Slippery Slopes-- Freedom Of Speech And Facebook And Trumpanzee

No jail for the incendiary crap Alex Jones puts on social media. In fact, free speech purists are freaking out that his garbage has been banned by Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, etc. Friday, Roy Gutterman, a professor and free speech advocate wrote that kicking Alex Jones off Facebook "may have opened a new, potentially dangerous door in the digital world where free speech conflicts with good taste, legitimate information and even downright human decency. Jones shot to notoriety through his far-right wing website, InfoWars, which touted outrageous conspiracy theories, misinformation and vitriolic material that many have interpreted as hateful. Though hate speech is neither illegal nor well-defined in the United States, Jones' outrageous and offensive postings have found him removed from Facebook's community of 2.2 billion users."

It is not easy to defend Jones' brand of vitriol and conspiracy theories. In the ever-evolving debate over "fake news," misinformation and hate speech, Jones contributes to all three. Some argue that this sort of content adds nothing to the discussion of important public issues and should not have a place in the marketplace of ideas. Elements of that argument may be valid, but it also diminishes the role of such material in the marketplace. It fuels debate, forces us to confront varying and sometimes ugly viewpoints and counter them with more speech.

...Even with the Facebook ban, Jones will not be without an audience or devoted followers. He still has his website, app and radio platforms and a legion of fans. But Facebook's ban raises concerns, regardless of how civil society may view Jones. By trying to make Facebook a safe space, devoid of offensive or hateful speech, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is almost single-handedly deciding to silence unpopular speech.

In another era, it might not have been so unusual to freeze out a host of speakers and ignore some hot-button, controversial or political issues by not covering them in the newspaper or on television, or closing down editorial pages sympathetic to their causes. This was a dominant tactic in the South during the fight for civil rights, where speakers were both censored and punished for their political views.

The internet, however, has equalized the media landscape, providing speakers, writers and consumers with innumerable platforms for expression and communication. Social media is an integral part of the equation.

But when a social media behemoth like Facebook decides to ban certain players, no matter how offensive, we are treading precariously close to the slippery slope. Once these platforms start excluding some speakers today, the question is, who will be excluded tomorrow?

He concludes that "If we truly believe in free speech, the marketplace of ideas must be open to even the most offensive speakers." I was awarded a defender of free speech award by the ACLU once. And this week I was happy when I saw that the moron fake president declassified self-serving Nunes memos on the Steele dossier that now make it incumbent on the FBI to declassify to declassify the reality-based memos. Josh Gerstein wrote that "the FBI has lost its authority to rebuff Freedom of Information Act requests about the bureau’s efforts to verify the report’s intelligence linking Trump to Russia during the 2016 campaign, a federal judge ruled on Thursday."

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta previously blessed the FBI’s decision to refuse such FOIA requests by declining to confirm whether any records exist about aspects of its handling of the hotly contested dossier, prepared by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The judge ruled in January that Trump’s tweets about the dossier did not require the FBI and other intelligence agencies to be more responsive to public records requests on the issue.

However, Mehta said Trump’s actions in February to greenlight the release of one memo from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) and a separate memo from the panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, left untenable the FBI’s position of resisting disclosure.

“It remains no longer logical nor plausible for the FBI to maintain that it cannot confirm nor deny the existence of documents” related to attempts to verify information in the dossier, Mehta wrote in a 13-page opinion.

This is the kind of free speech the Founding fathers were talking about when they drafted the constitution's first amendment (which guarantees freedom of expression by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak freely.) I have to admit I don't grok Facebook. I get annoyed when people try to contact me on it and ask them to e-mail me, text me or call me on the phone. I just find Facebook annoying, random and filled with unreliable information-- largely by fools for fools. That said, I was shocked to learn that people go the jail-- real jail, not virtual jail-- for things they write on Facebook.

Business Insider gave 7 examples of young Facebook users who went to prison for stuff they wrote on Facebook. I can even understand a couple of them-- one guy who claimed-- albeit sarcastically-- that he was going to shoot up a kindergarten. Two other guys were sentenced to 4 years each for trying to encourage a riot. "Many people exercise poor judgement on Facebook," wrote Alyson Shontell, "a site where Freedom of Speech may no longer apply. Recently, young Facebook users who have posted controversial status messages have ended up in jail. Sometimes the messages they typed were actually offensive. Other times they were jokes gone terribly wrong. One teen was even arrested for posting violent rap lyrics. Most of the time, the Facebook offenders are impulsive. They type before they think, and lately they've had to pay serious consequences."

