http://pjmedia.com/blog/revisiting-the-neighborhood/?print=1 On February 15, 2013, I posted an article at Front Page Magazine titled “Saving the Neighborhood [1]” that dealt with an invitation the democratic advocacy organization Act! for Canada had extended to British lawyer Gavin Boby, a specialist in town planning law and director of the Law and Freedom Foundation. I referred in […]
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/mr-first-amendment_778805.html?nopager=1
What are we to make of Floyd Abrams?
For more than five decades he has been toiling in the vineyards of the First Amendment, as a practicing attorney, a professor at the law schools of Columbia and Yale, and an apostle of free speech and a free press, writing and lecturing extensively in defense of his vision of both. He has appeared as counsel in numerous landmark cases in virtually every area of First Amendment law, from government secrecy to libel to campaign finance regulation. He holds the unique distinction of being the only lawyer in America known to have appeared before the Supreme Court wearing only one sock—and in the Pentagon Papers case, no less. Most of all, he is someone who has thought long and hard about 14 words—“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press”—that are not only central to our national life, but are the continuing source of fierce controversy and litigation.
Abrams has just published Friend of the Court, a collection of his writings and speeches on an array of critical issues; it follows Speaking Freely (2005), in which he ranged over some of the key cases of his career, including the tale of the missing sock. Abrams is a staunch, though frequently unorthodox, liberal, with a life project of protecting and expanding the scope of legal expression under American law. For anyone—conservatives very much included—interested in the continuing controversies surrounding the First Amendment, his writings are an excellent place to start.
In both volumes, Abrams reconstructs the 1971 Pentagon Papers case. Together with Alexander Bickel, he was the outside counsel brought in to defend the New York Times against Richard Nixon’s ill-conceived effort to stop the paper from publishing the trove of purloined secrets it had obtained from former Defense Department insider Daniel Ellsberg. The story of the battle over the attempt to impose a prior restraint on the newspaper—the first in American history—is gripping no matter who tells it, and Abrams’s pen brings it vividly to life yet again. After telling the tale from his participant’s vantage point, he steps back to reflect on its legacy. And he settles on a number of consequences, one of which is the emergence of a new era of “press militancy,” or adversary journalism, as others have called it. A second is the case’s dramatic demonstration to the public of the “absurdity” of a classification system that cloaked a wealth of innocuous information in official secrecy.
But it is the legal ramifications of the decision that, to Abrams, surpass all else in importance:
Up to that time prior restraints had historically been viewed as the single most intrusive and dangerous form of government conduct threatening freedom of expression. In the Pentagon Papers case, that notion was considered in the context of publication that a majority of the Supreme Court believed would do significant harm, yet still held was protected by the First Amendment.
This paved the way for our current legal order, in which the kind of disclosure that would warrant halting the presses in advance has been narrowed nearly to the vanishing point.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/02/victor_davis_hanson_on_our_path_to_armageddon.html Historian Victor Davis Hanson recently gave one of the finest and most memorable presentations on the subject of immigration. America could be on “a path to Armageddon,” given the blend of relativism, racial preferences, and nullified immigration laws, warned Hanson in an interview with Mark Levin, [link opens in pop-up, interview begins at […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/02/global_warming_dont_confuse_us_with_the_facts.html
Global warming is a planetary emergency, climate alarmists tell us. America and the rest of the world must fundamentally alter our lifestyles and radically reduce our consumption of energy and our industrial emissions if we are to survive thermogeddon. This is science, they tell us, and the science is settled.
President Obama echoed this in his State of the Union address, pointing his bony little finger at the American people and declaring global warming a “fact” despite the evidence on the ground. If Mr. Obama is to make such a decisive statement on the accuracy of computer models, then one would suppose he was privy to precise and accurate — and complete — data.
If global warming aka climate change aka global climate flatulence is so serious a problem, then why are they allowing our system of moored ocean buoys that measure sea surface temperatures and the El Niño/La Niña phenomenon to degrade?
From Nature News:
Nearly half of the moored buoys in the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array have failed in the last two years, crippling an early-warning system for the warming and cooling events in the eastern equatorial Pacific, known respectively as El Niño and La Niña. Scientists are now collecting data from just 40% of the array.
“It’s the most important climate phenomenon on the planet, and we have blinded ourselves to it by not maintaining this array,” says Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle, Washington. McPhaden headed the TAO project before it was transferred out of NOAA’s research arm and into the agency’s National Weather Service in 2005.
The network was developed over the course of a decade following the massive El Niño of 1982�’1983. NOAA maintains some 55 buoys across the eastern and central Pacific that monitor weather conditions as well as water temperatures down to 500 metres. Working in concert, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) maintains another dozen buoys in the western tropical Pacific. Combined, the monitoring system has become a cornerstone for seasonal weather forecasting given the tropical Pacific’s influence on broader weather patterns.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/02/satisfying_smackdown_of_prince_charles.html Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, is also heir to the sort of mush-headed liberalism that permeates high society on both sides of the Atlantic. Accordingly, he has thrown his lot in with the warmists, decrying the alleged danger to the future of the earth represented by the harnessing of energy embedded in […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2014/02/the_muslim_conquest_of_india.html India’s centuries-long resistance to Muslim aggression began in 636 C.E. This started a series of incursions in which Muslim warriors desecrated Hindu places of worship and universities, slaughtered monks and priests, and unleashed a reign of terror to impose Islam and subjugate the majority Hindu population. In K.S. Lal’s 1973 book, Growth of Muslim Population of […]
www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now The Jewish State in its true light. — In the 9th Feb 2014 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include: · Israeli HIV research has led to a breakthrough in treatments for autoimmune diseases. · Israel is helping the Philippines rebuild its agriculture after Typhoon Haiyan. · An Israeli app uses […]
