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A profound reversal in attitudes has taken place in the last twenty years. While in the 1960′s the cries of “freedom” and “liberty” came from Progressives, today it is the right that sees liberty under attack. The campaign rhetoric of the four Republican candidates for President all put the defense of liberty at the top of their agenda. They see in Progressives attempts to regulate bad actors in the world’s of finance, health insurance, or environmental pollution a basic attack on the free market. As Rick Santorum said on Super Tuesday about Obamacare, ”Ladies and gentlemen, this is the beginning of the end of freedom in America. Once the government has control of your life, then they got you.”

I think we need to really consider whether liberty is the value that trumps all others in our society. Let’s take the case of the publisher of backpage.com. 

The biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a Web site called Backpage.com. This emporium for girls and women — some under age or forced into prostitution — is in turn owned by an opaque private company called Village Voice Media. Until now it has been unclear who the ultimate owners are.That mystery is solved. The owners turn out to include private equityfinanciers, including Goldman Sachs with a 16 percent stake…

There’s no doubt that many escort ads on Backpage are placed by consenting adults. But it’s equally clear that Backpage plays a major role in the trafficking of minors or women who are coerced. In one recent case in New York City, prosecutors say that a 15-year-old girl was drugged, tied up, raped and sold to johns through Backpage and other sites.Backpage has 70 percent of the market for prostitution ads, according to AIM Group, a trade organization.

Now the State of Washington has passed a law creating criminal penalties for sites like backpage.com for advertising girls under the age of 18. And what is the response from backpage.com–”Censorship”.

“There’s going to have to be a challenge to it,” said Liz McDougall, general counsel for Village Voice Media Holdings. “Otherwise it would effectively shut down an enormous portion of the Internet that currently permits third-party content.”

Now where have I heard that before? The defenders of Kim Dotcom and the other pirates who have lived luxuriously off the stolen work of musicians and filmmakers around the world, say that any attempt to block these sites is censorship. This is utter nonsense. As I have pointed out before, the issue is not Google or Baidu’s precious freedom, but their precious revenues.

How did we get to this point that the Libertarian rhetoric dominates our political debate? The Village Voice’s liberty to service pimps of underage girls, trumps society’s right to protect those girls from exploitation? The selfish individual’s liberty to not buy health insurance and make the rest of us pay for his emergency room care trumps society’s right to create a working health insurance system? Megaupload’s liberty to host stolen movies trumps the artist’s right to get paid for his work?

As I have said before, we must come off the barricades and stop using this foolish rhetoric of censorship and liberty where it really does not apply. You have no right to free food. Why do you think you have a right to free music? It is time for all the parties involved to sit at the table and figure out some solutions that afford the creators of imaginative work to get paid for their considerable labors.

Sabu

About a year ago I was at the house of my friend David Fanning on the Massachusetts coast when a call came in that messed up our weekend plans. David has been the Executive Producer of PBS’s flagship show Frontline for 25 years. He has fearlessly told truth to power, despite all the possible reverberations in Congress or elsewhere and the fragile funding of PBS. The call came from his webmaster who said that the whole Frontline website had been destroyed by a hacker collective called Lulzsec. Lulzsec and their leader, Sabu had been outraged by a frontline documentary on Julian Assange and had vowed revenge. I had seen the show and found it to be very evenhanded, but Sabu and his friends objected to a passage in which Julian Assange’s tactics were questioned. When Assange first gave the raw intelligence cables from the State Department, all of the names of the local informants in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere were in the docs. The editors of the Guardian and the New York Times insisted on redacting the names of the local informants so they wouldn’t be killed for helping the Americans. Assange insisted the names stay in and started dumping the raw files out on Wikileaks. That anyone should even question Assange was too much for Lulzsec and so they waged cyberwar on Frontline. They didn’t just bring down the website, they destroyed it and all the archives. It took David Fanning weeks and a lot of money to restore the site. Read more…

From this week’s New Yorker, the amazing Roz Chwast.

