Category: First Amendment rights

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First Amendment rights general freedom national politics & policies too much government U.S. Constitution

The Costs of Airport Security

John Tyner, a 31-year-old man hailing from Oceanside, California, not only declined San Diego International Airport’s kind offer of a full-body scan via privacy-invading machine, he also declined a full-body groping via privacy-invading human.

Unfortunately for TSA (who would like to make it unfortunate for Tyner as well) he happened to record his interactions with security personnel on a cell phone. Now TSA honchos are growling that they may well follow through with a threat to fine him $10,000 for not submitting to either procedure — inasmuch as it’s now a crime to care about one’s personal dignity.

The penalty has gone up, though, since TSA threatened Tyner at the airport. It’s now $11,000.

Five or ten dollars for refusing an obnoxious groping, I understand. Or a nickel. Better? A penny. But thousands of dollars?

I’m sure other aspiring passengers who initially cooperated with such intrusions also decided mid-procedure that things were getting too invasive for comfort and that retreat was the better part of valor. I doubt that TSA has sought to extract $10,000+ from each recalcitrant.

But it seems Tyner’s conduct is especially heinous. First, he balked at unreasonable search of his person; second, he blatantly exercised his First Amendment rights by shockingly sharing evidence and testimony about what happened.

If the TSA doesn’t do something, fast, more and more people might act as if their constitutional rights still apply.

Do they?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture national politics & policies

Ad Ad Hominem!

Early reports and predictions about political spending in this election cycle claim there’s a 30 percent increase over the last mid-term election. One figure hazards that this campaign will total out to around $3.7 billion. Spending on ads is said to be up 75 percent. Traditional spending via parties and party committees shows Democrats to have an edge over Republicans by about $20 million. Republicans are making up for it, we’re told, by newly re-legalized “outside” spending.

A CBS News report relates the conventional wisdom about this. Watchdog groups “say more ads and information can be good — but voters can’t judge their credibility when donors are secret.” One expert decries this, saying “We just cannot know and we’ll never know who is ponying up the money.”

I say, “so what?”

Information cannot be judged good or bad, nor facts or argument dismissed, depending on where the money comes from to distribute the information and argumentation. The classic fallacy of the argumentum ad hominem judges conclusions by the character of the speaker rather than the truth of the facts or the validity of arguments.

Its dominance in politics is a curse, not a blessing.

Demands for full transparency of citizen activism bolster the nasty politics of a logical fallacy. When we don’t know the economic provenance of an ad or a slogan or an argument, we’ll just have to decide the issue on its own merits.

Horrors!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture

Should I Read This?

Yesterday I talked about a New York Times piece on the Tea Party reading list. I mentioned several authors, including Bastiat, Mises, Hayek, and even Saul Alinsky. As an astute reader mentioned, I did not bring up W. Cleon Skousen’s The 5000 Year Leap, which Ms. Zernike’s article treats at some length.

I also did not deign to mention a few books merely cited, such as Atlas Shrugged and The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.

Why?

Well, of the books I didn’t mention, I’d only read one. And it wasn’t The 5000 Year Leap. More importantly, the title of the Times piece, what interested me about it, were the classics. The 5000 Year Leap isn’t a classic yet.

But perhaps I should ask you: Have you read it? Does it deserve to be a classic?

The New York Times didn’t exactly entice me into the book’s pages. According to the paper, Skousen thought Jefferson urged teaching Christianity in state public schools. This seems to fly in the face not only of Jefferson’s humanistic “Epicureanism” but also of the disestablishmentarianism of the Baptists for whom Jefferson supportively coined the expression “wall of separation between church and state.” (It’s often forgotten, these days, that, during our nation’s founding period, Baptists were ardent supporters of keeping religion and politics separate.)

But I’ve learned long ago, you can’t always trust the Times.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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First Amendment rights too much government

Leahy versus the Internet

A censor’s work is never done. So, in a civilization where everybody salutes freedom of speech, censors must be especially clever, seeking new ways to hide their goals.

The latest camel’s rump under the tent? A bill to censor entire Internet domains on the grounds of alleged violations of rights that have not been prosecuted. Pending in the Senate and sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy, it’s called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA).

