The online world was up in arms last week after Twitter announced they would be complying with local speech laws around the world. The service would be taking down tweets that the local government deemed illegal. Obviously the chorus of “Censorship!” was deafening. The short-form social media network has been ground-zero for a range of popular uprisings from Iran to the “Arab Spring,” used to organize protests and disseminate breaking news stopped by official censors.

So, it comes as no surprise that a wide range of players, especially in the countries most affected by draconian suppression of free speech, have been vocal about the announcement.

Twitter founder Biz Stone came out with a clarification this week, stating that the blog post was poorly worded and that the company is fully committed to free speech across the globe. To wit, they most likely have a legal obligation to comply with local laws in countries in which they operate . With that, they will only be removing “offending” tweets in that specific country using Geo-filtering.

For instance, it is illegal to post anything pro-Nazi in France. If French authorities see a tweet praising the Third Reich, they would request Twitter remove it. It will then be removed and be replaced with a Tweet mentioning the removal, but only in France. The original would still be visible around the world. This removal also would not take into account retweets, which would continue on their merry way.

While this may have some affect on the organizing of local protests, the main added value of Twitter, in this case, remains.

That brings us to exactly what it is that makes Twitter such a wonderful tool for the modern age. It is the ultimate disintermediation of information. Without the need for the traditional gatekeepers of news, it now can flow directly from observers on-site to all corners of the world.  With approximately 300 million subscriber accounts producing  over a billion tweets every four days, the amount of information flowing through the system is mind boggling. While much of it is banal at best, the unregulated nature of it is perfectly suited for the democratization of information.

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***UPDATE: As expected, Politico’s Dylan Byers uses Martin’s suspension to once again admonish CNN for not “punishing” (his word) Erick Erickson and Dana Loesch.

Fascistic GLAAD wins another scalp.

Over the years, CNN’s Roland Martin has said some awfully outrageous stuff about Republicans and the Tea Party — and not on his Twitter feed, but on the air at CNN. He’s pretty much accused us of being everything  just short of Nazis due only to legitimate policy differences we’ve had with his precious Barack Obama. As a response, the left-wing speech police — who disguise themselves as “media watchdogs” — have never (according to memory and Google) put any pressure on CNN to have Martin fired, suspended, or reprimanded.  

And they shouldn’t. Martin has every right to be a racial demagogue, and CNN has every right to broadcast him. I don’t like the guy, but the thought of trying to silence him is anathema to everything I believe in. Unfortunately for Martin, the Washington Post and Politico aren’t big fans of the First Amendment and, as a result, just a few minutes ago it was reported that CNN has suspended Mr. Martin “for the time being.”

Martin’s sin? Tweeting a few childish jokes only a fascistic outlet like GLAAD could get away with pretending they are offended by. 

Martin’s mistake? Martin inadvertently stepped into a trap he probably didn’t know existed, and as a result he is now receiving an invaluable lesson about today’s politically-correct hierarchy, where gay trumps black. 

Naturally, media watchdogs who, in the past, have taken no issue with Martin’s race-baiting, are now into day three of their passive-aggressive censorship crusade that pushed CNN into taking the kind of action that puts another win in the column of GLAAD’s ongoing censorship crusade.  

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On Monday, students, faculty and supporters at the University of California, Davis, attempted a mass general strike to protest tuition hikes and to demand the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi after police pepper-sprayed eleven protesters who blocked a public access way at an #OccupyUCDavis event on November 18th. Students maintain it was Chancellor Katehi who requested the police remove the Occupy encampment and clear access to the facility.  The incident sparked a firestorm of media all across the world and has become a viral phenomenon, and now even an Internet meme.

We stand behind those calling for Chancellor Katehi’s resignation.  But not for the reasons they might think.

The events of UC Davis and the way in which the pepper-spray was handled has set a number of dangerous precedents.  In the setting of academia, the rights of the majority of students are being trampled on to appease the tyranny of a minority.  Further, the very system of law and order and its public servants instituted to protect the rights of the public at large have been undermined by incompetent leaders, unable to withstand the growing pressure of a noisy minority and the corrupt media that supports it.  Most importantly, propaganda has established a foothold that is now stronger than ever, and far more dangerous than the short-term effects of pepper spray.

Over the last week, we have seen the media pick up the UC Davis story and run with it, always highlighting the same twenty seconds of one Officer Pike, methodically pepper-spraying eleven “peaceful protesters,” as onlookers gasp and scream in horror and dismay.  The public was almost undivided in its immediate condemnation of the act.

But just as Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Perhaps in this case, it’s not so much a lie, but a lot of omissions.

