Tag: first amendment

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First Amendment rights

One Vote from Tyranny

Ron Calzone, Missouri Ethics Commission,

The bureaucrats at Missouri’s Ethics Commission lost.

By one vote.

Last Friday, the commission’s outrageous attempt to force Ron Calzone, an unpaid citizen activist, to file and pay a fee as a lobbyist in order to speak to legislators in the capitol was ruled unconstitutional.

After vacating a previous 2 – 1 decision by a three-​judge panel that had upheld that ridiculous requirement, the entire federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals weighed-​in, ruling 6 – 5 that such a mandate was a violation of fundamental First Amendment rights.

“[C]an Missouri require Calzone to pay a fee and publicly disclose his political activities, even though he neither spends nor receives any money in connection with his advocacy?” asked the majority opinion. “We conclude that the answer is no.”

Regular readers may recognize Calzone for the same reason Show-​Me State legislators know his name: he is an effective advocate for constitutional government. 

And we have covered this specific battle numerous times going back to 2014, when a paid lobbyist at the behest of two legislators (tired of his grassroots input) filed an ethics complaint against Mr. Calzone.

This whole case is one of politicians and their special interest cronies using the bureaucratic, regulatory state to attempt to harass citizens into silence. 

They sure chose the wrong citizen to mess with.

Be grateful to Ron Calzone who stood up for freedom during five years of court battles. And thank goodness for the legal eagles who soared to his defense — in this case the Freedom Center of Missouri and the national Institute for Free Speech.

Yet, be very afraid that while this most fundamental right to freely communicate with one’s elected representatives and speak out on legislation was sustained, it was by a narrow 6 – 5 vote. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

More on this particular case … 

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Ron Calzone, Missouri Ethics Commission,

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First Amendment rights Popular

Against Spying on American Journalists

antiwar, anti war, Justin Raimondo,

Does the Federal Bureau of Investigation have a file on you?

Does it — or some other agency — have an active file on you?

If so, does it have good reason for such an investigation?

Well, refine that last question a bit: does the FBI have a good reason under the principles of a democratic republic, abiding by the limits set by the rights listed (and not listed) in the Constitution?

Eight years ago, the folks at AntiWar​.com learned that they had been subject to FISA snooping and multiple “threat assessment” memos of the FBI. Eric Garris, founder, managing editor, and webmaster of the anti-​war site sued, under the Freedom of Information Act, for discovery, and, under the 1974 Privacy Act, to have the memos expunged. On September 11, the court instructed the bureau to expunge one of them, mainly because no crime was under investigation.

You can read a good account of the story at The American Conservative, by Kelly Beaucar Vlahos. It is not a simple story. But the gist is that a journalistic enterprise was targeted for a spy operation because the American Deep State disagreed with — or just plain feared — the journalists’ policy of opposing never-​ending war.

Never-​ending war being, of course, the health of the ever-​expanding state.

This may not unreasonably remind you of the Obama Era suppression of Tea Party activism via the Internal Revenue Service’s discriminatory doling out 501©3 statuses. But the FBI is even more ominous, as Angela Keaton, Director of Operations, acknowledged: “donors became scared.”

That is all the evidence we need to recognize how dangerous Deep State spying can be to the freedoms — political and personal — of Americans.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

antiwar, anti war, Justin Raimondo,

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media and media people

The Real Scandal Continues

Jimmy Dore, Tucker Carlson, Russia, julian assange,

The Mueller Report goes public today, and though some hope to find within it a splinter of kindling upon which to light the bier for President Trump, odds are high for a fizzle, a wet firecracker on a Fifth of July morning. 

Still, the whole Russiagate issue has not lacked for entertainment value. 

As comedy.

Little wonder that some of the best commentary on the left has included the incredulous coverage of the brouhaha by a professional comic.

Jimmy Dore, late of The Young Turks, has from the beginning been a skeptic of the modern conspiracy theory about Trump’s alleged Russian Collusion. Now he gloats. Earlier this week, on his podcast The Jimmy Dore Show, he came out swinging, insisting that the Hillary Clinton campaign actually did what the Donald Trump campaign was accused of doing. But, he laments, “accountability is not coming” — no journalist will be fired, nor the worst fake news stories even be retracted.

Mr. Dore also points to Tucker Carlson as a surprising purveyor of the truth about Julian Assange — that the Wikileaks guy, recently nabbed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, is not guilty of the crimes he is accused of. But Assange has humiliated nearly everyone in the political class. Dore wonders why Carlson can get this story right, but the major talking heads at CNN and MSNBC — all to the left — cannot.

Yes, why? 

Why is journalism now so lockstep in line with the corporatist Deep State and its major political operators?

I probably disagree with Dore on the answer. He thinks the Deep State’s main goal is to keep progressives out of power.

