Via American Glob: MEDIA MATTERS FAIL: Rush Limbaugh’s Ratings Increase By 10 to 60 Percent Depending on the Station

Bill Jacobson puts Rush’s win into perspective.

Earlier this month Media Matters launched its most ferocious boycott effort ever to force Rush Limbaugh off the air by intimidating advertisers. ...

The biggest damage has been to Media Matters, which put its reputation for intimidating advertisers on the line, and failed.

Media Matters wasn’t defeated by Limbaugh. Media Matters was defeated by tens of thousands of conservatives who recognized that this was not about Limbaugh or what Limbaugh said.

Those of us who criticized the use of those two words were among the most vociferous defenders against Media Matters’ advertiser intimidation tactics, and the double-standard employed by advertisers such as Carbonite who pandered to the crowd.

The campaign to force Limbaugh off the air was but part of a larger war in which Media Matters and others liberal groups seek to force numerous conservative voices off of the one media outlet dominated by conservatives, talk radio.

A study by Pew Research found liberals are so much more intolerant on the Internet than the rest of us that it isn’t even funny.

Not exactly shocking news for those exposed to them for years, but the respected Pew Research Center has determined that political liberals are far less tolerant of opposing views than regular Americans.

In a new study, the Pew Center for the Internet and American Life Project confirmed what most intelligent Americans had long sensed. That is, whenever they are challenged or confronted on the hollow falsity of their orthodoxy —such as, say, uniting diverse Americans—liberals tend to respond defensively with anger, even trying to shut off or silence critics. (i.e. photo above of President Obama reacting to Boston hecklers.)

The new research found that instead of engaging in civil discourse or debate, fully 16% of liberals admitted to blocking, unfriending or overtly hiding someone on a social networking site because that person expressed views they disagreed with. That’s double the percentage of conservatives and more than twice the percentage of political moderates who behaved like that.

The proportion jumps even higher when someone on a social site disagrees with a liberal’s post.

Only 1% of moderates would block or shut out someone who dared to disagree with them, compared to 11% of liberals, whose rate was nearly three times that of conservatives.

Of course, it is not as if liberal intolerance is restricted to opposing expression on the Internet…

Read the whole thing.

The progressive vision of the world seems to hold unshakable faith in expert studies as revealing the truth. This vision also assumes that people, being naturally good and rational after Rousseau’s doctrines, will always make the right choice if they have the right information. The progressive views supposedly false information that could lead people to choose something the experts have ruled the wrong choice (e.g. advertising by Pepsi, or Tobacco companies for that matter) as a dire threat to freedom. It’s like good marketing for something the experts don’t like is coercion in the progressive mind.

But a free society will not long endure if every time “studies” say particular behavior is harmful, the federal government is called in to curb free speech because it might influence people in a direction contrary to contemporary science. Even the most teeth-destroying sugar water supplier deserve to make an argument for their product. To paraphrase Voltaire’s phrase, I may disagree vehemently with your advertising, but I’ll defend to the death your right to advertise.

Read the whole thing.

Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical journal, was in 2007 the only publication in France to print the Danish Mohammed cartoons. As a result, Charlie Hebdo was then charged with slandering a group on the basis of religion, but was finally acquitted after a two day trial.

Charlie Hebdo today intended to commemorate the Islamic victory in the elections in Tunisia by temporarily renaming itself “Sharia Hebdo” and appointing the Prophet Mohammed “guest editor” and putting his portrait again on the cover.

The “Sharia Hebdo” edition had not even appeared yet, when last night the paper’s Paris offices were fire-bombed and its web-site attacked and taken down.

The bravery and readiness to defend the principle of free speech of the American urban elites was promptly demonstrated by Time Magazine’s Bureau chief, the aptly named Bruce Crumley.

Okay, so can we finally stop with the idiotic, divisive, and destructive efforts by “majority sections” of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant, futile demonstrations that “they” aren’t going to tell “us” what can and can’t be done in free societies? Because not only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good. What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent reaction?

The difficulty in answering that question is also what’s making it hard to have much sympathy for the French satirical newspaper firebombed this morning, after it published another stupid and totally unnecessary edition mocking Islam. ..

[Y]eah, the violence inflicted upon Charlie Hebdo was outrageous, unacceptable, condemnable, and illegal. But apart from the “illegal” bit, Charlie Hebdo’s current edition is all of the above, too.

All of which leads inevitably to the reflection that objectionable as the bigoted barbarian fanatics who firebombed Charlie Hebdo are, lickspittle cowards, appeasers, and traitors to their own culture and civilization like the invertebrate Mr. Crumbley are even more of a blight on the face of the planet.

Bugger Islam, and bugger bed-wetting liberalism twice.

This news agency story is relevant even to Americans, because the American left-wing establishment is very much in favor of adopting domestically progressive policies observed in other countries. So far, speech that “offends, insults, humiliates, or (supposedly) intimidates” is commonly outlawed on university campuses, but it is by no means beyond the ambitions of American progressives to try to enact such curbs on expression here.

A popular right-wing commentator was found guilty Wednesday of breaking Australian discrimination law by implying that fair-skinned Aborigines chose to identify as indigenous for profit and career advancement.

Federal Court Justice Mordy Bromberg ruled that fair-skinned Aborigines were likely to have been “offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated by the imputations” included in columnist Andrew Bolt’s two articles published by the Herald Sun newspaper in Melbourne in 2009.

Bromberg ruled out Bolt and his publisher’s defense under a clause of the Racial Discrimination Act that exempts “fair comment.” Bromberg said he will prohibit reproduction of the offending articles and will consider ordering the newspaper to publish a correction if it doesn’t print an apology.

Bolt, who writes opinion pieces for newspapers around Australia and hosts a nationally broadcast weekly public affairs television program, described the ruling as a defeat for freedom of speech.

“This is a terrible day for free speech in this country,” he told reporters outside court.

Andrew Bolt’s Blog

The DKE fraternity chant affair has concluded with utterly contemptible behavior by the university, embodying cowardice and extraordinary and astonishingly unbecoming stupidity and violating the university’s own official commitment to freedom of expression.

Quote:

Yale’s commitment to freedom of expression means that when you agree to matriculate, you join a community where “the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox” must be tolerated. When you encounter people who think differently than you do, you will be expected to honor their free expression, even when what they have to say seems wrong or offensive to you.

No one is entitled to any “atmosphere” free of speech or expression he (or she) does not like. The erection by the political left of a variety of groups claiming, on the basis of historical grievances and ressentiment, special privileges and status is a moral and intellectual abomination.