We know now that the Davis 11 locked arms to block the public access way, creating both a safety hazard and barring other students and the public from gaining access to facilities beyond that point.  What the media has never explained is that the protesters were repeatedly warned to clear the path.  Video shows officer Pike, the one with the pepper spray, informing each protester one last time that they would be “subject to the use of force” if they did not voluntarily move.  The protesters acknowledge the warning and hunker down for the consequences.

The media also never provides an accurate portrayal of why the students were protesting in the first place, and what prompted them to block the access way.  In an interview with Democracy Now, UC Davis Sustainable Agriculture student Elli Pearson, one of the protesters in the blockade who was pepper sprayed, reveals the truth.

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- Blowing apart the meme that free speech is being suppressed due to journalist arrests:

Put together by Josh Stearns, this document has been a great resource to track journalists working on Occupy Wall Street stories around the country who’ve been arrested. So who are they? Only seven of the 25 arrested are full-time employed traditional news-gathering employees. A number were student reporters; a few were interns; a larger number were freelancers. Some work for traditional “objective” news organizations; others work for “non-objective” news organizations, like Alternet and Indypendent Reader.

Yes, Alternet and Indypendent Reader, two lefty websites, the latter which comes across more as activism (replete with glowing reports of #OWS) than an actual media website. The presupposition you’re supposed to share as a reader of their memes is that every single arrested journalist was the antithesis of Natasha Lennard. If the hyper-fellation of this movement in the press is any indication–as well as the press’s blatant obfuscation of the rapes, shootings, etc. therein–it’s not a leap of logic to assume that other members of lefty media sites perhaps crossed the line of observation-to-participation like Lennard.

Now consider this: the Society for Professional Journalists statement.

The number of journalists arrested at Occupy Wall Street has now reached six (there may be more), but the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) has had enough. It is publicly denouncing the arrests of those covering all Occupy protests and is demanding that Michael Bloomberg and city officials from across the country drop the charges against detained reporters.

Funny: According to SPJ’s own bylaws, some of those arrested might not even qualify for membership within the group. For whom are they speaking? The couple of AP photogs arrested? When the cops order you to get out of the way your media cred doesn’t recuse you from following the law. The press can be aggressive to the point where they ignore the physical safety of others, even presidential primary candidates. Why have some media present at the exact same locations not been cuffed whereas a couple others were? The futile attempt to argue this as an attack on the press only underscores further media bias.

I’m willing to give some of them the benefit of the doubt, but they can’t rage “against” the machine after being its lapdog for fifty years, all while expecting public sympathy. If they want to be truly revolutionary, they’ll pull a Steve Kroft and stick a camera in Nancy Pelosi’s face while asking her how she came in to that Visa IPO or maybe set up shop in the DOJ while Holder fidgets under Fast and Furious scrutiny.

- Remember when MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer freaked out over this? Will MSNBC breathlessly report on the firearms at OWS? Will they report on the shootings already happening? Or the other crimes?

- AOL/Huffington Post is hemorrhaging talent:

At least three top names from the company have departed this month, including Brad Garlinghouse, head of the company’s Silicon Valley office, who quit last week. Mr Garlinghouse’s departure came on the same day that Sarah Lacy, a senior writer at TechCrunch, said she was leaving, and just days after Saul Hansell, a former New York Times reporter who was a senior editor at the Huffington Post, quit his job.

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On MSNBC, John Kerry told us that Tea Party ideas are not “real” ideas, not “factual,” and thinks that the media should stop reporting on anything that smacks of ideas or news coming from Tea Partiers. If this isn’t proof of how Democrats and leftists would use the power of government to quash free political speech, what is?

Not long ago, several Democrats tried to once again raise the ugly head of the defunct Fairness Doctrine that was killed during the Reagan administration in order to limit the free political speech of conservatives. In those dark days when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House of Representatives, several Republicans talked about forever outlawing the anti-free speech rule. Democrats at the time spoke up in favor of the Fairness Doctrine and countered that they wanted to bring it back.

Fortunately, the Fairness Doctrine has not come back. But this un-American policy idea has been talked about by leftists every few years since it was torpedoed by Reagan in 1987. They would love to bring it back. And despite what they claim, the left would use a new Fairness Doctrine to squelch the free political speech of those on the right.

Want proof? Then let’s look at what Democrat Senator John Kerry said on MSNBC this week.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.

It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what’s real, of who’s accountable, of who is not accountable, of who’s real, who isn’t, who’s serious, who isn’t?

