Free Republic

The Obama administration has marked its first foray into the UN human rights establishment by backing calls for limits on freedom of expression. The newly-minted American policy was rolled out at the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council, which ended in Geneva on Friday. American diplomats were there for the first time as full Council members and intent on making friends. President Obama chose to join the Council despite the fact that the Organization of the Islamic Conference holds the balance of power and human rights abusers are among its lead actors, including China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia....

American investigative journalist, and author, Dr. Paul L. Williams, will begin his crusade, October 8, in a Toronto courtroom to answer charges of defamation regarding his explosive investigations into missing radio active material at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Williams become entangled in a legal jam with the Canadian university . . .

It all sounds so innocent and good-governmenty: The Federal Trade Commission will hold a workshop Dec. 1 and 2 concerning "How will journalism survive the Internet age?" An assembly of editors, owners, government officials, consumer advocates, advertisers and others is scheduled to discuss a dozen topics. Three ought to make the hair stand up on the necks of every journalist and anybody else who cares about the survival of freedom of the press: » Are new or changed government policies needed to support optimal amounts and types of journalism, including public affairs coverage? » Should the tax code be modified...

I don't know if you've ever seen the Did Glenn Beck Rape and Murder a Young Girl in 1990 website, but it's fairly amusing. It's a political satire of the style of argument Glenn Beck likes to engage in, which involves requiring that someone prove a negative ("prove you didn't do X") and making claims in the form of an interrogative ("Hey, I'm just asking questions here. I'm not saying he did this. What's wrong with asking questions?"). Well now Beck is trying to kill the site by making a formal complaint (PDF) to an international internet governing body, the...

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal in Choose Life Illinois v. White, upholding a Seventh Circuit ruling that the Illinois system for approving specialty plates was not discriminatory. The case was filed in 2004 after citizens had collected more than the requisite number of signatures, but were denied a “Choose Life” license plate. “Ever-increasing numbers of pro-life Americans want to proudly display the ‘Choose Life’ message on their vehicles—as evidenced by the fact that 22 states now offer such plates,” says Dr. Charmaine Yoest, President and CEO of Americans United for Life. “Illinois is unfairly censoring...

JIHAD WATCH: U.S. co-sponsors anti-free speech resolution at the UN Free speech death watch. The U.N. Human Rights Council approved the resolution, cosponsored by the U.S. and Egypt, yesterday. It calls on states to condemn and criminalize "any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence." It also condemns "negative stereotyping of religions and racial groups," which is of course an oblique reference to accurate reporting about the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism -- which is always the focus of whining by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and other groups about negative...

A high school cheerleading squad is getting flak after parading religious banners at football games. The Lakeview-Fort Oglethrope High School cheerleaders, of Georgia, have tried everything to get their team to win, including displaying football banners with such biblical verse as “commit to the lord” and “take charge of it,” according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Community members are rallying around Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe High School cheerleaders after they were banned from displaying signs with Bible verses urging fans and players to “commit to the Lord” and “take courage and do it.” The banners — the paper ones that football players crash through at the beginning of games — have been common sights in the school’s football stadium since 2003, local officials say. “The cheerleaders are not trying to push a religious cause, to shove religion down someone’s throat,” said local youth minister Brad Scott, who was LFO High’s class president in 2004. “The cheerleaders are just...

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Honduras' coup-installed government silenced two key dissident broadcasters on Monday just hours after it suspended civil liberties to prevent an uprising by backers of ousted President Manuel Zelaya. Dozens of soldiers raided the offices of Radio Globo. Officials also shut down Channel 36 television station, leaving it broadcasting only a test pattern. Rene Zepeda, a spokesman for the interim government, said the two outlets had been taken off the air in accordance with a government emergency decree announced late Sunday that limits civil liberties and allows authorities to close news media that "attack peace and public order."...

Businessman evicted from US Mall for Anti-Obama Merchandise PDF Print E-mail Monday, 28 September 2009 Dan Fuchs said business was just starting to pick up at his kiosk in the Mall at Johnson City. Fuchs’ business, the Graphic Edge, printed slogans and pictures on items such as coffee cups, bumper stickers and T-shirts. He said more than half of his business came from the sale of anti-Obama merchandise. Bumper stickers with slogans such as “SOS: Stop Obama’s Socialism,” “Nobama,” and “Chicago got the party, but the country got the hangover” were displayed around the small stand. Now it appears Fuchs...