This one seems really silly though:

Cameron D'Ambrosio, 18, is a high school student who is also an aspiring rapper. The Massachusettes native posted some of his lyrics on Facebook and was initially arrested without bail. He was told what he posted was a "terroristic threat." The lyrics read: "F--- a boston bombinb [sic] wait til u see the sh-- I do, I'ma be famous for rapping, and beat every murder charge that comes across me."

When the prosector took him before a grand jury for an indictment, they refused and threw out the "case." That really is government trying to interfere with free speech and expression.

Raise your hand if you're looking forward to a choice between one of the GOP presidential dwarves and President Obama

President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivering a "fireside chat," around the time of the January 1944 State of the Union address, in which he enumerated "a second Bill of Rights," consisting of "economic truths" he said "have become accepted as self-evident" -- though not by most present-day "Democrats"

"On March 28, 2011, President Obama was given a "transparency award" from five 'open government' organizations: OMB Watch, the National Security Archive, the Project on Government Oversight, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and OpenTheGovernment.org. Ironically -- and quite likely in response to growing public criticism regarding the Obama Administration's lack of transparency -- heads of the five organizations gave their award to Obama in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House."

-- opening of a WarIsACrime.org post,
"Rescind Obama's 'Transparency Award' Now!"

by Ken

As you may have noticed, our coverage yesterday of the New Hamphshire Republican presidential debate came by way of China, and let me tell you, I was plenty grateful to Howie -- not to mention relieved -- for tackling it from the other side of the globe. As I wrote him after the fact, I really did feel that we ought to say something about this, er, event, but the chances of me watching, or even reading, what this rogues' gallery has to say are the proverbial slim to none.

Here they are again: your NH GOP presidential field.

Here I was thinking the 2008 Republican presidential field had hit rock bottom. I mean, really, could you imagine a lamer collection of losers fancying themselves presidential timber? Well, now you don't have to imagine it. I give you the 2012 Republican presidential field, in which anyone caught saying anything sane, or anything that can be twisted into anything that might resemble something that could be said by someone not entirely insane, is subject to immediate ejection, except by personal dispensation obtained via prostrating yourself before Rush Limbaugh and claiming you really didn't say it, or mean it, and in any case will never say or mean it again.

So we have a "front runner" about whom the only thing that can be said for certain is that he will never say what he actually believes on any subject, but only what he judges to be most acceptable to a mob of screeching ignoramuses and lunatics. I suppose there's some entertainment value in spectating what Sahil Kapur in The New Republic calls "The Campaign Within the Conservative Movement to Take Him Down." But there's not much entertainment value, when both sides are this repellent.

However, I can understand the sentiment of a colleague who reacted to this quote, "If the guy at the top of the ticket goes against the free market, goes against what we believe in, then we’re not really motivated by just getting a Republican in office,” by saying that he actually admires the attitude, that "this is how you move the conversation in your direction," something we on our side of the political spectrum are all kinds of terrible at doing.

And with the Democrats seemingly ever more hopelessly ensorceled the chimera of "centrism" (a more benign-sounding name for corporate conservatism) -- weren't we already confident, months before the 2010 electoral debacle, that the Village principals would "learn" wildly wrong lessons from it? -- that brings us back to the other half of the 2012 presidential equation, reminding us that however used we become to describing each successive election-cycle choice we're offered as the worst ever, we still manage to be surprised when the next one is even worse.

Far be it from me to suggest that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans, or that the difference isn't important enough to matter. Look how well that thinking worked in the case of the Republican recapture of the House of Representatives. But that doesn't mean I have to like it when Democrats offer a merely less crackpotty and rhetorically less savage rendering of what is in so many areas essentially the same policies. And case in point is this business of President Obama and "transparency." It does seem true that transparency is something he likes to talk about. Practicing it, however, is something else.

My goodness, is it really possible that nobody involved in the bestowal of this award at the end of March noticed the disconnect represented by bestowing it in secret? It's understandable that the administration wouldn't want to encourage media busybodies to go rooting around its actual record on transparency, but how did those five organizations that bestowed the award let themselves get snookered into doing it under cover of darkness?

It's a symbol of the administration's cynicism or ineptitude (take your pick) on transparency that they've actually gifted a low-life thug like House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa with an issue, deficient governmental Freedom of Information Act response, to bludgeon them with. It should go without saying that this would never happen if it was a Republican administration thumbing its nose at FOIA response (c.f. "Bush regime, eight years of"), in the same way that Republican voices would never be heard moaning about a Republican president taking on war powers unimagined ore even specifically barred by the Constitution. Still, the fact is that the Obama adminstration, either by misadventure or conviction, has found itself in the role of transparency opponent.

