but there's no part of this:

[i]The First Amendment was created back when citizens had a limited vocabulary, and most sentences had a fixed capacity to hurt or maim. Now, many years later, we have so many more words -- most of which are far more powerful and dangerous than our Founding Fathers could have ever imagined. For this reason, you should be extremely frightened.[/i]

that isn't absurd bullshit. And we already know that Fox and its lackeys want us frightened.

"The First Amendment was created back when citizens had a limited vocabulary, and most sentences had a fixed capacity to hurt or maim. Now, many years later, we have so many more words -- most of which are far more powerful and dangerous than our Founding Fathers could have ever imagined. For this reason, you should be extremely frightened."

The Second Amendment was created back when citizens had limited firepower, and most weapons had a fixed capacity to hurt or maim. Now, many years later, we have so many more weapons-- most of which are far more powerful and dangerous than our Founding Fathers could have ever imagined. For this reason, you should be extremely frightened.

Maybe he's being ironic.

Floyd Abrams thinks that hate speech should be banned but like pornography it is in the eye of the beholder. My problem with letting liberals (or anyone) determine what hate speech is is that I know that their definition of hate speech means that it is uttered by someone who looks like me (white male). Even saying a factually accurate statement that casts a non-white / woman / immigrant / gay ... as something other than perfect or a victim means I will lose my head.

A Fox News commentator telling me I should be "extremely frightened" feels just a bit too spot on, doesn't it?

Gutfeld was being ironic. Not sure what most of the comments added to the discussion.

The Imus issue is not just about the first amendment. He was at work. If I, for instance, called all the women in my company's accounting department "nappy-headed hoes", or referred to customers that way, I'd get fired too. Arrested, no; deported, no; fired, yes.

Having the LEGAL right to freedom of speech does not mean that exercising that freedom of speech won't have repercussions. Imus, through his speech, became a liability to his employer. So they canned his ass.

Freedom of speech does not equal freedom from consequences.

I think that a lot of people need to learn the difference between having a right to do something and doing the right thing. Imus had a "right" to use whatever language he wanted on his show. Other people had a right to tell his sponsors that they were going to boycott them if they didn't stop supporting him. Protesting certain words is as much a right of free speech as saying them. The government isn't allowed to restrict our speech, but that doesn't mean that we don't have a responsibility to censor ourselves, or that individual people and groups of individuals can't use their right of free speech to say "I don't want that kind of crap on my airwaves".

Will this kind of censorship sometimes result in undesirable consequences? Probably. As a great writer once said, we're delaing with human beings here, not angels. But the alternative is that anybody can say anything without consequence, and I think that's worse. We need some mechanism to enforce a basic level of civility. Sometimes people just need to say "Stop". Hopefully, these times will be mostly limited to times when the behaviour of the individual being criticized is truly reprehensible.

Sandra Tsing Loh was herself canned from a radio station. She was working at KCRW here in LA. She has a short program where she talks about life in the Valley and LA. Her engineer had been forewarned and fell asleep at the bleep switch. (or so the story goes) She made a comment about needing to hurry home to fuck her husband. It went out as spoken and she was canned by the Public Radio station. Her fans raised a stink and she was hired by KPCC, another Public station.

What should you be able to say on the radio?? The answer is simple: it depends on what color you are.

It's unfortunate that the Imus frenzy so quickly focused on racism and sexism. One of the reasons I found it so offensive was that it was personal and the power differential seemed so great; rich, famous shock jock attacks without provocation hard-working college athletes.

So here's my advice to radio and TV: don't censor but pick on people your own size. Attacking the powerful makes you look brave. Picking on the powerless makes you look like a coward and a bully. I think the main reason Imus had so few defenders was simply that no one wants to be friends with a bully or a coward.

If so, anything resembling state sponsored censorship should make us all very nervous. Instead, twenty-three years off schedule, Americans seem to be begging for an Orwellian police state. Let's just keep making everything illegal and restricted until were all unemployed and incarcerated, except for those who choose to work as censors and jailers. Our "free" speech does not require additional restrictions. Imus' mean spirited and unprovoked comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team were condemned by a large segment of society because they focused on physical characteristics associated with the ethnicity of the majority of the players. Society responded by requesting that he lose his mainstream platform to broadcast his unpopular, negative opinions. We can certainly seek to marginalize forms of expression that we find distasteful by withdrawing our support of it, but I would never deny him the right to say whatever he wants and reap the consequences of his utterances.

It cannot be denied that much of the momentum that built behind the call for Don Imus' ouster (if not the call itself)was from people like Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton. I was not a fan of the Don Imus show because I often found his remarks sophomoric and offensive. I was uncomfortable listening to his show. But I am more uncomfortable with these individuals censoring what I can and cannot listen to. Even if it is "moral censorship" and not government censorship, the question remains: "Who gets to decide what is OK?" I also believe that people like Don Imus and Bill Maher who have been fired for pushing the envelpe too far have also been contributors to the overall discussion of important issues. I am no fan of the racist remarks Don Imus uttered, but I believe this is a critical time in which we need more public debate, not less. Remember, we're in a war now because there was not enough public debate before we attacked.