brainrow

• Conservative columnist Ann Coulter:

College professors are the only people in America who assume they can’t be fired for what they say.

No, she’s not upset that the rest of us lack freedom of speech. She’s upset that anyone has it.

• On Veterans Day last year, the ABC television network broadcast Saving Private Ryan. But sixty-six ABC affiliates balked at carrying the movie, fearing indecency fines from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC knew the content of the movie, but wouldn’t say whether they would fine stations for airing it.

Republicans in Congress have moved to increase the indecency fines the FCC can levy from $32,500 to $500,000 — high enough to still almost any tongue. Republican Senator Ted Stevens wants to extend the FCC’s authority to regulate content to include cable and satellite TV and radio. In a court case on a different issue, the FCC has claimed:

regulatory power over all instrumentalities, facilities, and apparatus “associated with the overall circuit of messages sent and received” via all interstate radio and wire communication.

Broadcast, cable, satellite, internet… am I missing anything?

• House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, in the Washington Times, discussing some things he opposes (emphasis added):

I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them.

• California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a 1990 profile in U.S. News and World Report:

My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it… People need somebody to watch over them… Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.

Connect the dots. What do you see?