Jprof,
You do some really great posts. Thanks.

In the vein and spirit of your post allow me to link to a current post by the inimitable Glenn Greenwald.

JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings.

Yep, that's our darn liberal media, sure enough.

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.
- Benito Mussolini

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
Hunter S. Thompson

Madison was one of great intellects among the founders.

One of my favorite Madison writings:

(link...)

Papers 9 & 10 were bookends. United we Stand.

We need a modern day James Madison.

Do you really think the examples you list are restrictions on speech?

Hate crime laws don't criminalize speech, they just amplify penalties for crimes that target victims because of ethnicity or sexuality. They seem no different than laws against threats or inciting panic.

Campaign laws seem to enhance speech by clarifying who the speaker is. They certainly don't restrict an individual from speaking. Of course, I tend to think of free speech as a right alloted to brains operating through tongues or fingers, but not necessarily to corporate entities. It seems like free speech is more at risk of being drowned than censored.

I heard that Google arbitrarily removes sites from their index and
for no good reason. Some of these sites have trouble with spammers and hackers who spam illegal stuff on their referrals, like mail order drugs. Since these sites do the best they can to rid themselves of hackers and so on, why are they penalized when they do their best to remove this spam?

Low budget operations do not have a 24 hour consultant service to police these hackers and spammers. Freedom of speech on the internet includes freedom to be seen. Legal sites should not be penalized arbitrarily and removed from the index without recourse.There should be a clear phone number or hotline to call Google when hackers post this crap on a site.
Google should have consultants respond immediately.

I've always had a great fondness for John Stuart Mill:

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Although today he might not really be regarded as a Liberal, he is the Father of Liberal Thought and all three of these quotes come from his 1859 'On Liberty'. (Wonderful year, 1859! The same year saw the publication of 'The Origin of Species'.) But his articulation of the concept of the 'marketplace of ideas' and the notion that the solution for bad ideas is more ideas, both fit in very neatly with the opponents of censorship in any form.

So, now that Scotty McClellan has amply demonstrated that the current administration did all they could to stifle the free exchange of ideas about the run-up to war, branding any who challenged the 'official position' as traitors (or worse), how do we set the balance aright? A freedom, once lost, is very difficult to recover. A first step would be to throw the rascals out!