietnam time in the Texas Air National Guard. Here’s the (unintentionally) funny part:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear: There was then no nasty partisan politics in Texas except inside the Democratic Party. The Republicans were upper-class establishment types, and the tradition of Texas Republicans and Texas Democrats working and playing well together continued, actually, until the Republicans took over, when it ended with a bang.

What Ivins is trying to imply is that a bunch of rich Republicans invaded Texas, took it over, and started playing nasty. What happened, of course, was that a lot of Texas Democrats got sick and tired of the national party’s positions on issues (abortion, defense, welfare, government in general) and became Republicans. And so it went — in Texas as across most of the South. Then, new voters followed mostly in their parents’ footsteps and allied with the Republican Party. Their numbers have been reinforced by a steady in-migration of disenfranchised Republicans and Reagan Democrats who have fled the “liberal” North for the warmth and more companionable politics of the South. An invasion? No, just a good, old-fashioned combination of political conversion and American mobility. The upshot of which has been to make Texas a solidly Republican State.

Ivins, of course, is sick — just sick — because all those converts and new Texas voters have lined up with the “upper-class establishment types” instead of flocking to her Willie Nelson worldview. And when the Republican majority insists on acting like a majority, that’s “playing nasty” in Ivins’s view. Talk about sore losers.

As I Was Saying about Academic Dissent

RETITLED AND UPDATED

In this post I said, “The crushing of dissent is confined almost exclusively to liberal-run academia.” Here’s an attempt to legalize it (from AP via Yahoo! News):

Colo. Officials Fault Free Speech Policy

By STEVEN K. PAULSON, Associated Press Writer

DENVER – A university president and a Democratic state lawmaker said rules put in place this year to protect conservative viewpoints on Colorado campuses have harmed free speech and led to death threats against professors.

Republican lawmakers responded that conservative students are still being harassed and more needs to be done.

The comments came as a handful of college officials and students went before the Legislature’s Joint Education Committee on Thursday to report on efforts to enforce the Academic Bill of Rights. All state-funded colleges adopted the policy this year under pressure from Republican lawmakers.

The measure encourages the schools to review student rights and campus grievance procedures “to ensure that intellectual and political diversity is explicitly recognized and protected and to ensure those rights are adequately publicized to students.”…

Kieft said death threats against a Metro State political science professor have “sent a real chill across the campus.” The professor, Oneida Meranto, said in March she was threatened after a student filed a complaint against her and told lawmakers he had asked to drop her class because she was biased against conservatives.

Meranto responded publicly that the student was failing, prompting the student to accuse her of violating his privacy rights. School officials said the threats originated off campus, and the FBI has said it was investigating.

Sen. John Andrews, a Republican committee member, pointed to three new complaints aired by students at the meeting as evidence that schools need to enforce the policy more strictly.

University of Colorado law student Mario Nicholas said a professor called him a Nazi after Nicholas complained when the professor told the class that “the `R’ in Republican stands for racist.” The professor was chastised by the dean but not suspended.

Metro State student William Pierce said he filed a grievance after a professor accused him of spying on the class for Republicans intent on enforcing the new policy.

Colorado State student Heather Schmidt said she complained because a professor criticized the late President Reagan and drew a caricature of President Bush (news – web sites). She said when she complained, she was told to find another class.

Democratic Sen. Ken Gordon said he called that professor and was told he had been forced out of the classroom by death threats.

“He said he sleeps with a shotgun under his bed,” Gordon told the panel. The professor did not return a call from The Associated Press.

Rep. Lynn Hefley, a Republican, said professors who violate the rules should be suspended.

“It seems to me you need to take swift action,” she told the university presidents.

Larry Penley, chancellor of the Colorado State University System, CU President Elizabeth Hoffman and University of Northern Colorado President Kay Norton told legislators they are enforcing the policy.

And there’s more, from The Washington Times:

Academic bias cited at Colorado schools

By Valerie Richardson

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

DENVER — Four Colorado university presidents testified yesterday that their institutions are making progress in protecting students from academic bias, but several students said otherwise.

