Liberals who once preened as free speech absolutists sound increasingly like censors. Their customary enthusiasm for diversity of opinion has vanished as their gains in society erode under conservative free speech.

Liberals want the drawbridges to public opinion pulled up before conservatives dislodge them from power completely. Bill Clinton's lament last week about a "docile establishment press" was essentially a call for the liberal media to stamp out the growing number of conservative voices in it. A week earlier Al Gore had spoken bitterly of the slowness of mainstream journalists to recognize a "fifth column" in their midst. Gore might as well have said: "Hey, liberal journalists, get your act together and make sure conservatives don't enter your profession."

Clearly liberals are no longer in a Voltairean mood to defend to the death anyone's right to free speech. No, the disciples of Voltaire now prefer the likes of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Witness Tom Daschle accusing Rush Limbaugh of yelling fire in a crowded radio theater.

Liberals recognize that free speech absolutism is a poor guardian of their power. So they will suspend it for now, but are of course ready to revert to it should the recovery of power require it again.

If liberalism seems more unprincipled and opportunistic than ever, that's because there are no real principles underlying it. Nothing is consistent in modern liberalism save its willfulness. The will remains constant while the intellect operates randomly. The intellect is useful to it only in devising arguments that serve ever-changing appetites. The liberal intellect selects arguments not according to reasoning rooted in reality, but according to the demands of the will. If, say, a cramped argument about the proper limits of free speech happens to serve a desire of the moment -- such as "campaign finance reform" or stopping pro-life protests -- the liberal intellect will seize upon it, then discard it once a new desire pops up. And if words such as free speech must be willfully redefined, so be it.

The censorship of liberals appears under the guise of "civility" and "standards." When New York Times editor Howell Raines got caught out using the paper for liberal agitprop against Augusta National Golf Club, he couldn't just say, "We want the club's single-sex policy to change, so we are not running anything that defends the club." He had to say instead that he spiked columns deviating from the paper's crusade because they had problems with "tone and structure" and created an appearance of "intramural squabbling" at the paper. A few days earlier one of Raines's deputies was put in the ludicrous position of having to say that one of the columns was rejected because it contained a "logic" that "did not meet our standards." Curious since sloppy reasoning had never bothered the Times before.

And apparently it doesn't bother the editors now. Punctuating the absurd arbitrariness of the episode, Raines has now run the unacceptably illogical column. Under pressure from fellow liberals embarrassed at his maniacal riding of his faux "civil rights" hobby-horse, Raines relented. But he still denies the baldly ideological reasons for rejecting them earlier. "There is not now, nor will there ever be, any attempt to curb the opinions of our writers," he says implausibly. Censorship, he says, "is simply not in our thinking, tradition, practices."

Selective support for free speech is in fact an important component of liberal culture, since it can only succeed if conservative voices are restricted. Toward this end, liberals are now overstating the conservative representation in the media, hoping to cause a backlash against conservative free speech. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. speaks of the "rightward press," which is "heavily biased toward conservative politics and conservative politicians." And he asks, "What will the rest of us do about the new bias?"

From Clinton to Dionne, the liberal alarms are being sounded. The "new bias" is producing in them a new censorship.

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[CTRL] Showdown looming on right to own guns / Assault weapons ban upheld, putting court at odds with Ashcroft

From: Euphorian
Subject: [CTRL] Showdown looming on right to own guns / Assault weapons ban upheld, putting court at odds with Ashcroft
Date: Sat, 07 Dec 2002 14:29:58 -0800

-Caveat Lector-

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/06/MN211218.DTL

       www.sfgate.com       Return to regular view

Showdown looming on right to own guns
Assault weapons ban upheld, putting court at odds with Ashcroft
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, December 6, 2002
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/06/MN211218.DTL

A federal appeals court upheld California's ban on military-style assault weapons 
Thursday,
ruling that individuals have no constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

The Constitution's Second Amendment preserves only the right of states to organize and
maintain militias, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in a 
3-0
decision.

The ruling put the court at odds with the Bush administration and a decision last year 
by a
federal appeals court in New Orleans.

The amendment "was adopted to ensure that effective state militias would be maintained,
thus preserving the people's right to bear arms," wrote Judge Stephen Reinhardt. "The
amendment was not adopted in order to afford rights to individuals with respect to 
private
gun ownership or possession."

