Weighing degrees of "freedom" in any society must include the question: What's the condition of information-exchange?

Is it free and open? Can citizens talk about any and all subjects, and, more to the point, express opinions about them? Is some language or opinion taboo? Even illegal?

The flip side of these considerations, as far as measuring societal freedom, is how much the regime that governs the society is allowed to know.

Can it eavesdrop on its citizenry - to make sure they’re not tormenting elderly relatives or hogtying baby seals to the blades of industrial turbines? …Or cooking up insurrection? Can the regime investigate citizens’ business records and associations with no legal oversight or challenge?

Ideally, the degree of freedom in information exchanges should be inverse to its level in official circles. In other words, the higher we go within the operational framework of a governing entity, the more sanctions should be placed on information-access, particularly with regard to individuals.

Ideally, of course.

On the touchy issue of censorship, a New York Times piece this week takes a look at hate speech laws, now so popular in Europe, Canada, and some other parts of the world – and the reasons the United States has been (so far) reluctant to implement them:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/12hate.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

There is a dispiriting tone in the article that seems to acquiesce to at least the concept of censorship:

“…Even (Anthony) Lewis, a liberal, wrote… that he was inclined to relax some of the most stringent First Amendment protections ‘in an age when words have inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism.’ In particular, he called for a re-examination of the Supreme Court’s insistence that there is only one justification for making incitement a criminal offense: the likelihood of imminent violence.”

The Times, although tilting discussion of Canada’s odious, Orwellian Human Rights Commissions to the brief of critics of that encumbrance, also “loads” examples of Supreme Court affirmations of the First Amendment by citing decisions involving racists and Klansmen, construing these rulings as virtually misguided.

The simple fact is, whoever is the arbiter to define hate speech, controls all speech. The standard for what constitutes hate speech will default, naturally, to its most basic calibration: Hate speech is any speech I don't like.

Some of the most energetic lobbying for Web censorship comes from the Left, with the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center at the vanguard. Although avoiding the term “censorship”, these groups generally cloak their efforts to institute Internet policing as an extension of human-rights activism. To them, hate apparently is a unique manifestation of their political opposites, can be spread exponentially by information servers like the Internet – and can be righteously combated with legislation, often on an international scale.

It is within this context that ephemeral alliances emerge with right-wing groups – ubiquitous evangelical Christians taking the lead – in campaigns that target universally despised Internet manifestations like child porn and neo-Nazi sites. The repellant nature of these entities makes the idea of at least limited censorship, or “filtering”, an attractive option.

TPM poster Robert Feinman had an excellent entry this week on the decision by several ISPs to knuckle under to the Attorney General of New York and filter child-porn sites. Accurately (and chillingly) he entitled his piece "The End of the Internet."

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/06/the-end-of-the-internet.php

What can be so wrong about getting rid of child porn – even if it requires muffling a noisome, vital Internet? Well, as Feinman points out, the New York child-porn mandates put ISPs in role of law-enforcers. Because child porn is already illegal, there are already sanctions against it. If ISPs are in the business of deciding what qualifies as the dread stuff, can they not be empowered with defining and sanctioning anything they deem objectionable in their jurisdictions of the Web? What will their standards be, and just how qualified are these companies to make such calls?

As Feinman points out in his post:

“Those suspected of participating in criminal activity can be monitored using well-established procedures including authorized wiretaps and the like... Will some people get away with it? Yes, but how many people are getting away with illegal drug use? No society can have 100% enforcement of its laws. The best that can be expected is that most people will be disinclined to engage in criminal activity and that this will keep the rate low enough that enforcement can catch the bulk of those still engaging in such activity.”

In democracies, censorship rarely comes to us garbed in the sinister livery of despots. It comes to us wrapped in good intentions, and from agreeably sound impetus like political necessity and public safety. There are always good reasons for censorship… and censorship is always a bad idea. To the degree that information is muzzled in any society, that society is'nt free. In open systems, the best ideas - the best procedures and mechanisms - are recognized more quickly than in oppressive ones simply because ideas can be debated, discussed and openly studied.

