Congratulations to Jack Limpert, first to ID Deep Throat (in 1974!)

Sherlock Holmes, Columbo, Jack Limpert.

Three brilliant detectives, and the third one isn't fictional.

The editor of Washingtonian magazine correctly guessed in June of 1974 that Deep Throat was Mark Felt.

AmericaWantsToKnow.com salutes him and invites him to e-mail his pick for the Belmont.

Brass knuckles and the First Amendment: the Bill Maher problem

Alabama Congressman Spencer Bachus vented his anger at comedian Bill Maher Monday over some comments Maher made on his HBO show on May 13. Maher said the Army had missed its recruiting goal for April and suggested that the quality of new recruits was something less than excellent. To be precise, this is what he said: "We've done picked all the low-lying Lynndie England fruit, and now we need warm bodies."

Rep. Bachus said the remarks bordered on treason and undermined the national security of the United States. Then the congressman called Time Warner, parent company of HBO, and demanded that Bill Maher be fired.

Certainly U.S. troops, even new recruits, deserve more respect than to be sneered at as "warm bodies." But before you take sides in this fight, you really ought to see it for what it is.

If you've ever spent any time on the phone with a technical support representative, you may have heard the term "workaround." That's the name for a solution to a problem that is used when the direct approach won't fix it.

Rep. Spencer Bachus is using a First Amendment workaround. He is attempting to restrict speech through intimidation because the Constitution doesn't allow the Congress to restrict speech by law.

It is a brass-knuckled attempt to frighten all on-air talent into saying only sunny things about the war in Iraq. Treason charges against a performer may be far-fetched but job loss is not.

You may not know that Rep. Bachus serves on the House Judiciary Committee, or that the House Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over matters of intellectual property law and also antitrust, or how much money Time Warner could make or lose depending on the wording of an obscure clause in a pending bill. But you can bet Time Warner does.

That's why it's a flat-out abuse of power for Rep. Bachus to pick up the phone and tell Time Warner that he wants Bill Maher off the air.

We have seen this before. In March, 2004, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, angry over the content of a Howard Stern broadcast, sent a letter to the president of Viacom strongly implying that the company's radio stations could lose their broadcast licenses if they didn't take stronger 'voluntary' action to meet the government's decency standards.

In April, 2004, Sen. John McCain of Arizona sent a letter to the president of Sinclair Broadcasting accusing the company of shirking its "responsibility" by pre-empting a Nightline broadcast about war casualties. It is "a gross disservice to the public," McCain wrote.

In August, 2004, House members Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, John Conyers of Michigan and Pete Stark of California sent a letter to Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the parent company of Fox News Channel, warning that "the responsibility of the media is to report the news in an unbiased, impartial, and objective manner" and suggesting that Fox News had a "deliberate bias" toward the Bush administration and against Democrats.

You might agree or disagree with any of these lawmakers, but that's beside the point. What we are seeing here is an effort to use the federal government's power to influence the content of speech. The First Amendment prohibits the Congress from doing exactly that. So it's not a small thing when lawmakers attempt to intimidate broadcasters into changing their content solely to please officials of the federal government.

It's an abuse of power, a threat to freedom and a violation of the U.S. Constitution.


Copyright 2005

.

The only way out of Iraq

The L.A. Times reports today that U.S. officials are taking a "more central and visible role" in mediating among the political factions in Iraq, after a period of leaving the Iraqis to settle their own problems without apparent U.S. involvement.

That's not going to work either.

The administration that spends so much time advocating freedom around the world doesn't really understand what's necessary to make it happen. They are rearranging the furniture in a house with a cracked foundation.

Freedom is not a magical gift from God. It is a condition that exists under a government of limited power.

The government of Iraq has virtually unlimited power because the oil industry is a state-owned enterprise. In fact, all the important industries in Iraq are state-owned enterprises.

What does this mean?

It means, if you're an Iraqi, that the people who control the reins of government control your job and your economic future.

This is a problem that cannot be solved by putting a fresh coat of paint on a schoolhouse.

