Tag Archives: Censorship

79-year-old arrested for handing out “Jury Info” fliers

open quoteJulian P. Heicklen, a 79-year-old retired chemistry professor, has often stood on a plaza outside the United States Courthouse in Manhattan, holding a “Jury Info” sign and handing out brochures that advocate jury nullification, the controversial view that if jurors disagree with a law, they may ignore their oaths to follow it and may acquit a defendant who violated it.

Then, last year, federal prosecutors had Mr. Heicklen indicted, charging that his activity violated the law against jury tampering.

. . . .

“No legal system could long survive,” they added, “if it gave every individual the option of disregarding with impunity any law which by his personal standard was judged morally untenable.”close quote (Read more)

Rating agencies making sovereign debt look bad? Criminalize rating agencies!

EU Considers Ban on Country Ratings

open quoteThis week alone has seen a ratings downgrade for Spain as well as a threat by agencies to review France’s AAA status — and the markets have taken notice. Once again, it would seem, ratings agencies are making things difficult for European countries.

Now, the European Union is considering doing something about it.

European Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier is considering a move to ban the agencies from publishing outlook reports on EU countries entangled in a crisis, according to a report in Thursday’s issue of the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper.

In an internal draft of a reform to an EU law applying to ratings agencies obtained by the paper, Barnier proposes providing the new EU securities authority, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), with the right to “temporarily prohibit” the publication of forecasts of a country’s liquidity.close quote (read more)

Un-flipping believable.

Government Orders You Tube To Censor Protest Videos

open quoteIn a frightening example of how the state is tightening its grip around the free Internet, it has emerged that You Tube is complying with thousands of requests from governments to censor and remove videos that show protests and other examples of citizens simply asserting their rights, while also deleting search terms by government mandate.

The latest example is You Tube’s compliance with a request from the British government to censor footage of the British Constitution Group’s Lawful Rebellion protest, during which they attempted to civilly arrest Judge Michael Peake at Birkenhead county court.close quote (Read more)

The New Israeli Anti-Boycott Law

open quoteThe U.S. State Department responded Tuesday to the new anti-boycott law passed in Israel, saying that the freedom to organize and protest is a democratic value Israel and the U.S. have long shared.

. . . .

When asked to comment on the anti-boycott law, the U.S. State Department said the law was an “Israeli internal matter” but also hinted its criticism by pointing out the right to peaceful protest in democratic countries.

. . . .

J Street condemned the Knesset’s passage of the bill as well as a “clear and unabashed violation of the fundamental democratic precept of freedom of speech.”

According to newly passed law, a person or an organization calling for the boycott of Israel, including the settlements, can be sued by the boycott’s targets without having to prove that they sustained damage. The court will then decide how much compensation is to be paid. close quote (Read more from haaretz.com)

Israel passes new Nakba Law

open quoteIsrael’s parliament passed a measure on Tuesday enabling the denial of state funding to institutions that question the country’s existence as a Jewish state, in a move criticised as targetting an Arab minority.

The so-called Nakba Law, using the Arabic word for “catastrophe” which is how many Palestinians regard the founding of Israel, passed by a vote of 37 to 25 after an angry debate among right and left-wing lawmakers.close quote (Read more from ahram.org)

Dick Morris’s notable exclusion

So, if you had to guess which much-discussed potential Republic presidential candidate was excluded from Dick Morris’s review of contenders, who would it be?

Here’s a clue from this Hannity interview:

Still confused?

Here Peter Schiff interview Dick Morris, who quits the interview, and mentions the unmentioned man — RON PAUL.

I think this interview reveals that Dick Morris, like most Republicans favored by big media, wants to replace Obama’s socialism with their own brand of socialism.

So it should be no surprise that Morris ignores true anti-socialist, Ron Paul. Ignoring Dr. Paul seems to be a common tactic:

Gallup Poll excludes Ron Paul

Rasmussen excludes Ron Paul

Washington Post’s debate commentary 2007 excluded Ron Paul

Glenn “Bandwagon” Beck’s poll excluded Ron Paul

BBC’s election guide excluded Ron Paul

And the list goes on, and on, and on.

Check out my two earlier posts for more:
Censoring Ron Paul (then and now)
Censoring Ron Paul – Why the rEVOLution will not be televised

FCC’s Copps calls on agency to address decline of ‘real journalism’

open quote

Michael Copps

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps made a case for a government hand in media policy in a speech to the FCBA on Tuesday.

“The commission can act now. It should have acted on the media before now. I am disappointed that it has not,” he said.

The decline of “real journalism” justifies federal involvement, according to Copps. “The news is suffering from a bad case of substance abuse,” he said.

