"Kerry defends liberties, says Americans have 'right to be stupid.'"

Lucky for him.

Typical rich bastard, always looking out for his own interests.

"When does a fantasized crime become an actual crime?"

"A federal prosecutor, Randall W. Jackson, told jurors that [New York City police officer Gilberto Valle] had been plotting real crimes to kill actual victims, while Officer Valle’s lawyer, Julia L. Gatto, contended that he had merely been living out deviant fantasies in Internet chat rooms, with no intention of carrying them out."

One outside expert, Joseph V. DeMarco, an Internet lawyer and former head of the cybercrime unit in the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, said in a recent interview that beyond its sensationalism, the Valle case highlighted the fact that there were “dark corners” of the Internet “where a whole range of illegal and immoral conduct takes place, and the general public has only a vague and fleeting knowledge that these places exist.”



He noted that the Internet, as a medium of expression and communication, also made it possible for people with interests as benign as stamp collecting or as grisly as cannibalism to find and validate one another in community forums.

“If you were someone mildly interested in cannibalism 30 years ago, it was really hard to find someone in real space to find common cause with,” Mr. DeMarco noted. “Whereas online, it’s much easier to find those people, and I think when you have these communities forming, validating each other, encouraging each other, it’s not far-fetched to think that some people in that community who otherwise might not be pushed beyond certain lines might be.”...

Ms. Gatto, Officer Valle’s lawyer, said in her opening statement that if the jurors had been scared by what the prosecution had described, “who could blame you?” The allegations were shocking and gruesome, she said, “the stuff that horror movies are made of. They share something else in common with horror movies,” she added. “It’s pure fiction. It’s pretend. It’s scary make-believe.”

Ms. Gatto suggested that the stakes for Officer Valle, who has been charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, went far beyond his case. She said cases like his test “bedrock principles, the freedom to think, the freedom to say, the freedom to write even the darkest thoughts from our human imagination.”

IN THE COMMENTS: Nonapod said: "Real space? The term meatspace is often used as a silly antonym to the cyberspace, but this gives it a whole new meaning."

"I feel like I just won the Academy Award. If an artist can offend so many people that he has to go to prison..."

"... to protect society, that's really saying something. Most shock artists dream of this kind of attention, without the prison part."

Ira Isaacs, sentenced last month by a federal judge — this is in the United States— for 4 years, for violating obscenity law. The Huffington Post — considered a liberal website, and, again, this is in the United States — began its article about the sentencing with a joke: "Looks like someone's career went down the toilet." (The movies included the simulated consumption of feces.)

There is no shame anymore. And yet there still are obscenity trials. Absurd.

I'm finding this story now because I happened across an account to the trial in an article published last March at Reason.com: "Porn So Icky That It Can't Be Obscene" (by Jacob Sullum), describing the argument made at trial, which describes the argument made by Isaacs's lawyer:

"My intent is to be a shock artist in the movies I made," [Isaacs] testified, "to challenge the viewer in thinking about art differently... to think about things they'd never thought about before." Similarly, [his lawyer Roger] Diamond argued that the films have political value as a protest against the government's arbitrary limits on expression, illustrating the "reality that we may not have the total freedom the rest of the world thinks we have."

Sullum wrote:

I will be impressed if Isaacs, who faces a possible penalty of 20 years in prison, can pull off this feat of legal jujitsu, transforming the very qualities that make his movies objectionable into their redeeming value — especially since at least some of the jurors... found the evidence against him literally unwatchable. But if the jurors want to blame someone for making them sit through this assault on their sensibilities, they should not blame Isaacs. They should blame the Justice Department, which initiated the case during the Bush administration, and the Supreme Court, which established the absurdly subjective test they are now supposed to apply. Will they take seriously Isaacs' references to Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Kiki Smith, and Piero Manzoni, or will they dismiss his artistic name dropping as a desperate attempt to give his masturbation aids a high-minded purpose?

But here's some up-to-date news from 2 days ago: Minutes before Isaacs was to turn himself in to the  federal Bureau of Prisons, Isaacs go a call from his lawyer saying "don't go." The judge had approved his motion for bail pending appeal.

