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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (18220)	3/1/2006 2:34:19 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

This makes newspapers and television stations the real powerbrokers in the state, not the citizens. Free speech - sometimes by Jonah Goldberg townhall.com Mar 1, 2006 This week the Supreme Court heard arguments in yet another campaign finance case. At issue is a Vermont law that caps not only how much people can give to a candidate, but how much a candidate can spend. The smart money is on a long, messy, complicated ruling that clarifies less than it confuses. Why? Because that's how we like it. Free speech is a lot like free trade. It sounds simple in theory, but in practice it gets awfully messy. For example, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is supposed to establish "free trade" between the countries of North America, is - with all of its accompanying documents - about the size of a good encyclopedia. The thing is, if it were a real free trade treaty, it would take somewhere between a page and a sentence. It would say "there shall be free trade between the U.S., Canada and Mexico." Instead, it's a Byzantine series of lawyerly exceptions, caveats, codicils and loopholes. And yet, we call it a free trade document. Similarly, most of us believe in free speech, but if you took the pages laying out the rules determining what constitutes free speech - in court documents, government regulations and the like - it would probably stretch from here to the moon and back a couple times. This regulatory morass is no accident. It reflects both popular confusion and popular convictions about free speech. Nobody says they favor censorship, yet most Americans believe that the FCC should keep porn off broadcast television, for example. Copyright and trademark law often serves as a very useful form of censorship. It bars people from ripping off the intellectual property of others. But, technically speaking, plagiarized speech is still speech. And of course, there is the hothouse world of "public health," which requires corporations to say things they don't want to say. Much of this is unobjectionable. There's nothing wrong with truth in advertising and the like. One can get stuck in the weeds of principle, but as a pragmatic matter, forcing companies to tell you what's in the Twinkies they're selling strikes me as a legitimate public good. But it doesn't end there. In the '90s, the Clinton administration subsidized Hollywood to put anti-drug messages in shows such as "ER." Liberal elites were horrified by this, but they had no problem with the feds forcing tobacco companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to convince people not to buy their products. And surely the freedom not to speak is as sacrosanct as the freedom to speak. The biggest source of confusion stems from the left's success in turning personal and "lifestyle" rebellion into political rebellion. We now have in this country a widespread conviction, upheld by law, that smut is protected speech. Strippers have a constitutional right, many believe, to "express" themselves. Indeed, so ingrained is this conviction that every few years or so we have a big culture-war fight over state-sponsored "art" - crucifixes in urine, bullwhip enemas, Virgin Marys in dung, etc. - and the defenders say that the revocation of a subsidy is indistinguishable from "censorship." And this is what makes the debates about campaign finance "reform" so infuriating. The Founding Fathers would have seen absolutely nothing wrong with authorities censoring pornography. But they would be horrified by regulation of political speech. That is the whole point of the First Amendment - to protect political speech. Normally, when we debate civil liberty, we say that the extreme examples need to be allowed so that our core freedoms remain intact. From the pro-choice defense of partial-birth abortion to the NRA's advocacy for the right to own assault weapons, the argument is normally that we have to guard the fringe so that our most cherished liberties remain free. But campaign finance "reform" turns this on its head. Anonymous political speech - today called "stealth ads" - is often censored precisely when it would have an effect: during a campaign. The Federalist Papers, you might recall, were written anonymously. The Vermont law not only restricts what people can give to a campaign, which is bad enough, but it limits what a candidate can spend on his own campaign. A gubernatorial candidate can speak in his own defense until he spends $300,000, and then the state can tell him to shut up. This makes newspapers and television stations the real powerbrokers in the state, not the citizens. I'm no free speech purist. But, since no one else is either, maybe we could borrow from the public-health sector. Let's treat politicians like Twinkies. They have to disclose their ingredients - i.e., where their money is from - but beyond that, let the buyer beware. Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online. Copyright © 2006 Tribune Media Services townhall.com

