Allison Bricker

The impetus behind our founders warning government to keep its hands off the press comes not from a love of newspapers per se, but rather the necessity of free and uncensored mass communication. Newspapers just happened to be the only form of mass communication at the time.

Prior to the American Revolution, journalists who dissented against the royal governments, its decrees or public office holders often found themselves imprisoned and their equipment destroyed. One of the most famous trials of a journalist falsely charged is that of John Peter Zenger.

Mr. Zenger published criticisms of New York’s “Royal” Governor, William Crosby. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Zenger found himself imprisoned and charged with libel. His attorney, Philadelphia lawyer, Andrew Hamilton successfully argued that one could not commit libel merely by publishing opinion or fact.¹

It is my opinion that the The first Amendment to our Federal Constitution is too narrowly interpreted. Thus, had the internet, television, or radio, been present during the drafting of our Constitution, it is clear that the Founding Fathers would have extended government prohibitions on censorship to these mediums as well. However, the FEC has already attempted to sidestep the 1st Amendment and censor blogs under the auspices of McCain-Feingold.² Now the FCC is set to rule on the creation of a free nationwide filtered internet under the guise of “protecting the children”.³

It is also obvious by a candid reading of the uncensored historical record, that the plutocrats made massive inroads in their attempt to centralize Federal power from the beginning of the 20th Century. After the passage of the 16th and 17th Amendments, we then see a massive encroachment upon our unalienable rights with the passage of the “Espionage Act of 1917″⁴ and “The Sedition Act of 1918″⁵. The Espionage Act was passed at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson who felt that dissent during war could jeopardize our potential for victory. His flawed logic still exists today and is echoed by hacks like Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT). This belief is a stark contrast to the Founding Fathers who were all too familiar with the oppressive hand of government censorship.

The best known victim of prosecution under the “Espionage Act of 1917″ is Eugene Debs. Mr. Debs had previously run for President as the Socialist Party’s candidate and publicly denounced the U.S. involvement in World War I. He was charged with “obstructing military recruiting” after a speech in 1918. Mr. Debs was found guilty of sedition and sentenced to 10 years in prison. After serving three years, he was pardoned by President Harding and released.⁶ It is immaterial to me that I would vehemently debate and ultimately disagree with Mr. Deb’s socialist philosophy. His imprisonment merely demonstrates the lengths politicians will go to in order to silence opposition.

We the People, have failed to be vigilant as the guardians of our own liberties and we must bear some of the burden. In addition to the Espionage and Sedition Acts, by allowing the FCC to declare the airwaves publicly owned and therefore subject to regulation we do ourselves a massive disservice in pursuit of the truth. The consequences of this massive failure, was to allow the creation of broadcast licensing. By allowing the dissemination of information to be controlled by an ever decreasing amount of individual corporations via licensing we lose our ability to make proper judgments on matters of national importance, such as the invasion of Iraq or the disgusting pursuit of legalized torture by the Executive Branch.

Tyrants and their sycophant sympathizers love to claim that the FCC grants licenses to those who “serve the public interest”. However, the historical record contradicts this altruistic pursuit and in the end it merely grants licenses to those who serve to swell the bank accounts of both the bureaucrats and politicians.⁷

Fellow readers, the internet has allowed for the greatest expanse of news, opinions, and knowledge humanity has ever known. Abuse by some in the form of unsourced or libelous news reports does not justify statements by the traitor to the Constitution known as Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, who in a letter to Google regarding YouTube videos wrote:

“In other words, Islamist terrorist organizations use YouTube to disseminate their propaganda, enlist followers, and provide weapons training - activities that are all essential to terrorist activity. According to testimony received by our Committee, the online content produced by al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations can play a significant role in the process of radicalization, the end point of which is the planning and execution of a terrorist attack.”⁸

There is indeed great danger in the notion that a hack Senator and two-time loser such as Joe Lieberman should be telling a private corporation what should be censored for the sake of national security. The biggest dangers to national security are the power-hungry ambitions of terrorist politicians like Joe Lieberman and his insurgent bureaucratic operatives who seek to wage their personal jihad on the 1st Amendment and our inherent liberties.

Further, President-Elect Obama has selected Eric Holder as Attorney General. The Plutocratic fundamentalist, Eric Holder has also spoken publicly about his desire to censor the internet and further erode the 1st Amendment via his interpretation of “reasonable regulation”.

