Free Expression

The Justice Department has been under scrutiny before in its media-leak investigations. Its own Inspector General’s Office concluded in a January 2010 report that the FBI did not comply with the federal regulation and department policy “that requires attorney general approval and a balancing of First Amendment interests ... before issuing subpoenas for the production of reporters’ telephone toll billing records.”

The suspension of a Wichita Heights High School senior for a harmless Twitter wisecrack about his school’s athletic teams indisputably was against the law (May 8 Eagle). But beyond being illegal, it was a misguided educational decision.

A school where students must constantly second-guess everything they say for fear of punishment is one that inadequately prepares young people to debate issues and settle differences as participants in a democratic society.

The Justice Department is making common cause with the Department of Education to renew the push for “speech codes” on campus. The sordid scheme was revealed in a letter of May 9 to President Royce Engstrom at the University of Montana, where the federal government proposes to limit free expression as a “blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country.”

Colleges were once the place where young men and women could explore new ideas and learn a thing or two that might be useful. No longer. When the fad for political correctness came down on us in the 1980s and ‘90s, administrators quickly surrendered to bullies, and stringent speech codes were adopted to “protect” students from words deemed to be insensitive, discriminatory or hateful. Some of these codes have been struck down as unconstitutional, but many remain.

“The ACLU and the Westboro Baptist Church agree on freedom of speech but we are diametrically opposed to many other issues. But we have no problem with representing them here, because to protect freedom of speech you’ve got to be willing to defend speech that others would like to suppress.”

"Obviously, I want to find out more about it and what the justification is. But there’s almost never a justification for pervasive monitoring of how journalists gather news. 

The unusual provision to treat pot magazines like pornography was added last week by a Senate committee, making Colorado the first — and only — state to require stores that allow entry to shoppers under age 21 to place pot magazines behind the counter.

One has to wonder how Upton Sinclair, the famous muckraking journalist who covered the meat packing industry in his novel The Jungle, would deal with the laws.

Sstate laws already on the books protect livestock owners from unwanted intrusions by photographers.

State laws bar trespassing, so farm owners already have a means to keep activists off the premises. And if any videos are used to actually libel a business—meaning that the video is untrue or significantly misleading—there are other recourses in the courts.

Increasingly, some of the Deciders have become convinced that the greatest threats to free speech during the next decade will come not just from authoritarian countries like China, Russia, and Iran, who practice political censorship and have been pushing the United Nations to empower more of it, but also from a less obvious place: European democracies contemplating broad new laws that would require Internet companies to remove posts that offend the dignity of an individual, group, or religion.

Piles of horns littered the property. Cows struggled with workers who tried to lead them into a building. And one scene in particular made her stop.

“A live cow who appeared to be sick or injured being carried away from the building in a tractor,” Meyer told me, “as though she were nothing more than rubble.”

As she witnessed this, Meyer did what most of us would in the age of smart phones and YouTube: she recorded.

It is a ruling which has stunned animal lovers across the nation - a ruling which allows for the filming of abuse and torture, which would otherwise be considered to be criminal in nature.

Judge Lake dismissed several charges against Ashley Nicole Richards and Brent Justice, a Houston couple arrested last August after being accused of creating numerous animal snuff films.

Richards and Justice were accused of creating multiple "crush" films in which puppies, kittens, mice and even chickens were subjected to brutal torture.

Lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee became frustrated that Holder could not answer why the subpoena to obtain the records was so broad and why the Justice Department did not first try to negotiate with AP to obtain information.

I share the public outrage amid reports that the Department of Justice secretly seized the phone records of Associated Press offices in Washington, New York and Hartford as part of its escalating war on government leakers and whistle-blowers, and the reporters with whom they speak.

Lest there be any confusion: This is a big deal.

The city passed the local laws in January to outlaw certain types of aggressive panhandling, including soliciting money from motorists while standing in the street or on a traffic island or while walking in and out of traffic. Advocates said the laws were needed to protect public safety.

The ACLU's lawsuit says the ordinances are overly broad, prohibit a wide range of peaceful activities that don't implicate safety concerns and unfairly target the poor and the homeless.

Whether in the least developed countries or most developed ones, journalists and increasingly social media activists are opinion leaders. Together with politicians they have the ability to shape the current agenda and narrative, perhaps even more than scholars. Additionally, social media could change or deepen certain mindsets particularly among the youth. Therefore, it is only natural and absolutely necessary that they are included at policy debates at local, national and international levels.

The conservative legal advocacy group, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has been retained by Greek Life leaders at Trinity to move forward with legal challenges against Trinity.

 In a shocking affront to the United States Constitution, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education have joined together to mandate that virtually every college and university in the United States establish unconstitutional speech codes that violate the First Amendment and decades of legal precedent. 

 The Espionage Act, enacted during the first World War to punish Americans who aided the enemy, had only been used three times in its history to try government officials accused of leaking classified information — until the Obama administration. Since 2009, the administration has used the act to prosecute six government officials. Meet the whistleblowers.

In a series of tweets last week, Michael Moore suggested cryptically that there was a connection between the Boston bombing and the Tea Party.

When it comes to stupidity, the man is absolutely indefatigable. He goes out of his way to repeatedly demonstrate the danger of holding an opinion without any facts, or even basic common sense, to support it.

Or to put it more delicately, I think that the man is an idiot.

He has made a career out of human misery and being wrong. Bowling for Columbine was nothing less than using a terrible event to support a one-sided, perverse view of the world while cashing in to build a career. His statements about the Canadian health care system in Sicko were wrong. His early support of the Occupy Movement blew up in his face and he even admitted on Larry King Live that President Obama hadn’t delivered what had been promised but – he’d vote for him again anyway.

After the suspects were found and caught, in typical insensitive fashion, he tweeted a tasteless joke:

“I guessed correctly. The bombings were not carried out by women.”

He’s the kind of self-absorbed, self-serving hypocrite that gives liberalism a bad name. Unfortunately, he’s not alone.