The good news: Gun Control as a major political vote-mover is pretty much not only dead, but has reversed on itself to become a Social Security-level Third Rail.  Nationwide as well as in Minnesota, only the most hardened, defeat-proof Metrocrats dare propose anything to do with gun control, and then only as a flag-showing exercise.

Conservatives have led both the moral, ethical, legal and practical pushes for defeating gun control and un-doing the four decades of damage it has caused.

But behind the self-assurance one gets when one knows one is aboard an utterly righteous cause was the nagging realization that victory couldn’t really be consolidated until the other guys – the people who’d been causing all that trouble – really believed it too.

As I was noting in the days a decade before blogs became a household term, the sea was starting to change in the early nineties.  And today – via Powerline – I notice that one of the last ramparts of orthodox gun-control is falling to the peasants; the NYTimes, the most reliable media proponent of gun control (published by Arthur Sulzberger, holder of a New York City concealed carry permit) notes the rise of a consensus among liberal legal scholars that the Second Amendment “right of the people” to keep and bear arms actually does refer to “the people” as individuals:

There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

In those two decades, breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law, they have helped to reshape the debate over gun rights in the United States. Their work culminated in the March decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, and it will doubtless play a major role should the case reach the United States Supreme Court.

Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.

Tribe’s switch in allegiance – in the mid-nineties – was a huge victory for pro-liberty forces.

“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Professor Tribe said. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

An honest liberal lawyer.  Good to see they exist.

The piece notes the contributions of Akil Reed Amar and, especially (for me) Sanford Levinson in starting the slow swing in the legal left’s perception of the issue.  The Times piece notes Levinson’s article:

In 1989, in what most authorities say was the beginning of the modern era of mainstream Second Amendment scholarship, Professor Levinson published an article in The Yale Law Journal called “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.”

“The Levinson piece was very much a turning point,” said Mr. Henigan of the Brady Center. “He was a well-respected scholar, and he was associated with a liberal point of view politically.”

In an interview, Professor Levinson described himself as “an A.C.L.U.-type who has not ever even thought of owning a gun.”

The article – which is a fairly dense read for a layperson and a modestly-accessible read for legal scholarship – hit the anti-gunners’ stances like a pugil stick hitting a kitten.

And it still does:

Scholars who agree with gun opponents and support the collective rights view say the professors on the other side may have been motivated more by a desire to be provocative than by simple intellectual honesty.

“Contrarian positions get play,” Carl T. Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, wrote in a 2000 study of Second Amendment scholarship. “Liberal professors supporting gun control draw yawns.”

Appeals to “lack of sexiness” don’t carry a lot of legal, ethical or moral weight, do they?

The Times piece sums up much of the legal history of both sides of the movement, and is well worth a read, especially as we lead up to the possible hearing of the Parker case – the tossing of the DC gun ban – in the Supreme Court:

Filing [the Parker suit] in the District of Columbia was a conscious decision, too, Mr. Levy said. The gun law there is one of the most restrictive in the nation, and questions about the applicability of the Second Amendment to state laws were avoided because the district is governed by federal law.

“We wanted to proceed very much like the N.A.A.C.P.,” Mr. Levy said, referring to that group’s methodical litigation strategy intended to do away with segregated schools.

Levy, the suit, and the sea change in even liberal outlook are battling a four-decade encrustation of ignorance:

Linda Singer, the District of Columbia’s attorney general, said the debate over the meaning of the amendment was not only an academic one.

“It’s truly a life-or-death question for us,” she said. “It’s not theoretical. We all remember very well when D.C. had the highest murder rate in the country, and we won’t go back there.”

Question, Ms. Singer:  How many of those murders were carried out by people with no criminal records?

Get back to me on that.

Tribe:

Should the case reach the Supreme Court, Professor Tribe said, “there’s a really quite decent chance that it will be affirmed.”

I’ll be watching.

Champagne may be in order.

Jim McDermott did to a political opponent what he doesn’t want the Administration to do, with probable cause, to people talking with terrorists overseas.

And while the Sorosphere doesn’t want you to know about it, he’s finally gotten spanked:

Rep. Jim McDermott had no right to disclose the contents of an illegally taped telephone call involving House Republican leaders a decade ago, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The GOP is bringing their national convention to Saint Paul next year.

The local, regional and (I have to presume) national left is planning on being here in force.