In this case, a tiny minority of Yale’s most obnoxious and neurotic females, members of a gender comprising a slight majority of humanity, already empowered by Nature with staggering powers of influence and control over members of the opposite gender, particularly during a period of life when the reproductive impulse and any young lady’s powers of personal attraction are at their height, have been persuaded by ideological influences hosted and specially cultivated by Yale to see themselves on the basis of myths, stereotypes, and crude historical misunderstandings as victims, and then encouraged to exploit that status for personal and group power and rewarded for doing exactly that with attention and applause.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me” is an ancient article of life wisdom imparted by parents to very young children over many generations. Modern liberal society has retreated in maturity to an intellectual state on the other side of childhood, to a state of infantilism, in which name-calling is inflated into a national issue superseding First Amendment rights and the tradition of free speech in Academia, and is viewed as demanding federal intervention and a coercive university response.

The tradition of academic freedom is based upon a general recognition that the period of the education of young people at university is a special period in which a completely open and unprejudiced approach to inquiry is appropriate and in which students traditionally enjoy special immunities from responsibility and conformity.

College students traditionally mock society’s sacred cows and college students are traditionally expected to let off steam and express high spirits through a variety of outrageous pranks. Only fools and outrageously presumptuous tyrants would ever take expressions made by fraternity pledges undergoing a ritual ordeal as statements accurately representative of real positions or as in any way meaningful at all. The fact that two incidents of fraternity ritual farce have been treated as matters of literal heretical expression and as gravely important transgressions by federal and university officials demonstrates only that both Yale and today’s United States are prey to ideological impulses capable of causing them to lapse readily into totalitarian regimes governed by nincompoops.
——————————
Yale’s 1975 Woodward Committee Report on Free Speech.

Indignant female surgeons force President of the American College of Surgeons to resign over Valentine’s Day editorial. New York Times:

Dr. [Lazar] Greenfield, 78, was the editor in chief of Surgery News when the editorial was published but resigned that position in the wake of the controversy; the entire issue of the newspaper was withdrawn. He is an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Michigan School of Medicine.

The editorial cited research that found that female college students who had had unprotected sex were less depressed than those whose partners used condoms. It speculated that compounds in semen have antidepressant effects.

“So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates,” it concluded.

The editorial outraged many women in the field, some of whom said that it reflected a macho culture in surgery that needed to change.

She ought to move to South Carolina and run against that pansy for the Senate.

Hat tip to Roger Kimball.

What accounts for such feminine timidity, this instinctive unwillingness or inability to talk or taunt back, without seeking the protection of university or government bureaucrats? Talking is apparently beside the point. “I just want to be able to walk back to my dorm at night without hearing all this crazy stuff from these guys,” one student complains. I sympathize (I was a young woman once, too), but “hearing crazy stuff” from people in public is part of life in a free society, a society in which you enjoy equal rights to say crazy stuff.

Putatively progressive feminists might agree, if only they regarded women as equal to the task of talking back, if only they distinguished between men who “say stuff” about women and men who “do stuff” to women. In the feminist view reflected in the Yale draft complaint, the misogynist rants of some undergraduate men (perhaps a relatively small percentage of them) is not speech. It’s a series of “dangerous,” “sex-discriminatory threats” that “intimidate” and “terrorize” women, constituting a hostile environment (or “rape culture”) that causes sexual violence.

That simplistic, practically hysterical anti-libertarian approach to offensive speech appears to be shared by the Obama administration. OCR [Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights] has initiated an investigation of alleged civil-rights violations at Yale, and, coincidentally, on April 4th, it issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to schools, colleges, and universities nationwide, clarifying their obligations to prevent and address sexual harassment. OCR’s letter conflates harassment and rape. It defines sexual harassment as “including” sexual violence and ignores the conflicts between sexual harassment regulations and free speech, or, in public schools, the constitutional limits on regulating “offensive” speech. Given OCR’s expansive and potentially repressive approach to punishing and preventing “bullying,” it’s not surprising but still distressing to find no concern for speech in its letter on harassment.

The only nod to civil liberty in OCR’s letter is a reminder that students accused of sexual harassment (including sexual violence) should be accorded due process. Indeed, “(p)ublic and state-supported schools must provide due process to the alleged perpetrator”—but not too much due process, it seems: “However, schools should ensure that steps taken to accord due process rights to the alleged perpetrator do not restrict or unnecessarily delay the Title IX protections for the complainant.” This suggests, oddly and ominously, that the statutory rights of the accuser trump the constitutional due-process rights of the accused.

Generally, the OCR letter displays much more concern for the sensitivities of accusers over the rights of the accused. Schools should, for example, separate complainants and alleged perpetrators while investigations are pending, and in doing so, they should “minimize the burden on the complainant.” Why not also minimize the burden on the alleged perpetrator? The Obama administration, like the administrations of so many colleges and universities, implicitly approaches sexual harassment and sexual violence cases with a presumption of guilt.

Campus investigations and hearings involving harassment or rape charges are notoriously devoid of concern for the rights of students accused; “kangaroo courts” are common, and OCR ’s letter seems unlikely to remedy them. Students accused of harassment should not be allowed to confront (or directly question) their accusers, according to OCR, because cross-examination of a complainant “may be traumatic or intimidating.” (Again, elevating the feelings of a complainant over the rights of an alleged perpetrator, who may have been falsely accused, reflects a presumption of guilt.) Students may be represented by counsel in disciplinary proceedings, at the discretion of the school, but counsel is not required, even when students risk being found guilty of sexual assaults (felonies pursuant to state penal laws) under permissive standards of proof used in civil cases, standards mandated by OCR.

I don’t know the ages of Obama’s OCR appointees, but they seem to be operating under the influence of the repressive disregard for civil liberty that began taking over American campuses nearly 20 years ago. As FIRE President Greg Lukianoff remarks, students have been “unlearning liberty.” Concern about social equality and the unexamined belief that it requires legal protections for the feelings of presumptively vulnerable or disadvantaged students who are considered incapable of protecting themselves has generated not just obliviousness to liberty but a palpable hostility to it.

The Left simply invokes a simplistic kind of sophistry to re-define speech it doesn’t like as an aggressive act and to transform disapproval and displeasure at oppositional mocking speech into victimization.

“Those DEKE and Zeta Psi initiations dared to ridicule our self-important ideology of victimization, and that created ‘a hostile atmosphere’ preventing us from feeling equal, and that should be a federal offense.”

The claim being made here is arrant nonsense, which any rational adult should recognize immediately, but American society has not been headed by rational adults since at least the 1960s.

