McCain Will Keep This Country Safe From Librarians With Opinions

ProgressNowAction

Watch this unbelievable video of a 61-year-old librarian being given a ticket for trespassing and escorted out of the line waiting to get into a John McCain rally. Her crime? She was holding up a sign that said 'McCain = Bush'.

This is what the cop tells her:

You have two choices. You can keep your sign here and receive a ticket for trespassing, or you can remove the sign and stay in line and attend this town hall meeting.

Since when is holding up a sign trespassing? This is simply suppression of free speech.

McCain hates the 1st Amendment as much as his pal Bush.

Maybe she could express her opinion to John McBush if she had a Gulfstream and had given him buckets of money.

Jerry Falwell Did Make History

Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988)

Wikipedia: Hustler Magazine v. Falwell

Legal history, that is, when his award for damages for this Hustler magazine ad was overturned by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds:

Falun Gong Protestor: A Federal Offense?

Fuck the feds. This is not a federal offense. Speaking truth to power is protected by the United States Constitution, no matter how inconvenient the Bush Administration finds free speech. Speaking of offenses, I'm offended that we would be repressing speech. I'm offended by free speech zones surrounded by barbed wire and armed police officers; by not being allowed in to Presidential speeches unless I'm a Republican; and by stupid things like this potential prosecution. I can just hear the Bushco minions -- next they'll be arguing that the First Amendment was implicitly repealed by President's inherent war powers. Impeach now.

Attytood: Free-speech outrage: Wenyi Wang may be charged with federal crime for daring to criticize the president...of China

Earlier today, we made the point that if you consider 1989's so-called "Tank Man" of Tiananmen Square to be a hero for standing up to China's totalitarian regime -- and most Americans, regardless of political persuasion, do -- then surely you would think the same thing about 47-year-old Wenyi Wang.

Wang is the courageous woman who rose up on the South Lawn of the White House this morning to confront the leader of that brutally repressive regime, President Hu Jintao, as well as America's President George W, Bush, who was busy playing footsie with Hu. "Stop the killing and the torture!," shouted Wang, a Manhattan physician who writes for a newspaper supporting the spiritual group Falun Gong, banned in China.

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Last night, officials with the Secret Service, which eventually dragged Wang away and arrested her -- literally seconds after Bush called on China to permit more free speech -- said they are seriously considering charging Wang with an obscure federal offense, intimidating a foreign official.

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But do you honestly think Wenyi Wang violated the law -- "intimidating" the leaders of the world's two superpowers...by yelling really, really loud?

The irony here makes us sick. Hu, after all, is the leader of a regime which, according to Human Rights Watch, carries out:

restrictions on free expression; a deficient justice system that encourages the use of torture; restrictions on the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion and the right to act on those beliefs; harassment and arrest of HIV/AIDS activists; abuse of petitioners seeking remedies for official misconduct; and absence of progress in holding national elections.

What's more, it is Chinese oil money that supports Sudan's murderous militias committing genocide in Darfur. Those who protested in Tiananmin Square or who practice Falun Gong have been imprisioned, tortured, and killed.

So what kind of treatment does China's leader get? A 21-gun salute, music from a bluegrass band, and a fancy lunch in the White House.

And Wenyi Wang, who is not afraid to speak out against such a man, is dragged away by officers of our own government, one of whom put his hand over her mouth in a futile attempt to silence her. The picture of Wang being gagged by U.S. agents, shown at the top of this post, is something that America should be deeply ashamed of.

If the Secret Service ever takes the time to read all of Title 18, Section 112(b), they might notice this passage, too:

(d) Nothing contained in this section shall be construed or applied so as to abridge the exercise of rights guaranteed under the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Yeah, right.

What a freaking joke.

Terrible First Amendment Decision

Don't answer any questions or say slavery was morally wrong, some parent might disagree.

Judge Sarah Evans Barker
Progressive.org: Judge Rules Teachers Have No Free Speech Rights in Class

Here's an update on Deb Mayer, the teacher who said her contract was not renewed because she answered a student's question about whether she would participate in a demonstration for peace. (See “Teacher Awaits Day in Court.”)

Her case involves an incident that occurred on January 10, 2003, at Clear Creek Elementary School in Bloomington, Indiana.