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Humanity has always been violent. Criminal acts and atrocious crimes are the not the sole property of any one group, as anyone doing even a cursory review of European history (especially in the 20^th Century) can attest.  What happened in Norway was a crime of the most vile kind: an act of deranged terrorism where a man driven to madness and violence felt the need, even justification, to murder innocents just so his political and cultural concerns would gain notice.

The confessed killer, Oslo native Anders Breivik, offers as his twisted explanation for his actions a frustration over what he sees as his country’s cultural surrender to the ever growing influences of Islam and the Labor Party’s weakness in the face of this threat to his nation’s identity, traditions and values.  (Hence the attack on a Labor Party retreat).  The irony here is that Breivik probably did severe harm to his own cause by painting a growing, and legitimate, concern over the Islamification of Europe and the West as a whole with the hues of fringe lunacy.

But, Breivik’s horrific crimes notwithstanding, the rise of Islamic influence in the West from Oslo to Paris to Rome, and the clash of cultures it is creating throughout Europe, is still very much an issue.  It has been discussed in logical and reasoned terms by writers from Mark Steyn, to Pamela Geller, to the late Oriana Fallaci and Robert Spencer  as well as the focus of numerous websites like Jihadwatch.org.  Furthermore the growing influence of pan-Islamism has been addressed by such notable politicians as German Chancellor Angela Merkel who recently admitted in a moment of stunning candor for hyper-sensitive Europe that her nation’s attempt as Islamic assimilation through the multi-cultural approach has been an abject failure.

As if on cue, The New York Times was quick to point out that sections of Breivik’s 1,500 page anti-Islamic ‘manifesto’ quotes some passages from Spencer’s books.  Naturally, the left-leaning media, always anxious to paint those who cherish the ideals, history, culture and political expressions of the West as intolerant, hate-filled xenophobes, quickly gravitated to a false syllogism:  Spencer was quoted by Breivik … Breivik killed 76 people … ergo Spencer and his like are partly to blame for the murders.  Ostensibly,  if you have publicly spoken out in defense of your civilization against the forces of misogynism, anti-Semitism, anti-liberalism, homophobia, intolerance towards any religion but one, etc. you may have blood on your hands because one crazed, viciously prejudiced madman distilled a call to violence from genuine concerns over the future of the West and the liberal ideals of inclusiveness, religious tolerance, justice, and equality before the law that we so value.  (I guess I am guilty too even?)

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The left is always a bundle of contradictions. On one hand leftists set themselves up as the ultimate in “tolerance” and a guarantor of “freedom” to do as one wishes. Most leftists imagine themselves interested in making sure everyone is free to do as they wish to the point where that they are almost libertine about it. Until … until it comes to the freedoms of those they oppose. Then, all of a sudden, their tendency toward fascist group-think comes out in full force.

Joe Schoffstall of the Media Research Center highlighted that liberal “for me but not for thee” tendency in a recent video in which he asked a handful of Washington D.C. liberals if they’d like to sign a petition that bans conservative’s free political speech. Naturally, they were happy to do so.

One of Joe’s signers had that liberal confusion down pat. “I think there is freedom of speech,” the young woman said, “but sometimes … there has to be some kind of control. I mean, look at the tea party, you have all this hate going on,” she blathered. She went on to say that freedom of speech is “not something this country needs any more.”

One would imagine that if her freedom to speak were curtailed she’d suddenly find that hoary old First Amendment something she could not live without.

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Bill Clinton wants the government to “correct” what you say on the Internet, folks. Should the government listen to the former panderer-in-chief, we’ll go from Big Brother to Big Bubba on the ol’ Internet tubes.

Bubba is not happy with what he claims is the “misinformation” on the Internet and he wants the force of government to stop it all. Politico is reporting that Clinton makes the proposal in an upcoming CNBC interview saying, “It would be a legitimate thing to do.”

No, Bubba, it would not.

Clinton says that the idea of having a government agency that “corrects” the “misinformation” on the Internet would be “independent” of government so it isn’t a traditional government agency. This, he feels would make it all A-OK with those fearing Big Brother government ministries of propaganda.

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Say you write a couple things a few years ago glorifying cop killing (“free Mumia,” 2:15; “A Song for Assata” a cop-killer the FBI recognizes as a “domestic terrorist,” after whom you named your daughter). They’re immortalized on Youtube. You never walk it back or otherwise express any sort of remorse for it. Then you get an invite from the White House – at the same time police departments around the country commemorate fallen officers.

Use your mind and nine-power, get the government touch

Them boys chat-chat on how him pop gun

I got the black strap to make the cops run

They watching me, I’m watching them

Er, really?

You are genuinely surprised that there would be criticism of your invitation to the White House, the people’s house, for a poetry slam?

