#65715 by THOMAS BILLIS on 4/22 at 1:44 pm
(Unregistered commenter)

“What is everybody afraid of put it all on from David Duke to minister Farakhan.If the marketplace will support it have it on.Let the voices come from all over the spectrum.Why are we afraid to have a robust debate with all voices heard.”

Yeah, I love listening to radical left wing and liberal radio.  Especially enjoy hearing the hour-long in-depth discussions of labor and union rights.

In my dreams.

“Do I agree that some of it is over the top and hard to listen to yes but that is why God gives you an on off button and a channel changer.”

I’m skeptical: please provide me the US Copyright Office documentation which shows that “God” invented, and was awarded the patents for, the “on off button” and “channel changer”.

“Maybe in the run up to war if we had many voices instead of filtered voices we might have been able to avoid this disaster.Remember the tough speech to defend is the one you do not agreee with.”

Except when it’s false, in which cases it’s relatively easy to refute. 

The problem is when the intellectually dishonest refuse to renounce their dishonesty, lies, falsifications of reality.

Re: #64803 by christianjoe on 4/18 at 10:21 am
(1 comments total)

“Just to set the record straight, Rush Limbaugh’s comment about Barack being the ‘Magic Negro’ was a comment he pulled verbatim from the LA Times. A supposed LIBERAL paper. I’m not condoning his comments. But Rush makes his money by taking what the left says and running with it and hyperbolizing it. He illustrates the left’s absurdity (in his view) with absurdity of his own. He doesn’t believe what he said in this case. It’s satire. He’s enjoying life.

“Also, we must remember that all these comments are protected by the Bill of Rights. We may not agree with them, but if enough people get upset, then I suppose the market will speak and they will be silenced like Imus was. But government regulation is not the answer. Less government is more government.”
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The only record you’ve set straight, Christian, is how utterly ignorant and uninformed you are - so typical of right-wing, nutbag, Rush listening “dildo heads.”

There is nothing liberal, or supposedly liberal, about the LA Times, which is owned by the right-wing, fascist, Tribune Company, which, under the neutered FCC - following the fascist Ronald “The Brain Stem” Reagan’s disastrous deregulation movement, has been buying up many of the major newspapers in the U.S.

Further, as to the Bill of Rights (I presume you are talking about the 1st Amendment protection of free speech and press), there are many well established limits on speech, the boundaries of which depend on the nature of the speech.  (I know that this may seem esoteric to a right-wing, nutjob conservative, like you, but try to focus, if you can). 

Political speech is afforded the most protected of all protected speech.  Commercial speech (advertising) would be one of the least protected of all protected speech, subject to much regulation and limitation, such as prohibitions and punishment for false advertising.  Defamation (false statements that injure someone’s reputation), is not protected speech at all, and the aggrieved person can sue the defamer for damages and injunction. 

However, the hate speech of the kind regularly employed, by right-wing, republican hate radio personalities in order to gain the favor of the republican base - ignorant, bigots, is generally protected speech under the 1st Amendment.  But, that only prevents the government from passing laws that prohibit or impair such speech.  The rights created by the U.S. Constitution apply against the government, not private citizens.

As with most professions, a code of ethics should be enforced over public airwaves.

“Wow!  After reading through some of yall’s comments...just...wow.  I’m still amazed at the complete hypocrisy of the Left.  Honestly people, is there any wonder why these people are saying the things they’re saying?  It’s because of this double standard surrounding what’s “acceptable” that I chose to abandon my liberal perspective long ago.”

You were never a liberal.  Let’s see if you can grasp a few basics—even though they will be fact instead of groundless nonsense --

“If you applaud what happened to Imus, or worse wish there was more of it, then you are advocating for censorship by the consensus of a minority.”

1.  “Censorship” is prohibited when by _gov’t_.  It is not otherwise “censorship”; rather, as concerns Imus, it was that you love to cheer: free market.  The ADVERTISORS who pay the bills threatened to cease paying those bills, so Imus was fired.  (That Imus’ unacceptable, libelous personal attacks against the unoffending, and the taint on his employers’ reputations caused thereby, was an inconsequential factor.)

2.  To which “minority” do you refer?  The vast majority—which always hovers at around 73 per cent—of moderates/centrists who are opposed to the war, opposed to Bush and his agenda?

Clue: the extremist right-wing lunatic fringe—the traditional terms for the views you defend—have always been and remain a statistically-insignificant minority.  Being ignorant of that fact, or lying, even if only by implication, that such is a majority, will not change that fact.

“Of course, censorship in any form is strictly prohibited by the First Amendment, but since when did liberals care about the Constitution?”

That prohibition applies to gov’t—not to the private sector.  Else, in your view, We the people wouldn’t be allowed to change the channel so as not to hear such contentless, corrosively anti-social hate-speech.

Clue: name-calling is not intellegent, mature, or debate.

Question: When will you be READING the Constitution for the first time in your life?