The Oldest College Daily reports that Yale is under investigation by the feds:

[Yale] University is under investigation by the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights stemming from an alleged mishandling of several instances of sexual misconduct in recent years.

The Office for Civil Rights will open an investigation into the University “for its failure to eliminate a hostile sexual environment on campus, in violation of Title IX” — which prohibits discrimination or exclusion from education programs — according to a press release by the complainants sent to the News Thursday afternoon. Yale administrators said they have not yet received a copy of the complaint and cannot comment.

The measure comes after 16 Yale students and alumni filed a formal complaint March 15 informing the Office for Civil Rights about Yale’s breach of Title IX by citing a slew of “inadequate response[s]” to public episodes of sexual misconduct on campus, such as the controversial Delta Kappa Epsilon chanting incident on Old Campus last fall.

“We have tried so many avenues,” complainant Hannah Zeavin ’12 told the News Thursday. “We exhausted every internal process [available at Yale].”

On March 15, 16 students and recent alumnae of Yale filed a Title IX complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights; I was one of them. The signatories were a diverse group, representing men and women, current students and recent graduates, those who have been involved in campus feminism and those who have not. The complaint itself was a detailed and heavily sourced 26-page document that outlined incidents of sex-based harassment and intimidation that have occurred at Yale every year for the past seven years, and argued that these incidents — and the University’s inadequate response to them — have resulted in a hostile educational environment for women at Yale. ...

For the past seven years, Yale has demonstrated… tolerance towards harassment of women: in 2004, when fraternity members stole (and photographed themselves wearing) four t-shirts from the annual Take Back the Night Clothesline Project, in which past victims of rape record their testimonies on t-shirts and display them; in 2005, when a new class of fraternity pledges stole 20 more of the t-shirts; in 2006, when yet another class of pledges gathered by the Yale Women’s Center and chanted, “No means yes! Yes means anal!”; in 2007, when over 150 Medical School students wrote a letter of protest about the conditions of sexual harassment on campus in which eight specific instances of sexual assault were cited; in 2008, when Zeta Psi pledges posed in front of the Yale Women’s Center with a poster reading, “We Love Yale Sluts,” photographed themselves in the pose, and disseminated the photo on Facebook; in 2009, when anonymous male students at Yale authored and circulated a “Preseason Scouting Report” e-mail that rated incoming freshman women according to how many beers it would take to have sex with them, and listing their names, hometowns and residential colleges; and this past October, when DKE pledges congregated on Old Campus chanting, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I f—- dead women and fill them with my semen.”

So what do we mean when we say that Yale is a hostile environment for women? What we don’t mean is that every female student at Yale has experienced sexual harassment or assault. What we mean is that the University has consistently demonstrated an attitude of tolerance for highly public acts of misogyny and sexual aggression. Female undergraduates see their peers call them “Yale sluts” and hear still other peers chant that “no means yes.” They live with the knowledge that the University has failed to punish those peers for sexual harassment. It takes little imagination to understand the effect of this kind of atmosphere on female students’ ability to engage in campus life on a basis of safety and equality.

Oh me! oh my! Stolen t-shirts! Frat members displaying “Yale Sluts” posters… and on Facebook, too! DKE pledge chanting slogans which were crude!

And no one was expelled or conspicuously punished and ostracized for politically incorrect expressions in mocking and parodistic contexts. It is easy to understand how the failure of President Levin personally to horsewhip those rowdy and insensitive fraternity men inevitably drove Yale’s womynist leaders to drop a dime on their alma mater.

After all, as a lot of Old Blues warned back when Kingman Brewster started talking about coeducating the place in the 1960s, many womyn are just to emotionally frail, too politically refined and sensitive, to bear uncouth, oppositional speech or mocking expressions of political incorrectness.

Such females may suffer untoward intellectual confusion, ideological indignation, and hyper-emotional distress. They may suffer from feelings of persecution and harassment. Thus, a real sector of the female community cannot possible function at an equal level in a university environment which naturally and inevitably features high-spirited young men, and in which ideas and perspectives are intended to be challenged, ridiculed, and vigorously contested. Some of these poor lambs are simply too delicate, too frail, too easily upset for all that.

Females of this kind need protection. As we see, some 16 unhappy Yale womynists felt vulnerable and persecuted, simply because their preferred ideological positions had been mocked or derided on several occasions in the course of a period of years, and no masculine protector had come forward to avenge them. In the end, they had to turn to the ultimate alternative masculine surrogate, Big Brother himself.

I was talking about all this with one of my pre-coeducation friends from Bones and DKE, just this afternoon.

“I warned you that this kind of thing was bound to happen.” Tripp observed, taking another sip of his gin-and-tonic. “Political ideas and higher education just mess up some female heads. They become fanatical and they egg one another on. Sexual frustration, of course, is endemic among politicized females. And the combination of sexual frustration and their hormonal cycle leads directly to delusions of victimization, paranoia, and vicious and destructive behavior. Imagine complaining about Yale to the Federal Government! It’s the behavior of a cad and a bounder, but for a politicized feminist it’s par for the course. That radical Brewster sowed the seeds, and Levin is reaping the harvest.”

Matthew had a nice comment apropos of all the opportunistic leftist whingeing about “vitriolic political speech.”

The First Amendment is the singer on stage in front of everyone whose voice can not be ignored, while the Second Amendment is the individual in front of the stage making sure no one kills the performance.

Michael Barone identifies the moral of the firing of Juan Williams by NPR and applauds the happy result for this particular victim of liberal intolerance.

Reading between the lines of Juan’s statement and those of NPR officials, it’s apparent that NPR was moved to fire Juan because he irritates so many people in its audience. An interesting contrast: while many NPR listeners apparently could not stomach that Williams also appeared on Fox News. But it doesn’t seem that any perceptible number of Fox News viewers had any complaints that Williams also worked for NPR. The Fox audience seems to be more tolerant of diversity than the NPR audience.

The good news: Fox News president Roger Ailes has given Williams a three-year contract at an increase in salary. Hurray!

NPR has terminated its contract with Juan Williams, one of its senior news analysts, after he made comments about Muslims on the Fox News Channel.

NPR said in a statement that it gave Mr. Williams notice of his termination on Wednesday night.

The move came after Mr. Williams, who is also a Fox News political analyst, appeared on the “The O’Reilly Factor” on Monday. On the show, the host, Bill O’Reilly, asked him to respond to the notion that the United States was facing a “Muslim dilemma.” Mr. O’Reilly said, “The cold truth is that in the world today jihad, aided and abetted by some Muslim nations, is the biggest threat on the planet.”

Mr. Williams said he concurred with Mr. O’Reilly. ...

