Award Overturned in Abortion Doctor Wanted Posters — JACKASSES!

Read the rest of Ruling Against Anti-Abortion Terrorist Site Overturned …

More for the In a Stunning Development file: an internal audit commissioned by Chief Charles Ramsey, it has been found that 10% of the officers on the D.C. police force have sent e-mail containing hate slurs, including ethnic and racial slurs, sexually inappropriate content and offensive comments about homosexuals. Some of the e-mails also included content about illegal drug use by officers, sexual activity on the job, and evidence of racial profiling. Malcolm X once said that white hatemongers had traded in the hoods and sheets — well, some of them have traded in the hoods and sheets — and taken up blue uniforms. The sad thing is how often the news continues to prove him right.

The ACLU has put out an important Press Release: 03-01-01 — Limits, Limits and More Limits: Why McCain-Feingold is Wrong for America. Whether McCain-Feingold represents a double-barreled attack on political freedom in America or not is open to question, but the ACLU certainly articulates some really important concerns about the restrictions on publishing information about candidates. As I said earlier, I really wouldn’t mind seeing the fund-raising activities and 30-second ads of citizens’ groups — or corporate interest groups — die in favor of their get-out-the-vote organization and personal contact with legislators. However, if the act comes through in such a way as to prevent all distribution of issue-based advocacy near elections, then it will be a stranglehold on outsider activism and become what Rush Limbaugh has dubbed it, the Incumbent Protection Act. (It’s a strange, sad day when I find myself quoting Rush Limbaugh).

The Money Jungle by William Saletan is an interesting analysis of some of the pitfalls for the coalition over McCain-Feingold. This was particularly perceptive:

McCain imposes disclosure requirements on interest groups that run ads against candidates close to an election. He portrays these groups as constitutionally protected but insidious. In his worldview, citizens are on one side, and special interests are on the other. McCain’s chief antagonist, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., sees it differently. My favorite definition of special interest is a group [that’s] against what I am trying to do, McConnell quipped during Monday’s debate. McConnell offers a kinder term for organizations whose missions he favors: citizens’ groups.

It’s worth pointing out in this context that currently the biggest PAC in American politics is not the National Rifle Association or incumbents’ re-election PACs. It’s EMILY’s List, a PAC focused on electing more women to office. Not exactly my idea of a malignant special interest.

But, on the other hand, this presumes that the only thing that citizens’ groups have to offer is money for campaign contributions or interest ads. This is most of what they do today, but that’s only because money is so powerful in modern campaigning. An organized group of citizens has something besides money behind them: they have votes. And, geeze, isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be about? Part of the point of changing the campaign finance system is to make it so that citizens’ groups no longer compete for the amount of money they can organize, but rather the number of, well, citizens.

Reading Salon.com News: Who’s afraid of the big bad Horowitz? brings back memories of, well, just a few weeks ago, actually. Since I have myself protested an advertisement in our campus newspaper, it strikes me that many of the people writing on this topic seem to have no idea of what the real issue is here (although those who note that David Horowitz is a self-aggrandizing pig making publicity for himself on the backs of young journalists, are not far off).

This is simply not a free press issue. Horowitz was not being censored by some evil cabal of thuggish p.c. mavens, and if the so-called Human Life Alliance’s pamphlet had not been distributed in The Plainsman, they would not have been censored either. Student newspapers are incapable of denying them a forum for their views, since David Horowitz and the HLA are rather rich national figures, and Horowitz is himself a columnist in Salon. The point of a campus newspaper, however, is not to give a voice to well-positioned outsiders who have enough money to buy their way in. The whole point is to give students an open forum.

This doesn’t mean that all political advertisements from outside sources should be banned, since I recognize that student newspapers do need to make money somehow. However, it is extremely hypocritical for Horowitz to pose as some kind of martyr to censorship. Particularly when he and his colleagues are doing it in the pages of a webzine which reaches literally millions more readers than campus newspapers could ever hope to reach.

If Horowitz and the HLA really want to make their voices heard, they ought to write a damn Letter to the Editor like everyone else, or else take their commercial advertisement where it belongs: a commercial newspaper.