The time is now upon us, to beat back the ever encroaching hand of government and amend the Constitution to expand the scope of the 1st Amendment, thus ensuring all forms of communication both current and those not yet fathomed are protected from those who seek to stifle the free exchange of ideas and expression.

In closing, my only regret is that I have but one life to blog for my Republic.
Don’t Tread on Me!

Source(s): ¹University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law • ² FEC Agenda Document Number 05-16 • ³ CNET - “FCC Cancels Meeting for Free Interent Vote” • ⁴ Espionage Act of 1917 • ⁵ Sedition Act of 1918 • ⁶ DEBS v UNITED STATES of AMERICA No. 714 • ⁷ McCain Denies Pushing FCC on Paxson Behalf • ⁸ Dialogue with Senator Lieberman on Terrorism Videos

Joseph Marohl

I like Caroline Kennedy, daughter of JFK and big sis to John John—two other people I have a soft spot in my heart for, may they rest in peace. On the few times I’ve heard Kennedy speak, I’ve been reasonably impressed, though it’s hard for me (for a lot of Americans) to really hear her and not her family legacy in US politics.

She’s had a remarkable life—surviving every member of her immediate family, escaping death from an IRA bomb, and inspiring a Neil Diamond hit.

Now she’s interested in taking over the Senate seat soon to be vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of Bill Clinton and soon to be Secretary of State. But she’s in competition with Andrew Cuomo, son of former NY governor Mario Cuomo and ex to Terry Kennedy, Caroline’s cousin. Ultimately the decision will be made by the current NY governor David Paterson, son of a former NY state senator.

One of the reasons (I had several) I voted for Barack Obama instead of Clinton earlier this year was that, deep down, I feel that the United States of America should not operate like a family business. I could have lived with a Clinton nomination, but I really favored Obama for this reason (and several others, as well). I wanted the Bush-Clinton-Bush chain to end with George W.

I would never vote against a candidate merely because she or he has family ties to politics. But this sort of thing does figure into my thinking at election times. It is a matter of some importance to my concept of a working free democracy.

Now that the royal lines of Europe and Asia have either petered out or lost the powers of governance, is there really any need for America, where everybody is “created equal,” so we hear, to perpetuate dynastic politics past its expiration date?

Of course, the UK still has its Queen—but the governmental chief is the Prime Minister, of whom, recently, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Major, and Margaret Thatcher have had only remote family ties to politics—mostly descending from farmers, grocers, entertainers, educators, and clergy—and came into high office through lives of public service and/or law careers.

Aren’t there enough brainy, capable people in the United States—like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton—to fill top government positions without resorting to nepotism?

Do we really believe that bloodlines confer the know-how to lead a democratic nation? I would not want to impugn Caroline Kennedy’s, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s, or Andrew Cuomo’s political savvy or statesmanship by crediting it to genealogy or genetics. I also don’t mean to demean their individual accomplishments by assuming that everything they have achieved is due to nepotism. And yet what, apart from their names, distinguishes them from other qualified persons with political ambition?

Have Kennedy, Clinton, and Bush become brand names like Pepsi or McDonald’s? Certainly, name recognition is a selling point for politicians campaigning for elected office—but what advantage does it offer for political appointments?

Last month the citizens voted Barack Hussein Obama into the nation’s highest office in spite of his name (which, let’s face it, was no selling point, as the Republicans so often liked to emphasize). Like Bill Clinton, he was the son of a single mother—the paternal namesake being absent for most of his life. In many respects, unlike either Bush 1 or Bush 2, he represents the American dream—of assimilation, of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, of rising without the help of family or family connections.

So now that “change” seems so necessary and, for the first time in decades, so possible, why must we turn to brand names and/or dynasties for leadership?

Good luck to you, Caroline, and if you make it to the Senate next year, I hope it’s because you’re the best person for the job—and not just because of your tragically romantic name.

Joseph Marohl

I embrace the label “atheist” reluctantly because it smells of militant reaction to the monotheistic religions that long ago turned militaristic and, somewhat more recently, reactionary. The word sounds angry, when I’d much prefer that it sound simply bored and uninterested. So, usually, I use the word “irreligious” to describe myself.

Of course, there are matters I am angry about—homophobia, imperialism, wage slavery, subjugation of women’s bodies, destruction of the environment (on oh so many levels), child abuse (also on oh so many levels), war, torture, terror—matters on which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have, at their best, looked with blithe, big-hearted condescension and, at their (usual) worst, have sided with, inspired, inflamed, and offered comfort to the oppressors.

