Found this gem over at Townhall.com and have reprinted it in its entirety:

Free Speech Controversy at URI 

 This country is now entering its fourth week of debate over whether the phrase “nappy headed hos” is acceptable speech in a public forum. But as the media focuses on the issue of free speech in broadcast, they overlook a venue where first amendment rights are regularly violated: academia. A story from the University of Rhode Island this week suggests that free speech rights are threatened on many campuses. While making phony paeans to “tolerance,” universities use unconstitutional speech codes to suppress ideas that don’t sit well with the politically correct crowd.

The controversy at Rhode Island began last fall, when the College Republicans advertised a satirical “white heterosexual American male” scholarship in the school newspaper. College Republicans president Ryan Bilodeau said the ad was meant to be a humorous spin on affirmative action and identity-based scholarships.

Is a satirical ad in a school newspaper “speech”? Anyone with minimal understanding of the first amendment would say yes. But the Student Senate didn’t think so and declared that the ad violated URI’s anti-discrimination bylaws. The Senate told the group to apologize or face derecognition, an action that would cut off university funding.

But the College Republicans refused to apologize for something they weren’t sorry about, and on April 23, a Student Senate committee voted to derecognize the group. They only backed down when the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) threatened a first amendment lawsuit.

If you assume that selective censorship, forced apologies, and illegal bans on “offensive” speech are isolated incidents, think again. Groups like FIRE receive thousands of complaints each year, mostly from conservative or religious students whose universities apply speech codes only to them. Examples are not difficult to find:

- In October, San Francisco State University attempted to punish the College Republicans for stomping on Hezbollah and Hamas flags during an anti-terrorism rally.

- Administrators at Stetson University forbade students from distributing a conservative newsletter on campus because “elements of the publication lack sensitivity to and respect for diversity and inclusiveness,” according to a statement issued by the university.

- Professors in the Washington State University School of Education threatened to remove a conservative student from the teacher training program unless he attended “diversity training” classes.

Fortunately, the founding fathers forgot to include the “no hurt feelings” clause in the first amendment, which is why policies like these almost never hold up in court. But that doesn’t stop campus radicals from harassing any student who stands up for basic speech rights.

Last year, Georgia Tech senior Ruth Malhotra filed a lawsuit against the school for its unconstitutional speech code, which banned speech that was “injurous” or “maligning.” Malhotra believed the code was being used exclusively by gay-rights groups to prevent conservative Christians from speaking. Under Georgia Tech’s policy, accurately quoting a Bible passage related to homosexuality could constitute “injurous” speech.

Even people who support the gay-rights movement can recognize that others have a constitutional right to criticize it. But, for supporting the concept that people are allowed to say what they want, Malhotra received letters and e-mails threatening beatings, rape, and strangulation. Gay-rights activists passed out Twinkies to students on campus, explaining that Malhotra was “yellow on the outside, white on the inside” and “a Twinkie bitch” (Malhotra is Asian). Authorities suggested that she travel with a police escort in case the tolerant crowd got testy. Although the court sided with Malhotra, her experience most likely had a chilling effect on potential free-speech advocates.

It is ironic that, in an atmosphere that supposedly values free inquiry, it can take enormous courage to point out that free speech rights are for everyone. Only years of politically correct brainwashing can explain the widespread belief that “offensive” ideas should be banned.

It is also telling that speech totalitarianism is often embraced by extreme leftists – the same people that demand “tolerance” and “open-mindedness” toward certain favored groups.  If these people are so concerned with tolerance, why do they turn into Stalinist oppressors the second someone says something they don’t like?

 

Tolerance and open-mindedness are what come to mind when viewing the blog Jesus General.   Not surprisingly, the blog author and he/she/its following are staunch supporters of the DNC party platform.  

 

Colin McNickle takes on the misdirection of liberals:

To fully comprehend liberalism, one must fully understand deception. For that is what contemporary liberalism has become -- one long series of clever deceptions.

Liberals -- more "progressives" and rank socialists than anything remotely resembling liberalism's original meaning, rooted in free individuals and the free markets required to sustain them -- will dismiss such a contention as "more conservative bloviating." Hardly. The proof surrounds us early and often in this new year. The liberals' playbook for Social Security "reform" is a good place to start.

Whether it be liberal politicians, think tanks or media, the public is being bombarded with this supposed "truth" -- private accounts are a nonstarter that will leave the poor destitute and abandon our elderly. Tax increases must be enacted if we are to "save" the Rooseveltian entitlement program, they say. The liberal tax increase of choice is one on "the rich." Social Security taxes -- 12.4 percent of total wages; half paid by the employee with the other half matched by the employer -- were not collected after incomes reached $94,200 in 2006. (The amount is indexed annually.) Liberals, and the legions of the gullible who play the class-envy game, paint this as wrong. The rich must pay their "fair share," they huff and puff and snap their braces.

But there's a dirty major truth liberals are loath to discuss.
Workers who do not pay Social Security taxes on income over the limit -- often referred to as "the cap" -- also do not receive benefits for income over the limit, reminds Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement reform at the Institute for Policy Innovation and a senior fellow at the Free Enterprise Fund. Thus, "If the taxable limit is raised, more income will be counted toward future benefits as well, leaving little net gain over the long run," he wrote recently for National Review Online. If liberals get their way -- raising the taxable Social Security income cap to up to $150,000 -- Mr. Ferrara says those wage earners could pay as much as $7,000 more in annual taxes. It's a killer for small businesses and the self-employed.

