By an overwhelming majority of 8-1, the “Super Supremes” ruled today to protect the free speech protests of Westboro Baptist Church members who have been picketing at the funerals of dead soldiers.

It was a stunning victory for free speech and the First Amendment and really endorses earlier U.S. Supreme Court rulings that even reprehensible speech is protected by the U.S. Constitution. It’s one of the bedrock principles the country was founded on. Full story »

Savannah’s acting city manager found a loophole in the city’s ordinance banning local Girl Scouts from selling their cookies in front of founder Juliette Gordon Low’s historic home.

The loophole is another city ordinance that allows the city manager to permit sidewalk sales at city residences.

Common sense did prevail. Local Girl Scouts will be at their tables selling cookies at busy Oglethorpe and Bull Streets this weekend. The Girl Scouts still have to pony up to their civic responsibilities as part of the deal as noted in the letter from the city manager.

Kudos to acting city manager Rochelle Small-Toney.

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The Iranian government arrested all the opposition leaders and moved them to a military jail over the weekend. Bear in mind none of these guys is an actual liberal, merely calling for less oppression from the state. Still, it appears to have acted as some weird trigger. That and the protests elsewhere.

Anyhow, #10esfand is the hash-tag and the protests are happening right now. Unbelievable stuff. Traffic is ground to a halt in major cities. Thousands of people are standing on their roofs screaming, “Down with the dictators”. Plenty of YouTube stuff showing the crowds and chants. Absolute chaos. I still don’t believe the Iranian regime will fall but it is weakening daily. Who knows, though.

A lot of governments are considering that the choice is definitely as extreme as Egypt or Libya and have to be asking themselves which world they want to live in…

However, try for a moment to imagine a world in which most of the Middle East is run by representative governments. It doesn’t matter whether they’re Islamist. Imagine a shade of Turkey, for example. It could be the largest shift in human development … ever…

Arianna Huffington once put the squeeze on Jimmy Kimmel, and in the strangest way possible. Start the video at 0:53 to get right to the… er, bottom of this.

X-posted from Jazz from Hell

A neophyte freshman representative from Kansas who slipped into Congress on the strength of hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations from heavyweight industries does not want you and me to see a product-safety database compiled by a federal consumer agency.

In 2008, Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. Among its mandates: Consumers will have access to a public database to report and learn about hazards posed by unsafe products. The Consumer Product Safety Commission has compiled that database, and it’s ready to launch next week.

But Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) doesn’t want consumers to see it. He does not want them to see “reports of defective products from a wide range of sources, including consumers, health-care providers, death certificates and media accounts,” reports Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post. He does not want consumers to change how they make purchasing decisions. He does not want them to see a database that is “limited to complaints about safety and does not deal with product reliability or performance,” reports Layton.
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For some time – a few years, to be honest – I’ve been trying to imagine how some artists get better with age (or at least retain the level of energy and creativity they exhibited when they were younger), while others go completely to hell. Peter Gabriel, Graham Parker, Van Morrison, Don Dixon, John Hiatt (and even Bowie, to a lesser extent) – these are people you can still count on, even if you think that the old stuff was better. All of them have had high spots in recent years that at least nudge the 4-star mark, and you might justifiably nurture a sense that the next thing they release could turn out to be brilliant.

This column isn’t about those folks. No, this little list is dedicated to the First-to-Worst Club, a set of artists who once ruled, but somehow found a way to deteriorate as the years passed. In some cases – and these are the ones you’ll find at the top of the list – you have people or bands who went from legitimate greatness to breathtaking suckitude. In other cases you have people who simply lost their edge or were abandoned by their muse. They may not be forging new frontiers in suck, they’re just muddling along, mere shadows of their former selves. Full story »