It’s going to be an interesting 18 months.

Let’s pick up where we left off last Thursday.

———-

A couple of bits of housekeeping, first.

I’m schedule to appear on Minnesota Public Radio’s “In The Loop“.  It’ll be recorded Thursday night at the Taj MaKling in downtown Saint Paul, and broadcast  Friday, at 9 p.m. and Sunday at 6 p.m.

The subject?  Protest!

———-

As a couple of commenters obliquely pointed out last week, the temptation to rhetorically overstep is almost overwhelming.

As I noted, the Saint Paul City Council has officially welcomed protesters. I gave significance to the fact that they haven’t mentioned anything about protesters who come to town with an aim toward disruption – and a commenter correctly noted that in fact legislators’ resolutions should be presumed to refer to activities that are within the laws that they make and that their government is charged with enforcing.

True, and a good point.

Another commenter said something to the effect of “he’s just setting up a strawman”.  That’s not true in and of itself – I’m not trying to negate either the legitimate, law-abiding protesters’ points or right to speak with the activities of their less-legitimate pals. 

Merely pointing out something the mainstream media in this town, I suspect, will bend over backwards to avoid reporting; while the fringe left is complaining about nonexistent plans to stifle their free speech, some of them would seem to be intent on no good.

———-

Lassie at Freedom Dogs – who has, herself, immense experience dealing with the left’s professional protest clacque – writes in quoting the RNC Welcoming Committee (RNC-WC) website:

Looks like they hope to maintain a looser structure so as to escape notice by the authoritarians, and are confident that their numbers are strong.

…we hope that the RNC-WC will maintain a unified, anti-authoritarian presence at the 2008 RNC. Our numbers are huge, and it’s time that our actions reflected that.

Well anarkiddies, our numbers are also strong, and we look forward to welcoming you next fall. Keep daddy’s number on speed dial — that unfortunate authority figure is the one you’ll be crying to for bail. This is going to be fun to watch.

It’s a “MySpace” site.  Big whoop? 

Maybe, maybe not.  You be the judge.  Here’s the “Welcoming Committee’s” agenda:

Those who work with the RNC Welcoming Committee must agree to:

1. A rejection of Capitalism, Imperialism, and the State; [Whatever]

2. Resist the commodification of our shared and living Earth; [Kumbaya]

3. Organize on the principles of decentralization, autonomy, sustainability, and mutual aid.  [Kind of like a bunch of terrorist cells.  OK, that was a low blow.]

4. Work to end all relationships of domination and subjugation, including but not limited to those rooted in patriarchy, race, class, and homophobia; [Unless they’re Israelis, but again, whatever]

5. Oppose the police and prison-industrial complex, and maintain solidarity with all targets of state repression; 

6. Directly confront systems of oppression, and respect the need for a diversity of tactics. [Hm.  “Diverse” tactics?  Let’s come back to that later.]

Though the RNC-WC is focused on a specific event, we hope that our work transcends the convention by contributing to the development of anti-authoritarian movements and mutual aid networks both locally and globally. We are no more opposed to the Republican Party than we are to the Democratic Party. Affiliations and labels aside, we invite all who share our vision to join us in resistance.

So they wanna protest.

Cool.  See y’all on the street. I’ll be interested in checking out those “diverse” tactics.

Waving signs and walking around dressed in papier-mache puppets?  Go for it.

Threats, violence and intimidation?

———- 

Jeff Kouba – he of stronger stomach than I – apparently reads the MN Daily.

And a few weeks ago he found this little nugget; a U of M twinkie is having violent little delusions of grandeur.  And if you believe him, he’s not alone.

Oh, not

Maybe it was all the wine my buddy salvaged from some trash containers after a high-class tasting party, and then served up at his own festive blow-out gathering of assorted radicals on Friday night, but I’m really starting to have hope.

Yes, I’m starting to believe certain vague, visionary plans to throw our Republican friends a street party in St. Paul in 2008 are really, truly going to happen.

Look away, you fun-loving Republicans, we’re planning a big surprise party for little ol’ you during your special convention in 2008.

Aw!  You shouldn’t have!  I love surprise parties! 

Hopefully, it will be more fun than the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Oh, but now my mellow is harshed.  I don’t like violence!

