I don't see where this ordered-liberty-hating Salon deputy politics editor has a leg to stand on

Sofia Tesfaye at Salon makes a recent protest at the University of Arizona the focal point from which to examine the interface between First Amendment rights and laws against harrassment.

. . . the president of the University of Arizona is defending his school’s decision to seek criminal charges against three students who protested the presence of Border Patrol agents on campus. No violence took place during the March 19 demonstration, the school concluded that the students broke Arizona law when they publicly “harassed” the agents, a Class 1 misdemeanor that could result in up to six months of jail time.

“From the letter of the law, I think the chief obviously deliberated about this, in a very tough situation, and decided that the actions of the students did disrupt the presentation that was being made,” university president Robert Robbins told the Arizona Republic after the charges were made public on Thursday.

20-year-old Denisse Moreno Melchor, 22-year-old Mariel Alexandra Bustamante and 27-year-old Marianna Ariel Coles-Curtis were finally charged this week after video of their demonstration was widely shared by conservative outlets . . .

 . . . Arizona officials instead charged the students with interfering with the peaceful conduct of an educational institution and threatening and intimidating the agents.

Let's look at the legal code in question:

13-2921. Harassment; classification; definitionA. A person commits harassment if, with intent to harass or with knowledge that the person is harassing another person, the person:
1. Anonymously or otherwise contacts, communicates or causes a communication with another person by verbal, electronic, mechanical, telegraphic, telephonic or written means in a manner that harasses.
2. Continues to follow another person in or about a public place for no legitimate purpose after being asked to desist.
3. Repeatedly commits an act or acts that harass another person.
4. Surveils or causes another person to surveil a person for no legitimate purpose.
5. On more than one occasion makes a false report to a law enforcement, credit or social service agency.
6. Interferes with the delivery of any public or regulated utility to a person.
B. A person commits harassment against a public officer or employee if the person, with intent to harass, files a nonconsensual lien against any public officer or employee that is not accompanied by an order or a judgment from a court of competent jurisdiction authorizing the filing of the lien or is not issued by a governmental entity or political subdivision or agency pursuant to its statutory authority, a validly licensed utility or water delivery company, a mechanics' lien claimant or an entity created under covenants, conditions, restrictions or declarations affecting real property.
C. Harassment under subsection A is a class 1 misdemeanor. Harassment under subsection B is a class 5 felony.
D. This section does not apply to an otherwise lawful demonstration, assembly or picketing.
E. For the purposes of this section, "harassment" means conduct that is directed at a specific person and that would cause a reasonable person to be seriously alarmed, annoyed or harassed and the conduct in fact seriously alarms, annoys or harasses the person. 

Number 2 seems most pertinent here.

I suppose a leftist like Tesfaye would respond with "Ah, but there was a legitimate purpose. The point was to draw public attention to the moral darkness of the Border Patrol."

Well, consider this scenario, Ms. Tesfaye. Yes, it's entirely hypothetical and indeed a bit far-fetched, but what if it had been a cello recital going on in that room and the mob in the hallway was united by its intense hatred for cello music?

In short, you can't just go disrupting previously announced public events in spaces that have been arranged for, and in which people interested are already seated and paying attention to what is being presented. If First Amendment rights were to go that far, we'd have absolute chaos in a very short time.

But we probably shouldn't come down too hard on the flimsiness of Tesfaye's argument. You see, a bit later, she exposes the full extent of her intellectual vacuity with a buzzword that speaks volumes about what she's really up to:

As future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell's infamous 1972 memo dictated, propagating this lie is a centerpiece of the right-wing strategy to dismantle civil institutions to allow for corporate dominance. While college Republicans and elite liberals alike bemoan the rise of “social justice warriors” and “safe spaces,” modern conservatism has now become a sort of "protected class" on college campuses and dissenting voices have been criminalized. 

"Corporate dominance," whatever the hell that is, has nothing to do with it. You just can't go around disrupting public events that are in process.

And now she's going to try to turn the tables and claim that it's conservatives who are asserting protected-class status on campuses.

Doesn't wash, toots. The list of harassment incidents and indeed violence against right-of-center speakers is too long for your nonsense to have any validity.

  

SCOTUS gets another one very right

In a nation riven by chaos, at least one body is moving in the direction of ever-greater clarity:

The Supreme Court has just issued its long-awaited ruling in Janus v. AFSCME 31, holding that public sector unions cannot compel the payment of agency fees from nonmembers. The ruling was 5-4, with Justice Gorsuch casting the vote that Justice Scalia would have cast in the case before the Court presenting the same issue at the time of Justice Scalia’s death. 