The students were reading an article in Time for Kids about peace protests. She responded to the student’s question by saying she sometimes honks for peace and that it’s important to seek out peaceful solutions both on the playground and in society. Afterwards, the parents of one of the students got angry and insisted that she not speak about peace again in the classroom. Mayer’s principal so ordered her.

When the school district did not renew Mayer’s contract at the end of the semester, she sued for wrongful termination and for violation of her First Amendment rights.

On March 10, Judge Sarah Evans Barker dismissed Mayer’s case, granting summary judgment to the defendants.

The judge said the school district was within its rights to terminate Mayer because of various complaints it received from parents about her teaching performance.

But beyond that, Judge Barker ruled that “teachers, including Ms. Mayer, do not have a right under the First Amendment to express their opinions with their students during the instructional period.”

The judge ruled that “school officials are free to adopt regulations prohibiting classroom discussion of the war,” and that “the fact that Ms. Mayer’s January 10, 2003, comments were made prior to any prohibitions by school officials does not establish that she had a First Amendment right to make those comments in the first place.” The judge also implied that Mayer, by making her comments, was attempting to “arrogate control of the curricula.”

And the judge gave enormous leeway to school districts to limit teachers’ speech in the classroom.

“Whatever the school board adopts as policy regarding what teachers are permitted to express in terms of their opinions on current events during the instructional period, that policy controls, and there is no First Amendment right permitting teachers to do otherwise,” Judge Barker wrote.

The judge “has simply gotten the law wrong,” says Michael Schultz, Mayer’s attorney. “There is a long line of authority that teachers do not check their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door. And, in this case, Ms. Mayer was asked for her opinion in the context of teaching the approved curriculum. She only gave her opinion in a very appropriate, limited way and then related the issue to the students' lives (i.e., on the playground), and then moved on in the lesson. If giving one's opinion in response to a legitimate (and predictable) question is fair game for making a decision to terminate a teacher, who will want to teach? And, more importantly, what impact will this state of affairs have on the quality of instruction?”

Mayer says she’s going to appeal. “It’s too important not to,” she says. “Teachers everywhere are at risk because of what this judge has said.”

This judge was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan in 1984 (the first woman ever appointed to the federal bench in Indiana) and it seems that her brain has calcified.

I'm familiar with the Time for Kids issue that was discussed, because my friend's kid was assigned the same article to summarize. You really couldn't avoid discussing war and peace given the topic, peace protests.

This decision would make it impossible to teach, because if children think about the material presented and ask questions, you have to remain mute.

My father would have been fired a million times if this were the law.

Illegal Wiretaps: It's Deja Vu All Over Again

Rumsfield and Cheney have been trying to violate the Constitutional prohibition against warrantless searches for over 3 decades. This AP article, in today's Washington Post:

Papers: Ford White House Weighed Wiretaps

WASHINGTON -- The White House was eager to protect its ability to gather foreign intelligence. Congress was eager to rein in executive power. What sounds like a new debate over the president's ability to eavesdrop without warrants occurred 30 years ago.

Documents from the Ford administration reflect a remarkably similar dispute between the White House and Congress a generation before President Bush acknowledged that he authorized wiretaps without warrants on some Americans in terrorism investigations.

"Yogi Berra was right: It's deja vu all over again," said Tom Blanton, executive director for the National Security Archive, a private group at George Washington University that compiles collections of sensitive government documents. "It's the same debate."

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Lisa Graves, senior counsel for legislative strategy at the American Civil Liberties Union, said comparing the Ford-era debate to the current controversy is "misleading because no matter what Mr. Cheney or Mr. Rumsfeld may have argued back in 1976, the fact is they lost. When Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978, Congress decisively resolved this debate.

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Notes from a 1975 meeting between then-White House chief of staff Dick Cheney, Attorney General Edward Levi and others cite the "problem" of a New York Times article by Seymour Hersh about U.S. submarines spying inside Soviet waters. Participants considered a formal FBI investigation of Hersh and the Times and searching Hersh's apartment "to go after (his) papers," the document said.

"I was surprised," Hersh said in a telephone interview Friday. "I was surprised that they didn't know I had a house and a mortgage."

One option outlined at the 1975 meeting was to "ignore the Hersh story and hope it doesn't happen again." Participants worried about "will we get hit with violating the First Amendment to the Constitution?"

