Pam Brown's Blog l emission - control. net

The Power of Hate Speech in a Mediated World

While America is widely known for our allowance of all types of speech, there are important limits to freedom of expression established within American law.  We don’t allow people to yell “fire” (when there isn’t one) on a plane, for example.  And we don’t allow defamation in certain contexts, or invasions of privacy in others.  But what about words that cause others to commit harmful acts? 

Think Again: The Surprising Success of the Right-Wing Rant

From The Center for American Progress By Eric Alterman & Danielle Ivory:

"For once, Foxnation.com got it right. “Dems Now Get Taste of Being Called 'Racist,'” said a screaming headline, and there’s no denying it was true. How else to characterize a story in which ex-Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo and radio host Rush Limbaugh compared Sonia Sotomayor’s opinions on race to those of the Ku Klux Klan.

David Duke found this to be a bit much. After all, he wrote, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, while Hispanic, was actually part and parcel of a Jewish conspiracy. Subsequently, Tancredo was asked if he wished to reconsider his KKK analogy. Alas, he declined. He also mentioned that he wasn’t sure if the Obama administration hated white people."

Think Again: The Surprising Success of the Right-Wing Rant

Lincoln's Great Depression

From The Atlantic (2005): 

"When Abraham Lincoln came to the stage of the 1860 state Republican convention in Decatur, Illinois, the crowd roared in approval. Men threw hats and canes into the air, shaking the hall so much that the awning over the stage collapsed; according to an early account, "the roof was literally cheered off the building." Fifty-one years old, Lincoln was at the peak of his political career, with momentum that would soon sweep him to the nomination of the national party and then to the White House.

Yet to the convention audience Lincoln didn't seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. On the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the convention floor, "I then thought him one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw."

Lincoln's Great Depression

Obama exhumes Net neutrality from the Tomb of Forgotten Issues

From the LA Times: 

"The debate over Net neutrality has quieted considerably since the Federal Communications Commission rebuked Comcast in August for its discriminatory handling of BitTorrent traffic. Congress has been silent on the issue as one of the leading proponents of Net neutrality, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), has focused on cap-and-trade legislation to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The FCC is still awaiting confirmation of President Obama's pick for its chairman, Julius Genachowski, and has been preoccupied by the looming analog TV cutoff. The new chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz, has dropped hints about regulating broadband providers, but for the most part, whatever momentum that the Net neutrality drive had in 2007 and 2008 seems to have dissipated.

So when Obama brought up the issue today in a speech on cyber-security, it seemed like a bolt out of the blue."

Continued:  Obama Exhumes Net Neutrality from the Tomb of Forgotten Issues

Obama Defends Net Neutrality; Is Anyone Listening?

President Committed to Net Neutrality