In an opinion by Justice Alito, the Court overruled the Abood case, holding that fundamental First Amendment principles of free association precluded the result in that case. Public employees cannot be forced to subsidize a union if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes in collective bargaining and related activities. The public sector unions subject to this ruling have anticipated this outcome and planned to minimize its impact. The impact is not entirely predictable.

This is another case that vindicates the stand of Senate Republicans declining to take up the nomination of Merrick Garland in President Obama’s last year in office. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman held GOP Senators together in the face of a withering Democrat/media barrage.

Most federal-court cases involving free speech concern the prohibiting thereof. What makes this one interesting (not to mention glorious!) is that it's about compelling speech.

The devil tightens his grip on post-America's throat

We're still awaiting the SCOTUS decision on Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker, but a couple plying that trade and sharing his faith in Oregon are at this juncture in their struggle to conduct business in accordance with what they know to be true about sin:

A husband-and-wife baking team must pay a $135,000 fine for declining to make a cake for the wedding of two women, Oregon’s second-highest court has ruled.

A three-judge panel of the Oregon Court of Appeals on Thursday upheld a decision by a state agency that led to the fine and forced Aaron and Melissa Klein to close their bakery.

The court ruled that baking wedding cakes is not “speech, art, or other expression” protected by the First Amendment. The judges said the state did not “impermissibly burden the Kleins’ right to the free exercise of religion” because it compelled the Christian bakers only to comply with “a neutral law of general applicability.”

Oregon law prohibits businesses from refusing service because of a customer’s sexual orientation, as well as because of race, gender, and other personal characteristics.

“We are very disappointed in the court’s decision,” Michael Berry, deputy general counsel at First Liberty Institute, which represents the Kleins, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Friday. “I think that punishing people for their religious beliefs is … not American, and it’s wrong.”

“It does not matter how you were born or who you love,” one of the lesbians, Laurel Bowman-Cryer, said in a written statement following the ruling. “All of us are equal under the law and should be treated equally. Oregon will not allow a ‘Straight Couples Only’ sign to be hung in bakeries or other stores.”

Boyden Gray, former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush, argued the Kleins’ case. Gray told the three judges that the state violated the two bakers’ rights to free speech, religious freedom, and due process.

The Kleins had owned and operated Sweet Cakes by Melissa, a bakery in Gresham, Oregon.

Not sure what they're doing for income these days so as to comply with the fine, should they come up short in every last measure to resist this tyranny, but it won't be from their bakery. They had to shut it down in 2013 due to protests.

Wednesday roundup

Huge suicide-bomber attack near the cluster of embassies in Kabul. Many casualties and injuries.

UPDATE: At least 90 killed, at least 400 injured.

Kathy Griffin tries to go all contrite in the face of the backlash to the bloody-head-of-DJT photo. You buyin' it?

This is reassuring:

The U.S. military successfully shot down a mock nuclear warhead simulating the speed and range of a potential North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said Tuesday.

In a statement, the agency said an unarmed rocket launched from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean was "destroyed" by a ground-based interceptor launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California as it traveled outside Earth's atmosphere.

The successful test was the first of its kind in nearly three years.
It came two days after North Korea tested a SCUD-type ballistic missile that landed in Japan's maritime economic zone in the Sea of Japan.

This system is vitally important to the defense of our homeland, and this test demonstrates that we have a capable, credible deterrent against a very real threat," said MDA Director Vice Admiral Jim Syring. "I am incredibly proud of the warfighters who executed this test and who operate this system every day."

The mayor of Portland, Oregon wants to use that atmosphere-of-hate jive to try to deny some US citizens their First Amendment rights:

Portland's mayor is at odds with the ACLU over his request that the federal government revoke a permit for Sunday's scheduled "Trump Free Speech Rally Portland" on federal land, citing Friday's deadly stabbings on a city train after good Samaritans tried to stop the killer from harassing Muslim and African-American teen girls.

And, per the previous post, in which we once again make the case for the camp that cedes conservative bona fides to no one, but remains resolute in its conviction that DJT is a mess as president, we are the faction that knows it must acknowledge good moves when they occur, and pulling out of the Paris climate agreement certainly is that.

We will, of course, have to applaud it unflinchingly even as Leftists on social media try to conflate it with some kind of identifiable Trumpism, which is, as we know, not the case. And, per the previous post, the Dennis Pragers of the world are no help in this task.

Yet another level of stink

The post-American regime gives Madame BleachBit's campaign the heads-up about some journalism being practiced - as you know, a no-no in dictatorships.

The State Department tipped the Hillary Clinton campaign off last year that a New York Times reporter was asking questions about Clinton’s emails.