The Democratic commissioner pointed to Fox News’ Bernie Goldberg and Bill O’Reilly as examples of the problem with today’s media landscape, saying the pair has taken his own words out of context.

“What you and I are getting these days is too much opinion based on opinion and too little news based on fact,” Copps said.

The key going forward, according to Copps, is “making sure there is media about, and originating from, the local communities a station serves.” […]

The commissioner also reiterated his call for a “Public Value Test” as part of the broadcasting license renewal, a process controlled by the FCC.

We have, as a country, tolerated the multiple infringements on “Congress shall pass no law” for far too long. No government official should ever be in the business of enforcing quality of journalism, and when one tries, he–and the agency he represents–should be run out of Washington on a rail. This is appalling on every level, and the fact that there’s a journalistic constituency for it–read this awful commencement speech last year by Columbia Journalism School Dean and New Yorker essayist Nicholas Lemann for a taste–makes me deeply ashamed of my chosen profession.close quote (Read more from reason.com)

The Government’s Case Against Julian Assange Is Falling Apart

Surprise, surprise.

open quoteIf you spend any time at all reading about Bradley Manning, the young U.S. Army private who stands accused of providing WikiLeaks with massive amounts of intelligence pulled from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network used by the Pentagon and the State Department, the picture that emerges is one of a young man who also felt isolated, one who saw WikiLeaks as a means of ameliorating that feeling. Manning remains in custody — a particularly brutal form of solitary confinement, actually — at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Va.

Manning still faces charges of his own, but he’s played a larger role in the tensions between U.S. government officials and WikiLeaks, in that he is seen as the key figure in building a larger criminal case against WikiLeaks founder and figurehead Julian Assange. That Manning willingly provided WikiLeaks with classified information does not appear to be in dispute. The issue, rather, is one of “did Manning jump or was he pushed?”

. . . .

This case against Assange — that he had pursued Manning, with the intention of inducing the soldier into proving WikiLeaks with thousands of classified diplomatic cables — relied heavily on the word of Adrian Lamo, a high-profile hacker-turned-“threat analyst,” to whom Manning reached out in May of 2010, revealing that he had taken classified material and leaked it to Assange. Lamo reported this to authorities, and provided the contents of his chat logs with Manning to Wired Magazine.close quote (Read more from huffingtonpost.com)

UN mulls internet regulation options

open quoteThe United Nations is considering whether to set up an inter-governmental working group to harmonise global efforts by policy makers to regulate the internet.

Establishment of such a group has the backing of several countries, spearheaded by Brazil.

At a meeting in New York on Wednesday, representatives from Brazil called for an international body made up of Government representatives that would attempt to create global standards for policing the internet – specifically in reaction to challenges such as WikiLeaks.close quote (Read more from itnews.com.au)

Torturing Bradley Manning

Dirty revenge for embarrassing the political elite. We are the U.S.S.A.

open quoteBoth The Guardian and the Associated Press are reporting that the U.N.’s top official in charge of torture is now formally investigating the conditions under which the U.S. is detaining accused WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning. Last week, I described the inhumane terms of his detention at a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, including being held 23 out of 24 hours a day in solitary confinement for seven straight months and counting as well as other punitive measures (such as strict prohibitions on any exercise inside his cell and the petty denial of pillows and sheets). Manning’s lawyer, former U.S. Army Major and Iraq War veteran David Coombs, thereafter publicly confirmed those facts, and then announced two days ago that efforts to persuade brig officials to allow more human conditions have failed, meaning it is likely that Manning will languish under these repressive restraints for many more months to come, at least.

In addition to confirming the facts I reported, Maj. Coombs added several disturbing new ones, including the paltry, isolated terms of Manning’s one-hour-a-day so-called “exercise” time (he’s “taken to an empty room and only allowed to walk,” “normally just walks figure eights in the room,” “if he indicates that he no long feels like walking, he is immediately returned to his cell”); the bizarre requirement that, despite not being on suicide watch, Manning respond to guards all day, every day, by saying “yes” every 5 minutes (even though guards cannot and “do not engage in conversation with” him); and various sleep-disruptive measures (he is barred from sleeping at any time from 5:00 am – 8:00 pm, and, during the night, “if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him”).close quote (Read more from salon.com)

WikiLeaks: Cuba banned Sicko for depicting ‘mythical’ healthcare system

open quoteCuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a “mythically” favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a “popular backlash”, according to US diplomats in Havana.close quote (Read more from guardian.co.uk)

As Dr. Maltsev says, the only healthcare in Cuba is to swim to Miami.