Monthly Archives: March 2010

The First Amendment Protects Ann Coulter, William Ayers, And The Westboro Baptist Church

This morning brings the news that a speech by former Weather Underground leader William Ayers at the University of Wyoming has been canceled:

The University of Wyoming announced Tuesday that a public lecture by William “Bill” Ayers, a former 1970s radical antiwar protestor who is now a university professor, has been canceled.

Ayers, 65, a distinguished professor of education and senior scholar at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC), had been scheduled to give a public lecture from 4-6 p.m. Monday in the UW Education Auditorium.

The public lecture had been sponsored by the UW Social Justice Research Center, which is a privately endowed center that studies problems of oppression and inequalities among different social groups.

Titled “Trudge Toward Freedom: Educational Research in the Public Interest,” the talk would have focused on what makes education in a democracy different from other societies, as well as the importance of teachers seeing their students are more than just students, but whole human beings.

UW released a statement on its Web site on Tuesday afternoon explaining why the Social Justice Research Center had decided to cancel Ayers’ visit.

In the statement, the director of the center, UW Educational Studies chair Francisco Rios, apologized to the university community for any harm that may have come to it, and cited personal and professional reasons — including safety concerns — for the cancellation.

This is pretty much the same reason that the University of Ottawa used when it canceled Ann Coulter’s speech there a week or so back.

And it’s bogus.

First of all, it’s worth noting that the University of Wyoming is a public institution so the First Amendment applies. The fact that Ayers is controversial, or that he’ll say things that might offend people, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the right to say it. In fact, as I noted some four years when I first discussed the Westboro Baptist Church protesters, offensive speech is perhaps the most important speech to protect:

Over the past several weeks, several states have taken steps to prevent protesters from picketing at funerals, a move propelled by the fact that an objectively offensive group of extreme Christians have been staging protests at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq claiming that the deaths America is experiencing in Iraq are God’s punishment for tolerating homosexuality. Offensive ? Absolutely ? Should they have the right to be offensive ? I can’t see any reason why not.

Freedom of speech means that, sometimes, we will hear some truly offensive things. When government starts regulating speech based on the fact that it may offend, though, it diminishes freedom for everyone.

Exactly. I despise the Westboro Baptist Church protesters, I think Ann Coulter is mostly an idiot, and really don’t care what a tired old leftist like Bill Ayers has to say. Nonetheless, they all have a right to say it.

C/P: Below The Beltway

TLP Bracket Challenge Update — And Then There Were Two

The NCAA Tournament has been one of the most exciting in recent memory, with more major upsets than just about anyone could have rationally expected. As such, even prior to the Final Four, we’ve seen just about every entrant in the Liberty Papers Bracket Challenge go bust. Below are the standings:

1. Nate McHugh – 277
2. Brad Warbiany – 262
3. Brad Porter – 254
4. liberty for kids – 253
5. nic stersic – 248
10. William Satterwhite – 231

Why did I include the #10 spot? Because the competition can now only be won by Nate McHugh or William Satterwhite. Everyone else is mathematically eliminated.

Nate has Kansas [eliminated] winning the whole thing; William has Duke. With Nate’s big lead, all he needs to do to win is for Duke *not* to win the whole thing. He doesn’t need WVU to beat Duke, he simply needs Duke to lose either against WVU or in the championship game. William needs Duke to win out, which would give him a two-point advantage and the win in the final standings.

Good luck Nate, and good luck William.

Instead Of Trying To Save The Post Office, Let’s Try Freedom Instead

It’s been rumored for more than a year now, but the U.S. Postal Service is taking the first steps toward eliminating Saturday mail delivery:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Saturday mail could be one step closer to cancellation when the United States Postal Service submits an official proposal to a government regulatory board on Tuesday to eliminate 6-day delivery.

A new 5-day delivery schedule could save the cash-strapped Post Office $3 billion annually, the agency said. Earlier this month, USPS said it plans to incur about $238 billion in losses in the next 10 years if it doesn’t revamp its outdated business model.

“Every day, every month, every year this gets delayed, we end up further in the hole,” said USPS Deputy Postmaster Patrick Donahoe at a Monday briefing in New York.

Donahoe said a service cut would result in the loss of about 40,000 full-time jobs. About 600,000 workers currently work for the Post Office.

The Post Office hopes to drop Saturday mail in its next fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. But first, it has to jump through a series of regulatory hoops that could take much longer.

Although it’s an independent government agency and does not receive taxpayer dollars, USPS is overseen by the Postal Regulatory Commission, a separate government agency with five commissioners appointed by the president.

Ruth Goldway, chairwoman of the commission, said that once the board receives the proposal, it will open the issue to public comments and hold hearings throughout the country.

This, of course, is part of the USPS’s problem. If it were a real business, with competitors, it wouldn’t need to seek government permission to engage in cost cutting moves like this.

The Post Office has already set up a website explaining why the move to five day delivery is necessary, and a new poll shows that most Americans support eliminating Saturday delivery:

A majority of Americans support ending Saturday mail deliveries to help the U.S. Postal Service solve its financial problems, but most oppose shuttering local branches, according to a new Washington Post poll.