And to be perfectly clear, either does the “writer” of the MNDaily op-ed, John Hoff – as long has he’s potentially on the wrong end of it, as in this editorial, where he frets about the crummy neighborhood around his stop on the Ventura trolley.  So we know he’s not a diagnosable sociopath, since he doesn’t like potential violence aimed at him, anyway. 

Right?

Yup, we know you Republicans are still jealous about all the attention Democrats enjoyed in Chicago back in the days of the hippies, but just think: 40 years, my pinstriped, conservative friends.

Oooh!  An ambiguous warning!

Of course, there’s nothing ambiguous about the gutlessness of people like “John Hoff”:

Nobody in this column except me has a real name, of course, and even I have been known to become “John Hoffman,” in homage to Abbie Hoffman of the Chicago 7.

You know – Abbie Hoffman, upper-class yippie turned condo-pink cause celebre, who went “underground” for a decade after being busted for dealing coke?  The person over whom Pete Townsend earned everlasting credit for clubbing with a guitar at Woodstock? 

The person who served as the model, in many ways, for today’s pampered, privileged, tax-funded hothouse “radicals”?

Anyway, the article continues:

We talked about gas masks. I mentioned how difficult it was, during the Battle of Seattle, to procure a gas mask at the last minute. But it isn’t enough to merely possess a gas mask, oh no. I know from my time in the army that gas-mask training is essential, so you will trust your equipment even when you’re exhausted from running, fighting for breath, and it’s tough to suck air through the filters.

Wow.  Gas mask training.  Sounds dramatic!

Stella told me activists have been planning and coordinating for a few months, traveling to the Twin Cities and quietly familiarizing themselves with routes and landmarks. A meeting between a major group of “anti-authoritarians” and a large liberal Christian organization was scheduled to take place … um, well, no sense mentioning the day or the location.

Of course not!  Because acting like it’s a big secret certainly buffs up that self-serving sense of drama that being an arrested adolescent requires.

Which is, perhaps, what we should write this next bit off to (emphasis added):

Will enough people come to the street demonstrations in 2008? Will it be a gas? Will demonstrators have enough sense to focus on a target of opportunity outside the main security perimeter, like a luxury hotel where delegates will be staying with their laptops and revealing documents, instead of going up against massive security surrounding the convention center? It would be good to apply the hard-earned lessons of Seattle in 1999.

Yeah, I know.  John Hoff and his alleged friends are a bunch of hyperdramatic arrested adolescents; for this little flock of state-supported (over half of a U of M student’s costs are paid by the taxpayer before they even see a tuition figure) dilettantes, the drama is the point; sneaking about with secret names and big plans is validation for people who’ve adopted the whole “change the world now” mission in life.  I’ve known the type over the years – even interviewed a bunch of them on my old KSTP talk show (kids from the “Backroom Anarchist Center”); talking about recreating the fabled riots of the mystic past is for them what NASCAR and sports-talk radio are for blue-collar guys – a time-killer, a substitute for doing something useful.

And yet.

Hoff’s piece appears in the Minnesota Daily – a semi-independent body and not an official voice of the U of M, by any means (if I recall correctly, they are partially funded by student activity fees, although I’m not entirely sure of the extent), but certainly no underground publication.

Question:  If it were a Republican student advocating stalking pro-abortion activists (for that is exactly what Hoff is advocating; “Will demonstrators … focus on a target of opportunity…like a luxury hotel where delegates will be staying with their laptops and revealing documents” which has nothing to do with protesting the administration and everything to do with harassing people who are, in turn, exercising their own rights to free speech and assembly!), what would the university’s reaction have been?

———-

Relax.  I’m not especially exercised about little John Hoff’s fantasy life.  Talk is cheap.  And it doesn’t impugn the vast majority of protesters, who, wrong as they are in my opinion, don’t intend to do anything stupid.

But as much as some on the regional left fret about being “stifled” and “oppressed“, the fact is powerful, well-heeled interests in Saint Paul are looking out for protesters’ First Amendment rights.

I just want to make sure that the rights of those of us who dissent from this city’s political mainstream – and those who come to this city – will get the same consideration.  The mainstream media has been reticent to cover the abuses of the anti-war, anti-Republican protesters.  

If that’s a do-it-yourself job, that’s fine; it’s what we conservative bloggers do best.

But someone’s gotta do it.

No matter how they undercut the military, no matter what loathing they pour upon America’s system and elected adminsitration and capitalist system and history, no matter what horrors they’ve coddled as they do so, it’s established that one dare not call any liberal “unpatriotic”, for fear of being called an ugly angry conservative.

But apparently, if you’re a major-league leftyblogger, wanting to keep more of the money you earn not only makes you unpatriotic, but it means you hate democracy.

It’s not a coincidence that Grover Norquist, the architect of the right-wing ascension to power, runs an organization called Americans for Tax Reform.  People like Norquist, who are charlatans at heart and deeply unpatriotic and immoral, use the complexity in the tax code that they help to create to persuade Americans that taxes are bad.  This is also true in states all over the country, where it is the unpredictability of property tax burdens and not the amount that causes schools to go wanting for funding.

Our tax code is the DNA of our nation’s moral compass.  I am proud to pay taxes because I take pride in America, and paying some tiny burden to keep our society running is an extremely small price to pay for being able to call myself an American citizen.  The old expression ‘you get what you pay for’ is apt for all sorts of situations.  People tend to express what they value in how much they are willing to pay for it.  I am willing and feel privileged for the right to pay for my country.  The right-wing is embittered to do so, if they do so at all.  And that, more than anything, says something about how much they value this experiment called America

No, Matt Stoller; as Thomas Jefferson himself averred, keeping a lid on the size, power and appetite of government is fundamentally American and itself deeply patriotic; our founding fathers believed that government was not so much an enemy (let’s be realistic) as a animal that needed to be kept tame.

But much more important for this “experiment called America” is the ability and willingness to accept that dissent and difference aren’t themselves base and evil. 

Not to do so is a form of moral retardation that is itself deeply antithetical to what this country is about.

Let’s look at some violations of civil liberties.

1. Secret police infiltrating crowds, provoking violence that the authorities use as a pretext to arrest and lock up hordes of innocent protesters.
2. Dissenters are threatened with expulsion from school for voicing unpopular views, their grades suffering, their speakers barred from campuses – while mainstream “dissenters” and speakers with far more radical, divisive views are not only welcomed, but lauded.
3. Protesters penned into tiny areas, far from the scene they’re trying to protest.
4. Grass-roots groups forbidden from buying advertising related to their issues for weeks or months before a campaign.
5. Protesters swept away from the locations and routes that the objects of their dissent will travel and stay in.
6. Protesters kept across the street from the object of their demonstration, penned (under threat of arrest and incarceration) into a small, remote area, unable to make eye contact with those against (and for) whom they are demonstrating.
7. Undercover cops and feds aggressively targeting dissenting groups who intend to commit “civil disobedience”.
8. A right guaranteed under the Constitution is dishonored, shaved away, trampled underfoot.
9. Saint Paul under lockdown, with any sign of political dissent seen as a cause to arrest and detain the “dissenter”.
10. A government bureaucracy enforcing “balance” on the airwaves, forcing (under threat of governent sanction) radio stations to curtail partisan programming.

Can you tell the difference between these ten gross violations of civil liberty?

I can. 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9 are things the fringe-left in the Twin Cities are positing as their worries for the Republican National Convention, which is coming up in about 18 months. All of them, in the fevered imaginations of these fringies, are like bayonets aimed at the civil liberties of left-of-center protesters who will gather in their hordes for the RNC. And all of them, as far as anyone knows, are pure imagination (beyond the measures the Secret Service takes to safeguard all presidents, regardless of their party).

2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 are all real-life infringements on civil liberties that are in effect or proposed throughout and within the US right now – campus speech codes, McCain/Feingold, restrictions placed on anti-abortion protesters at Planned Parenthood clinics, gun control measures that attack the law-abiding gun owner, and the mainstream Democrat push to reinstate the “Fairness Doctrine” to muzzle talk radio.

I don’t like any of them.

I just wanna make sure we’re clear on that.

———-

I’m a genuine civil libertarian. I’m a constitutional constructionist. I support all ten amendments in the Bill of Rights; hands off my speech, my church, my group, my firearms; keep your troops and unwarranted searches out of my house; don’t take my property, life or liberty without fair, due process, and keep your federal government out of my state, local and personal decisions.