UnAmerican

The First Amendment was violated by Bushco and the Capitol Police at the State of the Union last night:

First Cindy Sheehan was dragged out: Police Remove Sheehan From Bush Speech

Then, the wife of Rep. Bill Young of Florida, who was wearing a shirt that said "Support the Troops": Lawmaker's wife told to leave during Bush speech

First Amendment lawyer Glenn Greenwald's take: Learning From Dear Leader

Update: Capitol police have dropped the charges against Sheehan, admitting she broke no laws. Of note, Mrs. Young was merely removed, and was not arrested and charged as Sheehan was.

First Amendment? That's so 1789

U.S. Constitution, First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Cindy Sheehan was arrested, dragged out of the U.S. Capitol, and roughed up by the police prior to the Chimperor's State of the Union address last night, because she dared to assert her First Amendment rights and wore a t-shirt that read: "2245 Dead. How many more?"

What Really Happened.
by CindySheehan

Freedom is on the march. Somewhere, but not in the good ol' US of A.

Or as skippy says: they hate us for our freedoms...only we don't have them any more

Bob Woodward: Tool of the Bush Administration

Woodward Was Told of Plame More Than Two Years Ago

Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday.

Fitzgerald interviewed Woodward about the previously undisclosed conversation after the official alerted the prosecutor to it on Nov. 3 -- one week after Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted in the investigation.

Citing a confidentiality agreement in which the source freed Woodward to testify but would not allow him to discuss their conversations publicly, Woodward and Post editors refused to disclose the official's name or provide crucial details about the testimony. Woodward did not share the information with Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. until last month, and the only Post reporter whom Woodward said he remembers telling in the summer of 2003 does not recall the conversation taking place.

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Woodward never mentioned this contact -- which was at the center of a criminal investigation and a high-stakes First Amendment legal battle between the prosecutor and two news organizations -- to his supervisors until last month. Downie said in an interview yesterday that Woodward told him about the contact to alert him to a possible story. He declined to say whether he was upset that Woodward withheld the information from him.

This is journalism? Telling the public the whole story? Woodward has been commenting on this case for over two years without revealing he is part of it.

"When the story comes out, I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter," he told CNN's Larry King.

Woodward also said in interviews this summer and fall that the damage done by Plame's name being revealed in the media was "quite minimal."

"When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great," he told National Public Radio this summer.

He's also been flat-out lying. This is what he said on October 27th on Larry King Live, quoted in this entry on the Huffington Post:

They did a damage assessment within the CIA, looking at what this did that Joe Wilson's wife was outed. And turned out it was quite minimal damage. They did not have to pull anyone out undercover abroad. They didn't have to resettle anyone. There was no physical danger of any kind and there was just some embarrassment.

There was no CIA damage assessment.

In an October 29 article by staff writer Dafna Linzer, headlined "CIA Yet to Assess Harm From Plame's Exposure," the Post reported that the CIA "has not conducted a formal damage assessment, as is routinely done in cases of espionage and after any legal proceedings have been exhausted."

Bob Woodward. He thought Watergate would provide his epitaph. Instead, I will always think of him as a pathetic little tool of the Bush Administration.

How the mighty have fallen.

Courageous Journalism is a Fairy Tale

From Democratic Veteran

Once Upon a Time

The Government did not tell the media what to report, or not report, sometimes they really, really wanted to but there was this little thing called the First Amendment, in a quaint document called the 'Bill of Rights'. In modern times, the Media is all about Access, and the government is all about Granting Access. Access has all kind of perks, like big salaries for those who have it, and lots of face-time on camera to make you a "star" and best of all, a Nickname from America's Worst President Ever, because Nicknames make you feel like you have "Insider Access".

So now when stories need to be told, the government says "tell this, but don't tell that" and those with Insider Access dutifully and gravely nod their heads and say "OK, we won't because we want to keep our multi-million dollar salaries, and our fame and most of all, our Nicknames at events where we get to see the Naked Emporer in person."

The U.S. agency leading Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts said Tuesday that it does not want the news media to photograph the dead as they are recovered....

"We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media," the spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

Once upon a time, before Insider Access and big salaries and Nicknames, that was called Prior Restraint. Or perhaps that was just a Fairy Tale.

posted by Jo Fish on 09.07.05 at 09:17 AM