Freedom of Speech (Update)

YouTube (Google) has poked this country’s Constitutional hornet nest by taking down a video of two California doctors discussing how we are dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. Basically their message is that we are not just quarantining the sick, we are quarantining the healthy too. This is bass ackwards and it is destroying our economy ... and also resulting in a far greater potential public health catastrophe. See: Banned on YouTube (Updated).

Now, these doctors’ message may be right or it may be wrong ... but a few techie pukes at YouTube do not and should not have the right to shut them down! This is totalitarian oppression of the first order! We are a country of sacred freedoms guaranteed by checks, balances and public debate.

The rise of social media’s power is coming dangerously close to negating our First Amendment freedoms.

Dear readers, don’t let this happen!

Afterward: Thanks to a clever reader, Lutfi, we know have another viewable video of these two California doctors that YouTube censored ... see: The Scoop.

Headlines

Pence woos 2016 anti-Trumpers to bankroll billion dollar re-election

Trump finally got his wish from the Fed, but not for the reasons he wanted

Fed: GDP growth will only be 2.1% for year ...

Maine House announces bill to rename Columbus Day

Aides struggle to see strategy in Trump’s Conway, McCain fights

US allies defy Trump administration plea to ban Huawei from 5G networks

Half of Americans don’t know all First Amendment rights ...

Illinois crowds protest radical abortion bill

EU has no choice but to approve Brexit extension

Fed holds the line on rates, says no more hikes ahead this year

Border Patrol says detention centers are full; Starts releasing ...

Poll: Kamala Harris rising as Beto O’Rourke edges in

Headlines

Manafort's defense team attempts mission impossible

'They're protectionists': Fed's James Bullard says other countries won't wipe out tariffs with the US

SURVEY: 40% of Americans can't name First Amendment rights ...

Saudi Arabia expels Canada's ambassador, freezes trade

Democrats surging on eve of pivotal special election

This bull market could become the longest in history this month

NKotean scientist attempting to clone humans for army ...

Brexit boom: Trade exports hit record high

Trump says Don Jr. wanted dirt on Clinton from Russian lawyer

Jamie Dimon says 10-year Treasury yield could hit 5%: 'It's a higher probability than people think'

Tech giants working together to block Conservatives?

Booker: Democrat party has 'lost, it's way ...

Media Matterss

The majority of the American media has long believed that it was the doctor and our political system was the patient. Its diagnosis was infallible. Its treatment plan was not to be questioned ... even if the patient died. This is a very powerful position to be in ... a position likely was not imagined by our Constitution's framers ... since they could not have foreseen the multi-faceted monster that the simple broadsheets of their era would become.

No, dear reader I am not attacking the First Amendment ... it is the most fundamental freedom ...  that is why it is first. However, both the ensuing media technological advancements and court decisions have given our media an extremely powerful voice in defining what is fact ... even if it isn't.  So today, there is ... or should I say, has been ... no balancing force to keep much of the media real. In particular, a series of court interpretations of libel standards makes it almost impossible to seek redress for even outrageous news stories designed to damage the reputation of someone or something. Clearly malicious news is brewed today for political ends and has had no counterbalance until Donald Trump invented "fake news." I believe this term caught on because the public has sensed the unchecked power of the media and welcomed some push back.

No, Trump and others now using this term are not attacking the First Amendment. They are preserving it unless or until our courts strengthen our libel laws. A media ... either liberal or conservative ... that becomes the sole arbiters of truth can lose their way. I believe that we have better reporting today because of Trump despite all the media's squealing. They are squealing not because they have lost their freedom to report ... but because they now have to work a little harder to get it right.

Banned in Boston

In a chapter out of George Orwell, the pompous powers that be shut down free speech on the Boston Common Saturday in a cute bit of "civic concern." I have no idea what ideas were going to be expressed at the rotunda there because they weren't expressed. Some speakers were physically kept from reaching this platform in the name of "safety." Thousands of self-righteous counter-demonstrators, a few dressed in black with black masks no less, assembled there to show their hatred of "hate speech" ... defined as anything that might possibly go against the grain of their orthodoxy.

I seriously doubt that there would have been any truly obnoxious rhetoric coming from these few speakers who were scurried away in police squad cars before word one. ... but then, we will never know ... because fascism took hold to suppress ... fascism. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and his phalanx of police officers kept his city sanitized from the imagined invective. After all, the ironic motif of this rally was in support of our First Amendment guaranteeing free speech and, in the process, Boston crushed free speech.

Afterward: Whatever happened to "defend to the death their fight to say it"? Is it now "defend to being slightly uncomfortable their right to say it"?

