Category: First Amendment rights

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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.

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First Amendment rights

Roll Your Eyes, Sigh

People disagree. When it comes to government policy, people not only disagree, but on occasion even get hot under the collar. Why? Governments have so much power and tend to waste so much money. Our money. Yours.

That’s why, in public meetings, we should expect citizens to fly off the handle every now and then.

And that’s why those who run public meetings must retain a measure not merely of civility, but lenience. When some citizens disagree, that disagreement will sometimes be . . . disagreeable. But understandable.

I’m preaching the obvious here, but to town officials in Elmhurst, Illinois, I’m preaching a message they don’t want to hear. When citizen Darlene Heslop rolled her eyes and sighed out loud as they moved to hire a state lobbyist, the officials running the meeting objected. They threw her out, saying she was disorderly.

And then they told the city attorney to look into the guidelines for public meetings — you know, everything from state statutes to Robert’s Rules (I kid you not) — to find a definition of “disorderly conduct” that would allow them to keep Heslop out of their hair. Her eyes! Her sighs!

Heslop is all for settling on a definition. Perhaps she knows state law, which defines disorderly conduct as acts of “such unreasonable manner as to alarm or disturb another, or to provoke a breach of the peace.” Her eye-rolling and sighing in no way qualifies — and should be tolerated . . . maybe even as free speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets property rights too much government U.S. Constitution

Hooray for IJ

Let a thousand floral arrangements bloom.

Louisiana has just abolished the “demonstration” section of the state’s licensing exam for florists. The new law came in response to a lawsuit by florists working with the Institute for Justice. IJ argued that the four-hour demonstration requirement was “arbitrary, subjective and antiquated,” and allowed state-licensed florists to determine the fate of their future competitors.

The outcome represents yet another victory for the “merry band of libertarian litigators” who regularly do battle “in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion on behalf of individuals whose most basic rights are denied by the government. . . .”

Founded in 1991, the Institute for Justice has successfully fought to lift caps on the number of licensed taxis in Minneapolis; eliminate laws around the country that prevent competition in every kind of occupation, from animal husbandry and interior design to hair braiding and pest control; restore freedom of speech undermined by vague and arbitrary campaign finance regulation in Florida and enemies of property rights in Tennessee; protect businessmen and home owners from eminent domain abuse in Arizona and Ohio.

IJ’s many successful efforts to defend the rights of individuals are having a major impact. Looking back over the many installments of Common Sense, I find that I mention this group’s work again and again.

With good reason. They keep fighting the good fight, and winning.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights incumbents national politics & policies

The Kill-Political-Discourse Act

Sometimes politicians name their legislation the better to hide what they are trying to do. The name fails to disclose, you might say.

Consider the so-called DISCLOSE Act, which just passed the House of Representatives by a mostly party-line vote of 219-206 and is now awaiting action in the Senate. The full name of the monstrosity is the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act. It should be called the Democracy Is Undermined by Rigging the Game to Favor Incumbents and Especially Democrats Act.

The goal is to hamper political advertising by independent groups and corporations by requiring disclosure of the names of contributors who give above $600 a year. The new rules would harm corporations more than unions, and would foist anew some of the same burdens on First Amendment rights just overturned by the Supreme Court. The same court that threw out chunks of McCain-Feingold on free speech grounds would also likely find DISCLOSE unconstitutional.

But could the court do so before the 2010 elections? Democrats like Hank Johnson ― who told fellow partisans that the Act, if passed, would stop Republicans from being elected ― are betting that it can’t. Their hope is that with the speech-shackling new law skewing things in their favor until the high court acts, they’ll be more likely to escape political annihilation in November.

No, we can’t wait for the Supremes on this one. Call your senator.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights media and media people too much government

Liberty and Licenses

Oh, no. We’re being drowned — in alternatives.

Remember the good old days, with three choices for national broadcast news, Walter Cronkite and whoever the other guys were? Plus the local paper and the New York Times? Sure, there were other avenues. But if the big boys happened to have a unitary government-approved perspective on something, you could battle uphill for years with hardly anyone noticing your particular flag.

Then cable arrived. The Internet. Zillions of webzines and blogs. If you want an alternative to whatever the Official View is, you don’t have to look very far or for very long. It’s harder for the powers that be to burble baloney unchallenged.

Big, big problem, all this competition, right?

It is according to Michigan State Senator Bruce Patterson. He wants to license journalists the way Michigan licenses plumbers and hair dressers.

From what I can tell, the state can’t be trusted with protecting us from bad hair cuts, let alone tell us who’s best suited to toot out the news. But Patterson says we’re being overwhelmed by all the media outlets. Poor us! So we need guvmint — which always puts the truth first, of course — to tell us good reporting from bad.

Think about this: The traditional job of journalism is to provide a check on lying politicians. Now politicians will vet those who get the privilege to criticize them?

Puh-leeze.

Patterson, we’ll take a pass.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom

Videotape Police Abuse, Go to Jail?

George Donnelly may be wondering what country he is in right now.

Recently, he and other activists trying to hand out pamphlets published by the Fully Informed Jury Association were confronted by U.S. marshals in Manhattan. Attempting to record the encounter, Donnelly found himself being pushed to the pavement by the marshals. Then arrested. He is accused of “assaulting a federal marshal.” Another FIJA activist on the scene, Julian Heicklin, was also arrested.

The Libertarian News Examiner is among those reporting about the injustice.

In another recent case, documented by Reason magazine’s Radley Balko, a Maryland motorcyclist was arrested for videotaping an encounter during which a state trooper pulled a gun. Andy Gruber thought this out of bounds. So he posted the video, which he had captured with a camera tucked in his helmet, on the Internet. This resulted in a raid and arrest, and the possibility of imprisonment. Maryland police officers claim that it’s “illegal” to record anybody’s voice — ever — in Maryland, a willful misinterpretation of the state’s wiretapping laws.

Miscarriages of justice have often been rectified only when video comes to light exposing falsehoods in the official story. As inconvenient as it is for law enforcers to be held accountable for how they do their jobs, the alternative of letting them make up the rules as they go along and hide or destroy evidence of their conduct is grotesquely unreasonable and dangerous, and should be itself punishable by law.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights

Free Speech Assault Dropped

America has a relatively robust tradition of respecting freedom of speech. Nevertheless, our government officials often find criticism not only annoying but actionable.

But actionable how?

Campaign finance regulation offers officials one avenue to go after political critics. The CFR regime is so ambiguous and complex that it often seems to cover anything anybody might say at any time about anybody running for office. But the ever-metastasizing repressive power of campaign finance regulation was probably not what Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett was relying on when he subpoenaed Twitter, the micro-blogging company, to try to learn who was savaging his conduct as attorney general.

Corbett demanded names, street addresses and IP addresses of two Twitter subscribers who have been claiming that his investigation into public corruption was politically motivated. Twitter representatives were threatened with arrest if they failed to appear before a grand jury to “give evidence regarding alleged violations of the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

Corbett’s office claims that the subpoena had nothing to do with aversion to political criticism but was related to a particular prosecution. Perhaps the angry tweeters were really a single disgruntled defendant, only pretending to be contrite in court?

Regardless, the attorney general was obviously on a fishing expedition, one that targeted First Amendment rights. The outcry from Twitter users, the ACLU, and others was swift and vehement, so Corbett has dropped his abusive subpoena.

Perhaps he should also drop his gubernatorial campaign.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.