The bill would create two blacklists in response to accusations of copyright violation or sales of counterfeit goods. One would consist of sites to which Internet service providers would be required to block access.

The second would consist of sites to which ISPs would be merely encouraged to block access.

Any chance the government might pressure ISPs to ensure the “voluntary” censorship of disapproved domains . . . including domains with just a few pages of dubious legality but many pages of criticism of government?

Sounding the alarm, the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already gives copyright holders a means of taking action against copyright violations. The Foundation argues that Leahy’s bill would enable the U.S. to join the ranks of the “profoundly anti-democratic regimes that keep their citizens from seeing the whole Internet.”

The Foundation’s message: “Tell Your Senator: No Website Blacklists, No Internet Censorship!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies

The Ad Hominem Bias

Can you discredit an opponent’s opinion by demonizing the opponent or his or her supporters, rather than addressing the opinion itself?

The President recently spoke on the horrors of the Citizens United v. FEC decision, in which evil corporations retained (or regained) a right to support political speech. Obama hates the decision, but insists he’s no censor. What he really wants is to force supporters of political messages to disclose the financing used to promote said speech. Who it comes from.

The Disclose Act, currently working its way through Congress, aims to do just that.

The odd thing, as former FEC Chairman Bradley Smith relates, is that the legislation is, well, redundant. Corporations that spend money on political speech during final election blitz-time are now required to report their funding sources.

So why pile on?

Perhaps the President and his confrères see disclosure as less about information and more about blocking the message by taking up half of a 30-second television spot with the names of various corporate executives.

But the stated rationale bespeaks of an underlying belief that arguments for or against something stand or fall depending on who supports them. It’s the argument ad hominem all over again. Someone for policy X? If A or B supports it, that’s bad; if C or D supports it, that’s good.

And that’s a fallacy. And evidence of a certain simple-minded partisanship, giving voters less credit than they are due.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights

Another Free Speech Advance

Whether in Washington State or in Washington, D.C., legislators regularly enact unconstitutional laws to suppress free speech.

Thankfully, courts often strike these restrictions down. It happened again on September 1, when a federal judge ruled that the Washington State’s limits on contributions made to Ballot Issue Committees during the last 21-day pre-election blitz is unconstitutional.

The plaintiff in the suit, FamilyPAC, said it had been limited in speaking out on Washington Referendum 71 (2009), a citizen-referred ballot measure to veto a state law regarding domestic partnerships. Specifically, FamilyPAC complained that state law had prevented its supporters from collecting funds to make their voices heard.

The judge ruled in their favor based on recent precedent as well as the clear wording of the First Amendment. Indeed, the case is so obvious, you have to ask: On what grounds was the initial regulation even proposed and voted in?

Well, Washington’s legislature, like the U.S. Congress, is filled with politicians who think they know best how to make politics work better. For them. This restriction barely bothers entrenched political interests. They are professionally organized enough to make their spending decisions early, and they like knowing that any last-minute effort by a less sophisticated individual or group will be blocked.

But when the politicians speak about such laws it sounds like they are taking a stand against “big corporations.”

Instead, they take a stand against citizens.

Thank goodness we have the courts!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Forcing You to Pay for Bad News

Poor old-media dinosaurs! The “news profession,” so assailed by the fact checkers, bias detectors and distortion documenters hailing from the Internet and other new tech, suffers under the scourge of unexpected competition.

What to do . . . aside from apply troubling degrees of ingenuity, conscientiousness and hard work?

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Lee Bollinger, Columbia University president and free speech “expert,” says the answer is “more public funding for news-gathering. . . .”

It’s very exciting. Under Bollinger’s plan, even more of your tax dollars will be diverted to support media outfits whose lucubration you don’t support voluntarily! Joy!

For Bollinger, past unconstitutional interference with media provides ample warrant for more. In the ’60s, the Supreme Court sanctioned government-compelled coverage of “public issues” and provision of “equal time,” even though it could have “limited government involvement simply to auctioning off the airwaves and letting the market dictate [sic] the news.”