It's odd that America seems to grow as conversely amenable to censoring as it becomes more and more intolerant of those annoying Constitutional fetters on secret surveillance. Under the Bush Administration, even the gelatinous bonds of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were too cumbersome for the post-9/11 War on Terror; the legislation set up courts to hastily review and approve official requests to probe and bug, but with phantom terrorists lurking ‘round every corner, even that paltry judicial footprint apparently is unacceptable.

In Salon this week, Glen Greenwald takes note just how closely the media enables this kind of Constitution-shredding in a post about a particularly egregious scare article in the New York Times:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/06/10/lichtblau/index.html

In it, Times writer Eric Lichtblau drags from the ash heap every scary pretext to excuse companies that cooperated with the White House in its years-long essay in “extra-legal” electronic eavesdropping. The Times is an on-again, off-again proponent of telecom amnesty, a position made all-the-more condemnable by the Times’ long history as booster of Bush’s Mideast policies.

The record of deceit includes the now-legendary front-page Weapons of Mass Destruction stories by Judith Miller in the runup to the Iraq War – a sorry tradition continued by Michael Gordon’s battlefield coverage. But the biggest stain soiling the Times reputation is its own hand in homeland spying: The newspaper of record sat on knowledge of unwarranted domestic surveillance before the 2004 Presidential election – and continued to keep mum for almost a year afterward. The paper that once gave us all the news that’s fit to print now admits to embargoing news that would give us fits.

This long, sordid tale still hasn’t puddled and cooled, as evidenced by TPM Muckraker coverage this week of the always-ebullient Rep. Silvestre Reyes’ hints that a compromise may be near to allow Bush’s paid co-conspirators – most American telecom companies – off the hook. (In case anyone thought Congress was free of taint in this crap.)

The centerpiece hazard generally escapes attention in panic propaganda like Lichtblau’s: Future Presidents will see unlimited wiretap privilege as a political tool too valuable to surrender. If they feel no compunction to reveal who they're bugging, what's to keep them from bugging their domestic political opponents? And if there's no official sanction to keep them from doing so, they will. Period. That's been the "Rovian" aspect of the wiretap case from the beginning - national security be damned.

Big Brother is watching us... and would muzzle us, too. The media has been a willing handmaiden in domestic spying, and if the censors are instituted as Red State Commissars, can we genuinely doubt the lickspittle industry will go along? To absolutely no one's surprise, there have been reports over the past two weeks that news executives have helped quash naysaying on the Iraq war's prosecution. Self-censorship is still censorship.

The New York Times article quotes Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Cambridge, Mass: “When times are tough, there seems to be a tendency to say there is too much freedom… Free speech matters because it works…"

Scrutiny and debate are more effective ways of combating hate speech than censorship, he said, and all the more so in the post-Sept. 11 era.

On the issues of censorship and surveillance, the real question is how much this government - or any government - trusts its citizens, and vice-versa. The degree of freedom in any society cleanly parallels that level of mutual trust.

In the uneasy aftermath of the primaries, the Obama and Clinton camps are like two bloodied schoolyard toughs circling each other after a grueling fistfight. For the winner, the victory has been all-but pyrrhic, and bitter is the realization the defeated foe is needed now as ally: Outside the chain-link surrounding the track field, the Fat Boy awaits, his car-trunk full of 9 mm’s and his fangs filled with toxin.

Now it begins. The big one, the main event. This jarring primary season was just the preliminary. And after the summer conventions, the gloves will really drop, and both corners will be awash in gore. Now is the time to stop the finger-pointing and start shoring up the old donkey stall. We must come together.

...And the party must start drawing the Democratic expatriates back to the fold.

The Obama campaign in the primary was prescient in noting that old models and drafts were no longer operative in a political climate altered by the strains of the last seven years – and Democratic strategists are aware that colors inking the red states aren't indelible, and in fact are fading under the wash of war fatigue and economic corrosion.