Here is just the start of the bill of particulars "drafted by FBI Whistleblowers Sibel Edmonds and Coleen Rowley," as part of an appeal to the five award-bestowing organizations, urging them to take the award back, an appeal that's already been signed onto by two dozen individual whistleblowers and more than two dozen organizations. (You'll find links as well as the rest of the list onsite.)

• President Obama has not decreased but has dramatically increased governmental secrecy! According to a new report to the president by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) -- the federal agency that provides oversight of the government's security classification system -- the cost of classification for 2010 has reached over $10.17 billion. That's a 15 percent jump from the previous year, and the first time ever that secrecy costs have surpassed $10 billion. Last month, ISOO reported that the number of original classification decisions generated by the Obama administration in 2010 was 224,734 -- a 22.6 percent jump from the previous year. See "The Price of Secrecy, Obama Edition".
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• There were 544,360 requests for information last year under the Freedom of Information Act to the 35 biggest federal agencies -- 41,000 requests more than the year before. Yet the bureaucracy responded to 12,400 fewer requests than the prior year, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.

• Obama has invoked baseless and unconstitutional executive secrecy to quash legal inquiries into secret illegalities more often than any predecessor. The list of this President's invocations of the "state secrets privilege" has already resulted in shutting down lawsuits involving the National Security Agency's illegal wiretapping -- Jewel vs. NSA and Shubert vs. Obama; extraordinary rendition and assassination -- Anwar al-Aulaqi; and illegal torture -- Binyam Mohamed.

• Ignoring his campaign promise to protect government whistleblowers, Obama’s presidency has amassed the worst record in US history for persecuting, prosecuting, and jailing government whistleblowers and truth-tellers. President Obama's behavior has been in stark contrast to his campaign promises which included live streaming meetings online and rewarding whistleblowers. Obama’s Department of Justice is twisting the 1917 Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks -- more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined.

• The Obama DOJ's prosecution of former NSA official Thomas Drake who, up till June 9, faced 35 years in prison for having blown the whistle on the NSA's costly and unlawful warrantless monitoring of American citizens typifies the abusive practices made possible through expansive secrecy agreements and threats of prosecution.

• President Obama has set a powerful and chilling example for potential whistleblowers through the abuse and torture of Bradley Manning, whose guilt he has also publicly stated prior to any trial by his, Obama's, military subordinates.

• Obama is the only president who has reenacted Fahrenheit 451 by actually having his agency collect and burn a book due to a never-justified classification excuse: Lt. Col Tony Shaffer’s Operation Dark Heart.

And the list goes on, to cover FBI harassment of antiwar activists; instituting a a secret assassination program; codifying by executive order the government program of secret kidnapping, imprisonment, rendition, and torture; going after reporters to reveal sources; protecting the secrecy of White House visitors' logs; aggressively pressuring foreign governments to refrain from investigating possible U.S. government crimes in matters of international law (consistent, it should be added, with its own refusal to do so).

We're all well aware by now that the hard-core "centrists" to whom the president almost always listens (and why not? they're his people), even beyond their generally visceral hatred of everyone to their left, believe there's a substantial net electoral plus from not just ignoring but actually spitting on us, that there are more votes to be gained from the phantom "middle" than lost from us crazy radicals. In reality, their only electoral hope is that the Republicans make themselves so egregious to voters that they'll give their votes to Democrats as a slightly-less-odious alternative.

And just as we've seen in numerous elections since 2010, starting with the Virginia gubernatorial disaster, voters who believe in core Democratic values will be left sitting on their hands on Election Day. Maybe President Obama doesn't care, since he stands a good chance of being reelected anyway. But I sure don't see much hope of preventing the all but inevitable Republican take over of the Senate, or of making the House Republican majority any less intractable. (Maybe the president doesn't care about that either, since the compromises he'll be "forced" to accept --as with the crippling of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- seem to be compromises he's eager to make anyway. And with that implacably hostile Congress, how can he be expected to accomplish any of the things Democratic voters assume, wishfully, he really wants to?)

WHAT DO I MEAN BY "CORE DEMOCRATIC VALUES"?

I would encourage you to take a list at the 1944 State of the Union address of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which Howie, again from China, appended to my post yesterday on the Congressional Progressive Caucus's summer 2011 12-city Speakout for Good Jobs Now "listening tour," which kicks off Saturday in Minneapolis. In that speech, you'll recall, the president enunciated some points that are part of "a second Bill of Rights," economic rights, which he insisted had already "become accepted as self-evident." I know this post is running long, but I think it's important to look again at the rights he insisted were included:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

"All of these rights," the president continued, "spell security."