How much freedom do you have at work? Can you lobby for the ouster of the person who signs your check? Sure you can, but it's generally not considered a good career move.

When everybody works for the government, nobody has any freedom. A guarantee of free speech is worthless if you know that one wrong word can cost you your livelihood. And you'd better be prepared to fight to the death to keep your people in power, or you're likely to starve.

That's why the only way out of Iraq, for the United States, is complete privatization of all of Iraq's state-owned enterprises.

That may create its own set of problems, with a few individuals becoming very wealthy thanks to relationships with government officials. But the oligarchs will not have an army or a police force or the power to throw individuals into prison. And the government will not control the job and economic future of every person in the country. Then the Iraqis will have the conditions necessary for freedom.

If you were raised to believe that freedom means "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear," you've been badly misled. Those are sweet-sounding phrases that really mean unlimited government power, and unlimited government power is exactly the opposite of freedom. The true foundation of freedom is private property. Read more about it here, in "A Plan to Get Out of Iraq: Blackstone's Fundamental Rights and the Power of Property."


Copyright 2005

.

Bill Frist's fine mess

There was an entertaining exchange on the U.S. Senate floor today, televised on CSPAN2, in which Majority Leader Bill Frist interrupted a serenely delivered tirade by Senator Robert Byrd to reveal what Sen. Byrd said yesterday in a closed meeting at the White House.

Senator Frist brought up the fact that Senator Byrd told the president yesterday he would allow an up-or-down vote on the president's judges. Sen. Byrd, who was leafing through a copy of the King James Bible and telling the story of Esther, stammered that he couldn't remember exactly what he told the president, whether he'd allow a vote on all the judges or five of them or three of them, but he didn't object to voting on some of them.

The problem for these fine gentlemen was summed up this week by Sen. Gordon Smith (R., Ore.), who told the Wall Street Journal that the voters back home are giving conflicting advice. "Don't change the rules but give them all a vote. Thanks a lot," he said. His frustration stems from the fact that it will take a Senate rules change to stop the filibustering so there can be a vote. It's hell to be a leader when the people you're following don't give you clear instructions.

The problem for the rest of us is more difficult. The American people are facing the logical outcome of an eighty-year habit of allowing judicial interpretations to substitute for constitutional amendments. Read A Retirement Plan for Sandra Day O'Connor to see how civil rights, women's rights and privacy rights were interpreted into the Constitution by the Supreme Court and technically can be interpreted out again.

And it gets worse. The next time you're out there exercising your freedom of speech, remember that the framers of the Constitution gave your state government a perfect right to arrest you for it. The First Amendment did not apply to the states. It's only because of Supreme Court rulings over the last eighty years that state governments are bound by the provisions of the Bill of Rights.

(Don't believe me? I don't blame you. Read it for yourself right here.)

For decades, the Constitution has been updated by judicial interpretations that define some rights as more fundamental than others. Fundamental rights, the Court has said, may not be abridged unless the state can show a compelling reason to do so.

This is why our constitutional rights are vulnerable to shifts of personnel in the federal judiciary. Not everyone strikes the balance between fundamental rights and compelling state interests the same way.

If the Constitution actually said the Bill of Rights applies to the states, if civil rights and women's rights and privacy rights were in the Constitution in plain language, it would matter much less who was appointed to the Supreme Court. They'd be powerless to interpret those rights away. They might as well say women don't have the right to vote or Prohibition is back in force.

Instead, we are where we are. The Senate confirmation vote for judges is the last chance for the American people to have any say at all in the making of law and policy on an infinite number of issues, from abortion to police searches.

We are having a fight over federal judges because the federal courts have usurped the power that the Constitution gave to state governments. Instead of having fifty separate debates about the appropriate limits on abortion or police searches, we are all forced to sit on the steps of the Supreme Court building and hope that this time Justice Sandra Day O'Connor comes down on our side.

She's a wonderful woman but this is not the deal we signed.



Copyright 2005