RICHMOND - A sign depicting President Barack Obama in the image of the joker from Batman is causing a stir. The large sign hangs outside Club Velvet in Shockoe Bottom and many in the community are reacting to it. And some are even asking the owner of the club to take it down. Thirteen year old Jamilia Cunningham is one of them. She says when she saw the banner she was left speechless and that the image is disrespectful to a man who has made history. "I wanted to be the first African American President and I am happy that...

Free Speech: The Senate votes against transparency as the administration silences a private insurer for exposing the president's health care proposal. Meanwhile, AARP is allowed to tout reform as it awaits payday. We weren't surprised when the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday voted 12 to 11 against allowing two weeks for the Congressional Budget Office to complete its cost analysis of the health care bill pushed by Montana Democrat Max Baucus and to put the bill online in its original wording. Instead, the Senate panel passed another amendment to require the committee to post the full bill online in "conceptual"...

(Reuters) - The White House kept insurance companies squarely in its sights Tuesday in the push for health care reform by releasing research showing that health insurance premiums have risen far faster than inflation in every U.S. State. If that research was funded by the taxpayers, (Reuters did not mention the source), then it was another waste of public funds. Who in their right mind would have thought they went down? Apparently in the health care wars it's alright for the White House to release an official report on insurance premiums, the sole purpose of which is to discredit the...

Yesterday Kentucky’s Courier Journal newspaper reported that the fight against political free speech has reached new levels. Louisville-based Humana is under federal investigation for a mailing that asks seniors to protest proposed cuts in funding for the Medicare plans sold by the company and other health insurers. The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, launched its investigation Friday at the urging of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., who accused Humana of “scare tactics.” The mailing from Humana, the second-largest seller of Medicare Advantage plans, warned that if Congress cuts funding, “millions of seniors and disabled...

Two days ago we were sitting on the dock in Como, having a gellato, waiting for our ship to come in. Not actually a ship, just a small commuter boat that connects the small communities on the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy. It is a breathtakingly beautiful place. I can see why VIPs come to a small hotel, built by a mediaeval Cardinal as his residence, just up the Lake. No wonder that George Clooney has a villa here, that is reached only by helicopter, or so the gossip says. And, this area's history reaches deep into the...

Apparently Nancy Pelosi loves the smell of inciting racial hatred and racial fears every morning, afternoon and evening. In one of the darkest, dank, cryptic, foreboding and apocalyptic warnings ever to be given by an elected official, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi choked out a dread warning of impeding violence which apparently will be sparked by yours and my first amendment rights to freedom of speech. It was as mysterious as foreboding and as bazaar a warning against debate and disagreement as anyone could ever remember. It’s as if in Pelosi’s Orwellian worldview dissent against Democrat radical leftwing leadership...

I suppose it's only fair. Judging by the Times' plunging stock value and rapidly shrinking readership, fans of conservative talk radio are not fans of the paper. But this is a little over-the-top, even for this discredited fishwrap. Call It Ludacris: The Kinship Between Talk Radio and Rap "Hour after hour, rant after rant, it is a feast of words and feverish emotion, interrupted only by regular commercials and the occasional call from the awe-struck fan. I’d heard these voices before, but only in sound bites. When you don’t own a car and don’t tune in at home, you probably...

For years, many of us in the blogosphere have argued that the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, better known as McCain-Feingold, violates the fundamental Constitutional exercise of free speech, especially in politics, which the founders expressly intended to protect. The Supreme Court failed in its duty to protect the First Amendment when it had the chance, as did George W. Bush when he signed the legislation into law. Finally, a federal appellate court has recognized the insult to the Constitution that the BCRA represents: A federal appeals court overturned hard-fought campaign finance reform regulations in a ruling on Friday that will...