The GOP has reaped the blessing of a decades-long defection of Democratic under-voters. The DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) or whatever they’re called - Reagan Democrats,  rebuilt Republicans – have handed the White House to the elephant party in seven of the last 10 elections., as Hillary Clinton pointed out in her concession speech Saturday.

It’s odd that GOP.com doesn’t list these Blue Dog allies as more substantial contributors to the cause, giving them a link on the “Groups” page, for instance. The party has a potential treasure trove in embittered Hillary backers – with 28 percent of Clintonians saying – immediately after the heat of the primary battle and before the smoke has fully cleared – that they prefer McCain over Obama this year. Now… that's grudge talk.

And familiar subject matter for the Democrats.

The white, working-class voters who gravitated to the GOP, the so-called “Reagan Democrats,” as a social phenomenon, preceded the Reagan-era 1980s. In the South, a key area of traditionally Democratic support, voters began turning GOP two decades earlier.  In the ‘60s, the civil rights movement was considered radical – a mortal threat to a status quo that attracted loyalty more out of comfortable familiarity than from premiums economic and social for the common folk. Democrats gave way to Dixiecrats - and then all-out domination by Republicans.

Across the country, most of what has come to be known as “Reagan Democrats” were working-class whites who felt estranged from a party that was gravitating toward social action and activism, and which seemingly viewed them in return as para-fascist “hardhats” filled potentially with reactionary violence and ill-will. The party was grooving with revolutionary chic, and so had little time for the thermos/time-clock crowd. Reflecting the political trends of whatever era seems a Democratic hallmark, and perspectives on most social issues are filtered through liberal, even leftist, lens.  The American working class takes a more conservative stance on issues like crime and taxes, for instance, simply because their lower-income neighborhoods and budgets are more susceptible to negative effects of these elements.

Almost a generation ago, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg discovered white ethnic voters in a Michigan area voted 63 percent for John Kennedy in 1960 – and 66 percent for Ronald Reagan in 1984.  He saw, rightly that these voters felt disenfranchised from their traditional party of choice.

But that picture has been long-altered across the country, where one-time roiling issues like social revolution, culture wars and the racial divide have either faded into the past or become integrated into the fabric of everyday life. Nowadays, truckers and small-town pig farmers in north Georgia and southern Illinois are beginning to wonder why they still cling to the GOP, a party revealing itself more and more as a distant Tory citadel, protecting elite interests that have more than beer-money to spend. Beckoning is that old time “religion” of soft-sell class warfare. Most Democratic Party speeches are dressed up as tone-poem meditations on WPA murals… Americans are forever hard-working, sacrificial and brave.

The  economy is always primary concern for these voters, and this year, fear has added the tincture of alarm for the Lunch-pail Quorum. The news on Main Street isn’t good. Our economic meltdown has become incandescent for these folks, and the key ingredient is spiraling fuel prices that incrementally boost household costs for every mercantile item transported across the waves or rolled down our highways – which are all items - and most crucially, food.

Added to this is the growing awareness that this most unpopular of wars is central to domestic financial woes.  The GOP must heft this debacle across its shoulders, and has found it as attractive as a lynx stole at a PETA convention. And, on top of that, the party can’t be trusted: Republicans lie.

…Too much.

These one-time Democrats are too thrify and industrious to be called "prodigal". But it's time to welcome the long-lost wanderers home, anyway.

For the past two years, since the Bush Administration fattened up Naval task force presence in the Persian Gulf and heated up its warlike smack talk at Tehran, when has replaced if as the key unknown in discussions about possible military operations against Iran.

At every minor incident - the capture of the British seamen, the Iranian speedboat "attacks" - teeth grit around the world in anticipation that finally the cataclysm might be triggered. And relief is almost palpable when tension fades from these insignificant international breaches. The eyeball-to-eyeball anxiety is so high in the Gulf and the Iranian offshore that it's easy to believe the batting of a butterfly's wings in Java could loose the dogs of war.