In a hearing before the General Assembly’s Joint Education Committee, students testified or submitted statements about recent incidents in which professors vilified Republicans, called conservative students “Nazis” and other names, and even implied that students’ grades would be affected by their political views.

Their testimony came as presidents at the four main state universities told the committee they were working to comply with the March “memorandum of understanding” in which they pledged to protect students from academic discrimination.

State Senate Majority Leader John Andrews said he was pleased by their progress, but emphasized that recent events show conservative students are still subject to academic bias.

“I’ve had three unsolicited complaints in the last 30 days,” said Mr. Andrews. “They’re indicative of a climate and culture where a lot of faculty feel free to demean personally and intellectually bully conservative and Republican students in a way they would never do to students in protected classes.”…

There’s a simple solution, though it requires some discipline on the part of professors: Stick to teaching and drop the propagandizing and name-calling. Some might call it self-censorship. I would call it doing the job they’re paid to do.

I will begin to sympathize with college teachers when they begin to respect their students’ points of view — all points of view, not just those they agree with.

How Are Your Civil Liberties Today?

How do you feel about government data-mining efforts? For example, do you think that your library records should be beyond the prying eyes of the FBI? If you do, you have already forgotten 9/11 and its proximate cause: We were unable to find the murderers in our midst because cooperation between the FBI and CIA was thwarted by an artificial line between domestic and international security. Perhaps this well help you remember what happens when we lose track of the murderers in our midst:

Women take the body of their relative killed in a school seizure, in a makeshift morgue in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, Saturday, Sept. 4, 2004. The bodies were brought to Vladikavkaz for identification. More than 340 people were killed in a southern Russian school that had been seized by militants, a prosecutor said Saturday. (AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev)

Where are their civil liberties today?

Now, how do you feel about your reading list? If you think it’s more important than catching terrorists before they kill you or your loved ones, you are hopelessly self-indulgent.

The FBI isn’t going to haul you off to jail for reading Das Kapital or Joy of Sex. Hell, you won’t be hauled off to jail for reading the Quran. The point isn’t to censor or question your reading, it’s to look for patterns of activity that might point to terrorists.

If you value your privacy so much that your reading list is sacrosanct, you must not have a driver’s license, a credit card, or a phone number. You must be paid in cash and pay in cash. You must never fly, because you won’t stand for the invasion of privacy that’s involved in airport searches and baggage screening.

Now tell me, again, how do you feel about your civil liberties today?

In the "It Could Be Worse" Department

UPDATED BELOW

Yesterday I attacked FCC commissioner Michael Copps, in particular, and the federal government, in general, for paternalistically and unnecessarily regulating the airwaves. Thanks to a tip from the proprietor of Occam’s Carbuncle, a Canadian blog, I’ve learned how much worse it is in Canada. As he says:

Copps would feel right at home in Canada, where our FCC equivalent, the CRTC, routinely sticks its nose in where it doesn’t belong. One of our better blogs, Trudeaupia, has been all over this issue.

(CRTC stands for Canadian Radio-television Communications Commission or, in French, Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications canadiennes.) Anyway, here’s the issue, in the words of CRTC:

In a decision issued today,…CRTC…denies the application…for the renewal of the broadcasting licence for the French-language commercial radio station CHOI-FM Québec….

The Commission considered that offensive comments made by the hosts over the station’s airwaves tended or were likely to expose individuals or groups of individuals to hatred or contempt on the basis of mental disability, race, ethnic origin, religion, colour or sex. The Commission also considered, among other things, that the station’s hosts were relentless in their use of the public airwaves to insult and ridicule people….

According to CBC Montreal, reporting on August 26:

A federal court has made it official—CHOI-FM can continue broadcasting after its licence expires at the end of this month.

The controversial radio station has reached an agreement with the CRTC to keep broadcasting until a final decision comes down about the fate of the station….

Trudeaupia is skeptical: “Or is this just a delaying action until the protest dies down, then they’ll abruptly close it?”