From a speech in March of 1918(Lenin’s appearance was greeted with a prolonged standing ovation. The “Internationale” was sung.) In his speech Lenin, in a clear and popular form, explained the essential features and basic points of the Soviet Constitution. The Soviets were the highest form of democratic government by the people. The Soviets were not something invented out of one’s head, they were the product of living reality. They appeared and developed for the first time in history in our backward country, but objectively they should become the form of government by the working people all over the world....

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that the anti-government rhetoric over President Barack Obama's health care reform effort is concerning because it reminds her of the violent debate over gay rights that roiled San Francisco in the 1970s. Anyone voicing hateful or violent rhetoric, she told reporters, must take responsibility for the results. "I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco," Pelosi said, suddenly speaking quietly. "This kind of rhetoric was very frightening" and created a climate in which violence took place, she said.

This month, with Judge Hadjis’s Marc Lemire decision, the wheels fell off the CHRC racket “Nice to see you all,” said Athanasios Hadjis, the Canadian “Human Rights” Tribunal’s vice-chair (i.e., judge), as he surveyed his courtroom in Ottawa last year. “More of an interest than there was before.” Indeed. The packed benches that greeted him were a rare sight at a CHRT trial, and especially at the Marc Lemire trial, where the prosecutors—the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission—had demanded that everyone other than them be banned from the courtroom, including the defendant, who would be graciously permitted to watch proceedings by...

Per Drudge

The First Amendment, as rewritten under the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, except if it is funded by a corporation, unless it is a media corporation, or if the speech occurs just prior to an election, unless it is in the form of a book, which, even though the law covers books, too, the Federal Election Commission would never apply that law to books because we say so, though we said something entirely different a couple of months ago." In an apoplexy of righteous indignation over...

WASHINGTON.Last March, during the Supreme Court argument concerning the Federal Election Commission's banning of a political movie, several justices were aghast. Suddenly and belatedly they saw the abyss that could swallow the First Amendment. Justice Antonin Scalia was "a little disoriented" and Justice Samuel Alito said "that's pretty incredible." Chief Justice John Roberts said: "If we accept your constitutional argument, we're establishing a precedent that you yourself say would extend to banning the book" -- a hypothetical 500-page book containing one sentence that said "vote for" a particular candidate. What shocked them, but should not have, were statements by a...

But Mr. Lloyd in the past has criticized corporate ownership of media outlets, saying it has led to conservative dominance of talk radio, among other things. He has called for a broader range of voices in the media and advocated taxing station owners to subsidize public broadcasters and local media.

Google is planning to roll out a system of micropayments within the next year and hopes that newspapers will use it as they look for new ways to charge users for their content. -

On the eve of what organizers call a 'Big Ol' TEA Party', the Washington, D.C., offices of FreedomWorks were evacuated by DC Metro police on Friday afternoon after the conservative organization reported to authorities at 3:42 pm ET that it had received a bomb threat. At 4:48 pm ET, the organization put out a Twitter message saying that it turned out to be a false alarm but the organization is not happy about the disruption. My colleague, ABC News' Teddy Davis has the story: Tens of thousands of anti-big government activists are expected in Washington on Saturday as part of...

New Federal Communications Commission chief Julius Genachowski says he wants to promote diversity in media ownership, but his recent decision to hire Mark Lloyd, a civil-rights attorney critical of corporate-owned media, to help with that effort has riled some talk-radio hosts who fear the agency is planning to go after them. The criticism comes as another Obama administration appointee, environmental jobs adviser Van Jones, resigned over the weekend following an outcry over things he said before joining the government. Mr. Lloyd was named in July to the new FCC post of chief diversity officer as part of what agency Chairman...

Posted by: on September 11, 2009 at 9:48 am That’s what people have been asking all week. The obvious next in line are Cass Sustein, the newly confirmed “regulation czar”; Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy Carol Browner—a “socialist” who wants to kill your air conditioner; and Mark “He strikes me as a Marxist” Lloyd, who works at the FCC. As a general policy, I prefer not to give ink to hatemongering—and I acknowledge that blaming Beck for Jones’s resignation unnecessarily oversimplifies what happened. But things are getting pretty hairy out there, so this...