NPR said in its statement that the remarks “were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

Here are the comments that got Williams fired.

Your tax dollars fund National Public Radio and pay the salaries of the representatives of the arrogant and intolerant left who enforce political correctness at the expense of freedom of thought and expression. Let’s hope the next Congress does something about this.

In its 1989 Texas v. Johnson decision, The US Supreme Court ruled that burning the American flag constituted “expressive conduct” protected by the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee.

Burning the Koran, on the other hand, gets you detained and questioned by New York City police, and fired by your employer, if you work for NJTransit.

NY Daily News:

The protester who burned pages from the Koran outside a planned mosque near Ground Zero has been fired from NJTransit, sources and authorities said Tuesday. ...

“Mr. Fenton’s public actions violated New Jersey Transit’s code of ethics,” an agency statement said.

“NJ Transit concluded that Mr. Fenton violated his trust as a state employee and therefore [he] was dismissed.”

Fenton was ushered from the protests by police on Saturday and questioned, but he was released without charges.

Mr. Fenton has the grounds for a successful law suit against NJTransit.

In November of 2006, Xavier Alvarez was elected to represent the city of Pomona on the board of the Three Valleys Municipal Water District as a war hero who had been awarded the Medal of Honor.

Alvarez claimed to be a retired 25-year Marine Corps veteran, who was many times wounded and had received the nation’s highest award for military valor for serving as a helicopter pilot and rescuing US POWs from behind enemy lines during the War in Vietnam. In fact, Alvarez was never in the military, and was 17 years old when the Vietnam War ended in 1975. (Inland Valley Daily Bulletin link)

In 1977, Alvarez was exposed and was prosecuted and pled guilty under the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, which made the unauthorized claim, display, manufacture, or sale of US military decorations or awards a federal misdemeanor. He was sentenced to more than 400 hours of community service at a veterans hospital and fined $5,000, but then appealed claiming the 2005 law violated his right to free speech (!).

Preposterous, wouldn’t you say?

But not too preposterous to persuade a three-judge panel of the 9th Circus. Judge Milan D. Smith opined, joined by Judge Thomas Nelson, as Josh Gerstein reports, that there is a free speech right to lie.

We have no doubt that society would be better off if Alvarez would stop spreading worthless, ridiculous, and offensive untruths. But, given our historical skepticism of permitting the government to police the line between truth and falsity, and between valuable speech and drivel, we presumptively protect all speech, including false statements, in order that clearly protected speech may flower in the shelter of the First Amendment.

While asserting that they were not endorsing “an unbridled right to lie,” Smith and Nelson said regulations of false speech that have been upheld by the courts were limited to narrow categories where a direct and significant harm was caused. But, they said, the harm caused by people making false statements about military decorations was not evident.

Both of these judges were Bush appointees, leading one to conclude that there must be something in the water out there.

President Obama’s performance has been so memorable that already, after less than two years in office, he has won a special place in the hearts of ordinary Americans: a place resembling Osama bin Laden’s as one of a series of carnival targets you throw baseballs at and win prizes for knocking down.

Gawker positively squeaked in protest at the political incorrectness of it all, headlining the story as “Horrible Obama-Smashing Game.” (chuckle)

That didn’t keep them from uploading a video of a young man hurling baseballs at the target of the president prefaced by “F**k you, Obama.”

1:36 video
———————————————————————————


Hit the alien invader with the health care bill & presidential seal game

The Jersey Shore boardwalk game, however, was not the great man’s first recognition by amusement park popular culture. Even earlier, a church fair outside Allentown, Pennsylvania attracted the attention of the Secret Service when a rented shooting game featuring You-Know-Who holding the health care bill appeared as the target.

The Morning Call reports that the feds were not amused and the games company was quickly strong-armed into removing this threat to his Imperial Obamaness.

The game’s target is a painting of a black man in a suit who is holding a scroll labeled “Health Bill.” He sports a belt buckle fashioned after the presidential seal, antennae and a troll doll on his shoulder.

Players paid $1 per shot, or $5 for six shots, to fire foam darts at targets on his head and heart. Those who hit their mark won a stuffed animal.

Cindy Wofford, special agent in charge of the Philadelphia office of the Secret Service, said her agents are looking into the game and will determine if there were any direct or indirect threats to the president. They will share their findings with the U.S. attorney’s office.

“We take these kinds of things very seriously,” Wofford said.

The White House issued a statement Wednesday through spokeswoman Moira Mack saying it disapproves of using the president’s name and likeness for commercial purposes. The longstanding policy precedes Obama.

I am inclined to think that Ieshuh Griffin is entitled to run for the Milwaukee Assembly using the ballot slogan “NOT the ‘whiteman’s bitch’ “, if that’s what she desires to do. Griffin says that she is going to appeal the Accountability Board’s decision banning her slogan.

Milwaukee Journal-Standard article

Irate Muslims attacked Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks who was delivering a lecture on free speech at Uppsala University last Tuesday, interrupting the presentation of a basically puerile and vulgar free speech exercise, a short 1:56 video, titled Allah ho Gaybar, made to protest alleged Islamic hypocrisy about homosexuality by the pseudononymous Sooreh Hera, an Iranian woman living and working in exile in the Netherlands. According to Hera, married Muslim males frequently indulge in homosexual relations, despite maintaining their religious intolerance of homosexuals and homosexuality.

Vilks was knocked to the ground and his eyeglasses were broken during the attack. The following Swedish televison 10:59 video shows the entire incident.

There is one happy moment (around 1:07) when a female Swedish cop peppersprays a belligerent Muslim youth wearing an orange coat and then her blond police compatriot bangs his head onto the back of a seat with a very satisfying thump.

But overall the video is horrifying. You see howling Muslim fanatics, chanting “Muhammed” in tones of insolent hostility, demanding that the film be stopped, shouting obscenities, and manipulatively threatening police with complaints. Several smirking non-Islamic Swedes do absolutely nothing to defend Vilks, public order, or the right of free speech in a major university in the face of open threats of mob violence, and in the end, in true contemporary European fashion, the authorities back down, the video is not finished, the lecture is canceled, and Muslim violence and intimidation are allowed to win.

Lars Vilks has been the object of Muslim threats for some time as the result of a humorous cartoon he drew depicting several years ago depicting the Prophet Mohammed as rondelhund, a kind of jocular street ornament in the form of a dog.

Muslims attempted to set Vilk’s home afire Friday night. His web-site was also shut down by attacks.

She said:

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:) Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects.

This young woman ought to have gotten away scot-free with saying the unsayable and thinking the unthinkable in private, but more recently she reproached one of those two friends about sleeping with another person’s boyfriend. Her interlocutor promised “to ruin her life,” and proceeded on a program of revenge worthy of the Jacobean Theater.

The vengeful strumpet forwarded the six-month-old email to members of the Harvard Black Law Student Association, who were definitely not amused.

Someone then passed it along to the legal blog Above the Law. Gawker and HuffPo picked up the story, and soon it was everywhere.

TaxProf has collected links.

Before very long, the Dean of Harvard Law School, Martha Minow was issuing official statements assuring Black law students that “Here at Harvard Law School, we are committed to preventing degradation of any individual or group, including race-based insensitivity or hostility.”

The PC-criminal, an editor at the Harvard Law Review, had already received a clerkship with colorful Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski. Indignant demands that her clerkship should be rescinded followed.

But they teach young people well at today’s elite schools. When you blot your copybook, it is still possible to save yourself by performing the appropriate prostrations and affirming loudly that the sun does move around the earth. Look at Bill Clinton.

Our guilty student did the necessary thing, she wrote a thoroughly PC letter of apology, and took complete responsibility. (laugh)

Boston Globe:

“I am deeply sorry for the pain caused by my e-mail. I never intended to cause any harm, and I am heartbroken and devastated by the harm that has ensued. I would give anything to take it back,’’ [Name withheld by me] said in the apology, obtained by the Globe.

“I emphatically do not believe that African-Americans are genetically inferior in any way. I understand why my words expressing even a doubt in that regard were and are offensive.’’ ...

In her statement yesterday, Minow called the incident “sad and unfortunate’’ but said she was heartened by the student’s apology. She added: “We seek to encourage freedom of expression, but freedom of speech should be accompanied by responsibility.’’

UPDATE: May 4:

Jonathan David Farley, Harvard ‘91, Ph.D. Oxford ‘95, reiterates his demand that the young lady be expelled and expresses the opinion that Eugene Volokh (who argued against her expulsion) should never have been admitted to the United States.

If anyone wonders why many Americans are not eager to follow the political examples set by European countries in all things, I would recommend this story as a good example of policies not worth following.

Telegraph:

Dale McAlpine was charged with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” after a homosexual police community support officer (PCSO) overheard him reciting a number of “sins” referred to in the Bible, including blasphemy, drunkenness and same sex relationships.

The 42-year-old Baptist, who has preached Christianity in Wokington, Cumbria for years, said he did not mention homosexuality while delivering a sermon from the top of a stepladder, but admitted telling a passing shopper that he believed it went against the word of God.

Police officers are alleging that he made the remark in a voice loud enough to be overheard by others and have charged him with using abusive or insulting language, contrary to the Public Order Act.

Mr McAlpine, who was taken to the police station in the back of a marked van and locked in a cell for seven hours on April 20, said the incident was among the worst experiences of his life.

Michelle Malkin, in the New York Post, describes how the thuggish efforts to punish corporations for describing the negative impact of the health care bill backfired on Henry Waxman.

The House Democrats’ Torquemada got cold feet. Self-styled “chief inquisitor” Henry Waxman announced this week that he’s canceling a planned show trial of corporate executives who called public attention to the financial hit they’re taking as a result of President Obama’s health-care mandate. Business owners can breathe a small sigh of relief. But the witch hunt isn’t over.

You’ll recall that Waxman fired off nasty-grams to the heads of Deere, Caterpillar, Verizon and AT&T last month, demanding their presence at a congressional auto de fé. Their sin? Publicly reporting the costs and consequences of federal health-care taxes on their firms’ bottom lines.

A vindictive Waxman sought internal documents and e-mails from the CEOs about the profit charges. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog and TV airwaves to condemn the “premature” and “irresponsible” disclosures. ...

An April 14 memorandum from the Committee on Energy and Commerce Majority Staff informed the Democratic hounds that the “companies acted properly and in accordance with accounting standards in submitting filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission in March and April.”

Indeed, after haggling about the overall impact of the health-care mandate on firms’ annual company cash flows, the staff memo acknowledged that notifying shareholders of these big one-time company write-downs was required by law.

No apology from Locke or Waxman has been forthcoming. Instead, the ruling majority seems bent on pressuring private companies to peddle the “beneficial” impacts of the law. The committee staff extracted statements from the targeted companies that “if” implemented “right” and “correct[ly],” ObamaCare “could” achieve “long term savings for the country” and their businesses.

Phelim McAleer, director and producer of Not Evil Just Wrong (2008) attempted to ask Stanford University Professor Stephen H. Schneider some questions about the Climategate scandal during a press briefing at the climate change conference in Copenhagen.

As soon as McAleer’s question is recognized as critical, Professor Schneider’s assistant sends a pretty young female UN employee to try to take away the microphone from McAleer, while using her cell phone to summon security.

Schneider snarls in response: “I don’t make comments on redacted emails presented to me by people whose values I don’t trust. ... What I can say is that private communications which people have between each other are certainly not public documents.”

McAleer is just trying to ask a followup question, when he is interrupted by Schneider’s assistant breaking in (inaudibly on the video). Schneider responds, “I agree. We’ll make it short.”

There is to be no followup. An armed UN Security Guard soon appears, menacing McAleer and his cameraman, and McAleer is ejected.

1:35 video

Hat tip to Big Government.

Just one week before Michael Savage was scheduled to debate via video link at the Cambridge Union in England, the co-presidents of the two-century-old society informed the top-rated radio host they have canceled the event.

...(T)he invitation from the Cambridge Union Society for the Oct. 15 debate was issued in July after Savage was banned from entering the United Kingdom by Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s government along with Muslim extremists and leaders of hate groups.

In an e-mail today to Savage producer Beowulf Rochlen, Cambridge Union leaders Julien Domercq and Jonathan Laurence wrote, “It is with great regret to inform you of the difficult decision we have taken to cancel the event.”

Domercq and Laurence pointed to problems with the cost and feasibility of setting up the necessary video link, but they also cited “legal issues.”

“We have reconsulted with our counsel, and been informed that there are numerous legal issues with Dr Savage speaking here,” they wrote, “and so because of all of the technical, financial and legal problems involved, we have come to the reluctant conclusion that the event cannot proceed.” ...

The July 2 invitation to the debate said the Cambridge Union had been following his case “with great interest” and believed he was “more qualified than anyone to talk about the subject of political correctness in American and Britain.”

The student society at the University of Cambridge wanted Savage to speak for the opposition in a debate titled “This House Believes Political Correctness is Sane and Necessary.”

The society, founded in 1815, has hosted the likes of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American presidents Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt.

