In Scotland, posting stupid things on Facebook is a “hate crime” punishable by serious jail time.

At what point does the legitimate right to demonstrate cross the line into infringing on the rights of others?

Yesterday, I noted that now that Rand Paul has gone from a primary race to the general election that:  “Paul is now facing a very different kind of campaign” because he is now going to be scrutinized in new ways and will have to explain himself to a different kind of electorate if he is [...]

In a rather weird exchange on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Salon editor Joan Walsh was stumped when asked to call out extremists on her side of the aisle: P.J. Gladnick has the transcript: JOE SCARBOROUGH: …I think it helps us all to say there are extreme voices on the left, there are extreme voices on the [...]

For some reason, I didn’t get the TrackBack and thus missed Dan Riehl‘s reply to my “Congress Receiving Death Threats” post.   Given that 18 hours have passed, I’ve decided to write a new post rather than bury my response as an update. He’s right that I mistakenly attribute a post with Doug Powers’ byline [...]

The goalies for the U.S. Olympic hockey team have been told to remove slogans on their facemasks. U.S. netminder Jonathan Quick will be ordered to remove the slogan ‘Support Our Troops’ from his helmet for contravening Olympic rules on political propaganda, the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) said on Monday. Netminder Ryan Miller, Quick’s team [...]

Remember that report from a few weeks back that President Obama was targeting American citizens accused of terrorism for assassination by U.S. intelligence and special operators?  Well, it’s  not quite true. Steve Aftergood: “The article referred incorrectly to the presence of U.S. citizens on a CIA list of people the agency seeks to kill or [...]

In last night’s State of the Union speech, President Obama called out the Supreme Court’s decision overturning corporate and union spending limits, saying it “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.” Associate Justice Samuel Alito shook his head [...]

A recent Gallup poll shows that the American public agrees with the Supreme Court that campaign contributions are free speech but that most nonetheless want to limit said speech. Fifty-seven percent of Americans consider campaign donations to be a protected form of free speech, and 55% say corporate and union donations should be treated the [...]

Missouri native Rush Limbaugh has been dropped from membership in a group seeking to buy the St. Louis Rams and keep them in the city.  This speeds up the inevitable conclusion fo the NFL’s owners refusing to let the controversial pundit join their ranks. Limbaugh was to be a limited partner in a group headed [...]

How far does the 1st Amendment go?  Hal Turner is about to find out. Internet radio host Hal Turner disliked how three federal judges rejected the National Rifle Association’s attempt to overturn a pair of handgun bans. “Let me be the first to say this plainly: These Judges deserve to be killed,” Turner wrote on [...]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has termed those who show up at town hall meetings and speak their mind “evil-mongers.” Reid coined the term in a speech to an energy conference in Las Vegas this week and repeated it in an interview with Politics Daily. Such “evil-mongers” are using “lies, innuendo and rumor,” to drown [...]

While I share Michael Tomasky’s disdain for people carrying signs about “the blood of tyrants” while protesting democratically elected leaders, he goes too far here: There was an election. One guy one, another guy lost. It wasn’t disputed. It wasn’t decided by an ideologically divided Supreme Court, which gave the win to the guy who [...]

A Colorado jury yesterday decided that Ward Churchill had been fired, not for his blatant plagiarism, but for saying outrageous things that embarrassed the University of Colorado.  He was awarded a dollar in damages, presumably because his actual plagiarism mitigated the fact that it wasn’t the reason for his termination. The former ethnic-studies professor won [...]

The Supreme Court has ruled that kids should be able to access pornographic images on the Internet. Or, rather, the fact that a lot of parents don’t supervise their kids does not supersede the rights of adults to access said content. A long legal drive to shield children from sexually explicit material on the Web [...]

The 9th Circuit has upheld Los Angeles bans on billboards, saying no 1st Amendment issues were at stake. Outdoor advertising company Metro Lights LLC had argued that the city could not prohibit new “off-site” signs — images that advertise products not sold on the immediate property — while at the same time selling advertising space [...]

Pennsylvania is fighting over rules banning the wear of campaign clothing at the polling booth. Sue Nace thought election volunteers were joking when they told her she would have to remove her T-shirt to vote in the presidential primary last spring. But it was no laughing matter to the poll workers-turned-fashion police, who said Nace’s [...]

A plurality of Americans want “government [to] require all radio and television stations to offer equal amounts of conservative and liberal political commentary” and nearly a third believe even privately owned blogs should have that requirement, Rasmussen reports. Nearly half of Americans (47%) believe the government should require all radio and television stations to offer [...]