This image adorned the front page of the Colorado Springs Independent "newspaper" today. Evidently, it is racist and hateful to portray President Obama as The Joker, but perfectly acceptable to portray Glenn Beck as the same fictional character. I have written often of the illogical nature of subjective morality, but this offers another illustration (pardon the pun) of how it is used to rationalize impropriety as propriety. The editor and author, Anthony Lane, undoubtedly decided that because it was done to Obama they were justified to do it to Beck. Similar arguments abound in the liberal mind. Just today I...

High court tackles 'Hillary: The Movie,' again It's 'not a musical comedy,' Justice Stephen Breyer says of the film WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court signaled Wednesday it may let businesses and unions spend freely to help their favored political candidates in time for next year's elections. In a case that began with a movie attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton, newly seated Justice Sonia Sotomayor jumped right into the questioning. She appeared skeptical about taking the far-reaching step of lifting the ban, a move urged on the court by a lawyer for a group that made the 90-minute movie that sought to...

The selective muzzles applied by the McCain-Feingold law. BY DAVID N. BOSSIE The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." The Framers' clear intent was first and foremost to protect political speech. Today, in a rare summer session, the Supreme Court will hear arguments as to whether it should overrule two previous, and in my opinion incorrectly decided, rulings on political free speech. Namely, the justices will decide whether or not to allow Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce and a significant section of McConnell v. Federal...

PHOENIX (AP) - An Arizona pastor has triggered protests after preaching a sermon last month titled "Why I Hate Barack Obama." Dozens of demonstrators gathered Sunday outside Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe to protest the message preached by the Rev. Steven Anderson.

Insulted in Restroom, Texas Judge Jails Court Attendee, 69, for Contempt Posted 1 hour, 15 minutes ago By Martha Neil Angry about a Texas judge's ruling in a custody matter involving his granddaughter, Don Bandelman followed the jurist into a public restroom at the Caldwell County courthouse. Then the 69-year-old called District Judge Jack Robison a fool, reports the American-Statesman. Bandelman says the judge told him to leave, and he did. But then Robison had his bailiffs arrest Bandelman on the courthouse outside the sidewalk and, without any hearing, sentenced him to a 30-day jail term for contempt, the article...

The Supreme Court will weigh First Amendment rights against campaign finance law when it holds a rare September argument Wednesday to review a case that started as a dispute over an anti-Hillary Clinton movie a conservative group wanted to air during the 2008 presidential primaries. The politically hot case will also be the first Supreme Court case for new Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The court will, as is customary, convene its next term on the first Monday in October, but this case originates from arguments it first heard in March. Instead of issuing a decision, the justices announced they wanted additional...

Public discussion about the character and fitness for office of presidential candidates is at the core of the First Amendment's command that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the Freedom of Speech." Yet Congress, in its zeal to impose onerous campaign-finance restrictions, has made political speech a felony for one class of speakers. Corporations and unions can face up to five years in prison for broadcasting candidate-related advocacy during federal elections. Is outlawing political speech based on the identity of the speaker compatible with the First Amendment? Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear arguments to determine the...

Dutch prosecutors said Wednesday they would charge an Arab-oriented cultural group under hate speech laws for publishing a cartoon that suggests that the death of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust is a fabrication. The public prosecutor's office in Utrecht in the Netherlands said the cartoon insults Jews as a group and is therefore an illegal form of discrimination. T Advertisement he chairman of the Dutch arm of the Arab European League says it published the cartoon on its website to highlight a double standard in freedom of speech rules in which anti-Muslim cartoons are permitted but anti-Jewish cartoons are...

There are only two basic engines for making law. One is top down: it is law by edict and national commission. The other is bottom up: law built by adjudication in common-law courts. One kind of law occupies thousands of pages in the U.S. Code and the Federal Register. The other evolves in the courts, as a pure product of common law, or under short, general mandates like the Bill of Rights or the Sherman Act. The first century or so of law in the telecosm was given to the top-down managers. Herbert Hoover gave it to them. As a...

The Supreme Court appears poised to wipe away limits on campaign spending by corporations and labor unions in time for next year's congressional elections in a case that began as a dispute over a movie about Hillary Rodham Clinton. The justices return to the bench Wednesday , nearly a month early , to consider whether to overrule two earlier decisions that restrict how and when corporations and unions can take part in federal campaigns. Laws that impose similar limits in 24 states also are threatened. The court first heard arguments in March in the case of whether "Hillary: The Movie,"...