Isaacs told XBIZ that today's events were so surreal he had felt like he was in an episode of the "Twilight Zone" or a Quentin Tarantino movie....

"Last night, I was thinking it would be my last night of freedom," he said. "I really thought that this would be it; that I would be sleeping in prison the following night... and that would continue for a very long time."

We'll see what happens in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and — if we're lucky — the Supreme Court.

"The Supreme Court reentered the controversial field of campaign finance Tuesday, agreeing to consider a Republican challenge..."

"... to decades-old limits on the total amount a person can contribute to candidates, political parties and political action committees."

"There are some short transitory passages between the various sexual episodes..."

"... but, for the most part, they only set the scene and identify the participants for the next orgy, or make smutty reference and comparison to past episodes."

An amusing sentence from Justice Clark's dissenting opinion in the 1966 case Memoirs v. Massachusetts, attempting to explain what is in the text of "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," because he is "obliged to portray the book's contents, which causes me embarrassment." He avoids actual quotations from the book because it would "debase" the set of volumes that contain U.S. Supreme Court opinions. I was also amused by: "The pubic hair is often used for a background to the most vivid and precise descriptions of the response, condition, size, shape. and color of the sexual organs before, during and after orgasms."



The narrator in "Memoirs" is a prostitute named Fanny Hill, and Justice Clark, addressing actual legal arguments made in this First Amendment case, writes: "To say that Fanny is an 'intellectual' is an insult to those who travel under that tag. She was nothing but a harlot — a sensualist.... As an empiricist, Fanny confines her observations and 'experiments' to sex, with primary attention to depraved, lewd, and deviant practices."

I was also amused by Clark's dismay that one expert at trial had claimed that the book had literary merit because the verb "waddles" was used instead of "walks" to describe a fat woman entering a room and that another expert said that the 18th century book contributed to an understanding of history through its repeated descriptions of "the male sexual organ as an engine... which is pulling you away from the way these events would be described in the 19th or 20th century."

It's funny now, when you can get the book through a simple click. Feel free to read just the dirty parts, in other words — if I am to believe Justice Clark's opinion and as they say in the blogosphere — read the whole thing.

ADDED: I love the idea of insulting those who "travel under the tag" "intellectual." That's something I know I try to do whenever I can. And I'm fascinated by the expert's inadvertently causing us to picture a giant penis-locomotive dragging us into the past. That's quite a time machine you've got there! And the notion of pubic hair as a background for a visualization of male genitalia. It's like pubic hair is to cock as black velvet is to Elvis.

AND:  Why the sudden interest in Justice Tom Clark? My conlaw casebook has a squib on this case:

[I]n Memoirs v. Massachusetts, 383 U.S. 413 (1966), a plurality of three (Warren, Brennan, and Fortas) restated Roth as follows:

[T]hree elements must coalesce: it must be established that (a) the dominant  theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters; and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social value.

As Chief Justice Burger later noted in  Miller, “While  Roth presumed ‘obscenity’ to be ‘utterly without redeeming social importance,’  Memoirs required that to prove obscenity it must be affirmatively established that the material is ‘utterly without redeeming social value,’ [a] burden virtually impossible to discharge under our criminal standards of proof.” Nevertheless, this formulation was the most widely applied, even though no majority of the Court could agree on a standard to determine what constituted obscenity. Warren, Brennan, and Fortas subscribed to the Memoirs variation; Black and Douglas asserted that obscenity was constitutionally protected; Harlan held to his Roth view; and Stewart thought that both federal and state governments could suppress “hard-core” pornography. Justice Stewart’s famous epigram in his concurrence in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964), dramatized the problem of defining “obscenity.” Speaking of hard-core pornography, Stewart said: “I know it when I see it.”

I'm counting: Warren, Brennan, Fortas, Black, Douglas, Harlan, Stewart. That's only 7. Somebody's not getting any respect. The other unmentioned Justice? Byron White.

Donald Trump says he's suing Bill Maher for $5 million after Trump accepted his offer, making a valid contract.

The "offer," made last month, was to "pay $5 million to Trump’s charity of choice if he provided a birth certificate proving that he’s not 'spawn of his mother having sex with orangutan.'"