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Have you ever heard someone say that a rape victim was “asking for it” by dressing a certain way, entering a certain place, or behaving a certain way? You’d rightly dismiss them as sociopaths or enablers or sociopaths. However, a growing number of media figures– Mediaite,  Time’s Joe Klein, and now even FNC’s Bill O’Reilly– would have you believe it’s a valid assertion, if we’re to apply their logic concerning Floridian Koran-burner Terry Jones.  Instead of framing the recent murders in Afghanistan as a shocking overreaction to an insensitive expression of free speech, these personalities and publications focused their ire and blame on Jones.

Terry Jones

“This Terry Jones idiot has blood on his hands;  he had to know fanatical Muslims would go crazy,” O’Reilly stated. Ah, yes, because as we all know, the only possible response from the Muslim world would be violence; that’s not an ugly, condescending stereotype at all!  I’m no fan of Sharia, but to insinuate Jones “should have known” that someone would take anger beyond any acceptable societal standard without personally knowing any of the individuals who killed is just like saying that a rape victim “should have known” that the sight of her would cause her assailants to fly into an uncontrollable lustful rampage.

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This is utterly revolting:

U.S. lawmakers said Sunday they would consider a request by Afghan President Hamid Karzai to formally condemn a Florida pastor’s decision to burn the Koran, after the act triggered deadly riots in Afghanistan.

Note that once again it is being said that one act – the burning of paper – “triggered” the deadly riots. Not the ideology nor the people who committed the acts, of course. Reid flat-out says that Terry Jones caused the murders — murders committed at the hands of other people. People apparently so simple-minded that they cannot think for themselves and cannot possibly know the difference between right and wrong. Headlines in newspapers conveniently omit the actual murderers.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid repudiated pastor Terry Jones for touching off the chaos with what he called a “publicity stunt.” Jones had earlier threatened to burn the Koran, but then shelved the plan until last month. The burning attracted little U.S. attention at the time but was used as a rallying cry in Afghanistan.

"Freedom of speech is a great thing, but we're in the middle of a war."

“This was an effort to get some publicity for him. He got it. But in the process, 10-20 people have been killed,” Reid said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Asked whether Congress could pass a resolution condemning it, he said, “We’ll take a look at this.”

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Settle in, this is a great video debunking from How the World Works:

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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has ranked Yale University as among the worst violators of free speech on U.S. campuses.

Alum Michael Rubin, writing at Commentary, provides examples:

In 2009, Yale College Dean Mary Miller censored the Freshman Class Council’s traditional t-shirt before the Yale-Harvard game because it sported an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote containing the oh-so-incendiary word – sissies.”

Yale also garnered international headlines when a chief administrator pressured the allegedly autonomous Yale University Press to censor a scholarly view of the Danish cartoon controversy. And, oh, the intervention happened to coincide with Yale President Richard Levin’s courting of Persian Gulf donors.

Also, when Levin was on the trail of Chinese money, he restricted protests outside the campus venue in which Chinese President Hu Jintao, the university’s guest of honor, would hold forth.

Such trampling of free speech is par for the course on campuses throughout the nation. But what magnifies the usual hypocrisy and arrogance in Yale’s case is the high-level responsibility of journalists in rubber-stamping the transgressions.

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You may remember President Obama’s recent call for civil discourse this past January.  Well, it appears that the Left is still very much struggling with the #newtone online.  Unless, of course, you consider a persistent stream of steady death threats against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker a display of etiquette straight from the Emily Post Etipedia of manners.

Here’s but a small sampling from the #caring Tweeters:
(NOTE:  I prefer to view the video with music like this as accompaniment…)

Initially, I’d written a summary here of some of the details around Gov. Walker’s proposal, including some of the positive highlights, like granting employees the right to choose whether or not to contribute dues to a labor union.  But then I decided, “nahhhh….why bother?”  Agree or disagree with some, all or none of the Governor’s proposal, everyone has something to contribute to the conversation.  But death threats are NOT an acceptable part of ANY conversation.

I’d thought we’d learned that by now, after documenting the same exact behavior in January.  With all the Big-Brother Twitter monitoring the Soros flunkies are doing out there, you’d think they would have posted and condemned this by now.

So much for that #newtone.

Video h/t Joe Haas and Kim Hedum.

Liberals are despicably exploiting the tragic Tucson Arizona shooting as an opportunity to launch another “Hush Rush” initiative. A liberal pundit lamented that there is no left wing radio talk show host as powerful as Rush Limbaugh. Typical of their thinking, this lib believes it is unfair for Limbaugh to be King of the Radio Talk Show mountain. In every area of American life, this lib believes government should take control to produce equal “fair” outcomes.