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was often hazardous to the health of the American economy. Sometimes it was even hazardous to the health of Americans. An example is Roosevelt ’s almost-forgotten decision in 1934 to cancel the federal airmail contracts. Here is the story. Airmail service began in 1918, and the first such flights were done by the U.S. Army Air Corps. Private airlines, however, were improving so rapidly that soon after 1918 the government bid out contracts to major airlines to deliver the mail. By 1930, with almost all airlines losing money, President Hoover’s postmaster general, Walter Brown, decided to...

Bad Supreme Court precedent can and should be ignoredNext Wednesday the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a rare second round of oral arguments in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. At issue is the documentary Hillary: The Movie, which was produced by the conservative group Citizens United and intended for distribution before the 2008 elections. As Justice Stephen Breyer noted during the first round of arguments back in March, the film "is not a musical comedy." It's a 90-minute political harangue attacking Clinton's ideas and character. In other words, it's exactly the sort of controversial political speech...

The mayor of Mount Vernon has made it official. Mayor Bud Norris says he will give the key to his city to conservative talk show host Glenn Beck on September 26. Norris says Beck will deliver a short talk that night and become the first person to receive a key to the city in the six years Norris has been mayor. Protesters from the Skagit County Young Democrats walked outside city hall Tuesday with protest signs, one reading "Change the locks!"

NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites. The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.” In the course of investigating procurement by the White House New Media office, NLPC discovered a 51-page solicitation of bids that was filed on Friday, August 21, 2009. Filed as Solicitation...

1st Amendment: Mark Lloyd, a disciple of Saul Alinsky and fan of Hugo Chavez, wants to destroy talk radio and says free speech is a distraction. The new FCC diversity "czar" says Venezuela is an example we should follow.When Mark Lloyd was appointed July 29 as the chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission, a nation focused on ObamaCare and a deteriorating economy took little notice. But as angry constituents flood town hall meetings and call in to talk radio, a man dedicated to silencing them sits at the right hand of the president. They share a common hero...

How many of you can remember the free speech zones outside the Democrat and Republican National Conventions in 2004? Ostensibly a part of stringent security measures in a post-9/11 world, those who protested war in the Middle East, George W. Bush in general, or anything else in particular were confined to fenced areas well away from those they were protesting. I saw pictures of these free speech zones and was horrified by chain link fences and razor wire; I actually viewed in person one of these so-called zones, and I can tell you first hand that the pictures didn't do...

A revision to the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, the proposed Rockefeller-Snowe legislation in Congress, has drawn criticism because of concerns that it would give the president power to shut down the internet. The proposed law, introduced in April by Sen. John (Jay) Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., and Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, originally contained a controversial clause that said: “The president may declare a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of internet traffic to and from any compromised federal government or critical infrastructure information system or network.” The bill recently was revised, and the new language now reads: “The president...

Regardless of the outcome of ObamaCare, if past behavior signals the future, the Obama administration's next big push will be to mute its most successful critics. It will come as no surprise when ObamaCare proponents invoke the name of Ted Kennedy to promote passage of a healthcare reform bill when Congress reconvenes. "Let's win one for the Gipper" will become "Let's win one for ol' Teddy." But will that alone tip the balance in favor of healthcare reform as represented in the House's version? Not likely. Nor is it likely that the Obama administration will declare defeat and retreat from...

Sweden's fervent defence of free speech has sparked a diplomatic storm with Israel over the government's refusal to condemn an article accusing Israeli soldiers of smuggling dead Palestinians' organs. The row is likely to overshadow a visit to Israel by Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt next month, right in the midst of Sweden's presidency of the rotating European Union, a key player in the Middle East peace process. Many ordinary Swedes back the government's stance of not condemning the piece by Aftonbladet, the country's top-selling daily, according to a survey released on Wednesday. In an online poll answered by 24,000...

When Obama appointed Cass Sustein to be in his Shadow Government to control the White House Office of Information, was it one more step in his effort to close down free speech on the Internet?

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet. They're not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency. The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer...