Democrat Operative Rick Hasen Wants Trump Censored, American People Need Protection , Says Censor

Liberal Authoritarianism Returns with No Dissents from Democrats

Madison, Wisconsin — Rick Hasen is an election law scholar, commentator and Democrat operative.

It's the last two parts of his CV that has thrust the poor man into la-la land.

Hasen has joined the liberal-Democrat chorus of voices insisting that Donald Trump must be censored, deplatformed, and stopped from writing on social media because Trump's emissions are a "grave threat to American democracy" that likely will remain.

Instead of using the government to stop thought, Hasen wants to privatize repression of unpopular writing using the Tech Giants. 

#ELB: My New Paper: “Donald Trump Should Remain Deplatformed from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube Despite the High Bar That Platforms Should Apply to the Question of Deplatforming Political Figures” https://t.co/4e1Qw5bcnJ

— Rick Hasen (@rickhasen) October 10, 2022

One thing about censors like Hasen is the spectacular narcissism and self-regard proclaiming Rick Hasen is fit to sift and winnow Trump's social media content with no threat that Hasen will be filled with hate or driven to violence, while others are not equipped with Hasen's powers of discernment.

Aaron Sorkin bellowed the same clarion call for censorship of Trump three years ago with the same lack of self awareness.

Censors such as every Democrat and Hasen who advocate for authoritative selection of published views  believe only they are immune from the corruption of unorthodox thoughts from a lunatic such as Trump. The American people cannot be trusted with exposure.

Time for another lesson on the need for the First Amendment, while there's still time.

From Justice William Brennan in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964):

The First Amendment, said Judge Learned Hand,

presupposes that right conclusions are more likely to be gathered out of a multitude of tongues than through any kind of authoritative selection. To many, this is, and always will be, folly, but we have staked upon it our all. United States v. Associated Press, 52 F.Supp. 362, 372 (D.C.S.D.N.Y. 1943).

Mr. Justice Brandeis, in his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 375-376, gave the principle its classic formulation:

Those who won our independence believed . . . that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. ... Believing in the power of reason as applied through public discussion, they eschewed silence coerced by law -- the argument of force in its worst form. Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed.

Thus, we consider this case [New York Times v. Sullivan] against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials. (New York Times v. Sullivan).

Hasen ought consider the foundations of Sullivan today, because free speech protections may not be around forever.

Social media, though it lives in private quasi utilities, well serves our national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited.

There is another case, with another classic formulation, that Rick Hasen should give a once-over:  Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 US 444 (1969).

That whole imminent lawless action test as it applies to politcal speech. Give it read, couldn't hurt.

Wisconsin Citizens to Capitol on Feb. 8 for Water Days

Wisconsin families over generations know the Badger state is a great place to live.

A running feud with Minnesota is which state really has more lakes, and whose people are really more nice.

But the gentle folk of Wisconsin have been targeted by Big Ag as entire regions are threatened by the massively polluting industrialized agriculture, CAFOs or Confined Animal Feeding Operations.

Big Ag is rapacious, toxic and it will not look back as its operations devastate families, ruin rural economies and pollute Wisconsin surface and ground waters.

From Don Ystad of Rome, Wisconsin

Rome and Saratoga friends and neighbors,

This all started with a suggestion from our neighbor and friend Bob Benkowski, and it grew when another Rome friend and neighbor offered to donate buses to get us to Madison. And, it really grew when Concerned Rome Citizens reached out to a statewide group, Sustain Rural Wisconsin Network.

Five hundred of us are traveling to Madison next week Wednesday (Feb 8th) to take our message to the Legislature. The right to clean and abundant water belongs to all of us. It doesn't belong to just a select group of industry lobbyists blowing into the ears of our representatives. And that is the message we plan to deliver respectfully and without screaming and shouting.

We are bringing with us citizens and progressive farmers concerned with protecting our water and our environment. All with a clear message about protecting water for all of us. Our buses are full, but we invite like-minded citizens to drive down and join us.

Concerned Rome Citizens

MacIver Institute Predictions Proven Wrong

The MacIver Institute is a Wisconsin-based propaganda outfit, funded by rightwing money, staffed by rightwing Republicans, and emitting rightwing propaganda.

If you want credible, unbiased information from MacIver, you would have better luck getting a disquisition on string theory from Sarah Palin.

The MacIver Institute—like the GOP—spent the last several months asserting massive fraud of recall signatures, massive voter impersonation fraud, massive fraud of anything critical of the Republican Party.

Turn outs the MacIver Institute, like the GOP are wrong.

But don't look for a retraction from MacIver Institute President Brett Healy for his defamation of the Wisconsin people. Healy is a hack; and accurate, credible information is not his business.

By Will Dooling at the Center for Media and Democracy's PRWatch

Upon receiving the signatures, the GAB worked hard to scan them and post them online so that all parties could examine them. In a February 6 interview on the Mike Gousha Show, the most respected TV news show in Wisconsin, MacIver Institute President Brett Healy declared that he had personally reviewed the thousands of pages of petitions, and by his estimate almost one third of the signatures would be invalidated, and only 650,000 signatures would be found valid.

Yet in the end, the final count released by the GAB on March 29 found an error rate of only about 3.2 percent -- about a tenth of Healy's initial prediction of 33 1/3 percent. This is no surprise to the 30,000 volunteers of the grassroots group United Wisconsin, who collected and submitted signatures and established a multi-stage review process to make sure that every signature was clear and complete, and made their best effort to eliminate duplicates.

While only 931,000 signatures were submitted, slightly short of the one million claimed, the GAB disqualified only 30,000 from the Walker recall, and about 34,000 from the Kleefisch recall. The three percent error rate is significantly below the 15 percent rate predicted by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. It was also dramatically below the 30 percent rejection rate for the one million signatures collected for the referendum to reverse SB-5, the Ohio collective bargaining measure, in 2011.

The Wisconsin GAB has recently released a statement giving comparably low error rates on the petitions to recall state senators Fitzgerald, Wanggaard, Moulton, and Galloway. ...

Dire predictions of 'rampant signature fraud' and 'floods' of phony signatures have been proven false. We hope that MacIver, 'True the Vote,' and other groups that alleged fraud will promptly and professionally apologize to United Wisconsin, the grassroots group that gathered the signatures. But we will not hold our breath.

Bo Morrison Was Murdered, Empowered by NRA-Corporate-backed Front Group

Sign From the 2011 Wisconsin Protests

Adam Kind is the killer of Bo Morrision of Slinger, Wisconsin.

Kind and other killers like George Zimmerman are legally empowered by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Castle Doctrine Act model legislation that has been enacted across the nation.

In Florida, the Stand Your Ground law uses the same language as the Castle Doctrine Act, and both are pushed by ALEC, as reported in the Center for Media and Democracy.

ALEC is a front group run by several corperations, the Koch brothers and the NRA.

Sure, ALEC alum Scott Walker signed the Wisconsin ALEC Castle Doctrine bill into law, but he did so with a lot of Democratic support.

As reported by SourceWatch:

ALEC’s agenda extends into almost all areas of law. Its bills undermine environmental regulations and deny climate change; support school privatization; undercut health care reform; defund unions and limit their political influence; restrain legislatures’ abilities to raise revenue through taxes; mandate strict election laws that disenfranchise voters; increase incarceration to benefit the private prison industry, among many other issues. 

ALEC legislation is running wild in the states. Let's hope Democrats challenge this threat to democracy and life before someone else gets killed.

As Paul Krugman writes:

[L]anguage virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy. ...

What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law. ...

Yet that’s not all; you have to think about the interests of the penal-industrial complex — prison operators, bail-bond companies and more. (The American Bail Coalition has publicly described ALEC as its “life preserver.”) This complex has a financial stake in anything that sends more people into the courts and the prisons, whether it’s exaggerated fear of racial minorities or Arizona’s draconian immigration law, a law that followed an ALEC template almost verbatim.

Think about that: we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.

Don't Let Me Down

This song's going out to President Obama—please remember that your base takes human rights, civil rights and democratic values very seriously ...

Russ Feingold: Government in Secret

Thank you Russ Feingold.

See Russ Feingold: Government in Secret in the LA Times via Common Dreams:

... It’s a given in our democracy that laws should be a matter of public record. But the law in this country includes not just statutes and regulations, which the public can readily access. It also includes binding legal interpretations made by courts and the executive branch. These interpretations are increasingly being withheld from the public and Congress. ...

In a serious presidential campaign, the Bush administration's performance on the issue of secrecy in a democratic society would be debated endlessly by the major candidates. How about you, Sen. McCain: What's your opinion on the Bush administration's commitment to secrecy?

I don't believe we will get this discussion in the campaign from George Stephanopoulos, Charles Gibson and Wolf Blitzer.

Democracy Is No Club, It's an Expression of Peoples' Rights

Many Americans share concern about the transformation of the American electoral process into a rarefied club unresponsive to the people's concerns.

Joan Didion echos this concern in her Political Fictions (Vintage, 2001)

It was clear in 1988 that the rhetorical manipulation of resentment and anger designed to attract (target voters) had reduced the nation’s political dialogue to a level so dispiritedly low that its highest expression had come to be a pernicious nostalgia. Perhaps most strikingly of all, it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.

There is little accountability by political elites to the American people, both in the electoral process and in the public policy made.

You can see this by Dick Cheney's blithe "so what?" response to the question noting that the vast majority of the American people want to withdraw from Iraq and say that it was a mistake to have invaded.

You can see it in Hillary Clinton's refusal to stake out positions clearly defining what a responsive democrat is, in favor of blurring the lines with John McCain so that she might brand Obama as less than the mighty McCain and the great leader Hillary.

You see it in the casting out of appeals meant to divide and breed suspicion.

No one beyond her strategists is calling for Clinton to tarnish Obama and mendaciously build up McCain.

As Obama has reached out and attempted to build a people-based coalition based on unity and social justice, the backlash from political elites has been a new low in the amount of crap floated into the political culture.

Many voters are going along for the ride, watching the pollution with a strange, detached amusement.

And those who thought they were Democratic leaders and presidential material refrain from forcefully speaking out for one candidate or another, and watch the pollution occur with mumbled, vague disapproval.

America needs Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd, Tammy Baldwin and most importantly John Edwards, to stand up and forget worrying about the politics in their rarefied world, call out and denounce appeals to fear and division where they see it, and fight for a candidate clearly distinguishable from the tragic John McCain.

This, the pollution and self destruction of our political process, does not have to happen. The people are their own cure. Political blogs are a partial anecdote. Obama is a partial anecdote.

But the baleful virus remains alive and even if Obama gets the Democratic nomination, it will strike and bleed out the American political system if we let it.

The United States is not a mature democracy with a healthy immune system protecting itself. It need boosters and infusions to fight off diseases for which the American people are the only cure and vaccine available.

Presidents

U.S.-backed Pakistani Pervez Musharraf rules the country as a "President," according to American corporate news broadcasts and the Bush administration.

Though Musharraf seized power in 1999 through a military coup, has suspended the Pakistan Constitution twice, and cancelled elections, Bush has held steadfast with Musharraf.

Compare this relationship with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who Bush and Condi Rice regularly chide for not being "democratic," and destabilizing.

After all, Chavez is giving Venezuelan oil money to the people of Venezuela, and holding elections and referendums, so Chavez must be a threat to Bush and Rice's idea of a democracy.

On democracy and freedom, Bush and Rice have less credibility in the world than they do in the United States, and that's very low and appalling to people who are concerned with such matters. Bush is simply another in the line of numerous American presidents who sing the praises of democracy while subverting it abroad, and in Bush's case at home.

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NYT' s Roger Cohen Pens Imperialistic Column on Hugo Chávez

With no sense of irony, Roger Cohen pens an op-ed this morning in the New York Times telling President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela to shut up, and halt that economic model to which Cohen objects.

Cohen was quoting the paragon of democracy, King Juan Carlos of Spain, who "got it right when he recently interrupted Chávez’s trademark verbal diarrhea with a brusque: "Why don’t you just shut up?"

To democratic minds, it's monarchs like Carlos who are repulsive and obscene, an assault on the very notion of democracy. [Democracy etiquette tip: When in the presence of monarchs like Juan Carlos, politely interrupt and remind them that they are grotesque anachronisms.]

So it comes as no surprise that Chávez, elected, re-elected, and committed to using the spoils of oil to spread the wealth around to the poor should be such a pain to the monarch Carlos and the imperialist-minded Cohen, who take it as an assumption that they have a right to tell the people of Venezuela and its president how to conduct themselves.

Cohen notes: Venezuelans will vote Sunday in a referendum that would remove all limits on presidential re-election, grant Chávez direct control over foreign currency reserves, allow him to censor the media under a state of emergency declarable at his discretion, expand his powers to expropriate private property, and create the second formally socialist nation in the Americas alongside Fidel’s.

The reality is a bit more complicated. As Mark Weisbrot writes in the New Statesman (via Z): In any case, the voters will decide, with a far stronger opposition media than exists in the United States proselytising against the government. Venezuelans have not lost civil liberties the way people in the U.S. (or even the UK) have in recent years, and ordinary citizens continue to have more say in their government, and share more in its oil wealth, than ever before. It is doubtful that the referendum will reverse these changes, regardless of the outcome.

One fact one ought to emphasize is that the Venezuelans will vote, just like they voted for Chávez. [Cohen does allow that "Certainly, the oil money Chávez has plowed into poor neighborhoods (at the expense of an oil industry suffering chronic underinvestment) has reduced poverty. "]

As for Cohen (and King Juan Carlos - yuck!), if you do not like Chávez, don't vote for him, or for his proposed Constitutional amendments in the next election.

Wait a minute; you're not citizens of Venezuela, are you?
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Idiot Wind

The logical consequence of the latest administration assertion of executive authority is that once the president invokes "executive privilege," then the administration or any member thereof no longer is subject to Congressional oversight or legal prosecution.

The name for this form of government is not democracy, but rather a strongman formally anwserable to no one and no law, as a worried country of non-Republicans looks on.

As is predictable, this administration action, a genuine move away from democracy, is portrayed by the Washington Post as a mere dispute among political parties.

Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.

The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals.

What would the administration have to do to compel an accurate description of what form of government to which we have devolved?

Glenn Grenwald at Salon nails it:

The administration's position is a direct assault on prosecutorial independence, and an attempt to vest the President with the unchallengeable power to block criminal prosecutions of anyone in the Executive Branch who breaks the law at the President's direction.

Via ThinkProgress:

White House seeks legal cover from Gonzales. The New York Times reports that the White House is confidently asserting that any attempts by Congress to hold White House staffers in contempt will be stymied by Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department:

“The Justice Department would be likely to block any efforts by Congressional Democrats to seek contempt charges against present and former White House officials for refusing to give information to Congress, a White House spokesman said Friday. […]

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Congressional threats to have presidential aides charged with criminal contempt would probably end in failure. “It has been the Justice Department’s long-held view that the law does not permit Congress to require a U.S. attorney to convene a grand jury or otherwise pursue a prosecution” when someone refuses on the basis of executive privilege to testify or turn over documents, Mr. Fratto said.”

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