Maher was comically commenting on Trump's offer to pay $5 million to Obama's charity of choice if Obama releases his college records.

This lawsuit news is, of course, Trump, once again, hogging — orangutanning — the media spotlight. Fine. I don't care. But to actually file a lawsuit is: 1. An offense against free speech, and 2. An irresponsible appropriation of the public wealth that will be consumed processing the lawsuit.

“I don’t think he was joking. He said it with venom. That was venom. That wasn’t a joke. In fact, he was nervous when he said it. It was a pathetic delivery,” Trump said on Fox News.

Speaking of pathetic... go away, Donald. And take your hair with you when you leave. 

Aggressive prosecution #1: California businessman commercially growing medical marijuana.

Adam Nagourney, in the NYT, gives very sympathetic treatment to Matthew R. Davies — "a round-faced 34-year-old father of two young girls" with "graduate-level business skills" who "paid California sales tax and filed for state and local business permits" and got the advice of many lawyers as he set up an enterprise that plainly and overtly is a felony under federal law. Davies told the NYT:

“We thought, this is an industry in its infancy, it’s a heavy cash business, it’s basically being used by people who use it to cloak illegal activity. Nobody was doing it the right way. We thought we could make a model of how this should be done.”

Cloak illegal activity? It is illegal activity. Federal law is real. Haven't you heard?!

The right way? Cloaking is the right way when you're committing crimes. With your business education, somehow you were all: Hey, what a smart idea I have — being completely out in the open about breaking the law. Why hasn't anybody else thought of this?

And I love the way the NYT suddenly has a pro-business orientation. Davies deserves special grace under the law because he's using the structure of business and because he's excited about making big profits! Compare that to all the articles anguishing over Citizens United and how terrible it is to respect free speech rights when the speech comes from a place that is structured as a business.

“Mr. Davies was not a seriously ill user of marijuana nor was he a medical caregiver — he was the major player in a very significant commercial operation that sought to make large profits from the cultivation and sale of marijuana,” [said a letter from United States attorney for the Eastern District of California, Benjamin B. Wagner, a 2009 Obama appointee.] Mr. Wagner said that prosecuting such people “remains a core priority of the department.”...

“It’s mind-boggling that there were hundreds of attorneys advising their clients that it was O.K. to do this, only to be bushwhacked by a federal system that most people in California are not even paying attention to,” said William J. Portanova, a former federal drug prosecutor and a lawyer for one of Mr. Davies’s co-defendants. “It’s tragic.”

Yes, and it is mind-boggling that those who argue for the broad interpretation of federal power and who scoff at the idea of the 10th Amendment and reserving powers to the state somehow can't grasp the meaning of their general propositions when they encounter an issue where they prefer the state policy to the federal policy. The NYT and other drivers of elite opinion ought to have to face up to the reality of what their legal propositions entail.

And quite aside from the problem of the allocation of power at the federal and the state levels, how about some consistency about equal justice under the law? Let the law — as written — apply the same way to everyone, whether they have a round face and 2 young daughters or not, whether they've gone to grad school or not, whether they have big visions of massive profits or they are living hand to mouth. If the law is wrong, change the law — for everybody. Don't cry over the people you think are nice — like David Gregory and Aaron Swartz. Nonphotogenic and low-class people deserve equal treatment, and cutting breaks for the ones who pull your heart strings is not justice.

Professor who teaches a course called Culture of Conspiracy...

... is denounced for "inquir[ing] whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place — at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation's news media have described."

People these days seem to be so confused. If we hear about something terrible happening, it's as if talking about the details is equivalent to saying you don't care about the people who were hurt. This is a dangerous development, which itself ought to be examined as a possible conspiracy.

9th Circuit panel blocks California ban on gay "reparative" therapy.

"The appeals court's order prevents the state from enforcing the law, SB1172, while a different three-judge panel considers if the measure violates the First Amendment rights of therapists and parents."

Earlier this month, two federal judges in California arrived at opposite conclusions on whether the law violates the Constitution.

"'Candyass Blogger' Update: Free Speech Absolutists Who Banned Mr. Althouse UPDATE: 'These Are Historical Dildos.'"

I wasn't going to wade into the Loomis lunacy, but that headline caught my eye. I won't even try to summarize the post, by Robert Stacy McCain, other than to say that I read it out loud to Meade and we both laughed a lot and that it contains the phrases "Everest's testicles" and "historical dildos."

As for Loomis, I lean heavily toward academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the comprehension of metaphor, but against the hypocrisy that for purposes of this blog goes under the tag "civility bullshit" and against the appropriation of a child massacre for diversion and propaganda.

"The First Amendment affords a publisher - not a reporter - absolute authority to shape a newspaper's content."

Says a panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to the dismay of AlterNet:

Rather than uphold their rights both to unionize and to speak out against bad editorial practices, the federal court instead said their dismissals were protected by the publisher's First Amendment Rights to print whatever she wanted.

The dispute began in 2006, when nearly all the top journalists and editors at the Santa Barbara News-Press quit because the paper's owner and publisher Wendy McCaw was interfering in the editorial content.

If a business employs people to do the work of writing, it gets to direct the work it's paying for. How could it be any other way? I'm only talking about the law — the extent to which courts should interfere. Obviously, there's endless room to criticize newspaper owners who demand biased or bad journalism. That's more speech in the speech marketplace.

"The First Amendment affords a publisher - not a reporter - absolute authority to shape a newspaper's content," Judge Stephen Williams wrote for a three-judge panel.

As the Santa Barbara Independent notes, the court's judges are overwhelmingly conservative — a bias clearly reflected in this ruling.

Clearly! Nonsense.

CORRECTION: I'd mistakenly identified the court as the 9th Circuit. (The events took place in Santa Barbara.)

Why are people having so much trouble understanding rhetorical devices?

You may remember Justice Scalia the other day tweaking the kids at Princeton for not being able to handle reductio ad absurdum:

It's a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd'...

It can't be, of course, that the Princeton students never get argument that comes in the form of taking a principle you know your interlocutor holds dear and presenting him with other things that could fall within the principle that you know he'll object to. It's irritating to be on the receiving end. The one who wields that argument is playing with ideas, fun-loving, and challenging. The one on the receiving end doesn't want to play along. He may get super-serious and offended: How dare you talk about something I hold dear alongside those horrible things that all decent people loathe?! It's an argument with which older, calmer people needle the emotional young.

Scalia never said homosexuality is like bestiality. Here's the passage in his dissenting opinion in Lawrence v. Texas that heats up his opponents:

State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are... sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding.

Now, it's rhetoric to act like he equated homosexuality with bestiality. It's rhetoric to say — as the Princeton student did — "Do you have any regret or shame for drawing these comparisons you did in your dissents?"

It's rhetoric to respond to that question — a demand for an account of Scalia's inner life — by mocking the student's inability to understand rhetoric. That was cold, intentionally cold. Hey, you Princeton guys are supposed to be smart. But Scalia could have chosen a warmer approach without selling himself out. That question could have been answered:

Actually, I do have feelings and I know that many of the opinions I write upset people, but what would cause me regret or shame would be to let things like that sway me from deciding the cases according to the law. I'm a judge, and when I'm doing my judge work, I have to stick to being a judge. And part of being a judge is to demand that a case express a rule that can be applied to other things that are similar. The question in Lawrence was whether moral feeling, standing alone, is enough to support a law. If the majority was saying no, then it needed to commit to that proposition across the board, and I was testing that, and a test really does need to be sharp and probing. I get that it pains you, but step up and argue with me. Tell me why bestiality is different from the other things on the morality-only list. Actually, it's pretty easy: The animal has feelings. We have feelings. Animals have feelings. Feelings matter. But as a judge, I can't do feelings. Come on, have some empathy for me in my plight!

I've gone on quite long about Scalia, but Scalia wasn't the inspiration for this post. What got me started on this track was the difficulty readers had with 2 of yesterday's posts that entailed the use of rhetorical devices. One consisted of 2 quotes: "What is the gun community going to do about this tragedy?"/"I dunno. What is the gay community going to do about Penn State?" This linked to Instapundit, who provided the source of the quotes and who now has a couple updates that suggest he's getting pushback similar to some of what I see in my long comments thread, e.g., "Professor Althouse, the comparison is absurd, bigoted and offensive any way you cut it. You should be ashamed of yourself for linking to it with approval."

See? Shame on you! I am offended! Come on, think about it. Figure out the puzzle. It's an analogy, pithily phrased, and thus an occasion to pick apart the ways in which the 2 statements are/are not parallel. Many readers in my comments thread did understand the rhetoric and deal with the coherence of the analogy, but many fell into the sort of expression of outrage that's so common and so dull these days. At least show you understand the rhetoric and then tell me it's in bad taste to be humorous and challenging over topics so raw and painful.

The second post that got me started on this topic was the one that linked to this Matt K. Lewis item "The media should be ashamed of its Connecticut coverage." I'd quoted only the last few lines of that piece, where he proposed "some common sense media control." He's doing a twist on the post-Newtown gun control arguments, switching the right under threat from the 2d Amendment to the 1st Amendment. I thought that was clever and thought-provoking, but unfortunately some readers didn't get it. One said: "Professor Althouse, I'm not sure whether you got punked or if you get that this article is satire and are endorsing it's [sic] specious point." Oh, jeez, that's annoying! I like to keep things crisp around here. Are people going to be so dull that all humor will need arrows pointing at it saying it's humor?

Actually, I see that the 2 comments I've selected for quotation here are by the same person. Maybe he's simply pretending to be dull and doing the Theater of Outrage. That's rhetoric too, and I need to get it.

"Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism."

"It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite. And as the Occupy movement makes clear, also the demonstrators that precipitated regime change in Egypt and Myanmar last year, assembled masses don’t require guns to exercise and secure their freedom, and wield world-changing political force. Arendt and Foucault reveal that power does not lie in armed individuals, but in assembly — and everything conducive to that."

So writes Firmin DeBrabander, who is a philosophy prof at the Maryland Institute College of Art, in the corner of the NYT called "The Stone," which calls itself "a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless."

I'm not familiar with Firmin DeBrabander but I would like to know if he extends his principle generally to all of the individual rights currently protected in the various interpretations that have emanated from the Supreme Court.

Does our abortion culture/free speech culture promote a fatal slide into extreme individualism? Do abortion rights/free speech rights foster a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another. Would Professor DeBrabander say that abortion rights and free speech rights are not freedom but the opposite?

Let me offer a bonus literary reading to sharpen the question. It's from a famous book. I've added some boldface to stress things relevant to DeBrabander's philosophy:

"You are thinking... that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?...

"We are the priests of power.... God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: "Freedom is Slavery." Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone— free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realise is that power is power over human beings. Over the body— but, above all, over the mind....

"We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation— anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to...."

"The founding fathers never envisioned the damage that could be done by a 24-hour news cycle."

"The media incentivizes killers by giving them attention, and they put innocent people in danger."

Clearly, we cannot sit by and hope this situation will improve. How many more deaths will it take before someone does something?

I know what you're thinking: Free societies are inherently messy. And what about the First Amendment?

I'm not suggesting we completely abolish the media. But perhaps we should curtail it. Isn't it time for some common sense media control?

It's time for a conversation and perhaps a commission... about common sense control....

Joe Lieberman on censoring pop culture and reporting "troublesome" young people.

On "Fox News Sunday," Chris Wallace got Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman talking about the Sandy Hook massacre, specifically the question of violence in video games, movies and TV. Lieberman said violence in popular culture "does cause vulnerable young men, particularly, to be more violent," and "We’ve got to ask the entertainment industry, what are you going to do to try to tone that down."

Wallace asked whether this would be voluntary, and Lieberman said:

In our society we try to do it voluntarily. But I think we’ve come to a point where we have to say, if not, maybe there are some things we can do to tone it down.

So, in other words, not voluntary! Having let his authoritarian side show, Lieberman shifts to talking about "the mental health system" and says:

I think we really have got to ask ourselves, first, off, this is like the slogan that we use in Homeland Security -- see something, say something.

See something... like what?