There has been uneasy talk of late that the Bush Administration, unwilling to leave office with the loose end of Iran hanging over its tattered legacy, will attack the Islamic republic sometime between the November election and Inauguration Day in January to guarantee that America will have to deal with a changed strategic seating arrangement in the Middle East - especially if Obama is elected president.

One of the best outlines of the genesis of such thinking has come from Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz in today's The Cutting Edge:

http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=554.

"In the final months of his presidency, it may be that Bush confines himself to ensuring that he gives Israel the best chance of successfully neutralizing the Iranian threat should it need to act once he has left the White House. This would involve, for instance, guaranteeing that Israel is able to purchase F-22 stealth bombers - the world's most advanced fighter jet and a vital asset in the face of Iran's advanced radar and other defense systems.

"Or it may be that Bush, who constantly stresses the moral imperatives that have guided his presidency and his own indifference to outside criticisms of the paths he has followed and the actions he has taken, is prepared to defy conventional wisdom about lame-duck presidents sitting with their arms folded in their final months. He has always had his own misgivings about the NIE, and will have noted that the International Atomic Energy Agency is now expressing profound concern about the military aspects of Iran's purportedly peaceful nuclear program.

"Media outlets as diverse as Time magazine, the Asia Times and Israel's Army Radio have all carried reports in the last couple of weeks related to a supposed readiness on the part of the Bush administration to launch military action against Iran's nuclear sites in the coming months."

Olmert today has backed off his threat that Israel would be forced to attack if the U.S. doesn't, but that saber-sheathing may be for public consumption only. After all, the main impetus for his Washington visit was to convince Bush that he should not trust the lyin' eyes of the NIE, and put his faith in Israeli-produced intelligence that indicates Iranians are on the very tippy-tip of that oft-declaimed "verge" of getting The Bomb.

The heightened war talk has brought some old friends scurrying out from under their rocks: Michael Ledeen, world-class intriger, has chimed in with a Wall Street Journal op-ed over the weekend:

http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB121279291616353311.html

...And here's a surprise: The Iranians are - you guessed it - on the verge of the verge of destroying Israel.

Sounding what has become a standard for the Mideast Imperium crowd, Ledeen conflates all of Israel's enemies - Hezbollah, Hamas, the Syrians - along with Iran into a kind of... well... "fascist" enemy of world peace and pink hatchlings. In this corner of the world, apparently, it's always Warsaw, 1939.

Ledeen has had a stinger for Iran a long, long time - to the point of cozying up to their intelligence aparatus for choice tidbits of strategic information. But, it seems that in the run-up to the Iraq War, the Iranians may have used this perennially shady character to their own ends. Ledeen has been mentioned as a figure in the Niger uranium forgeries - documents that purported to link Saddam Hussein to the famous African "yellow cake" - and other half-baked "intelligence" that helped launch the Iraq war once the fabricated info was cherry-picked by neoconservative fanatics in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. Since we now see the Iraq War as a strategic boon to Tehran, Ledeen may yet emerge as one of Iran's best - if unwitting - operatives.

In an informative - and strangely entertaining - Mother Jones MojoBlog piece by Dave Wagner and Laura Rozen, Ledeen's services on behalf of the Iran war lobby get reviewed by none other than the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence "Phase Two" report released last week. "The Cocktail Napkin Plan for Regime Change" is at:

http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/06/8595_three_days_in_r.html

And finally, the Darkness in November template gets some cheerleading by McCarthy-in-waiting Daniel Pipes, who takes time out from baiting Arabs and Arab-Americans in academia to posit that a post-election assault on Iran may be just peachy:

http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=YjNlYjdjNmExZGQ3ZDM2ZDNiYWQ5MmFjMDhkZDcyNmE=

The National Review Online has Pipes' sick nonsense in a recorded interview.

If all this cooks out, say hello to more death, less standing for the United States internationally... oh... and $20-a-gallon gas.