Then comes the conviction yesterday of a Massachusetts man for viewing and translating jihadi videos online. The eight-week trial featured starkly contrasting portrayals of the bearded Muslim, Tarek Mehanna, a Sudbury, Mass., fundamentalist who traveled to Yemen and has made no secret of his contempt for U.S. foreign policy.

His Boston legal team haloed him as a kind and loving man, if an angry and opinionated intellectual type. They argued he was being persecuted for his disapproval of  U.S. foreign policy. The government countered with the belief that Mehanna was just the sort of hater who’d take glee in seeing Americans getting gunned down in bloody shopping malls.

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Those beautiful words, almost haiku-like, are the sparse poetry of the American democratic experiment.  The Founders purposely wrote the First Amendment to read broadly, and not like a snippet of tax code, in order to emphasize that it should encompass everything from shouted religious rantings to eloquent political criticism.  Go ahead, reread it aloud at this moment when the government seems to be carving out an exception to it large enough to drive a tank through.

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And what’s Washington’s response? Nothing. In fact, Congress’s so-called “supercommittee” just disbanded because Republicans refuse to raise a penny of taxes on the rich.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court says money is speech and corporations are people. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision last year ended all limits on political spending. Millions of dollars are being funneled to politicians without a trace.

And a revolving door has developed between official Washington and Wall Street – with bank executives becoming public officials who make rules that benefit the banks before heading back to the Street to make money off the rules they created.

Other top officials, including an increasing proportion of former members of congress, are cashing in by joining lobbying power houses and pressuring their former colleagues to do whatever their clients want.

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First things first. The Supreme Court’s rulings that money is speech and corporations are people have now opened the floodgates to unlimited (and often secret) political contributions from millionaires and billionaires. Consider the Koch brothers (worth $25 billion each), who are bankrolling the Tea Party and already running millions of dollars worth of ads against Democrats.

Such millionaires and billionaires aren’t contributing their money out of sheer love of country. They have a more self-interested motive. Their political spending is analogous to their other investments. Mostly they want low tax rates and friendly regulations.

Wall Street is punishing Democrats for enacting the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation (weak as it is) by shifting its money to Republicans. The Koch brothers’ petrochemical empire has financed, among many other things, candidates who will vote against environmental protection.

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That was the cultural belief the Supreme Court reinforced on Monday when it rejected an attempt to ban the sale of violent video games to minors. Despite the frequent rhetorical link made by politicians and activists between sex and violence in the media, when it comes to First Amendment exemptions, sex stands entirely on its own. The majority ruling states clearly that federal obscenity law applies only to "depictions of 'sexual conduct'" and not to scenes that are "shocking" for other reasons, like extreme violence. The Court ruled in the 1968 case of Ginsberg v. New York that states could ban the sale of sexual material to children, even if the content is not considered "obscene" for adults.

This latest ruling reveals a remarkable double standard -- one that dissenting justice Stephen Breyer calls out in his written remarks. He asks:

[W]hat sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her? What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restricting sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman -- bound, gagged, tortured, and killed -- is also topless?

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While the whole statute stands on weak constitutional grounds, that last nuance seems particularly shaky -- and dangerous. That's because of the special jurisprudential protections granted to core political speech -- much of which is consciously intended to upset those who are exposed to it. Indeed, you may be upset by that antiabortion group mailer showing a photo of a fetus, or you may be upset by the antiwar ad showing graphic images of battlefield violence, but that's constitutionally protected speech (as is, by the way, your right to subsequently express your outrage at the images).

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If a high-schooler uses an off-campus computer to create offensive material that relates to his or her school life -- writing nasty messages about school administrators or fellow students, for instance -- is his or her speech still protected?

On Monday, the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that two students -- each of whom had created an unflattering mock MySpace profile for a school official -- had been unfairly disciplined by their respective school districts. In both cases, whatever disruption the students' actions had caused was simply not profound enough to merit school involvement, the court decided. It was a victory for these students, and all others whose online speech is objectionable but not "substantially" disruptive. (For some, of course, the ruling is not so rosy: As Wired notes, the rights of those students who do seriously disrupt school life can still be restricted by administrators).

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Alex Seitz-Wald of Think Progress rightly takes Sen. Rand Paul to task for going on Sean Hannity's radio program -- one week after commendably leading opposition to the Patriot Act on civil liberties grounds -- and advocating the arrest of people who "attend radical political speeches."  After claiming to be against racial and religious profiling, Paul said:  "But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that's really an offense that we should be going after -- they should be deported or put in prison."  Seitz-Wald correctly notes the obvious:  "Paul’s suggestion that people be imprisoned or deported for merely attending a political speech would be a fairly egregious violation on the First Amendment, not to mention due process." 