Christians complain that “Christ” has been taken out of “Christmas.” This is more or less the bottom of the barrel as far as martyrdoms go, and Christians have been scraping this wood for a long time (1). It almost hurts to have to tell them, as they nail their hands to their Christmas trees, that Christians stole the holiday from the pagans (2)—and that their puritanical and more fundamentalist brothers have banned celebrating Christmas altogether (3).

I like Christmas well enough. It’s some days off work—and God knows the greedy capitalists would have us at the grindstone 24/7/365 if they could. And, now that both my parents are dead—and I have no brothers or sisters, no husband or wife, no children, I am relatively unburdened by the family sniping and the burden of obligatory gift giving that others (with good reason) so often complain about.

For the past five years, I celebrate Christmas the first Saturday of every December. I invite some friends over and we eat crab cakes, drink wine (and sometimes absinthe), get high, and bake cookies—either following recipes (the orthodox wing) or freestyle mixing shit together (the heretics)—the heretics have more fun, but orthodox cookies are generally edible (4).

I also buy the guests some small tokens of the season—ornaments, hard candies and mints, holiday music, dreidls, DVDs of Bad Santa and It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a “small, good thing,” to cite Raymond Carver, to share like this with people I enjoy—no burden or obligation at all.

Generally I am in favor of gift giving, not to help or save the economy, but to express some measure of transcendent connection with the people I care about. (I am even a bigger fan of birthdays than Christmas.)

Gifts are—or should be—symbols for sharing oneself. Gifting should not be competitive, expected, obligatory, or too deeply read into. Gifts should be selected on the basis of one’s feelings or hopes for the gifted. They should be wrapped, if possible, because wrapping can suggest the mystery of our fellow feeling, and unwrapping can suggest the opening up of the self to others.

I like the word “Christmas.” It does not too heavily intone Christianity for me, as an atheist—no more than “Thursday” reminds me of the Norse god Thor or “Saturday,” of the Roman god Saturn. As I am not a Christian, I don’t object to “Xmas,” and as I am not an idiot, I recognize that “Xmas” is simply an abbreviation of “Christmas,” “X” long being an abbreviation for “Christ” among monks and scholars, either to save time or to show reverence (like the ancient Jews and the later Muslims who eschew naming or portraying their God).

Atheist Christmas seems so much richer and dreamily loving than Christian Christmas. Still, I enjoy nativity scenes and “Silent Night,” in pretty much the same way (and to pretty much the same extent) as I do The Nutcracker and Peter Pan, with a willing suspension of disbelief to provide only the finest, lightest crystals of magical thinking to dust and sweeten the long, dark nights of winter and the long, dark night of humanity’s intolerance, self-righteousness, cruelty, ignorance, and greed.

***

(1) Think of the outrage many Christians felt when Phyllis Burgess, 69 and Christian, protesting against gay marriage at a pro-gay marriage rally, had a Styrofoam cross yanked from her hands by fire-breathing homos and saw it broken and dashed to the ground. This was no spiritual release from the heavy burden of Styrofoam; this was, of course, anti-Christian persecution—which, as Mike Huckabee instructed the women on The View, is analogous to the pistol-whipping of Matthew Shepard (and the beatings and deaths of many, many others—unavoidably linked with Christendom) or the merely mischievous exclusion of thousands of queer Americans from the legal, civil privileges of marriage.

(2) Namely Pope Julius 1 in the fourth century—Isis worship, Saturnalia, and Yule all have earlier claims to December 25—and the Druidic custom of worshipping nature by decorating trees and logs was ripped off somewhat later in history. Julius also squashed the Arians, who opposed the worship of Jesus (as, apparently, did Jesus—John 14.28; John 17.20-26—and possibly the apostle Paul—1 Cor. 8.5-6).

(3) Reed, Kevin. “Christmas: An Historical Survey Regarding Its Origins and Opposition to It.” 1995. Still Waters Revival Books.

(4) I belong to the orthodox wing, but with liberal tendencies, permitting myself to substitute walnuts for pecans or dark for milk chocolate. My Bible is Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book (1963; Old Testament) and the 2005 Martha Stewart Holiday Cookies magazine (New).

Allison Bricker

GOOGLE, Inc. acknowledged this week that its employees do have the ability to alter search results and rankings. For a company who claims their mantra to be “Do no Evil” this is a troubling admission, albeit not too surprising. Most are already aware that Google along with a consortium of other companies helps the Chinese government (and now Australia and Italy) censor the internet in a scheme dubbed “The Great Firewall of China.”