I am demonstrably more fervent about genuine civil liberty than the vast majority of those who’ve been caterwauling about the issue since John Ashkkkroft was sworn in as Attorney General (before which most of them thought “libertarians” were toothless banjo-playing redneck tax protesters). I ran for office as a big-L Libertarian, in 1998). My credentials as a “civil rights first” conservative are vastly more solid than those of the “quit being rude to terror suspects” sect of the movement that’s been grabbing the headlines for the past few years.

So for the record; protest. Dissent. Go to the marketplace of ideas with vats of roiling ire.

And remember, always – your rights (like mine) end where mine begin. There is no right not to be offended (and have no fear, I’ll mix it up with any of you, and win every time, rhetorically speaking), and I certainly don’t ask not to be. Neither should you, of course.

———-

It should come as no surprise that the St. Paul City Council – dominated by a hard-left faction that makes Paul Wellstone look like Barry Goldwater – has officially rolled out the welcome mat for the demonstrators:

The St. Paul City Council says protesters will be welcome when the Republican National Convention comes to town.

The council agreed the city should greet protesters “with the same respect and honor accorded to conventioneers.” It voted unanimously Wednesday to create a special committee to oversee demonstrations.

I’m not aware that any convention city has ever passed a special resolution welcoming protesters – which, if true (please let me know if it’s not) sends the message that the City Council is partial to the protesters rather than the conventiongoers.

Which (take note, potential RNC delegates) should surprise nobody in this town.

But you’ll note that the resolution doesn’t differentiate between civil, peaceful protesters and the other kind; the kind that thinks violence is, itself, a statement; the kind that, awash in outrage at the Administration, thinks the ends justify the means; the kind that shows up at WTO meetings throwing rocks (like girls french soccer players) and trashing stores.

In fact, if you talk with the fringe-left as they voice their concerns for their own civil liberties, you’ll note that they never acknowledge that these people exist. Neither, for that matter, does the mainstream media in covering the “Anti-war” protest movement.

It’s almost as if they don’t want to know they exist.

You’d be forgiven for asking at this point “do they?”

Let’s talk about that tomorrow.

Ryan Sager in the NYSun about the fifth birthday of the McCain-Feingold speech rationing law:

…the folks who brought us the bill known colloquially as McCain-Feingold will be taking a wildly undeserved victory lap this week. After all the big promises leading up to the passage of McCain-Feingold, one is tempted to resort to the phrase “moving the goal posts.” But, in truth, the more apt simile would be that the reformers’ arguments are like bumper bowling: So long as they roll the ball in the right direction and manage not to hit anyone in the face, they get to feel good about themselves.

Take as a prime example of the reformers’ boasting a statement put out yesterday by the Reform Institute, a non-profit group affiliated with Senator McCain of Arizona. The statement claims that BCRA has “succeeded in its objectives.” How so? It “significantly reduced the corrupting influence of campaign contributions and enhanced the participation of small donors in the process.”

This, Sager notes, is patent rubbish for a couple of reasons:

As to the first part, that corruption has been reduced, this is a simple assertion, with not a single piece of evidence to back it up. There’s a reason for that: There is no evidence. By what metric does one measure “corruption”? Mr. McCain and his crew couldn’t define it before they passed McCain-Feingold; they can’t define it now; and, thus, there’s no way to measure it.

Indeed.  The only thing McCain-Feingold was ever designed to deal with was a generalized, nonspecific distaste for “money in politics”.   McCain-Feingold merely shuffled who got the money and how.

As for the enhanced participation of small donors in the political process, here’s a question: If Messrs. McCain and Feingold took credit for water running downhill, would that mean they could slap it on their resumes? Small donors are participating more in politics because politicians are learning how to harness the Internet. So, unless Mr. McCain invented the Internet — and not Al Gore as we all learned in our civics textbooks — no one ought to be attributing this development to BCRA.

Worst of all, McCain-Feingold added a level of bureaucracy to free political speech that anyone who cares about civil liberty (I’m looking at all of you Democrats who became instant “libertarians” the moment John Ashcroft was sworn into office!) should find nauseating.

The former senator from Tennessee, Fred Thompson, who championed McCain-Feingold, promised that it would “help challengers reach a threshold of credibility when they want to challenge us in these races.” Putting aside the ludicrous notion that 535 incumbent politicians sat down and tried to write a piece of legislation that would make it harder to get reelected, five years later there’s no evidence electoral competition has increased. Sure, control of Congress turned over. But anyone who attributes the 2006 election to McCain-Feingold, as opposed to Bush-Cheney-Hastert-Frist, is delusional.