The cancellation of speaking appearance by controversial political figures on the right at student debating forums at elite universities as the result of pressure from on high has quite a long tradition.

I don’t think much of Michael Savage, née Weiner, myself, but this sort of thing only ever happens to controversial speakers from the political right. The most loathsome communist, the most extreme anti-humanity environmentalist, the noisiest representative of any kind of leftwing craziness can be allowed to speak on campus. Columbia can even host Mahmoud Ahmedinejad for a speech denouncing the United States.

An invitation to George Wallace to speak at the Yale Political Union was canceled by union officers under direct pressure from Yale President Kingman Brewster in the early 1960s. A decade later, the administration intervened again, forcing the YPU to rescind an invitation to speak to William Shockley. That second time, Yale conservatives determined to test free speech at Yale simply passed the responsibility for the invitation from one captive student organization to another, as the Yale administration continued to try forcing a cancellation. When the event actually was held, leftwing activists prevented Shockley from speaking at all. The embarrassment of a second public address at Yale (the left had also forcibly shut down a speech by General William Westmoreland a bit earlier) prevented from happening by force provoked a serious reexamination of Yale University’s commitment to free speech by the Woodward Committee, which issued a report strongly affirming the principle of Free Expression.

The Woodward Report resulted in Yale being one of relatively few major universities to escape the adoption of politically correct civility codes.

It sounds like the Cambridge Union caved in the face of pressure from the Labour Government rather than from the University. Free expression in Britain is clearly in trouble not merely at the university but at the national level.

Bill Hobbs thinks there must have been some kind of misunderstanding. Maybe the Obama administration is dyslexic. They see “Free Speech” and think it says “Free Sheep”. Maybe not, too.

The Obama administration has marked its first foray into the UN human rights establishment by backing calls for limits on freedom of expression. The newly-minted American policy was rolled out at the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council, which ended in Geneva on Friday. ...

For more than a decade, a UN resolution on the freedom of expression was shepherded through the Council, and the now defunct Commission on Human Rights which it replaced, by Canada. Over the years, Canada tried mightily to garner consensus on certain minimum standards, but the “reformed” Council changed the distribution of seats on the UN’s lead human rights body. In 2008, against the backdrop of the publication of images of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, Cuba and various Islamic countries destroyed the consensus and rammed through an amendment which introduced a limit on any speech they claimed was an “abuse . . . [that] constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination.”

The Obama administration decided that a revamped freedom of expression resolution, extracted from Canadian hands, would be an ideal emblem for its new engagement policy. So it cosponsored a resolution on the subject with none other than Egypt—a country characterized by an absence of freedom of expression. ...

The new resolution, championed by the Obama administration, has a number of disturbing elements. It emphasizes that “the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities . . .” which include taking action against anything meeting the description of “negative racial and religious stereotyping.” It also purports to “recognize . . . the moral and social responsibilities of the media” and supports “the media’s elaboration of voluntary codes of professional ethical conduct” in relation to “combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.”

Pakistan’s Ambassador Zamir Akram, speaking on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, made it clear that they understand the resolution and its protection against religious stereotyping as allowing free speech to be trumped by anything that defames or negatively stereotypes religion. The idea of protecting the human rights “of religions” instead of individuals is a favorite of those countries that do not protect free speech and which use religion—as defined by government—to curtail it.

The Utrecht public prosecutor’s office announced today that it intends to prosecute the Arab European League (AEL) on hate speech charges under Dutch Law for re-publishing the above cartoon on its website.

When the cartoon first appeared last month, the public prosecutor’s office threatened to charge the group if it did not remove the cartoon. The cartoon was punishable, Dutch prosecutors warned, “because it offends Jews on the basis of their race and/or religion.”

Subsequently, the same prosecutor’s office ruled that the Danish Mohammed cartoons were not offensive to Muslims as a group and were not an incitement to discrimination or violence against them. It declared that the Danish cartoons publication
on Geert Wilders website in 2006 had not violated Dutch law. Nor had the TV programme Nova, which also showed the cartoons.

AEL responded to what it declared to be a double-standard on freedom of expression, and re-posted the Holocaust cartoon.

The Utrecht prosecutor’s office said charge have been filed against AEL for “insulting a group and distributing an insulting image.” The maximum penalty under Dutch Law is a year in prison, but the prosecutor’s office stated that a fine of up to euro4,700 ($6,700) would be a more likely penalty when charges are filed against an organization.

I find it interesting to reflect that long ago, during the period of the European wars of religion, the Dutch port cities used to represent a refuge of tolerance sought by heretics of all descriptions and a publishing center beyond the reach of repressive ecclesiastical authorities. Contemporary political correctness clearly has a longer reach than the Council of Geneva or the Holy Office of Rome. Benedict Spinoza could peacefully grind lenses in Rijnsburg or The Hague, despite having offended the Jewish community with his “abominable heresies and monstrous acts.”

It was touch and go clearly on whether one could publish a cartoon expressing mild derision of the Muslim prophet. There can be no doubt that questioning the Holocaust is an intolerable heresy. Good thing the stake is also politically incorrect.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Note that Phillips already knows, even before reading any such communications, that the other side of the story, counter-arguments or expressions of opposition to Obamacare, intrinsically represent “disinformation” and are “fishy.” Better start making a list of sources of all that wrongthink and identifying those responsible.

Captain Brandon del Pozo of the NYPD discusses the Gates arrest from a professional police perspective on Crooked Timber, refuting, I think, effectively the Free Speech claim.

Whether or not a person should be arrested for disorderly conduct depends on subjective assessments that are nonetheless important to make. (more on discretion later) These include the extent to which the interaction is actually in public, the extent to which he has genuinely impeded the investigation by being verbally combative with an officer who needs to elicit investigative information from him, or created a situation of genuine public alarm, and, admittedly more controversially, the extent to which he fosters a climate wherein it’s acceptable for people to harass, berate and otherwise annoy the police as they are trying to conduct routine investigations that are in the interest of public safety. ...

The officer instructs the person to exit the house and talk on the porch. This is standard police safety practice. An unfamiliar building with unknown occupants that is the potential site of a burglary is not a safe place for an officer to enter, especially alone. If he is drawn into the home and attacked there, he can be locked in and will take longer to rescue. Kitchens have a variety of weapons, and rooms have limited sight lines and places for suspects to hide. Bringing a suspect to the porch is a prudent move for an officer.