To: Sully- who wrote (18220)	3/2/2006 5:45:50 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Freedom for the thought we hate by Jeff Jacoby townhall.com Mar 2, 2006 Funny people, the Austrians. If you're Kurt Waldheim -- a former Nazi military officer linked to a genocidal massacre during World War II -- they elect you president. But if you're David Irving -- a British author who claimed that there never was a Nazi genocide during World War II -- they throw you in the slammer. On second thought, not funny at all. Austria disgraced itself when it elected Waldheim president in 1986, apparently unconcerned by the revelation that he had served in a German military unit responsible for mass murder in the Balkans and been listed after the war as a wanted criminal by the UN War Crimes Commission. In a very different way it disgraced itself again last week, when a Vienna court sentenced Irving, a racist and an anti-Semite, to three years in prison for denying that the Nazis annihilated 6 million European Jews. Irving is a man of great intellectual gifts who devoted his life to a grotesque and evil project: rehabilitating the reputation of Hitler and the Third Reich. Necessarily, that meant denying the Holocaust and ridiculing those who suffered in it, and Irving has long done so with relish. ''I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend," he told a Canadian audience in 1991. ''There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around -- in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to say the least -- I'm going to form an association of Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars, or A-S-S-H-O-L-S." Presumably Irving had in mind people like my father, whose arm bears to this day the number A-10502, tattooed there in blue ink on May 28, 1944, the day he and his family were transported to Auschwitz. My father's parents, David and Leah Jakubovic, and his youngest brother and sister, Alice, 8, and Yrvin, 10, were not tattooed; Jews deemed too old or too young to work were sent immediately to the gas chambers. His teenage siblings, Zoltan and Franceska, were tattooed and, like him, put to work as slave laborers. Zoltan was killed within days; Franceska lasted a few months. Of the seven members of the Jakubovic family sent to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, only my father was alive in the spring of 1945. So on a personal level, the prospect of David Irving spending his next three years in a prison cell is something over which I will lose no sleep. He is a repugnant, hate-filled liar, who even as a child (so his twin brother told the Telegraph, a British daily) was enamored of the Nazis and had a pronounced cruel streak. But as a matter of law and public policy, Irving's sentence is deplorable. The opinions he expressed are vile, and his arguments about the Holocaust -- perhaps the most comprehensively researched and documented crime in history -- are ludicrous. But governments have no business criminalizing opinions and arguments, not even those that are vile or ludicrous. To be sure, freedom of speech is not absolute; laws against libel, death threats, and falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater are both reasonable and necessary. But free societies do not throw people in prison for giving offensive speeches or spouting historical lies. Austria, the nation that produced Hitler and cheered the Anschluss, may well believe that its poisoned history requires a strong antidote. Punishing anyone who ''denies, grossly trivializes, approves, or seeks to justify" the Holocaust or other Nazi crimes may seem a small price to pay to keep would-be totalitarians and hatemongers at bay. But a government that can make the expression of Holocaust denial a crime today can make the expression of other offensive opinions a crime tomorrow. Americans, for whom the First Amendment is a birthright, should understand this instinctively. ''If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought," wrote Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1929. ''Not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate." It is popular in some circles to argue that the United States should do certain things -- adopt single-payer health insurance, abolish capital punishment, etc. -- to conform to the practice in other democracies. Those who find that a persuasive argument might consider that Irving is behind bars today because Austria doesn't have a First Amendment. Neither do Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, or Switzerland -- all of which have made Holocaust denial a crime. ''Freedom for the thought we hate" is never an easy sell, but without it there can be no true liberty. David Irving is a scurrilous creep, but he doesn't belong in prison. Austria should find a way to set him free -- not for his sake, but for Austria's. Jeff Jacoby is an Op-Ed writer for the Boston Globe, a radio political commentator, and a contributing columnist for Townhall.com. Copyright © 2006 Boston Globe townhall.com