Lifting the payroll cap cancels out the Bush tax cuts. The outcome will "retard the economy and produce less tax revenue than expected," he says. After all, the more something is taxed, the less of it is produced. Should liberals be successful in rescinding those tax cuts, it would be an unparalleled, growth-killing double tax increase. The liberals' Social Security "reform" of choice is nothing more than populist pap that, sold as a "fix," actually sets up the economy for years of negative "returns."

In real numbers, as the Cato Institute and Carriage Oaks Investments calculated it (and as reported by The Wall Street Journal), low-wage workers could double their annual income in a long-term private account (based on investing 10.6 percent of one's paycheck over 45 years). A Social Security benefit of $8,500 a year would be $17,000 annually from a private account. An average wage earner could more than double his annual retirement income in a private account ($15,200 vs. $39,000). A high-wager worker would more than quadruple his annual retirement income in a private account ($22,600 vs. $94,000). Simply put, liberals are lying about Social Security reform. It's a shameless act of self-preservation aimed at perpetuating the Dependent Society. It is a moral bankruptcy that liberals are trusting the general public's ignorance will shield. And thus far, sadly and tragically, the liars are winning.

Then there's the liberals' much ballyhooed plan to allow Medicare to negotiate "lower" prices for the far too large prescription drug entitlement that they want to be even larger. The liberal spiel is that those big, bad, dastardly pharmaceuticals will be forced to stop "gouging" the public and lower their prices if forced to negotiate lower prices for the government's big-block purchasing.

Sorry, but it simply isn't so. In fact, exactly the opposite would happen. And it's a textbook lesson in the "seen" vs. the "unseen," straight from the teachings of Frederic Bastiat. Proffered the 19th-century French economist: "In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them."

And our purses are less tapped if government relies on economic laws instead of political expediency. But that seldom happens. And it's certainly not happening with liberals in the prescription drug "negotiation" debate. As David Hogberg, a Ph.D. scholar with the National Center for Public Policy Research, notes, "Drug companies will have all the incentive to push their prices higher in the private sector, since higher prices in the private sector mean a higher 'average' price and, hence, bigger reimbursements from Medicare." There's ample evidence this is true. Average prescription drug prices are 7 percent to 10 percent above what they otherwise would be, says Dr. Hogberg, citing research by the government's own National Bureau of Economic Research.

The bottom line -- the "unseen" -- is that "insurance companies will have to charge higher premiums to cover the costs of those drugs," Hogberg says. "Higher health insurance costs mean that it will be harder for employers and individuals to afford health insurance, and a higher number of uninsured will be the result." And liberals say it's conservatives who are in bed with Big Drug, eh?

As was noted in "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli: "Men are so simple and yield so readily to the wants of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer himself to be tricked." Liberals at the forefront of the Social Security "reform" movement and those pushing for negotiated "lower" Medicare prescription drug prices are lying to justify their existence. It is a trickery that is a treachery that must not be allowed to prevail.

Perhaps calling liberals "lieberals" is a good place to start the fight.

Any Questions?

Makes one want to find an available film crew and shout "Rosie hates Heterosexuals"

HH: I want to talk about Kerry, but before we do, during the last segment, when I was replaying Mark Steyn from the first hour, I was sent an e-mail, and I went to the Democracy Project. I've linked this at Hughhewitt.com. And there are pictures posted there of a Halloween party at the University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday night at the President's house, at which a student showed up dressed as a suicide bomber with a Kalashnikov. And the pictures are just very disturbing. And the President of the University of Pennsylvania appears alongside a suicide bomber and is laughing. Your comments, Victor Davis Hanson?

VDH: Well, I saw that, and again, I think it's emblematic of this endemic problem on the left, that they don't really see that we're in a war, they don't really see that there's a moral difference between suicide bombers and people who try to deliberately kill people, and people in the war who have collatoral damage by accident, when they try to target terrorists. So I mean, it's a problem we're having, these Fraudian slips. John Kerry didn't mean to slur soldiers, but he has a problem. And when he makes a mistake, and he makes a gaffe, that's the type of things that comes out. It reveals a deep-seated distrust, just like Kennedy, just like Jay Rockefeller, just like Senator Durbin, just like all of these people when they have these outbursts, and they lapse into sort of a stream of consciousness. What you expect to come from them is a 1960's deep distrust of the United States socio-economic and military system. And then they do silly things, such as President Gutmann, who was provost at Princeton University, allowing a picture of her with a suicide bomber. They just don't have the same antenna that most of us do.

HH: Well, it's beyond not having an antenna. It's lacking any moral sensibility. I'm sure that there were Jewish-American students at Penn deeply offended by this.

But I mean, Iraqis died today from a suicide bomber.

VDH: I know it.

HH: They died in Jordan. They died in London.

VDH: I know it.

Noticably absent were any partygoers dressed in a burka. Could that costume have been deemed to offensive for this crowd? This is yet another examply why no SANE Democrat actually votes Democrat these days.

I'm greatly disapointed with Kerry issuing this non-apology regarding his remarks that denigrated the individuals who comprise the US military in Iraq. Here was a golden opportunity for the senator to stand by his convictions - for once. A shining star of the Democrat Party has lowered the veil and allowed us mere mortals a peek at a core value of liberals and democrats.



Kerry should NOT have issued this 'apology' - he was not wrong, he was honest. His comments reflect an innate belief of liberals and democrats. If Kerry can admit this contempt for the military, isn't time the rest of the Dems dropped their false pretense of 'supporting the troops'?

For the Democrats, this can potentially be a Stonewall-esque moment. Liberals have the chance to let their freak-flag fly 24/7 - freely and openly displaying their contempt for the US and her military. No more hiding behind a mantra that they do not believe in, or are attracted to. It would be a whole new world for liberals...a world that could look something like this:

It goes without saying: The above useful fools vote Democrat exclusively.

Had Enough? Vote Republican.