The revelation undermines the State Department’s claims that it has not worked to help Clinton during the ongoing email scandal.

“State just called to tell me that Mike Schmidt seems to have what appear to be summaries of some of the exchanges in the 300 emails the committee has,” Nick Merrill wrote in a March 14, 2015 email.

Schmidt is the Times reporter who broke the news that Clinton used a private email account as secretary of state. The article was published on March 2, 2015. Clinton had turned more than 50,000 emails over to the State Department in Dec. 2014. The State Department then provided around 300 emails to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which was chaired by South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy.

Your tax dollars at work - undermining the First Amendment.

Loretta Lynch proves to be as foul and vile as her predecessor

She really said this:

In her response to what appears to be a deadly, ISIS-motivated domestic terror attack, Attorney General Loretta Lynch has offered an almost Onion-level self-parody of liberal pieties. Per Obama administration protocol, the attorney general was determined to never let a crisis go to waste. There is now a “wonderful opportunity and wonderful moment to really make significant change,” Lynch declared the day after 14 innocent Americans were murdered and 23 injured at the hands of a Muslim couple who’d reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS. And what is this change? New gun-control measures, of course, including stripping the constitutional rights (without due process) of Americans often-arbitrarily placed on the vastly over-inclusive terror watch list.
Lynch addressed the Muslim Advocate’s 10th anniversary dinner and declared that she is concerned about an “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric . . . that fear is my greatest fear.” Her greatest fear is — not terrorism — but a nonexistent Islamophobic backlash? ISIS has demonstrated that it can bring down passenger jets, strike the heart of a great Western capitol with urban assault teams, and inspire horrible carnage in California. We also know that ISIS has pledged to keep attacking the U.S. and possesses chemical weapons. Yet it’s politically incorrect speech that strikes fear into the heart of our attorney general. What about blurring the distinction between speech and violence? Lynch is so serious about stopping Islamophobia that she’s sending a clear message to those who engage in “anti-Muslim rhetoric” — the Department of Justice is watching you:

When we talk about the First amendment we [must] make it clear that actions predicated on violent talk are not American. They are not who we are, they are not what we do, and they will be prosecuted.

And yet, there is no legally meaningful category of “action[s] predicated on violent talk.” Lynch spoke against rhetoric that “edges towards violence,” but the law obviously prohibits violent actions — she’s speaking in terms alien to the First Amendment. True threats are unlawful, and true “incitement” isn’t protected by the Constitution, but these are extraordinarily narrow legal categories. Is it not enough to declare that the Department of Justice will enforce the law and uphold the Constitution?

It's apparently not enough for the second ideologue in a row in the position of Attorney General.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

Welcome to post-America:

The permissionless Internet, which allows anyone to introduce a website, app or device without government review, ends this week. On Thursday the three Democrats among the five commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission will vote to regulate the Internet under rules written for monopoly utilities. 

No one, including the bullied FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, thought the agency would go this far. The big politicization came when President Obama in November demanded that the supposedly independent FCC apply the agency’s most extreme regulation to the Internet. A recent page-one Wall Street Journal story headlined “Net Neutrality: How White House Thwarted FCC Chief” documented “an unusual, secretive effort inside the White House . . . acting as a parallel version of the FCC itself.”

There is nothing that our overlords can't leave alone.

The rich have as much right to free speech as anyone else

Great takedown at Breitbart by Wynton Hall of Thomas B, Edsall's NYT op-ed trying to make it look like the Koch brothers are up to something sinister by putting their money where their mouths are:

Indeed, the left’s rush to deem corporate money in political thought as legally actionable is one progressives would do well to quash.

Case in point: progressive New York Times op-ed writer Thomas B. Edsall’s banal and one-sided screed against Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers, those reliable boogeymen of liberal nightmares. In a breathless Wednesday piece titled “Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers and the End of Political Transparency,” Edsall served up heaping doses of phony outrage over the perfectly legal practice of conservative 501 (c)(4) social welfare organizations receiving anonymous donations.

“The financial resources of the anonymous donors to Crossroads are striking, according to the organization’s 990 filing,” wrote Edsall. “Among the donors were 53 who contributed at least $1 million. Even more generously, one donor gave $22.5 million, another gave $18 million, and two gave $10 million each.” 

After dragging readers through a tedious gauntlet of 501 (c)(4) regulatory compliance verbiage, replete with percentages of allowable political activity, Edsall excitedly raises the specter that groups like Americans for Tax Reform may have engaged in two percent more political spending than is permissible before begrudgingly conceding: “I asked a number of experts in money and elections about the discrepancy and got conflicting answers.”