STAGE SET FOR HIGH COURT ACTION

The ruling paves the way for the controversial issue to be addressed by the nation's 
highest
court, which has not touched the topic since 1939.

"When you have something like the Ninth Circuit, the largest judicial federal circuit 
in the
country, coming out with a ruling like this, it means we're within a couple years of 
it coming
before the Supreme Court," said Peter Keane, dean of the Golden Gate University Law
School. "Because it's a hot issue, the Supreme Court hasn't wanted to deal with it."

The state Legislature passed the nation's most sweeping assault weapons ban in 1989,
outlawing 75 high-powered weapons that have rapid-fire capabilities. The ban was
expanded in 1999 to include copycat weapons with similar features.

The original version was upheld by the state Supreme Court in 2000, when it was
challenged by a group of gun rights activists who said the ban violated the Second
Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause and several other constitutional provisions.

Reinhardt said he concluded that the Second Amendment cannot be used to strike down the
ban after a lengthy analysis of the amendment's history and text. The amendment states:
"A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right 
of the
people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

His interpretation of the amendment's intent matched that of the federal government's
before Attorney General John Ashcroft wrote a letter to the National Rifle Association 
in
May. In the letter, Ashcroft declared that the Second Amendment protected the 
individual
right to bear arms. The Justice Department took that position formally in a U.S. 
Supreme
Court filing a year later, saying the right was subject to "reasonable restrictions" 
on certain
types of weapons and categories of owners.

Ashcroft's views were endorsed by a federal appeals court in New Orleans in October 
2001.
Despite concluding that the Constitution protected an individual's right to bear arms, 
the
court upheld a federal law banning gun possession by people under restraining orders 
for
domestic violence.

Because the issue has become so debated, Reinhardt chose to address it with a
comprehensive opinion instead of relying on a similar decision rendered by the court 
six
years ago.

Matthew Nosanchuk, senior litigation counsel for the Violence Policy Center in 
Washington,
told the Los Angeles Times that the 86-page ruling was one of the most comprehensive
ever written on the Second Amendment.

"This is a very important contribution that should drive a stake through the heart of 
the
individual rights position," Nosanchuk said.

RULING REJECTS 9 CHALLENGES

In Thursday's decision, Reinhardt expressly disagreed with the Second Amendment
interpretations by Ashcroft and the New Orleans court. He also noted that the San 
Francisco
court, which oversees federal courts in nine Western states, had ruled in 1996 that the
Constitution does not protect individual gun ownership.

The ruling rejected challenges to the law by nine gun owners. The court then went a 
step
further and broadened the law by striking down an exemption that allowed retired police
officers to own assault weapons, ruling that it served no public purpose.

The NRA expressed disappointment with the ruling.

"For 131 years, we've been standing steadfastly to protect the freedoms of all law- 
abiding
Americans and stand steadfastly that the Second Amendment is an individual right and 
will
continue to do so," spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said.

Chronicle news services contributed to this report. / E-mail Bob Egelko at
begelko@sfchronicle.com.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle.  Page A - 1

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[CTRL] Showdown looming on right to own guns / Assault weapons ban upheld, putting court at odds with Ashcroft, Euphorian

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Neil Boortz has already stated (give credit where credit is due) that we will soon see an attempt to reimplement The Fairness Doctrine or something similar via legal maneuvering such as a lawsuit.

Ha! Let 'em try. The main reason the (un)Fairness Doctrine was scrapped in the first place was because the SCOTUS gave a none-too-subtle hint to the FCC that the state of brodacast communication was about to reach a point where the FD would no longer be constitutionally viable ... and they said this in 1984! Since then, the number of cable channels has gone up by a couple of orders of magnitude, three more broadcast networks have come into existence, the number of actual TV and radio stations has exploded, and then, of course, came the Internet.

The FR made some sense when it was instituted in 1949, and there was practically nothing around but the three networks. It would serve absolutely no purpose today but to supress popular speech (and destroy much of the broadcast industry in the process, because they would be disallowed from running shows that actually got ratings). If it were ever reinstituted by the FCC, or forced into law by the RATS, an immediate injunction would be issued, and the SCOTUS would eventually rip it to shreds. And the chances of such a law ever getting passed is almost zero in the first place, since the National Association of Broadcasters is generally considered the most powerful lobby in Washington by far, and they of course HATE the FD.

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