However, for a company which once claimed to rely solely on their proprietary “PigeonRank”¹ system, a computer generated algorithm developed by Google, Inc.’s founders, it sort of makes their disclaimer at the bottom of the Google news page disingenuous.

From Google News:

“The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. The time or date displayed reflects when an article was added to Google News.”²

During the LeWeb ‘08 conference in Paris, France in an interview with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Marissa Mayer, GOOGLE Vice-President of Search and User Experience said:

“..I do think there is a possibility of us looking in aggregate when we see large signals [in GOOGLE Search Wiki], you know, a thousand people deleted this result from a search, those will start to be signals that could be used in search.”³

While Google is a private company and no way bound to free speech as a public government entity would be, the fact that the company admits to the likelihood of fudging search results is a substantial backtrack on the company’s previous statements. Google rose to capture 60% market share on the false promise of unfettered search results by algorithm.

This also is troubling since GOOGLE owns YouTube the video sharing site, which is constantly under accusation by users of mischief regarding view counters, ratings, honors, etcetera. Combine the search engine dominance, video dominance, RSS dominance through Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner, and being in the final stages of acquiring DIGG⁴ for “somewhere around 200 million” and we see the old-media business model fully employed by a “new media” behemoth.

It is my opinion that as the consolidation and roll out of Web 2.0 continues, now is the time for a competitor to rise up and keep GOOGLE from obtaining monopoly. Therefore, those of us who enjoy the open uncensored access the web has to offer must make use of upstarts like BreakTheMatrix.com and Zuula.com.

Source(s): ¹ Google Inc., “Our Search - Google Technology” • ² News.Google.com - Disclaimer • ³TechCrunch “Marissa Mayer At Le Web: The (Almost) Complete Interview” • ⁴ The Independent Online - Google close to acquiring Digg for ‘$200m’

Allison Bricker

Government television, PBS, has begrudgingly agreed to air “Torturing Democracy”. However, the program will air on January 21st, 2009, one day after President Bush officially leaves office. Truth be told it should have been shown at its earliest availability, as the abuse evidenced within the documentary is enough to make one’s stomach turn, yet must be repudiated by our nation as wholly unacceptable. The evidence presented makes me ashamed to be an individual living in Neo-America. Everything our founders fought so hard to secure, has been squandered away. Not only have we allowed our inherent liberties to be legislatively curtailed in a post 9/11 world, almost silently the Bush Administration and its demented perverse sycophants, wholly jettisoned every last shred of our Republic’s decency.

The thought occurred to me as I watched memo after memo and heard line after line of official interrogation detail, that had I been taken captive or kidnapped via a rendition, that my retaliation to such treatment would be to bash my head against the wall until I was dead. Shortly thereafter, actual film from inside Abu Ghraib shows a detainee doing exactly this after being subjected to a variety of acts no reasonably decent person could even fathom.

Many of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” come from the C.I.A.’s 1963 “KUBARK”¹ manual which was so severe and inhumane that it was originally shelved. That is at least until Afghanistan, when it was dusted off and its techniques reemployed on enemy combatants. Techniques range from multiyear isolation, total sleep deprivation, water-boarding, to threats of repeatedly raping or killing one’s family members all in the hopes of obtaining a confession. In fact some of the techniques employed date back to punishments inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition as well as those of the former Soviet Union’s K.G.B.

Experienced soldiers and other military personnel will tell you, torturing only yields whatever will make the interrogator stop the abuse. Nonetheless and even though 500 of the approximately 700 to 800 detainees at Guantanamo have been released and never charged, countless were subjected to these techniques of dehumanization and legalized torture thanks to the sociopaths within the Bush Administration.

If we are to retain and restore the image of America, we must begin by forever outlawing this type of treatment in precise words so as not to give any room for a future John Yoo or Alberto Gonzales. Secondly, we must demand as decent law abiding Americans that all of those in the Bush Administration including the President, be tried and found guilty of Treason for their gross negligence both to their oaths of office and torturous war crimes; legalized, advanced, and committed on their behalf.

The film may be viewed in its entirety ahead of the scheduled January 21st, 2009 broadcast at TorturingDemocracy.org Additionally, their website has every single Presidential Directive, memo, and interrogation detail cited in the movie for your personal review.

Source(s): TorturingDemocracy.org “Torturing Democracy the Movie” • Hamden -v- Rumsfeld et al, No. 05-184. Argued March 28, 2006–Decided June 29, 2006 • ¹The National Security Archive at George Washington University