So why isn’t there a left wing equivalent to Limbaugh? Lord knows they have tried. The left even launched an entire radio network, Air America, committed to trashing conservatives and America. Air America featured several “Great Left Hope” talk show host contenders to dethrone Limbaugh. They all crashed and burned including their radio network. Air America is off the air.

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Ever since Saturday’s terrible tragedy in Tucson, Arizona, conservatives have endured, to use my colleague Dana Loesch’s words, a massive orchestration of defamation against them.  And of all the vitriol that has been hurled around the internet, no other target has sustained more of it than Sarah Palin.

Within minutes of the shooting Saturday, the onslaught of inflamed rhetoric was immediate.  And by the time Sheriff Clarence Dupnik made his now infamous accusations against right-wing radio and TV, which he’s since confirmed are nothing more than opinion, he’d stoked up the hate level online to a boiling point.  I watched as so many on the left took to Twitter to join the herd.  It eerily reminded me of my college days – it was like our Greek initiation rituals, when hopeful fraternity pledges take to public places to perform acts of stupidity as proof of loyalty to their organization.  I was stunned by the hundreds and hundreds of brazenly stupid threats of death against a woman whom most of these people had never even met.

Others were just as shocked.  In fact, a couple of conservatives on Twitter – @coyotered9 and @JoeKenHa – were so disgusted that they decided to collect just a sampling of these public tweets and compile them into a slide show of sorts.

The result was this video, Twitter Users Wish Death on Sarah Palin, originally posted at YouTube.  It’s since been cross-posted on Vimeo because of a takedown notice they received from YouTube in response to a privacy complaint.  That’s right, one of the haters who was brave enough to publicly tweet her yearning for the death of a former Governor and Vice Presidential candidate is now suddenly concerned for her Twitter privacy.

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While appearing on Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show November 17, 2010, Al Sharpton joined Schultz in criticizing Rush Limbaugh for “race-[baiting]” and using “federally-regulated airwaves to malign people.” Sharpton was bothered by the fact that Limbaugh dared talked about the racism inherent in the Democrat Party, particularly the racism white Democrats like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) and former Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md) displayed in pushing a black Democrat, Jim Clyburn (D-Sc), to the back of the bus” in order to preserve their own prominence.

It seems that when the Democrats restructured their positions in the House after losing control of it on November 2^nd, they made sure that the top two positions went to white people (Pelosi and Hoyer) even though Clyburn, who happens to be black, already held the position Hoyer wanted. Because Limbaugh dared point this hypocrisy out, Sharpton pounced and equated Limbaugh’s monologue on Clyburn with “race-[baiting.”

Two things need to be pointed out here. First, Limbaugh has the Democrat Party (and particularly Pelosi and Hoyer) dead to rights, and that’s why men like Sharpton are using accusations of racism to silence him. But no matter what Sharpton says, Pelosi and Hoyer did move Clyburn to the back of the bus in order to guarantee that they, two white folks, would hold the key positions on the Democrat side of the House.

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Americans have seen what speech codes do to freedom in other countries, past and present.  But not to be outdone MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, a man who encouraged voter fraud, said he’d urinate on Hugh Hewitt, and admitted to wanting to kill a former Vice President, says its actually Rush Limbaugh who should be penalized in some way for exercising his freedom of speech.

Schultz again used his hardly watched MSNBC timeslot to demonize conservatives by taking clips out of context.  He plays a couple clips from Rush Limbaugh’s show where he points out that the House Democrats are attempting to push the highest ranking black official in Congress out of his leadership post.  In making his point, Limbaugh used similar language to President Obama’s statement that the GOP has to sit in the back of the car.

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Last week, Drummond Pike took his FOX News fight to a whole new level, this time painting all of the right with a scarlet letter.  Coincidentally, Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald had also published a similar piece in much the same vein, only a week prior.

In his opinion contribution piece to Politico titled “Why Does the Right Hate Soros?”, the founder and CEO of Tides Foundation pondered aloud the imaginary reasons he’s fabricated in his mind for the animosity toward the Hungarian born billionaire.

His conclusion?  Because we hate immigrants.

This is the typical left.  When you don’t get the response you want, inject a new element of manufactured hate into the mix – when you can’t make it about race, make it about immigration.  Drummond Pike even decided to step up the rhetoric, implying that George Soros is in danger because of right-wing media outlets and bloggers.  But the sad truth behind this piece, behind all of these public letters, boycotts and petitions is that they are all coordinated, and they are all aimed at turning the public opinion against those who do not share the ideals of the leftist agenda.

Some highlights from Pike’s opinion piece:

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