The public support for moving to five-day deliveries may bolster a new proposal to end six-day deliveries to help the mail agency trim hundreds of billions of dollars in losses by 2020.

Cutting Saturday mail deliveries would save $3.3 billion in its first year and about $5.1 billion annually by 2020, Postmaster General John E. Potter said Monday. But the changes would also mean cutting the equivalent of 40,000 full- and part-time jobs through layoffs and attrition, Potter said as he prepared to formally submit his proposals to postal regulators on Tuesday.

Under the plan letter carriers would stop delivering mail to American homes and businesses and would not pick up mail from blue collection boxes on Saturdays. Post offices would stay open on Saturdays and mail would be delivered to post office boxes. Mail accepted at post offices on Saturday would be processed on Monday. Express mail and remittance mail services also would continue seven days a week.

Potter’s proposal has the support of 71 percent of Americans, with most Democrats, Republicans and independents in favor of the idea, according to the poll.

It sounds like a good idea, but over at Cato@Liberty, Ted DeHaven has an even better one:

Here’s a better idea: give Americans the freedom to choose the mail services they want by repealing the USPS monopoly. That way consumers and businesses could choose to provide and use mail services zero days a week or seven days a week.

Online movie rental services like Netflix offer a small example. A lot of folks time their Netflix rentals so that they have movies for Saturday night. Eliminating Saturday delivery will necessarily degrade the quality of online movie rental services that people are paying for. With competition, Netflix could offer Saturday (or even Sunday) delivery through a private alternative. Perhaps there would be a surcharge, but at least consumers would be allowed to make that choice.

(…)

I find it more impressive that I can go into a grocery store almost anywhere in the country and be met with an incalculable number of choices. Take Coke products for instance. I recently made a list of the various Coke products available to me at a local grocery store. The following is just a sample: regular Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-Free Coke, Diet Caffeine-free Coke, Coke Zero, Coke with Splenda, Coke with Lime, Coke with Lemon, and Diet Coke Plus. Don’t like Coke? There’s a similar array of Pepsi products. Don’t like either? The grocery stores also offer pricier micro-brands with all sorts of unique flavors.

These choices reflect the awesome power of the market, which provides nearly all the goods and services people want without any direction from officials in Washington. It would interesting to see what sorts of innovations and products private mail deliverers would come up with if the government’s mail monopoly didn’t exist. Instead, Americans are stuck with a government operation whose floundering business model will require it to raise prices while simultaneously reducing its services. So much for freedom of choice.

Eliminating Saturday delivery is likely to help the USPS achieve fiscal solvency, but it will only be temporary. The forces of technology that are making much of the mail obsolete will continue to work in ways that we can’t begin to anticipate and, some day not to long from now, we’ll be reading they want to cut back to a four day a week schedule to “save money.”

Instead of going through all that, let’s do what we should have done a long time ago — privatize the mail.

Stossel On Government Schools

From his blog at Fox Business Network, John Stossel has this on government schools:

It’s absurd that powerful Americans consider it normal that they must move their residence or manipulate politicians to get their kids into a good school No one has do that to buy an iphone, or a good restaurant meal In every business besides education, successful producers expand. When more people started liking McDonalds – there were no lines around the block, because McDonalds expanded to meet demand.

What exactly is Stossel talking about? Yet another corrupt Obama administration official.

While many Chicago parents took formal routes to land their children in the best schools, the well-connected also sought help through a shadowy appeals system created in recent years under former schools chief Arne Duncan.

Whispers have long swirled that some children get spots in the city’s premier schools based on whom their parents know. But a list maintained over several years in Duncan’s office and obtained by the Tribune lends further evidence to those charges. Duncan is now secretary of education under President Barack Obama.

The log is a compilation of politicians and influential business people who interceded on behalf of children during Duncan’s tenure. It includes 25 aldermen, Mayor Richard Daley’s office, House Speaker Michael Madigan, his daughter Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, former White House social secretary Desiree Rogers and former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun.

Non-connected parents, such as those who sought spots for their special-needs child or who were new to the city, also appear on the log. But the politically connected make up about three-quarters of those making requests in the documents obtained by the Tribune.

The American education system can be best described as “all children are equal but some are more equal than others”. This is because of the way we have structured government schools. While most of these special requests were rejected by Duncan, the fact that Chicago’s ruling elite could even make these special requests is troubling. Expect Chicago-style school admission policies to spread nationwide as Obama completes what his predecessor started when he likely nationalizes the education system this year. America’s health care system will be heading on this track soon.

If we had school choice via vouchers, parents could decide where their children are educated, not government bureaucrats. Good schools will expand to take in more children while bad schools will improve in order to stay in business.

Until your state gets a real school choice program, if you are able to, get your children out of government schools. Put them in a private school or better yet, homeschool them yourself. Ever since government involvement increased in education, students have been dumbed down and our nation has become less free. Teacher’s unions continue to demand pay raises and obscene benefits without being held accountable for student performance.

If our country is to regain its freedom, the government education monopoly must be broken.

I’m one of the original co-founders of The Liberty Papers all the way back in 2005. Since then, I wound up doing this blogging thing professionally. Now I’m running the site now. You can find my other work at The Hayride.com and Rare. You can also find me over at the R Street Institute.
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