Blogdom Civil Disobedience!
The blogosphere is abuzz with back-and-forth outraged commentary over the not-so-veiled threats to free speech in the US posed by an activist judge. This would not necessarily be a problem, since court rulings are not necessarily sacrosanct if there are other courts that actually respect the Constitution, but the (big-D) Democrat-bloc on the FEC has prevented an appeal of Judge Colleen Kottar-Kotelly's made-up ruling that "campaign finance reform" (read: Incumbent Protection Act, AKA "shut-up, you inconvenient non-MSM pajamahadeen") applies to blogs.
The K-K ruling is based on some breathlessly creative and specious "reasoning". I suspect a convenient new emanation of a penumbra, or whatever that last one was (Harry Blackmun's creative writing in 1973 regarding "privacy" showing up in the margins of the First Amendment and what that means about legislatures writing laws).
It is kind of amazing what the First Amendment says these days, and what it doesn't say.
This makes old conservative me wonder what would happen if we operated here the way they do in other countries that are just coming out from under the yoke of totalitarianism. If the Orange Revolution can defy Putin, and the Cedar Revolution can defy Assad, why can't the PJ Revolution tell the New Age censors in our midst, "Byte Me"? Could everyone who has ever posted an entry (whether or not a site that no one would ever read, such as mine, or Instapundit, which everyone reads) band together and simply refuse to comply with the planned gag orders from the hoped-for 21st century keepers of the Electronic Gulag?
Will those who claim to be libertarians (a couple of big ones come to mind)- who actually have readers- take the lead in organizing the rest of us to stick out our little smiley tongues at the decisive group of crypto-fascists in the FEC (Weintraub, this means you) and the Appeals Courts?
When Big Brother comes to restrict our rights of free expression, presumably in time for the 2006 mid-term elections, there will be court orders shutting down servers. Google, of course, would terminate any Blogspot bloggers, so there would need to be new available outlets. Who are the experts who can start planning the underground insurrectionist servers (offshore? Wherever the porn purveying autodialers, who face no threat whatsoever of censorship, originate out of the reach of all of us?) to which folks could migrate when Kotar-Kotelly mounts her broom to come after us all, with John and Russ, the virtuous censors of political speech, riding shotgun.
Who's in charge here, in the event that this nonsense is not turned on its ear by a SCOTUS properly stricken with remorse over the BCFR decision?
The K-K ruling is based on some breathlessly creative and specious "reasoning". I suspect a convenient new emanation of a penumbra, or whatever that last one was (Harry Blackmun's creative writing in 1973 regarding "privacy" showing up in the margins of the First Amendment and what that means about legislatures writing laws).
It is kind of amazing what the First Amendment says these days, and what it doesn't say.
This makes old conservative me wonder what would happen if we operated here the way they do in other countries that are just coming out from under the yoke of totalitarianism. If the Orange Revolution can defy Putin, and the Cedar Revolution can defy Assad, why can't the PJ Revolution tell the New Age censors in our midst, "Byte Me"? Could everyone who has ever posted an entry (whether or not a site that no one would ever read, such as mine, or Instapundit, which everyone reads) band together and simply refuse to comply with the planned gag orders from the hoped-for 21st century keepers of the Electronic Gulag?
Will those who claim to be libertarians (a couple of big ones come to mind)- who actually have readers- take the lead in organizing the rest of us to stick out our little smiley tongues at the decisive group of crypto-fascists in the FEC (Weintraub, this means you) and the Appeals Courts?
When Big Brother comes to restrict our rights of free expression, presumably in time for the 2006 mid-term elections, there will be court orders shutting down servers. Google, of course, would terminate any Blogspot bloggers, so there would need to be new available outlets. Who are the experts who can start planning the underground insurrectionist servers (offshore? Wherever the porn purveying autodialers, who face no threat whatsoever of censorship, originate out of the reach of all of us?) to which folks could migrate when Kotar-Kotelly mounts her broom to come after us all, with John and Russ, the virtuous censors of political speech, riding shotgun.
Who's in charge here, in the event that this nonsense is not turned on its ear by a SCOTUS properly stricken with remorse over the BCFR decision?
posted by Kurmudge at 5:08 PM
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