“YOU DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO SUE SOMEONE FOR WHAT THEY’VE SAID OR THOSE WHO ASSOCIATE WITH THEM!”

Actually, that isn’t true—and I hope the Rutgers womens basketball team acts on that fact.  LIBEL is actionable, especially when the target of such smears are not public figures, or not seeking the attention of the libeler.

“If you don’t like what a person is saying, then a) explain to them why you don’t like it or b) don’t associate with them.  Don’t go and take their means of living by force!”

“Force”!?  We the people didn’t fire Imus.  His employers did—in response to the ADVERTISERS who were threatening to cease paying the bills. 

Again: calling people names is not intelligent, let alone being “debate”.  Smearing people, spewing hatred, is not intelligent, let alone “debate”.  It doesn’t even qulify as being “discourse”.  It wouldn’t even be acceptable if hatred were only stupid—it is that—but in reality the first person adversely affected by it is the hater.  Don’t you get weary of being angry based upon contentless, mindless hatred, even as you pretend to yourself it’s a “righteous” “superiority” to those you are instructed by lie to hate?

We read about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the abuse and murder and an administration that not only condoned it, but made sure they got a law out of the repub congress to make it legal.

Correction: enacted an unconstituional law which makes it _appear_ legal to those who don’t know better.

The several international laws/treaties which define and prohibit torture as a war crime to which the US is a signatory are part of the law of the land.  The law of the land is the Constitution.  Neither Congress, nor the Executive, nor both together, even with the endorsement of the Judiciary, cannot change the Constitution.  In addition, the Constitution prohibits _ex post facto_ laws—laws which would make past illegal actions legal after the fact.

Torture remains a war crime, even when the US does it, despite the anti- and unconstitutional actions of the Republican-controlled Congress in effort to give the Bush gang’s continuing of that war crime the appearance of legality.

So, just why does Michael Weiner call himself Michael Savage?  Do you suppose he didn’t think “Weiner Nation” would go over too well with the ignorant, bigot demographic aka the republican base?

Just to set the record straight, Rush Limbaugh’s comment about Barack being the ‘Magic Negro’ was a comment he pulled verbatim from the LA Times. A supposed LIBERAL paper. I’m not condoning his comments. But Rush makes his money by taking what the left says and running with it and hyperbolizing it. He illustrates the left’s absurdity (in his view) with absurdity of his own. He doesn’t believe what he said in this case. It’s satire. He’s enjoying life.

Also, we must remember that all these comments are protected by the Bill of Rights. We may not agree with them, but if enough people get upset, then I suppose the market will speak and they will be silenced like Imus was. But government regulation is not the answer. Less government is more government.

“Everything is upside-down,” one Michael Weiner laments to close the above litany of latter-day lunacy symptomatic of this terminal phase of what Oswald Spengler decades ago called “The Decline of the West.” This old Indian’s grandfather noticed that simple fact many years earlier.  He would remind us often that the wasichus had created and trapped theirselves in what the Lakota people called a “heyoka” world.....one in which everything is “upside down,” inside-out, and backwards from the natural organic living arrangement of our Mother Earth.

Among our people, and free wild natural peoples just about everywhere, are found a few “holy fools,” the sacred clowns who “live backwards” as living proof for the rest of us of the unpleasant consequences of going against not only our given human nature, but “contrary” to the greater Nature who has engendered the Two-legged form, and which sustains us in the fulfillment of our given organic function here.  The domesticated nations have pretty much forgotten all about that, so are currently condemned to number their days in this-that-or-another virtual world-of-hurt.

We might once’ve given theamericanpeople, for example, the benefit of the doubt, and credited them with consciously and conscientiously taking on the great burden and demanding responsibility of the heyoka vision on purpose....for the benefit of their civilized siblings everywhere.  There is no evidence really to support that, though, and their own widely-held and constantly-advertised national self-image argues strongly that they are, rather, committed to their globe-girdling crusade to “americanize” everybody and everything else totally convinced of its righteousness.  No genuine heyoka would ever succumb to such self-serving self-delusion.

Voluntarily or not, however, this random collection of ersatz “individuals” known as “America” is giving us all an object lesson in what happens when what Bob Dylan called the “Idiot Wind” fills the sails of the-ship-of-state....and the public airwaves, to-boot.  So what are we to make of the greedy gangs of homegrown privateers already deserting the crippled vessel for more lucrative pickings elsewhere?  What will the “right-and-left-wing” chambers-of-horrified-umbrage echo with when the last ragged and bloody shreds of America’s national banner disappear beneath the weight of all the criminal enterprise it has had to hide?

One day soon these things may be of only academic interest, if even that, and the subject of tales told around winter lodge-fires for the amusement and enlightenment of our children, and theirs.  Meantime, it’s good to know which side of “the looking glass” one is on.

HokaHey!

up-close-and-personal tour of Abu Grhaib for the lot of them - hang ‘em upside down by their toes - then maybe everything would start looking rightside up