But the question is at least worth asking.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Jimmy Dore, Tucker Carlson, Russia, julian assange,

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First Amendment rights

Fake News; Real Assault

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, Alex Jones, censorship, free speech, First Amendment, social media

I don’t defend the way Twitter, Facebook, and others target users for expressing views that these firms dislike. I do defend the individual rights of all persons, including owners of companies. Our freedom to act includes the freedom to act in ways others consider to be wrong — if we do so while respecting the (actual) rights of others.

But something is extra-​disturbing about the way Facebook, Google, Apple, Spotify, etc. (though not Twitter) ejected Alex Jones from their platforms. The firms apparently obeyed journalists and politicians demanding InfoWar’s ouster for purveying “hate speech.”

And now: “These companies must do more than take down one website,” intones incumbent U.S. Senator Chris Murphy.*

Such statements aren’t laws. But every company must worry about the arbitrary government power that incumbents like Murphy can deploy. And fellow U.S. Senator Mark Warner’s leaked paper on the dangers of technology-​abetted fake news tells us we’re in for a more direct assault on free speech.

“The size and reach of these platforms demand that we ensure proper oversight, transparency and effective management of technologies that in large measure undergird our social lives … and our politics,” says the plan. The goal is to “ensure that this ecosystem no longer exists as the ‘Wild West’,” i.e., unfettered by government.

So … the idea is to rescind that wild First Amendment? 

I would sooner press for a new law penalizing politicians who threaten the liberty of firms on the basis of catering to the “wrong” customers.

But there is no crying need for this. Let’s stick with “Congress shall make no law …”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* These companies did not take down a website, by the way. Alex Jones’s InfoWars​.com appears to be going gangbusters. Those companies ousted InfoWars from their Web services. This is a distinction with a difference.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard

May Trigger Eye Rolling

microaggressions, trigger warning, free speech, First Amendment, freedom,

The fashionable campus notion of “microaggressions” blurs the distinction between peaceful speech (offensive or not) and bashing somebody over the head with a club. 

If courts, police and/​or university officials can rationalize regarding the perpetrator of a so-​called “microaggression” as initiating force against an offended listener, they can also rationalize using actual physical force in retaliation. Which, to the extent implemented, would mean the end of freedom of speech. 

After all, nobody needs a First Amendment in order to utter banal pronouncements about the weather.

The allied campaign urging or requiring professors to issue “trigger warnings” before discussing anything that might provoke discomfort also dampens discourse. 

Who can object to letting viewers of TV news know that they are about to see a corpse? Or sending little kids out of the room when certain subjects are discussed? But is such common sense the point of “trigger warnings”?

At best, “trigger warnings” are a silly name for referring to what nobody seeks to keep secret. At worst, they help trigger distress themselves — or impede frank discussion of controversial subjects. The latter treats adults as if they were not adults; the former makes adults less adult. 

If and when “trigger warnings” are imposed by force, with penalties for omitting them, they also endanger freedom of speech.

Advocates of open discourse seem to be in an endless war with champions of a repressive political correctitude. The jabberwocky used to justify that repression keep evolving. The response must be constant: intellectual clarity and eternal vigilance.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Common Sense First Amendment rights national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Free Designs

3d printing, gun, gun rights, Second Amendment, First Amendment, gun control

The relationship between the First and Second Amendments is closer than commonly believed.

This is especially clear in the 3D gun printing story, the subject of yesterday’s Common Sense, “Progressive Designs.” As I finished the copy, a news story broke: U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik “muzzled Defense Distributed with a court order,” as Declan McCullagh puts it. 

And then, as McCullagh goes on, a mirror site appeared. Though Cody Wilson, the man behind Defense Distributed, immediately took his plans offline, “the Calguns Foundation, the Firearms Policy Coalition, and other civil rights groups” published plans for “AR-​15, AR-​10, Ruger 10 – 22, Beretta 92FS, and other firearms” on their sites.

This made my footnote especially relevant, for it was there that I noted that “plans like this have been available on the not-​exactly-​easy-​to-​access Dark Web for some time.” And now Cody Wilson’s precise “freely downloadable computer-​aided design (CAD) files,” though “dark” on his site, are bright elsewhere.

McCullagh admits that though it is certainly “possible that Defense Distributed may lose this legal skirmish and be prevented from returning its instructions to the DEFCAD site,” since such plans are now everywhere, and not easily stoppable, constitutionally, the “Second Amendment, it turns out, is protected by the First.”

Which is, of course, natural enough — for the Second Amendment’s protections of self-​defense has held power-​lusting politicians at bay, keeping Americans freer than citizens anywhere else. What other country has better free speech protections?

All freedoms help each other, reinforce each other.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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