We’ve got to ask parents, friends, school officials, if you see a child, a young person, that really looks like they are potentially... real troublesome, get them mental health help and we have to ask ourselves, as a society, is there enough mental health help available for these kids?

Troublesome! He should have said troubled, if he meant to talk about mental illness, and he paused before he said the word. A fascinating slip. Troubling!

"Sometimes conduct is speech (think of burning a flag) and sometimes speech is not 'speech,' as strange as that sounds."

"In this instance, for example, the speech involved in talk therapy is, for all practical purposes, analogous to electric-shock therapy. It is a method of therapy, and it is the method, not the speech as such, that is being regulated. This is a common phenomenon. The state can regulate bribery, threats, conspiracy, and many other forms of 'speech' because, in context, what is being regulated is not the speech as such, but the underlying course of conduct, of which the speech is but a part."

Says lawprof Geoffrey R. Stone, cautioning against a "too literal... understanding of the constitutional guarantee of 'the freedom of speech."

"Strangles"?

Really? Where's the strangling? Calling speech offensive is more speech, not censorship.

Via Instapundit, who quotes the headline that contains what I say is a deceptive metaphor: "Harvard, Legendary Home Of Harvard Lampoon, Strangles Campus Satire."

If the authorities are offended and express outrage and demand more circumspect speech, satire is not murdered. It is the opposite of murdered. It is given fertile ground in which to grow and prosper. What better foil for comedy than a bunch of dour, repressive authority figures? Since when is satire ruined when the superiors don't think it's funny? Seems to me their outrage makes it funnier.

If you don't have enough courage with your humor to keep moving forward, you were never very funny in the first place.

"The seven countries where the state can execute you for being atheist."

Only 7. And it's not really about being atheist. It's about talking about it. This is the old freedom of speech issue, and we still have a problem with that in the United States. Last I noticed, that man who made the "Innocence of Muslims" video was in prison, right here in the U.S.

"We're all adults here, it's time we take our freedom back."

Fabulous slogan from ad — viewable at the link — for blu eCigs.

Most living Americans had never before seen a cigarette advertised on television - they were banned in 1971.

But the electronic cigarettes fall outside that law, since they contain no tobacco. That is just one way they fall into what one anti-smoking campaigner calls a regulatory "no man's land."...

Unless they make a therapeutic claim, for example that they can help people quit smoking, they fall in the cracks between federal tobacco regulations and rules covering drug devices like insulin pumps...

In the new commercial, Lorillard appears to have reached into the bag of advertising tricks that got previous generations of Americans hooked on cigarettes, tobacco industry critics say.

"It feels like what they're trying to do is re-establish a norm that smoking is okay, that smoking is glamorous and acceptable," says Cynthia Hallett, executive director of Americans for Non-Smokers' Rights.

Step back, nanny.

I'm waiting for the day when there will be legal THC-delivering eCigs. And here I am smoking a blu eCig. I've never been a tobacco smoker. So I think these things might be nice for people who want to play-smoke and have a bit of nicotine — which is a stimulant and a relaxant.

Nicotine appears to enhance concentration and memory... It also appears to enhance alertness.... Arousal is increased...  Pain is reduced... Anxiety is reduced...

Research suggests that, when smokers wish to achieve a stimulating effect, they take short quick puffs, which produce a low level of blood nicotine. This stimulates nerve transmission. When they wish to relax, they take deep puffs, which produce a high level of blood nicotine, which depresses the passage of nerve impulses, producing a mild sedative effect.

Anyway, watch the ad at the first link. When I showed it to Meade — who, like me, loved the "take our freedom back" slogan — he said that was the key to understanding the famous "smoking guy" ad for Herman Cain.

"Federal District Judge Enjoins California's Law Prohibiting Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy."

Senior District Judge William Shubb wrote that "a mental health provider’s pursuit of SOCE is guided by the provider’s or patient’s views of homosexuality, [so] it is difficult, if not impossible, to view the conduct of performing SOCE as anything but integrally intertwined with viewpoints, messages, and expression about homosexuality."

Free speech, an American tradition, inconvenient, as ever, to lawmakers who think they know better than the people who insist on talking about things.