It’s unclear why advocates of pushing people around so often make this precedent-worshiping argument. It’s as if some tyrant were to say, “There’s already well-established precedent for my beating up and killing innocent people. So why not expand and codify the process?”

Hey, maybe something’s wrong with the media-bullying precedents? And something right with the First Amendment? Perhaps today’s overdue media ferment would have happened earlier absent government fostering of media behemoths.

How about dropping the shackles and subsidies and letting Americans make our own choices about which media to patronize?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability First Amendment rights

What a Pile

Jarrod West has seen the other side of government. Instead of service with a smile, it’s no service, no smile and a slap at fundamental freedoms. He bought a house in Valley Center, Kansas, only to discover that his new neighborhood floods, regularly. It flooded again this June, long after having been promised help (he said) from the city administrator. So he put up a sign on his lawn, addressing the city:

Fix this problem
That’s what I pay taxes for.
PS. Joel This Means You!

City administrator Joel Pile was not amused. He convinced the city attorney to file defamation charges against West. Pile explained that “individuals have an absolute right to free speech. But however, when they do it and continue to do it within the realms of what we believe is actual malice for the purpose of holding me accountable to the public we believe that crosses a line. . . .”

You gotta love that “but however” segue, wherein “absolute rights” vanish after “a line” has been crossed. Plus, Pile objects to being held “accountable to the public.”

More pertinently, Pile claims that he’s not responsible, claiming that only the city council can rectify West’s flooding. That’s under dispute, and worth debating.

But if any line has been crossed, it’s been crossed by Pile and the city attorney. West ought to be free to speak, and criticize — even unjustly — his local government.

Why? That’s the foundation of a republican form of government, where citizens are in charge, and the employees are “public servants.”

Not rulers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights

Talking the Non-Talk

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech. It says Congress “shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” etc.

The Founders assumed that individuals might sometimes combine to pursue common ends. Indeed, the First Amendment also safeguards our right of peaceable assembly, often called freedom of association. Obviously, we have this right not only up until the moment we assemble, but also even as we are assembling — even as we constitute a group pursuing a common cause.

In light of this, the gnashing of teeth over the Supreme Court’s expanding — really, recognizing — the right of persons in corporations to exercise freedom of speech seems silly. The rights of an individual, whether to utter a political thought, buy an ad or shop for groceries, do not disappear when he formally cooperates with others. But some persons regard corporations as such as morally suspect, and therefore properly subject to special restrictions.

An example is Bill de Blasio, Public Advocate of New York City. His official website lists non-media corporations that have not promised to gag themselves this campaign season. The website supplies the phone numbers of these companies so you can call to bemoan their offensive belief in reserving their rights.

Blogger Eugene Volokh has a different idea: Call de Blasio’s office to complain about his offensive belief in preemptive self-censorship. The number is (212) 669-7200. You can also send an email from the Public Advocate website.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom national politics & policies

Oppressors Triumphant

Richard Falkenrath is tired of all this civil rights nonsense.

Falkenrath is a former official with the Department of Homeland Security and now works for a consulting firm run by former Homeland Security honcho Michael Chertoff. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Falkenrath explains why a recent ban of the Blackberry by the United Arab Emirates was greeted “with approval, admiration and perhaps even a touch of envy” by “law enforcement investigators and intelligence officers” here in America.

The UAE banned the gizmo because its officials could not easily snoop on BlackBerry users. Falkenrath says the ban was justified because the BlackBerry maker, Research in Motion, had “refused to modify its information architecture in a way that would enable authorities to intercept the communications of select subscribers.” Which “select subscribers”? Any subscribers the UAE government selected, of course. (RIM later cut a deal with UAE officials to restore service.)

Alas, because of legal obstacles in the U.S., “there remain a number of telecommunication methods that federal agencies cannot readily penetrate.” Falkenrath disparages the “liberal sensibilities” of those who wish to keep private communications private until a proper warrant is issued.

There’s a word for a government that can easily sidestep the rights of everyone in the name of national security: Dictatorship. Would Americans really be more “secure” if, like the United Arab Emirates, we lacked freedom of speech, freedom of association, democracy, and so forth?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.