Tag Archives: free speech

You Already Have, Ace

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Egyptian Prime Minister Mohamed Morsi had this to say on the third day of rioting, vandalism, desecration, and protests in and around the American Embassy in Cairo:

We will not permit any such event, any such occurrence against the embassies present in our territories.  The Egyptian people reject any such unlawful act.

You already have permitted such events.  For days.  And apparently, for days, the Egyptian people reject no such thing.

Morsi added this, too, in all seriousness:

We count on the US administration and the US people to take serious steps to put an end to that [anti-Islamic movie], because this is considered a crime against humanity and a crime against Muslims[.]

No unutterable arrogance here.  Free speech is a crime against humanity?  Free speech is a crime against Muslims?  According to whom, exactly, and by what authority?

Speaking of crimes, where is Muslim respect for our beliefs, for our free speech?

Oh, and Morsi had some boilerplate, too:

But at the same time we firmly say that this cannot be taken as a justification to assault consulates or embassies and cannot be taken also as a justification for killing innocent people.

Sure.

Progressives and Freedom

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From The Wall Street Journal:  Progressives are now actively lying about the National Federation of Independent Business because that organization is the formal lead plaintiff in the Obamacare lawsuit, which ruling the Supreme Court is scheduled to announce today.

Here’s what’s going on.

The chairmen of the House Progressive Caucus, Democrats Raul Grijalva [D, AZ] and Keith Ellison [D, MN], [wrote] a letter accusing the NFIB of acting against “the best interest of small business owners” and “the popular opinion of the American small business community.”

Because, of course, all those 300,000 small business NFIB members adore Obamacare.  These guys say so.

Then the WSJ notes:

…among the four million small businesses eligible for new tax credits if they provide health insurance for their workers, a mere 170,300 have signed up.

Hmm….

And they ask:

…if the NFIB is as unrepresentative as liberals claim, then why have its ranks grown by 5% since it became a plaintiff in the ObamaCare suit?

And they add:

Some 65% [of NFIB members, in an NFIB poll of its membership] believe ObamaCare will do the opposite [i.e., will increase health care costs] and 77% believe it will result in a higher tax burden, which are among the reasons the group joined the suit. One in five small businesses believes it’ll be forced to alter the benefits it offers employees.

Yeah.  That’s broad-based support for Obamacare, all right.  It’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

When the Shoe’s on the Other Foot

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Progressives spent $741 million on their 2008 Presidential campaign, and President Obama announced a goal of $1 billion for his spending on the current campaign.  Candidate John McCain spent all of $228 million on his.

Today the Republicans are competing on even ground—even leading the Progressives in some areas—in campaign funding, while Obama’s $1 billion goal is at risk.

The Progressives’ response?  They’ve petitioned the Federal Election Commission with a formal complaint, demanding that the Republican donors to those SuperPACs that don’t side with the Obama camp be revealed; in particular, they’ve complained out the Crossroads GPS SuperPAC.

Never mind that Crossroads, and the other SuperPACS, is organized under a section of the tax code that allows it, and all SuperPACS—conservative and liberal—to keep its funding sources private.

Robert Bauer, a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, wrote in the complaint to the FEC, in all seriousness

There has never been any doubt about its true purpose: to elect candidates of its choice to the presidency and Congress.  Crossroads has tried to shield its donors—wealthy individuals, and corporations who may be pursuing special interest agendas that are not in the national interest.

They make this complaint even though there’s no requirement for donors to SuperPACs to lose their anonymity.  Never mind what the law says.  The law is what Progressives say it is, as Obama has already made clear in another matter.  Never mind what the national interest is.  The national interest is whatever the DNC says it is.

That this is simply a dishonest attempt to stifle campaign donations by the wrong side (in the manner of the KeepingGOPHonest Web site, among others), and so to stifle the political speech of those who are saying things of which the Progressives disapprove.  That there is no legitimacy at all to this beef is demonstrated by the Progressives’ decision to file their “complaint” first with a newspaper (The New York Times) and only after that with the Federal Election Commission.

Oh, yeah—the Progressives have Priorities USA, which is organized under the same tax code section as is Crossroads.  And whose donors are carefully kept secret, as is entirely appropriate under the law.  But Priorities isn’t having the same fund-raising success as Crossroads.

It’s no fair the other side is doing well—we’re supposed to win, dammit!

Free Speech and the UN

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There is a carefully sub rosa international attack on free speech in progress, and unless our government takes a more active role than it has been, that attack is going to have very serious negative repercussions right here at home.  Gordon Crovitz described this in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.

The UN’s International Telecommunications Union is hosting a World Conference on International Telecommunications this December, which will be attended by all 193 of the UN member nations, including the US.  This meeting has been utterly devoid of publicity, and any knowledge we have about the agenda and goals have come to us only through leaks.  But here’s what we know, according to Crovitz.

A 200+ page “planning document” indicates the UN’s goals for the conference, and Eli Dourado, a George Mason University researcher, summarized the document’s contents thusly:

These proposals show that many ITU member states want to use international agreements to regulate the Internet by crowding out bottom-up institutions, imposing charges for international communication, and controlling the content that consumers can access online.

