More on Democrats' antipathy to free speech

Powerline has the latest in a "series of near-daily 'Democrats vs. Free Speech' stories." Stanley Kurtz has now crossed the Dems' hawse with his inquiries into Obama's connections to the terrorist Bill Ayers. According to Politico, the Obama campaign responded with an effort to disrupt Kurtz's appearance on a Chicago radio program.

The campaign e-mailed Chicago supporters who had signed up for the Obama Action Wire with detailed instructions including the station's telephone number and the show's extension, as well as a research file on Kurtz, which seems to prove that he's a conservative, which isn't in dispute. The file cites a couple of his more controversial pieces, notably his much-maligned claim that same-sex unions have undermined marriage in Scandinavia.

"Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse," says the email, which picks up a form of pressure on the press pioneered by conservative talk radio hosts and activists in the 1990s, and since adopted by Media Matters and other liberal groups."

It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies," it continues.

Clearly, this issue touches a nerve in the Obama campain.

UPDATE: Guy Benson has a first-hand account.

So much for free speech

Barack Obama is trying to silence a group that is raising legitimate, unanswered questions about Obama's ties to the terrorist William Ayers. He is threatening to employ the Justice Department to pressure television stations that carry advertisements linking him to Ayers. And he is impliedly threatening to have the stations' broadcast licenses revoked, asserting that running the ads violates the stations' obligations to operate "in the public interest." That phrase is a term of art, the standard for determining which television stations get to broadcast and which ones do not.

I have not seen the ads. Perhaps they imply stronger inferences than the evidence will bear. However, Obama is a public figure, so the ads are almost certainly not defamatory. Cheaps shots? Perhaps. But in this country we happen to believe that tough questions in a political campaign are protected under the First Amendment. And we trust American citizens to distinguish between political ads that are legitimate and those that are over the line.

The bigger issue is this. If Candidate Obama is willing to go to such extremes to silence critics during a political campaign, imagine what a President Obama might do once he has actually obtained the reigns of power. The man obviously has little regard for the First Amendment. Add this to the list of things -- human life, marriage, free markets -- for which he has little regard, and one discerns a troubling pattern.

UPDATE: Police in Denver have arrested an ABC news producer for "trespass" on a public sidewalk, a physical impossibility. At the time of his arrest, the producer was attempting to photograph Democratic senators and DNC donors. How little do Obama's folks value free speech?

I am informed that Rush Limbaugh is covering this story on his radio show.

At last, a tax I can heartily support

A tax on porn in California? Eugene Volokh doubts its constitutionality. He asserts that "the law targets not just unprotected and illegal obscenity, but also constitutionally protected pornography."

For those of you who are not corrupted by a law school education and not familiar with the Supreme Court's bizarre obscenity doctrines, simply know that the Court in its infallible judgment claims to discern a difference between obscene porn and merely erotic porn. Merely erotic porn is constitutionally protected, while obscene porn is not.

If the California tax proposal is over-inclusive, that problem can be remedied. The bill can be amended to exclude so-called "soft porn." It could, for example, provide a defense to a claim for non-payment of the tax that the material to be taxed is protected under extant Supreme Court obscenity rules. The bill would then permit men to buy not-too-naughty magazines, with all of their manifest artistic and literary value, free of the 25% tax. The men are happy, the Supreme Court is happy, and the people of California can tax the heck out of an industry that objectifies women's bodies, encourages vicious conduct, and swamps millions of men in an unhealthy addiction.

The amended bill would have the addional, ancillary effect of demonstrating how silly and unworkable the Supreme Court's obscenity jurisprudence is. Amended to exclude constitutionally-protected material, the tax bill would generate massive litigation over the question what counts as obscene porn and what constitutes merely erotic porn. Dockets in California would expand accordingly. And that's a good thing. Let the courts bear the costs of their own forays into obscenity regulation.