Furthermore, Edsall asserts that the “labyrinthine secrecy characteristic of the $400 million network of 17 interlocking advocacy groups that coexist under the aegis of the Koch brothers” has created a climate wherein “a kind of lawlessness prevails that is incompatible with the goals of democracy.”

Wowzers.

Yet nowhere in Edsall’s 2,300-word diatribe does he mention any of the myriad progressive 501 (c)(4) groups, such as Center for American Progress, or the “labyrinthine secrecy” that shrouded Big Labor’s $4.4 billion in political spending between 2005 and 2011.

Moreover, as Edsall himself noted in March, the 1958 N.A.A.C.P. v. Alabama and the 1995McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission rulings upheld anonymity as a legitimate means of political activism.

Hall winds up his piece with a reminder of possible unintended consequences of the bill the Freedom-Haters tried to push through the Senate.  Favorite venues for spouting their snark, such as SNL, could be on the chopping block.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

Does Tom Udall's Senate bill look outrageous to you?  Of course it does.

 The amendment, which is favored by Harry Reid and most Senate Democrats, would give Congress unprecedented power to limit debate on public issues in the context of elections. You really have to read the proposed amendment to understand how radical it is. This is the key language:

Congress shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in-kind equivalents with respect to Federal elections, including through setting limits on—

(1) the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, Federal office; and

(2) the amount of funds that may be spent by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates. …

Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress the power to abridge the freedom of the press.

The states would be given similar powers to restrict participation in state elections.

Many observers have noted that if the Udall amendment became law, Congress could set ridiculously low contribution and spending levels, so as to virtually guarantee the re-election of incumbents. This is true–campaign finance “reform” has always been largely about incumbent protection. But I think the proposed amendment is even worse than that. Given its appallingly poor draftsmanship, I don’t see any reason why Congress couldn’t permit a high level of spending on behalf of incumbents (or no limit at all), while setting low limits for spending on behalf of challengers, or prohibiting such contributions altogether.

The linked Power Line post has great video of Ted Cruz's thunderous turn behind the microphone at the Judiciary Committee hearing about it, wherein he says it would have the potential to muzzle Dinesh D'Souza and Michael Moore alike and that "Ray Bradbury would be astonished."  And also excerpts some points that the ACLU makes about this monstrosity:

To give just a few hypotheticals of what would be possible in a world where the Udall proposal is the 28th Amendment:

• Congress would be allowed to restrict the publication of Secretary Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming memoir “Hard Choices” were she to run for office;

• Congress could criminalize a blog on the Huffington Post by Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, that accuses Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) of being a “climate change denier”;

• Congress could regulate this website by reform group Public Citizen, which urges voters to contact their members of Congress in support of a constitutional amendment addressing Citizens United and the recentMcCutcheon case, under the theory that it is, in effect, a sham issue communication in favor of the Democratic Party;

• A state election agency, run by a corrupt patronage appointee, could use state law to limit speech by anti-corruption groups supporting reform;

• A local sheriff running for reelection and facing vociferous public criticism for draconian immigration policies and prisoner abuse could use state campaign finance laws to harass and prosecute his own detractors;

• A district attorney running for reelection could selectively prosecute political opponents using state campaign finance restrictions; and

• Congress could pass a law regulating this letter for noting that all 41 sponsors of this amendment, which the ACLU opposes, are Democrats (or independents who caucus with Democrats).

While it is unlikely the bill could pass the House and get a 38-state approval, Hinderaker points this out:  "Forty-two Democratic (or pseudo-independent) Senators are on record as supporting the repeal of the First Amendment. That is a scandal of the first order, and should be treated as such."

As with most of their tyrannical proposals, the FHers are trying to sell this in class-struggle terms, making it about billionaires.  Okay, let's talk about billionaires - and equality before the law. 

Why we call it post-America - today's edition

A chaplain at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst put together a video tribute to First Sergeants and uploaded it to YouTube.  The Air Force made him take it down because it mentioned God.

As IRS-gate continues to unfold, these names bear close scrutiny

Former White House and MEC campaign counsel Robert Bauer, and several people who came to see him when he was in those capacities: Tova Wang, Richard Hasen, Meredith McGehee.

J. Christian Adams at PJ Media provides links in his article about this web of thuggery that will fill out your understanding of who these people are.

They are all bound by a common zeal for that campaign-finance-reform hoo-ha and weird notions about the First Amendment.  And none of them are too keen on anybody snooping around particular elections to make sure they're being carried out fairly.

Just wow - this hour's edition

The Pentagon announces that military personnel who share their Christian faith could be court-martialed.

We can think a meeting between MEC appointees and snot-nosed smartass Michael Weinstein for this.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

It's come to this.