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Haas organized the event to protest the treatment of Isaac Eslava, an LSU student who was charged with felony criminal damage and arson after he stole and burned the LSU War Memorial's American flag on May 1, shortly after President Obama had announced the death of Osama bin Laden. But Haas now says that by Wednesday morning, the negative reaction had caused him to abandon the idea of burning a flag, and he planned merely to make a speech. Sustained physical and verbal taunting prevented him from doing even that; before he could speak more than a few words, policemen led the student away, as obscenities (and water balloons) continued to fall. (Flag-burning may be legal, but Haas lacked a burn permit, so would technically have been breaking the law had he followed through with his original plan.)

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I think the decision is a travesty. But, alas, after reading it, I also find it perfectly defensible, probably even correct.

Right. OK, well, column over. A bit short this week, but that does seem to sum it up nice—wait, I'm sorry, there's another 650 words? But... why?

Goldberg goes on to quote various editorials about how the case is painful but correct and blah blah blah. Jonah Goldberg has no time for your pointy-headed liberal values that he says he agrees with!

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With Breitbart claiming that Sherrod's suit is part of a "last-ditch attempt to shock me into silence," does Sherrod actually have a case? To find out, we spoke with  Floyd Abrams, the renowned constitutional lawyer, who gave us a crash course in what Sherrod has to prove in court in the months ahead.

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The Koch brothers, who use their vast fortunes to encourage the creation of political consensus around various government policies that allow them to pollute as much as they want in order to make as much of a profit while sacrificing as little of said fortunes to the tyrannical government as possible (they'd rather spend a million dollars on a libertarian think tank than see one cent of that hard-earned money go to a wasteful big government school lunch program), held their annual retreat in Rancho Mirage, Calif., last weekend. A bunch of liberals protested the event, in order to call attention to the obscene wealth of the brothers and the ways they use that wealth to quietly influence the political process in their favor.

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Who would teach the classes? The only people she mentions by name are the most conservative members of the Supreme Court (and they're going to lecture freshmen Republican representatives on the Constitution once a week?) and David Barton.

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Last week at NYU Law School, I was on a panel -- along with NYU Law Professor Burt Neuborne, Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone, and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force Supervisory Agent Niall Brennan, moderated by Time's Barton Gellman -- which examined whether the threat of Terrorism was being exploited to erode core First Amendment/free speech rights, including the First Amendment right to advocate violence as recognized by the 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio.  The 1-hour event -- which contained discussion of Obama's assassination program and Anwar al-Awlaki -- is worth listening to.  The video is below.  My initial presentation was the last one of the four panelists and begins at 30:00, and a quick rebuttal from me of a few of the other panelists' points begins at 50:50. 

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The Oregonian reports Robert Ekas settled the suit for $4,000.

In his lawsuit, Ekas said that in July 2007, he flipped off a Clackamas County deputy while driving, and the deputy gave him tickets for illegal lane change and improper display of license plates. Ekas was acquitted on the citations. A month later, he gave the finger to another deputy, who detained him but wrote no tickets.

Ekas alleged he was being harassed.

A story earlier this year in the Portland newspaper brought Ekas national media attention, including an appearance on Comedy Central's "Colbert Report."

County officials say it was cheaper to settle the case than to proceed with defending the suit.

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Information from: The Oregonian, http://www.oregonlive.com

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But book banning isn't the only form censorship takes, and schools and libraries aren't the only places where it happens. As reported in Publishers Weekly, the Texas Appeals Court last week heard an important but little-known case filed against Carla Main, author of "Bulldozed: 'Kelo,' Eminent Domain and the American Lust for Land," and her publisher, the conservative press Encounter Books. The plaintiff, developer H. Walker Royall, claims that Main has defamed him and wants her book yanked off the market and any future printings curtailed. Royall has also attempted to sue a newspaper that reviewed the book and even a law professor who provided a back-cover endorsement. (The latter case has already been dismissed.)

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He's been in prison since 2008, when he returned to Iran, believing that he would be welcomed home. Now he's been sentenced to 19.5 years in prison for the crime of speaking his mind. It's better than being executed, which was what prosecutors were demanding, but it's still an absolute outrage.

As I wrote in 2004:

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Here's what he said to the Salt Lake City Fox affiliate:

HATCH: Let’s be honest about it, in the First Amendment, religious freedom, religious expression, that really express matters to the Constitution. So, if the Muslims own that property, that private property, and they want to build a mosque there, they should have the right to do so. The only question is are they being insensitive to those who suffered the loss of loved ones? We know there are Muslims killed on 9/11 too and we know it’s a great religion. … But as far as their right to build that mosque, they have that right.

I just think what’s made this country great is we have religious freedom. That’s not the only thing, but it’s one of the most important things in the Constitution. [...]

There’s a question of whether it’s too close to the 9/11 area, but it’s a few blocks away, it isn’t right there. … And there’s a huge, I think, lack of support throughout the country for Islam to build that mosque there, but that should not make a difference if they decide to do it. I’d be the first to stand up for their rights.

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Heroes

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Despite her raging animosity against him, however, Geller actually agrees with Obama concerning the essential point about the mosque and community center on Park Place. Speaking with Talking Points Memo, she  explained, "It's up to the imam to withdraw the mosque. I don't think the government should stop it."

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