And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America's own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens.

For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

Can you imagine how the Republican scum in Congress would react if a president dared to give such a State of the Union speech today? More important, can you imagine how most of the Democrats in Congress would react?

Howie refers a lot in his DWT posts to the betrayal by today's Democrats of "core Democratic values," and I suspect some readers sometimes wonder what values he's talking about, or whether they're really "core" values. Well, here they are.

On that day in January 1944, with World War II still raging, and with a whole reelection battle still to be waged (successfully, of course), I don't know whether President Roosevelt knew how close he was to the end -- just 15 months, almost to the day. But on that day he left a powerful testament. It's a shame so few Democrats choose to accept, let alone honor, that legacy.

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An Important Question-- Maybe An Existential Question-- For America: Can Issa Be Trusted?

I thought I'd follow up on yesterday's tweet (above) with a more detailed explanation. As we pointed out, it's worth being very suspicious about who exactly Rep. Darrell Issa is and how he-- a low grade car thief, gun-totin' thug and arsonist-for-profit-- wound up as the richest man in Congress. Right-wingers have been warning that Issa is a kind of Manchurian candidate for Arab terrorism. That may be a stretch... but that he's a danger to American democracy isn't, not by a long shot. This weekend Eric Lipton in the NY Times pointed to a development that shows why giving actual power to a deranged, irresponsible sociopath like Issa-- whether he's a conscious agent for our destruction or not-- is antithetical to a thriving democracy. Issa just took over the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and he's demanding "the names of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, business executives, journalists and others who have requested copies of federal government documents in recent years."

[H]is extraordinary request worries some civil libertarians. It “just seems sort of creepy that one person in the government could track who is looking into what and what kinds of questions they are asking,” said David Cuillier, a University of Arizona journalism professor and chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee at the Society of Professional Journalists. “It is an easy way to target people who he might think are up to no good.”

One of America's most intrepid and well-respected investigative reporters, Russ Baker, asks if Issa's mug is the new face of Big Brother. He calls Issa's demand "an ominous development that is likely to pass almost unnoticed" and warns that "it’s hard to accept that at face value, without at least considering the corporate interests that backed the GOP takeover in November, and Issa’s ascension to this powerful position."

The very short Times article doesn’t get into the extent to which Issa and his allies are indebted to corporations that have a strong interest in finding out about inquiries that could affect their interests. Like reporters nosing around into the military-industrial complex, or trying to find out about stalled prosecutions of egregious polluters.

If, indeed, Issa is just super concerned about openness in government, that’s fine. But it’s not clear that a member of Congress-- and a highly politicized, partisan one at that-- ought to be the one to receive such sensitive information.

Can Issa be trusted? Well, consider this New York Magazine summary of a New Yorker dig into Issa:

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza has taken a long look into the often shady past of California congressman Darrell Issa, the House Oversight Committee chairman who intends to unleash a flurry of investigations on the Obama administration. Issa has, “among other things, been indicted for stealing a car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, and accused by former associates of burning down a building.” “Everyone has a past,” Issa tells Lizza. This is true. But not everyone has fired an employee by “plac[ing] a box on the table, and open[ing] it to reveal a gun.”

Is Baker being paranoid to think Issa could possibly put the interests of GOP corporate donors ahead of a value like, say, democracy? Absolutely not and the best source of all is... Darrell Issa himself. Last year, asked what he’d do if GOP took the House, he told 400 applauding party members and Republican donors during a dinner at the chocolate-themed Hershey Lodge, "That will make all the difference in the world. I won't use it to have corporate America live in fear that we're going to subpoena everything. I will use it to get the very information that today the White House is either shredding or not producing." And I'd guess Paul Krugman doesn't trust Issa much either. He ran this tangentially-related post this morning in the NY Times: Inquiry And Intimidation. I think he's talking about Issa here; the McCarthy line is a dead giveaway.

I haven’t seen this reported elsewhere-- but Republicans in Congress are planning to investigate the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, looking for evidence of corruption and wrongdoing.

It’s absurd, of course: a tiny commission with a small budget didn’t offer much scope for corruption.

But what this is really about is intimidation-- in much the same way that investigations of climate scientists are about intimidation.

What the GOP wants is to make people afraid even to do research that produces conclusions they don’t like. And they don’t stop at trying to undermine the research-- they go after the researchers personally. The goal is to create an environment in which analysts and academics are afraid to look into things like financial-industry malfeasance or climate change, for fear that some subcommittee will either dig up or invent dirt about their private lives.

McCarthy had nothing on these guys.