The U.S. Government has long maintained a policy that they have the right to stop and search anyone at the border. The Department of Homeland Security is now taking the position that “the border” is the 100-mile wide strip that wraps around the “external boundary” of the United States. The ACLU took all the recent census maps and came to a rather surprising conclusion.

What we found is that fully TWO-THIRDS of the United States’ population lives within this Constitution-free or Constitution-lite Zone. That’s 197.4 million people who live within 100 miles of the US land and coastal borders.

That means the Fourth Amendment of the constitution, barring random and arbitrary stops and searches, does not apply to two-thirds of U.S. Citizens.

Shouldn’t Senator Leahy and the Judiciary Committee be looking into this?

The Mormon Church has poured almost $18 Million into the campaign in California to ban gay marriage. Recently they have been running the classic scare ads saying that without Prop 8, all the homosexual teachers in California schools would be teaching kids the “gay lifestyle”. The anti-Prop 8 forces are underfunded but fighting back on the net.

Some of us have smiled when our correspondents talked about the possibility of martial law and the election being cancelled. “Oh those paranoids”, I thought. Then a friend sent me this little dispatch from the Army Times.

The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team has spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle rattle, helping restore essential services and escorting supply convoys.

Now they’re training for the same mission — with a twist — at home.

Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.

But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.

They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.

The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

“It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it.”

The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.

I’m still not buying the martial law idea, but if banks start failing and Wall Street barons flee the country on their private jets, there might be some pretty angry mobs in the streets. Somehow the “non-lethal weapons package” does not seem designed for assisting in natural disasters.

Late last month local Virginia Republican officials began to worry about the thousands of students at Virginia Tech who were being registered by the Obama Campaign. So they put out a series of press releases incorrectly asserting dire consequences for the students.

The releases warned that such students could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns, a statement the Internal Revenue Service says is incorrect, and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents’ car and health insurance.

After some inquiries from students and parents, and more pointed questions from civil rights lawyers, the state board of elections said Friday that it was “modifying and clarifying” the state guidelines on which the county registrar had based his releases.

When I was helping register Black Voters for SNCC in 1964, I would have laughed if you had told me that middle class white college students would need the help of a civil rights lawyer to get registered. Before the clarification over 1000 students withdrew their registration application. The War Party becomes The Bully Party.

We have been carrying on a great discussion about the role of culture and politics since early August. One band, Rage Against The Machine is still walking the walk. After having been prevented by the St. Paul Police from playing an outdoor concert, the band brought their politics indoors to the Target Center. This is just a camcorder view from the audience with terrible sound, but the visual of the opening is all you need.

The last night of the Republican Convention was probably the most vivid exercise of George Orwell’s theory of Doublethink, in the modern political era. As Orwell wrote,

If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.

As the hall monitors from The War Party handed out the Peace signs, the lines from Orwell’s 1984 sprang to mind.

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.

In 2004 when Karl Rove was able to get George Bush reelected, a certain cynicism descended over the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Read more…

The Wall Street Journal reports about Gov. Palin’s church.

At the Pentecostal church where Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin worshipped for more than two decades, congregants speak in tongues and are part of a faith that believes humanity is in its “end times” — the days preceding a world-ending cataclysm bringing Christian redemption and the second coming of Jesus.

The Rev. Ed Kalnins, pastor of the Pentecostal church, Wasilla Assembly of God, says he has told church members that God put President George W. Bush in office and that America is locked in a “holy war” with terrorists.

At Mr. Kalnins’s invitation, Gov. Palin appeared on stage in June before a youth group at Wassila Assembly of God, where she reminisced fondly about getting baptized there, before asking the young people to pray for a proposed natural-gas pipeline in Alaska and for American soldiers.

“Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country,” Gov. Palin said, in a video of the talk posted on the church’s Web site. Pray “that our national leaders are sending them out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure we’re praying for: that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.”

It also turns out she was at church when the leader of Jews for Jesus stated that  “terrorist attacks on Israelis as God’s “judgment of unbelief” of Jews who haven’t embraced Christianity.”

How is the Rove Swat Team going to keep her from answering questions about these views? Do they really think they can avoid having a press conference?