Strike one to Thompson, who had better back the hell away from his support for McCain-Feingold if he wants my support for President.

Ahem:

A NASA scientist [James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies] who said the Bush administration muzzled him because of his belief in global warming yesterday acknowledged to Congress that he’d done more than 1,400 on-the-job interviews in recent years.

Censorship?  Nah. 

However, the Administration would be justified in calling the guy a panty-waisted drama queen:

Mr. Hansen refused to denounce earlier comments he made referring to the White House as a “propaganda office,” and saying, “It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States.”
    “I was referring to the constraints of speaking to the media,” Mr. Hansen said, when asked about his comments.

 1,400 interviews.

It’s like he’s got a number tattooed on his forearm.

Republicans questioned him about his ties to prominent Democrats. 
Mr. Hansen received a $250,000 grant from the Heinz foundation, which is controlled by Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat. Mr. Hansen was a vocal supporter of Mr. Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.
    “As far as I know, there’s no political connection to this award,” said Mr. Hansen, who has donated several thousand dollars to past presidential campaigns for Mr. Kerry and Mr. Gore. “It’s an environmental award.”

Mr. Hansen; you might have a future with the Minnesota Monitor.

Katherine Kersten writes re the Somali booze/pork flap:

Will America do better than Europe at assimilating Muslims? The jury is still out. But recent local events – Somali taxi-drivers refusing to carry passengers with alcohol, Target cashiers refusing to handle pork, the flying imams incident — signal that difficulties lie ahead.

Perhaps, but I’m not sure for whom.

Where are these problems in other cities? Detroit, which has the largest Moslem population in the nation per-capita, doesn’t seem to have these issues (or maybe Detroit’s other issues overshadow them); If the scruples of Moslem cabbies and checkouts were causing trouble in New York or LA, you wouldn’t think the selectively-righteous indignation of a few cabbies and clerks in the Twin Cities would make the news, would you?

These “problems” just don’t seem to exist elsewhere.

Submitted for your approval; the “problem” arises from…:

1. …the presence of a relatively huge Somali community, brought to the Twin Cities during the Clinton Administration (with major help from our local DFL representatives, who realize that poor, welfare-bound immigrants make reliable DFL supporters),
2. a number of imams serving that community that preach a strain of Islam that’d seem to be more fundamentalist than the Quran itself, and
3. a local media that will serve as the chuzzlewitted, unpaid sock puppet of any special interest that can chant “Bush Sucks” in any language.

How will it resolve? Well, that’s the interesting question. Will the new DFL majority, to be sensitive to the new immigrants’ mores, ban pork and alcohol? Will local Somalis tire of the ostracism their excessively fastidious and publicity-hungry coreligionists will continue bringing them?

Or will this be for a group of publicity-hungry imams what Tawanna Brawley was for Al Sharpton?

I’m trying to picture what would happen if, in the interest of preserving liberty, any conservative were to advocate forcing those who disagree with us to  fall in line, “for everyone’s good”.

Volokh points us to this extraordinary call from The Nation – Chris Hedges’ demand for censorship of the fringe right:

This is the awful paradox of tolerance. There arise moments when those who would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society possible should no longer be tolerated. They must be held accountable by institutions that maintain the free exchange of ideas and liberty.

The radical Christian Right must be forced to include other points of view to counter their hate talk in their own broadcasts, watched by tens of millions of Americans. They must be denied the right to demonize whole segments of American society, saying they are manipulated by Satan and worthy only of conversion or eradication. They must be made to treat their opponents with respect and acknowledge the right of a fair hearing even as they exercise their own freedom to disagree with their opponents.

I’m trying to think of any credible conservative (and Hedges is “credible”; he’s worked for the NYTimes and NPR) that’s called for anyone on the left to have anything forced (Hedges’ word) upon them.

Oh, and there’s no parsing his meaning; Volokh has Hedges’ “clarification” from an appearance on Talk of the Nation:

I think that, you know, in a democratic society, people don’t have a right to preach the extermination of others, which has been a part of this movement of – certainly in terms of what should be done with homosexuals.

Of course they do – noxioius as such preaching is.  I’ve heard some of the “Christian” Radio that Hedges is complaining about – and some of it is sickening.

