Moe Lane

There’s something fascinating about this article from the New York Times on the Citizens United case.  The author (Adam Liptak) noticed that the decision removed certain onerous restrictions on political speech, yet left current mandates on disclosure of funding largely intact.  ‘Resolving’ the two led Liptak to this:

The two parts of Citizens United are not hard to harmonize. Citizens United takes the libertarian view that people may be trusted to evaluate the messages they hear and need not be sheltered from the responsibility of critical thinking. The theory is as applicable to the marketing of soda and cigarettes as it is to that of political candidates.

[snip]

The five-justice majority in Citizens United said that speech about politics is at the core of what the First Amendment protects, that more speech is better than less and that the government has no business deciding who can speak or how much.

It is a small step from that reasoning to saying, as eight justices did, that it helps to know who is advancing the ideas you are evaluating.

(more…)

As I understand this stalking case, the guy’s facing criminal charges for cyberstalking, which in this case seems to be somewhere between ‘being a relentless jerk’ and ‘there may be actual worms in his head.’  I understand free-speech concerns, but Twitter isn’t actually public space: it’s a private forum where people are permitted to register and participate without paying a fee.  And I’m not being pedantic, here: it’s that distinction that allows site moderators to moderate sites*.

Which is not to say that, say, Eugene Volokh is wrong to question the law itself.  The defendant seems to have avoided sufficiently explicit and credible threats of violence, at least from a legal point of view (warning: I am not a lawyer); and I favor a high bar for that sort of thing.  But I think that it makes more sense for Twitter to seek legal redress against somebody who is deliberately abusing their communications network to harass other people.  For that matter, isn’t this sort of thing more properly a case for the civil court system anyway?

Moe Lane

*This is, as I can attest personally, a distinction that is lost on a lot of ‘libertarians.’

A federal court has come to the fairly common sense realization that when the Constitution says “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” it kind of means it:

A federal court in Alexandria, Va. on Thursday struck down a federal ban on corporate campaign contributions, in a case with potentially dramatic ramifications for a campaign finance regulatory system under siege by legal and regulatory attacks.

The short version: this case draws on the landmark US Supreme Court free speech case Citizens United, which partially revoked the odious McCain-Feingold Act, which was easily one of the most blatantly unconstitutional laws that Congress has passed in recent memory.  Since CU ruled that you couldn’t muzzle a group under the cynical guise of ‘campaign finance reformed,’ the judge in the case has determined that a group may make the same kind of contributions to a specific candidate as a group that an individual can.  That effectively means that, say, the AFL-CIO can give Barack Obama five grand directly next year (half for the primary, half for the general), perfectly legally*.

This will be appealed, of course: the usual suspects are already making noise about how this case violates the last Supreme Court decision-but-one on the matter.  Of course, it’s the ‘but-one’ that’s the kicker…

Moe Lane

*Mind you, that particular group plans to give that particular candidate considerably more, ideally (for them) in a form that will not result in actual convictions for money-laundering.  Frankly, I think that it’d be easier all around if we had less restrictions on maximum contributions and more requirements on transparency.

I was looking for fodder for a couple of light and fluffy posts, but I probably shouldn’t let this pass by without comment.

In an oped in USA Today, John Brennan — Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism — responds to critics of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies by saying “Politically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda.”

The title of the op-ed is “We need no lectures” – which, given the fact that this administration rather stupidly read a foreign terrorist his Miranda rights, and has been trying to wiggle out of the consequences of it ever since, is self-evidently not true – is ably enough pushed back on here and here by AoSHQ, so I’ll just repeat something that I’ve written before.  The oddity of the current administration is that it’s as if the Democrats went out and found somebody who was just like what they thought George W Bush was – only, in this case?

It’s all true.

Weird.

Moe Lane

Comes from Matt Welch over at Reason (although he wrote it for CNN), and it should serve as a useful answer for everybody who wants to play “Let’s try to scare the right-wing by talking about scaaaaaaary foreign corporations:”

“Let’s boil it down to the essential words: Political documentary, banned, government.”

You can safely assume that anybody not taking the point is probably not going to. One way, or the other.

Crossposted to RedState.