Tag Archives: free speech

Free Speech

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So long as the government determines what’s free to be said.

There’s this American rock band, all of whose members are of Asian heritage, who call themselves The Slants. When they tried to trademark their name, the US Patent Office refused, claiming the name is “disparaging.” The matter is now before the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is the appellate court that hears such cases. The Court is hearing the matter en banc, or the whole court is handling the appeal instead of the usual three-judge panel.

The government is censoring naming. At oral argument,

Judge Kimberly Moore asked what would happen if the government started rejecting copyrights for controversial art or other expressive works as it is doing with trademarks.

Would there be “no more porn? No more crucifixes in urine?”

The government is arguing, and it’s serious,

[T]he law governing trademark registrations does not violate the First Amendment…. Its purpose is not “to help people to make a political statement or prevent people from making political statement[.],

Indeed. However, the government’s lawyer, Daniel Terry, is arguing that Government is the one that will determine what is political speech that the government must protect and what is not political speech that the government gets to censor. And Terry argued with that claim that Government has determined that a name can never be political speech.

Gotta Regulate

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Senator Elizabeth Warren has discovered a bit of financial activity that she can’t regulate, and she wants to regulate it.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) on Monday sent letters to six financial regulators saying she is troubled that the big banks and other financial firms backing Symphony Communications Services LLC may use the new tool to skirt regulatory and legal requirements, as well as escape enforcement action by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other regulators.

Symphony’s sin? Their words on their publicly accessible Web page.

Symphony is designed to meet the cyber-security and compliance needs of financial firms.

They also tout their ability to guard against government spying.

Never mind that Symphony also says,

The use of Symphony does not change regulators’ ability to obtain messages from our clients. Symphony delivers messages to its clients to download, decrypt, and archive, and they are able to provide those messages to regulators just as they would with other compliant messaging systems.

Symphony is plainly acknowledging that message handling is the sole responsibility of the correspondents, and not at all that of the pipeline.

Senator Warren (and FBI Director James Comey) are prime examples of the need of private citizens and our enterprises for protection from government spying—even domestic spying. They’re already having some success, too, in browbeating Symphony:

Symphony’s current website doesn’t appear to contain the language Ms Warren raises in her letter.

What’s in that message? Inquiring Progressive minds want to know.

Obama Gets One Right

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Edward Snowden will likely remain hiding in Russia for some time, with Washington officials and most Americans offering no leniency or forgiveness for him notoriously stealing classified information and jeopardizing U.S. national security.

President Barack Obama, through his Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco, said this about that:

Mr Snowden’s dangerous decision to steal and disclose classified information had severe consequences for the security of our country and the people who work…to protect it[.]

And then he tossed a petition to pardon this…scofflaw, the petition a product of a two year effort to let Snowden skate, into the round file.

Hear, hear.

A Corrupt IRS

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Two Congressmen have some concerns, and they want IRS Commissioner John Koskinen removed. Ron DeSantis (R, FL), House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security Chairman, and Jim Jordan (R, OH), Subcommittee on Health Care, Benefits and Administrative Rules Chairman, laid out their case in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. RTWT, but here are the highlights.

  • Failure to inform Congress. Koskinen concealed—during repeated sworn testimony—from Congress for four months his knowledge that the IRS that it had “lost” vast amounts of Lois Lerner’s (of “I didn’t do it” infamy) emails.
  • False testimony before Congress. One example: of the more than 1,000 computer backup tapes discovered by the IRS Inspector General, approximately 700 were available with their contents intact. Koskinen testified he had “confirmed” that all of the tapes were unrecoverable. Worse, those 700 intact backup tapes were found within 15 days of Koskinen’s informing Congress that they were not recoverable.
  • Failure to correct the record. After his false statements to Congress under oath, Koskinen refused to amend them when given the opportunity at a public hearing earlier this year.
  • Failure to reform the IRS to protect First Amendment rights. Koskinen still hasn’t acted on President Barack Obama’s May 2013 promise to “put in place new safeguards to make sure this kind of behavior cannot happen again.”

It’s not just Koskinen who needs to be fired—not allowed to retire, not allowed to resign, fired—though. IRS personnel cannot be trusted down to the worker bee accountants who do the actual work of checking tax returns. The breadth of IRS crimes—worthy of a RICO case, were it a private enterprise—renders the entire agency worthless. And that’s to the detriment of those worker bees.

Freedom to Dissent

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Four men already had been convicted of murder in southeastern China when a fifth person confessed to the crime. But when lawyers demanded to review case documents to clear the men’s names, the court stonewalled. So the lawyers unfurled banners outside the venue.

They protested for days, alongside social activists who insulted the top judge, and uploaded pictures online.
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Authorities say these lawyers have strayed far beyond their professional role into illegal activism aimed at sabotaging the country’s legal system. …

Since late May, police across China have detained and called in at least 215 rights lawyers and social activists, most of them during the past week or so. State propaganda has kicked into high gear to denounce them as rabble-rousers, criminal gangs, profit-seeking opportunists.

Wisconsin’s John Doe persecutions have been struck by that state’s Supreme Court. We’ll see how long that lasts before our own Left starts up again.

In the meantime, our own national Left’s loudly protected IRS continues to persecute Americans: those who dare to speak contrary to the Left’s approved speech—all those exposures of personal and personal tax information, all those stonewalls of tax status applications for particular groups who would dare speak contrary to the Left’s approvals. The same IRS continues to refuse to return seized funds to those from whom the money was…confiscated…under patently false pretenses, even after this IRS said they would stop the confiscations.