So, it could be worse here in the U.S. of A. First, we could have to say everything twice: once in English, again in French. Second, we could have to put up with limitations on freedom of speech that dwarf the infamy of McCain-Feingold.

UPDATE:
How could I forget that other bastion of freedom in the English-speaking world, our “mother country”? Well, here’s Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy to remind me (quoting from Bloomberg.com):

Ford Motor Co., the world’s second biggest carmaker, has had a television commercial for its Land Rover brand banned by the U.K. communications regulator after it was judged to “normalize” the use of guns.

The advertisement, which featured a woman brandishing a gun later revealed to be a starting pistol, breached the Advertising Standards Code and must not be shown again, Ofcom said in an e-mailed statement. The regulator received 348 complaints against the ad, many concerned that the commercial glamorized guns and made it “appear that guns are fun and cool.”…

Ofcom said glamorization is “part and parcel” of the advertising process but this commercial “normalized” gun ownership in a domestic setting. The pistol, fired by the woman into the air as a man got into his car, was used in “an apparent casual manner and just for fun,” Ofcom said….

George Orwell, wherever you are, call home.

This Is Getting out of Hand

I thought Bush’s condemnation of ads by 527 groups was a clever political ploy. After all, the SwiftVets shoe-string operation has hurt Kerry a lot more than Soros-Hollywood liberal backed outfits like MoveOn.org have hurt Bush. But now we read this:

Bush, McCain Discuss Ads by Outside Groups

By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer

LAS CRUCES, N.M. – President Bush wants to work with Republican Sen. John McCain to go to court against political ads by “shadowy” outside groups, the White House said Thursday amid growing pressure on the president to denounce attacks on John Kerry’s war record.

“We want to pursue court action,” Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to New Mexico. “The president said if the court action doesn’t work, that he would be willing to pursue legislative action with Sen. McCain on that.”

Say it ain’t so, George.

Offensive Language

The Washington Times reports:

Jew can distribute fliers on campus

By Joyce Howard Price

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The University of New Orleans has settled a yearlong First Amendment lawsuit by allowing a Messianic Jew to distribute pamphlets on campus that contain the words: “Jews should believe in Jesus.”

The lawsuit was filed last summer on behalf of Michelle Beadle, a missionary with a group that seeks Jewish converts to Christianity, after she was told by a university official that she could not hand out the pamphlets because of their “offensive” language….

In a telephone interview yesterday, [Miss Beadle’s attorney] said the university’s decision to reject Miss Beadle’s request was “flawed.” Pointing out that the university is a public institution, he said, “It is not the government’s job to decide what is offensive … the speech in that pamphlet is protected, and its content cannot be censored by a government entity. The First Amendment protects individuals against government intrusion.”…

That was a close call, but don’t worry, McCain-Feingold will be expanded to prohibit offensive political speech. Things like, BUSH LIED!!! KERRY FLIP-FLOPS!!! Might hurt someone’s feelings, you know.

There’s Only One Solution…

…to the problem of murder. Making guns harder to get doesn’t prevent murder. The murderous simply turn to other weapons, as noted in this article from WHDH-TV. The headline is “Police See Surge In Gang Attacks Using Machetes”. Now, if machetes are banned, murderous thugs will simply turn to other weapons, such as Chinese throwing stars and Japanese metal chain whips. (Mmmm….no racist remarks, please.) And if those weapons are banned, thugs will simply turn to baseball bats, then to fists and feet.

You know what that means. Procreation will have to be banned in order to prevent the production of any more fists and feet. After all, the weapons-control freaks will say, guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Now, where have I heard that one?

Censorship Knows No Political Bounds

From Australian IT:

Labor bid to block net porn

Emma-Kate Symons

AUGUST 16, 2004

ALL internet service providers would be forced to block hard-core pornography reaching home computers under a radical plan to protect children being pushed by federal Labor MPs….

I’m not getting into the merits of the debate. I simply want to point out that conservatives have no monopoly on censorship. Of course, we knew that already because campus speech codes are an entirely left-wing initiative. But I couldn’t resist an off-campus example of left-wing censorship.