But for Hedges to assume that there’s no slippery slope – and to ignore the absolutism with which his fellow NYTimes and NPR correspendents regard equally egregious free speech from, say, Louis Farrakhan or some moslem clerics or for that matter Mary Daly – is myopic at best.

Not to mention “par for the course”.

Read the whole sickening thing.

(Via Peg Kaplan)

Gary Miller at TvM quotes Bob Novak in noting some potential good news:

The provision, one of the more absurd consequences of the campaign finance reform craze of 2002, bars any mention of a candidate’s name or the broadcast of his image except by an FEC-regulated political committee. Groups such as Wisconsin Right to Life are barred from buying ads mentioning them.

In this case, the group wanted to air ads in 2004 urging Wisconsinites to contact their senators — Democrats Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl — to tell them to support judicial confirmations. But Feingold was up for re-election, therefore campaign law shielded him from being mentioned on television by any group that does not follow FEC regulations for gathering contributions and filing disclosure forms.

The new court – which previously ratified parts of the speech rationing law – shows promise of reversing the previous court’s decisions.

Which would be the just about the first positive fallout from the ’04 elections we’d have seen.

Senate Bill S.1 has garnered a fair amount of controversy.  Intended to reform rules for lobbyists, it is in some ways a fair idea (and apparently a retread of a bill sponsored in the last session by Trent Lott).  It would put limits on lobbyists’ transactions with Congress.

The controversy comes from its attempts to classify blogs and bloggers as lobbyists:

Section 220 of the bill “would require grassroots causes, even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more members of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K. Street lobbyists,” said [direct-mail campaigner Richard] Viguerie in a statement, but the truth isn’t that simple.

First, a couple of facts: though groups like the Family Research Council claim that “the liberal leadership in the US Senate seeks to silence groups like the Family Research Council,” the bill was actually cosponsored by Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the top Republican leader in the Senate. What’s more, the bill appears to be an exact reintroduction of last year’s S.2349, which was introduced by Trent Lott (R-MS) and actually passed the Republican-controlled Senate, complete with section 220.

The fact that Lott introduced it is hardly prima facie evidence that it’s a great idea.  But let’s proceed:

So much for the liberal plot. In fact, some liberal groups oppose the measure, including the ACLU. The group argues that the reporting requirements are “onerous” and that “people must be able to disseminate information, contact their representatives, and encourage others to do so as well.”

And with this, I agree with the ACLU.

More below:

Section 220 introduces a series of modifications to the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act. The most important is that “paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying” now counts as “lobbying” under certain circumstances…This is what has inspired claims that bloggers and activists of all stripes will suddenly be classed as lobbyists and will be monitored by the government.

Hm.  So is it a fact?

What the bill says, though, is that the rules only apply to people who are paid by clients to encourage the public to contact Congress about specific legislation. The rules do not apply to any communication directed at less than 500 people, they do not apply to any communication directed at a group’s current membership, and they do not impose any speech regulations (all that is required is a quarterly report describing where one’s money came from and what bills were worked on).

Would this apply to a political blogger? Not usually. Because section 220 is only a series of changes to the Lobbying Disclosure Act, that legislation’s other rules still apply. According to OMB Watch, a government accountability watchdog group, the LDA’s registration requirement is only triggered by groups that spend more than $24,500 on lobbying semiannually and employ a least one person who spends 20 percent or more of their work time on lobbying. The bill also concerns only the federal government; groups operating at the state level are exempt.

On the one hand, like most “Reform” legislation, it leaves more questions than answers; the big one for me is “do I fit in?”  I reach a lot more than 500 people, but I might make $50 a month in blogads, if I’m lucky.

This sort of thing is a two-edged sword.  On the one hand, more transparency in this sort of thing would be good – and it would be best to depend on the honesty of all involved.  I do, in fact, disclose every non-advertising nickel I get from this site.  Other sites’ financial underpinnings are a little fuzzier and closely held.

Still and all, there’s a chance it’ll come to naught:

Sen. Robert Bennett (R-UT), though, is concerned that section 220 is overly broad. He has introduced amendment 20, which would kill section 220 but leave the rest of the bill intact. (As a sign of just how much interest the bill has received on Capitol Hill, it currently has 96 proposed amendments).

Worth watching.