The man knows what’s going on. He did, in fact, just force his own front door open. All accounts indicate the sergeant showed up moments later; the 911 caller personally informed him, in sum and substance, “he just went into the house a few seconds ago.” There is a continuity of events that indicates a reasonable person would understand why the police came to his door a few moments after he broke it open. The only thing that could indicate a race bias is the unobserved hypothetical that the police would not have been there if he was white. This doesn’t matter; for a homeowner of any race there is a facially plausible race-neutral reason why the police have come to the door.

Around this time, the person begins to accuse the officer of racism, at first refusing to cooperate with the investigation. This makes the investigation more difficult, and might make the officer wonder if he is safe. To assume Gates isn’t the type of man to use violence when he is angry and using obscenities is to emasculate him, or patronize him, or to resort to stereotypes based on age, stature, type of employment, etc. Anyway, early on, the sergeant concludes this man is not a burglar, but reports that the man continues to be verbally belligerent. ...

The police cannot be expected to leave a location simply because the person there is screaming at them and ordering them around, even if that person is apparently innocent and likely lives there. They should still thoroughly investigate. If this were a legitimate expectation of the police, then it would sometimes allow genuine criminals to berate cops into leaving the scene prior to a complete and thorough investigation of the crimes they have committed. Officers should leave when they are convinced that the investigation is complete, and that the situation is under control, regardless of the demeanor of a person.

The police need to foster an environment in which they can deliver public safety without being subject to obscenities, accusations and yelling from any party, even innocent parties. The judgments of policing are obviously difficult and subjective, and are often marred when they are made in the face of people issuing inflammatory comments even as the police are rendering routine services with an obvious cause. It is in the collective interest of citizens and police to promote an environment where the police can conduct an investigation calmly and with mutual respect. It cannot become commonplace for people to be allowed to scream at the police in public, threatening them with political phone calls, deriding their abilities, etc. Routine acts like rendering aid to lost children, taking accident reports and issuing traffic violations could be derailed at any time by any person who has a perceived grievance with the police. The police service environment is not the best venue for the airing of such grievances.

The police should not be cowed by threats of phone calls to people such as mayors, police chiefs and presidents of the United States, along with allegations that “you don’t know who you’re messing with.” It is traditionally whites who have had this type of crooked access and influence. These appeals to higher authorities are often meant to exempt the ruling castes from following the rules and laws that the rest of the community will be expected to follow. It happens, it is unfortunate, and it is not in the interests of justice for it to continue. Nobody trying to do their job fairly deserves to hear the equivalent of “My daddy donated fifty million to this university, and you’ll be getting calls from everywhere in the administration about raising my grade enough for this class to count as a distributive requirement.”

It is possible for a person to commit disorderly conduct by unabated screaming and verbal abuse in a public setting. Without drawing conclusions about the Gates case, there comes some point where a person is genuinely causing public alarm, and where he is acting with a rage that exceeds what we can expect from a reasonable person in a heated moment. The mere presence of the police conducting a legitimate investigation should not provoke continuous rage and epithets from such a person. One response is that the police should just leave if the investigation has been conducted successfully, and that this will calm the person down. In practice, this is indeed often the best thing to do. On the other hand, it should be noted that it is just as much the responsibility of the citizen to see that his actions are an inappropriate way to relate to police officers who have not, in the specific case at hand, acted unreasonably. This point may be hotly contested, but I believe it is true: there is no obligation for the police to hurry in their activities or to leave as soon as possible because they have incited the rage of a person who is acting unreasonably. There is a distinction between hanging around to show them who’s boss and working at a steady, professional pace, to be sure. But in the end the mere presence of the police cannot be seen as an acceptable reason for disorderly conduct, and should therefore not spur the police to leave a scene simply to de-escalate it. A police strategy of “winning by appearing to lose” emboldens citizens to attempt to get the police to lose in more and more serious matters, including walking away from situations where a person is genuinely guilty of a crime.

It is in the civic interest for cops to have discretion over violations and some misdemeanors.

This law is unconstitutional, a blatant violation of the First Amendment. It destroys the basic tenets of the Constitution. The left is ripping it to shreds. You can view the bill here.

This represents the end of political blogging and free speech on the world wide web.

If both bills are not opposed and thrown out then the First Amendment will become nothing more than a relic of a bygone age.

That this is even being proposed speaks volumes as to how far America has fallen. Here is the language in the bill:

a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

‘(b) As used in this section-

‘(1) the term ‘communication’ means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received;

‘(2) the term ‘electronic means’ means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages.’.

What this means?

U.S. House of Representatives would make it a felony to offend someone online.

A felony.

Under this new law you would not just be slapped on the wrist and have to pay a fine.

You would go to big boy prison.

(T)he tobacco regulation bill recently passed by Congress indicates that the spirit of liberty is even scarcer than usual in the halls of government.

What motivates advocates of stricter tobacco regulation is the unassailable assurance that they are not only completely right but that their opponents are a) wrong and b) evil. This invigorating certitude makes it possible to justify almost anything that punishes cigarette companies, even if it does no actual good—or does actual harm.

One of the main purposes of the new law is to reduce the number of smokers in the name of improving “public health.” This is a skillful use of language to confuse rather than enlighten.

An individual decision to take up cigarettes is a private event, not a public one, and its health effects are almost entirely confined to the individual making the choice. ...
Cigarette makers are forbidden to use color in ads in any publication whose readership is less than 85 percent adult. They are barred from using music in audio ads. They are not allowed to use pictures in video ads. They may not put product names on race cars, lighters, caps, or T-shirts. From all this, you almost forget the fleeting passage in the Constitution that says “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”

When it gets in a mood to regulate, Congress doesn’t like to trouble itself with nuisances like the First Amendment. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional for Massachusetts to ban outdoor ads within 1,000 feet of any schools and playgrounds. So what does this law do? It bans outdoor ads within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds.

The Court said the Massachusetts law was intolerable because it choked off communication about a legal activity. “In some geographical areas,” complained Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, “these regulations would constitute nearly a complete ban on the communication of truthful information about smokeless tobacco and cigars to adult consumers.”

But to anti-smoking zealots, that effect is not a bug but a feature. The only problem they have with imposing “nearly a complete ban” is the “nearly” part.

Read the whole thing.

Sonia Sotomayor may not have a long paper trail on hot button social issues, but in one area of the law—campaign finance—she has staked a position that could have far-reaching political consequences.

The clarity of her support for limits on campaign fundraising and her background as a pioneering campaign regulator is raising eyebrows among election law experts who say her record is more substantial and explicit than that of any Supreme Court nominee since the dawn of the modern, post-Watergate campaign finance regime.

“There hasn’t been one with as vigorously expressed policy views on campaign finance as this one that I am aware of, and I’ve been pretty aware for a number of years,” said James Bopp, a leading conservative attorney who has won four Supreme Court cases challenging campaign finance regulations.