Good News, Bad News

Good news: President Trump is no longer crazy! Bad news: He seems now to be suffering from dementia! This is the latest "thinking" by many in the fake-news media ... see: NewsMax Story ... as a way of explaining Trumps recent candid comments about North Korea's Kim Jong Un: "I would be honored to have him come to the White House". And also his take on the Civil War, "Why was there a Civil War? Why could that not have been worked out?" Both comments, to me, seem within one sigma of normal. But not to much of the media which now has him entering his dotage.

The liberal media is quite good at such innuendo. They have a bag of semantic tricks with which to smear or embarass their enemies on the Right. And their number one enemy is Donald Trump. They, being knee-jerk liberals, disliked him instinctively. But, when he started calling them out for their fake news stories, dislike turned to loathing. They are now so twisted in their attempts at revenge, that many have abandoned any attempt at objectivity.

It is getting so bad that much of the media is looking silly to anyone who is not an anti-Trump partisan. Can we label it "white spittle time" as this foam forms at the corners of their mouths when his name comes up ... and many of their subtle semantic slights are now abandoned in favor of brickbats like this calling him senile. "Crazy" was silly, but "senile" is obviously vindictive.

Is such rhetoric protected by the First Amendment and even our current libel laws? Sure, but with freedom comes responsibility. Perhaps, as Trump has suggested, our libel laws should at least be re-examined and brought more in line with England's ... because so much fake news today does seem to be motivated by "malice and reckless disregard for the truth" -- a good definition of libel.

Afterward: For a reasoned discussion of why Trump is unreasoned see: CNBC Editorial. All good points ... and a view held by many. However, it is not the view of a great many other Americans (like myself) who like what Trump has been doing but are ignoring much of what he has been saying ... often the same people who liked what Obama was saying but hated what he was doing.

Blame Game

With one foot on Marine One ready to whisk him away on the start of his 17 day holiday frolic in Hawaii, President Obama today at his press conference blamed Sony for caving into the North Koreans by canceling the opening of its movie, “The Interview.”  Sony apparently did this because of terrorist threats from anonymous (North Korean) sources against anyone attending this movie. The President’s other foot was firmly planted where it usually is … lodged in his pie hole.

This newest faux pas was because President Obama said that, had Sony called him, he would have told them to not accede to this threat to its First Amendment rights. And, as it turns out, Sony did call the White House for advice, but Barry was probably polishing up his surf board and never responded to its entreaty … see: Breitbart Article.

I know that I criticize our president a lot, but this shame visited on Sony … and the American people by proxy … was another affront that came as a direct result of the incompetence and inattention of the Obama administration … made worse by its leader’s inability to ever accept the responsibility for anything. I do believe that Obama keeps the Greyhound Corporation afloat by his frequent use of its bus fleet to cover his continued haughty and shameless disregard for the facts.

Jackboots

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.

These were President Obama’s poorly-chosen words in his recent commencement address at Ohio State University (for more on this, see: American Thinker Comments) … during the time it was being revealed (and reviled) that his administration had an extensively wiretap dragnet out for the Associated Press and Fox News reporters, a clear violation of our Constitution’s First Amendment … and had also given, since 2010, extensive jackboot power to the IRS to suppress conservative activists … probably with the intent of affecting the outcome of the 2012 election (see: Bad Apple).  Frightenly, this actual tyranny may have succeeded.

And, in the last few days, we have also learned that our National Security Agency (NSA) has acquired years of phone and Internet “metadata” (phone numbers, URLs, times, and durations) of virtually every American (for an interview with the leaker of these revelations, Edward Snowden, see: Guardian Story).  I strongly suspect that we will someday discover that the extent of these government intrusions on Americans’ privacy actually went much further than has been reported.

Now, to use Obama’s own words, this “sinister entity,” our government, also does have the obligation  to protect its citizenry ... and so there is some rationale for them to monitor extremists on both sides of the political spectrum … those who might be trying to do us evil.  

But, it seems, to this commentator, that the Obama administration is seriously unbalanced in its approach to such threats.  When the Director of Homeland Security (and, possibly, our next Attorney General), Janet Napolitano, was a tyro in her current office, she specifically fretted that those on the right were the greatest threat to our national security … see: Washington Times Story.  Boy was she off the mark!  Despite all these NSA communication intrusions and Justice Department First Amendment tramplings, every actual or attempted serious assaults on Americans on our soil over the last 4 ½ years have come from Islamic extremists … see: Washington Times Story

I guess I now classify as one of those voices against whom Obama was railing to the Ohio State graduates?   Damn straight!

Afterthought: With all of NSA's uber-extensive monitoring of U.S. citizens' communications traffic, not only did it miss the Boston Marathon Bombers' intrigues ... but it also dropped the ball on Ed Snowden himself's mischief making.  Perhaps it only is interested in our e-mails that contain  phrases like "Don't tread on me"?