The proposals include the following:

  • give countries authority over “the information and communication infrastructure within their state”
  • require that online companies “operating in their territory” use the Internet “in a rational way”

Since these proposals come from the People’s Republic of China, this means government authorities and government definitions of “rational way.”

Other proposals would actually let the UN regulate Internet content:

  • “protect” against computer malware or spam
  • inspect private communications
  • measure Internet traffic along national borders and bill the originator of the traffic
  • give the UN authority over allocating Internet addresses, replacing ICANN, the self-regulating body that presently ensures the stability of the Internet

These proposals come from Russia and Iran; although amazingly, Europe supports the billing drive (perhaps not so amazingly considering the penchant for government controls that EU member nations have).

So far, our government’s reaction to this assault on free speech—and on American free speech—has been…muted.  The best the Obama administration has been able to do is to mumble about

“unnecessary and beyond the appropriate scope” of UN regulation

and

the text [of the planning document] suggests that the ITU has a role in content-related issues.  We do not believe it does.

This is a far cry from the bolder response we took took when the UN’s UNESCO became too ideological and not enough concerned with science and education: we cut off funding to the organization.

This administration needs to become a whole lot more forceful in opposing this attempt to grab the Internet and to use that control to stifle free speech.

Give Him a Speedy Trial and a Fast Impeachment

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Convicted serial bomber, drug trafficker, and perjuror, Brett Kimberlin, is continuing his assault on any and all who are rude enough to write about him in any way less than completely fawning of his wonderfulness.  In one such assault, done under the guise of his lawfare war, he had the rude blogger Aaron Walker arrested while in court responding to a prior Peace Order Kimberlin had managed to obtain.

But of interest here is not so much Kimberlin’s behavior, but the behavior of Maryland Judge C.J. Vaughey in that matter.  The Peace Order Kimberlin had obtained, and under which Walker was arrested in Vaughey’s court, centered on this:

Mr. Walker has tweeted on Twitter about me in alarming and annoying ways over hundreds of times in the past week and urged others to attack me.  He has generated hundreds of blog posts directly and indirectly based on false allegations that I framed him for an assault.

Mr. Walker has had many people threaten me directly with death, and told me to stop talking to the police, and not show up in court or I would die.

These are carefully, cynically, vague and unsubstantiated claims, yet Vaughey took them at face value, not even inquiring into evidence to support the claims.  Then we get this from Walker’s hearing before Vaughey [emphasis mine]:

VAUGHEY: –You’ve decided to battle, and he comes back.  And see, you’re—you—you’re the kind of guy, you don’t want to get into this to settle this, mano y mano.  You want to get all these friends who got nothing else to do with their time, in this judge’s opinion, because—my God, I’m a little bit older than you are, and I haven’t got enough time in the day to do all the things I want to do.  And I thought by retirement, I would have less to do.  I got more!  Because everybody knows I’m free!  So they all come to me.  But you, you are starting a—a conflagration, for lack of a better word, and you’re just letting the thing go recklessly no matter where it goes.  I mean, you get some—and I’m going to use word I (ph)—freak somewhere up Oklahoma, got nothing better to do with his time, so he does the nastiest things in the world he can do to this poor gentleman.  What right has that guy got to do it?

WALKER: He has no right to do that, Your Honor.

VAUGHEY: Well, he’s—you incited him.

WALKER: But, your honor, I did not incite him within the Brandenburg standard though.

VAUGHEY: Forget Bradenburg [sic].  Let’s go by Vaughey right now, and common sense out in the world.  But you know, where I grew up in Brooklyn, when that stuff was pulled, it was settled real quickly.

WALKER: I’m not sure what that means, your honor.

VAUGHEY: –Very quickly. And I’m not going to talk about those ways, but boy, it ended fast.  I even can tell you, when I grew up in my community, you wanted to date an Italian girl, you had to get the Italian boy’s permission.  But that was the old neighborhoods back in the city.  And it was really fair.  When someone did something up there to you, your sister, your girlfriend, you got some friends to take them for a ride in the back of the truck.

WALKER: Well, Your Honor, what–

VAUGHEY: –That ended it.  You guys have got this new mechanical stuff out here, the electronic stuff, that you can just ruin somebody without doing anything. But you started it.

As Popehat points out, the Brandenburg standard is from a Supreme Court ruling that held that speech may be banned on the theory that it is incitement only when it is intended to create, and is likely to create, a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action.

What do we have in this…judge’s…actions, then?

First we have his statement that the law is what he says it is, not what is actually written by our legislators, not what has been ruled by his superiors, the Supreme Court.

We also have this judge’s implicit recommendation that if someone offends Walker, then Walker should simply take that offender for a ride in a truck and “settle” the matter.  And by extension, he’s given that ex-con Kimberlin permission to do exactly that.

And he’s accused the victim of Kimberlin’s assault of having started the ex-con’s assault.

Vaughey is unfit to be a judge; he should be removed from the bench he’s sullying as soon as possible.

 

h/t to Grim’s Hall.