“I can’t think of anybody who has had such a track record,” said Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies and a follower of battles on the issue since the early 1970s. “There are clearly going to be cases coming before the court that will be challenges to the law, and there will be some very important cases.”

Sotomayor brings hands-on experience to the issue from her four years of experience on the New York City Campaign Finance Board, an independent, nonpartisan city agency created in 1988. One of the first members appointed to the board by then-Mayor Ed Koch, Sotomayor helped implement—enthusiastically, according to her cohorts—one of the most comprehensive campaign finance laws in the country.

In a rare and little-noticed law review article, she forcefully defended the policy motivations behind such restrictions, questioning the line between campaign contributions and “bribes,” calling on Congress to overhaul campaign finance laws – including suggesting public financing of its own elections – and blasting the Federal Election Commission for not enforcing existing laws.

“The continued failure to do this has greatly damaged public trust in officials and exacerbated the public’s sense that no higher morality is in place by which public officials measure their conduct,” she wrote in a law review article based on a speech she gave to Suffolk University Law School in 1996, when she was a federal district court judge.

On the only occasion when she was confronted with the issue as a jurist, Sotomayor joined a decision that effectively gave a pass to a Vermont law that severely limited campaign contributions and capped campaign spending – a law that the Supreme Court later overturned as a First Amendment violation.

In 1996, the Suffolk University Law Review published Returning Majesty to the Law and Politics: A Modern Approach, by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. This article touches on her legal philosophy in general, as well as her understanding of the First Amendment in particular. The views expressed in this article are troubling, and should give all Americans pause.

Judge Sotomayor writes, “The law … is uncertain and responds to changing circumstances.” It is true that some development in the law takes place as new circumstances arise. For instance, courts today are working out the contours of ‘cyber-law’—a concept that was unheard of a mere thirty years ago. With the proliferation of personal computers and the Internet, however, cyber-law is now a rapidly developing body of law. Some of the old rules regarding the formation of contracts have had to be re-considered to take into account e-transactions. And laws regulating what can, and cannot, be posted on the Internet have had to be evaluated in light of First Amendment protections.

To say that the law develops as new situations arise, however, is far different than what Sotomayor is saying. She calls it a “public myth” that law can be stable, or provide predictable results. Instead, she suggests that the law is in such a constant state of flux that one can never be sure what the law is, or what one’s rights or obligations under it are. What we have, she writes, is an “unpredictable system of justice.” And she believes this “continually evolving legal structure” which leads to what she calls “the uncertainty of law” is a good thing for society.

This is a wrong understanding of the role and function of law in our society. Law is not to be uncertain and arbitrary. Rather, it is to provide rules that all must live by, and guidance whereby we can structure our lives. Sotomayor’s position, though, is that such certainty is a bad thing, and uncertainty in the law is the desired result.

This philosophy opens the door for Sotomayor, and judges who believe similarly, to avoid following what the law actually says. It allows them to place “empathy” above impartiality. After all, if the law is uncertain and constantly changing, why shouldn’t a judge rule in favor of the party that she likes best or agrees with most? Sotomayor’s philosophy facilitates the type of judicial activism and legislation from the bench that decides cases according to what the judges personally believe should be the correct result, instead of what the law actually says should be the correct result. It also destroys any confidence Americans might have in the law’s fairness, if judges are free to make rulings which go against what the law says in order to benefit parties they like or agree with.

Perhaps nowhere is Judge Sotomayor’s problematic philosophy better illustrated than in her approach to campaign finance law. In Returning Majesty to Law and Politics, she compares restrictions on the fundamental First Amendment right of citizens to engage in political speech and association by making contributions to candidates, with restrictions on gift-giving to politicians. Because gift-giving can be restricted, she seems to say, contributions should be restricted, too. She suggests that both gifts and contributions can function as bribes, and seems to be open to the elimination of what she terms “private money” from politics.

The problem with that reasoning, of course, is that there is a difference of constitutional magnitude between buying lunch for a bureaucrat and making of a political contribution to a candidate. The Founders thought that the right of Americans to engage in political speech and association was so important that they enshrined it in the First Amendment to the Constitution and the First Amendment protect campaign contributions.

Our Constitution, including the First Amendment, should not be regarded as evolving. Rather, it should be understood as a constant guarantee: It is a contract between the previous generation of Americans and this one, and between this generation of Americans and the next one. It assures us, and each succeeding generation of Americans, of the nature of the Republic and our rights within it. And so, our freedom to engage in political speech and association guaranteed by the First Amendment—including our right to make contributions to the candidates whose message we agree with—should be absolute. It should not be subject to the whim of a judge who believes that the law is uncertain and constantly evolving.

Judge Sotomayor, however, appears to disagree. While her thoughts regarding campaign contributions are difficult to discern from her law review article, they are more clear in a decision she signed onto in 2005. This case, known as Randall v. Sorrell when it was before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, involved a challenge to Vermont’s contribution and expenditure limits. A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit upheld the district court’s decision that the contribution limits were constitutional, but determined that the case should be remanded to the district court for reconsideration of the expenditure limits. The plaintiffs in that case asked for the full Second Circuit to rehear the case, and the Second Circuit denied that rehearing. (The plaintiffs would eventually win in 2006 at the Supreme Court when, in Randall v. Sorrell, the Court held that both the contribution and expenditure limits were unconstitutional).

Judge Sotomayor signed onto an opinion written by two other judges which concurred in the decision to deny rehearing. This opinion which she signed began by noting that the question before the Court involving whether the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights were being trampled was not important enough to justify rehearing the case. Instead, the judges noted that disputes which are highly political or partisan should not be addressed by the courts.

There’s just one little problem with that: If the Court will not vindicate our First Amendment rights, who will? Judge Sotomayor is correct when she observes that campaign finance is partisan and politicized. Incumbents frequently enact campaign finance laws in order to protect themselves, and if they can do so in a way that benefits their political party, so much the better. Far from providing that the courts be reluctant to involve themselves in such matters, the Founders envisioned a vigorous role for the courts in upholding First Amendment freedoms.

A judge who sees the law as constantly changing and evolving, however, feels more free to refuse to vindicate Americans’ rights when she personally does not think that Americans should have them. So, since Sotomayor is of the opinion that severe restrictions (or, even the elimination) on private money in politics is acceptable, she did not feel the need to consider the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights in Randall.

Such a judicial philosophy is troubling. It places all Americans’ rights at risk. Judge Sotomayor should be questioned on this extensively, and should not be confirmed if this is really her view.