But the UK excluding him from being able to travel there because he is controversial is not the kind of behavior a world power like the UK should be engaging in.

Call me a flag-waving American if you must, but I think one of the great things about this country is our tolerance for speech. Even crappy speech, like Michael Savage. Why does this work? If you ban certain types of speech, as the UK, Canada, and Germany do in one form or another, all it does is lend strength to the hatemongers. It tells them and their supporters that their speech is so powerful the government has to specifically restrict it.

Allowing the extremes to speak as we do here in America puts their words into the public sphere for scrutiny, and as bad ideas often do – they lose. The racist movement in America is for the most part dead as a door knob because the government allows them to speak.

Michael Savage is an ass. Nothing he says makes any sense. The UK is a far stronger nation than the words of Savage, why give loons like him any sense of power by banning him for his words?

With a planned showing of a controversial pornographic movie on the University of Maryland campus just hours away, the state legislator who is trying to halt the event turned his attention to the university’s capital budget, threatening an attempt to cut those funds in Annapolis.

State Sen. Andrew Harris (R-Baltimore County), who last week tried to block the university’s $424 million share of state operating funds over plans to screen the film at the theater in the student union, announced his new approach today. The state operating budget is now in conference committee and cannot be amended when it emerges, but debate on the capital budget could begin as early as tonight.

Of course Andrew Harris is a Republican. And of course Andrew Harris has his priorities out of whack.

The movie in question is “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge”, which I would figure has a plot that’s impossible to follow unless you see Pirates I.

A US publisher has cancelled the publication of a novel about the youngest wife of the Muslim prophet Mohammed amid a growing controversy over the book.

‘The Jewel of Medina,’ a debut novel by journalist Sherry Jones about Mohammed’s child bride A’isha had been due for release in the United States last week.

But publisher Random House released her from the contract amid the controversy and her agent said Jones is now looking for a publisher in another country to pick up the rights.

Look, pulling a book from publication because it might offend the religious sensitivity of some jackholes is antithetical to what books represent. I’m sick of the theocrats making the rest of society walk on eggshells around them. This current go around it has been Islam that’s bitching, and the idea that the right way to respond to this is to declare jihad and whatnot is clear evidence of the dumb.

Bollinger is telling Ahmadinejad he’s a tin-pot dictator – right to his face!

UPDATE: Ahmadinejad’s b.s. “there needs to be more research” on the Holocaust sounds eerily like the folks who still don’t believe in global warming or evolution.

UPDATE2: LOL. Ahmadinejad says they don’t have gays in Iran. LOL. How could conservatives be afraid to have this guy talk? He’s hoisted himself up on his own petard. Freedom of speech is the greatest weapon.

Tom Rogers, a retired Indianapolis detective, toils away most days in his suburban home office reviewing sexual Web sites and other Internet traffic to see whether they qualify as obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

His work is financed by a Justice Department grant initially provided through a Congressional earmark inserted into a spending bill by Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia.

The grant, about $150,000 a year, has helped pay for Mr. Rogers and another retired law enforcement officer in Reno, Nev., to harvest and review complaints about obscene matter on the Internet that citizens register on the Justice Department Web site.

In the last few years, 67,000 citizens’ complaints have been deemed legitimate under the program and passed on to the Justice Department and federal prosecutors.

The number of prosecutions resulting from those referrals is zero.

Real American Hero.

[Brent] Ward, who was among the most strident adversaries of the porn industry as U.S. Attorney in Utah in the 1980s, is heading a new Justice Department task force aimed at enforcing federal

You see what porn does to you? Think of the children, Jenna Jameson!

obscenity laws.

…

The way Ward sees it, American culture is saturated with pornography, and it has profound consequences, eroding families, increasing violence against women, warping perceptions of sex and helping child predators groom victims.

“We’re not going to prosecute it away, but it’s important, I think, that Americans see their government trying to do something about it,” he said. The task force, with a total of four prosecutors, 10 FBI agents and a postal inspector, has the job of putting together cases that can be prosecuted by U.S. attorneys in various states.

…

Wade Smith, a lawyer who defended P.H.E., said Ward took a hard line in his distaste for pornography.

“He was unwilling to acknowledge that there was a place for any kind of adult material in the framework of the First Amendment,” including publications like Playboy, Smith said. “As a matter of fact, he was extremely and completely rigid in wanting us out of business.”

Judges first in Washington, D.C., and later the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the strategy went too far. The 10th Circuit judges called the charges “the tainted fruit of a prosecutorial attempt to curtail P.H.E.’s future First Amendment protected speech.”

What a psycho and an amazing waste of taxpayer funds against a constitutionally protected form of speech.

And I’ve got to say that CNN and other Western media outlets come across as idiots when they digitally obscure these cartoons. The best barometer of when you’re doing a good job is when you have the wacky fundamentalists – Christian, Muslim, or otherwise – up in arms over something because it probably means you’re on the right track.

In a last-minute referendum push, petition-gatherers clad in bunny costumes will be stationed in front of Buzz Nightclub at Scottsdale Road and Shea Boulevard from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily through Tuesday.

Adult film star Jenna Jameson, co-owner of Babe’s Cabaret, is doing impromptu appearances at Buzz to register voters and collect signatures.

Signatures also are being collected daily until 9 p.m. at Vegas Pawn & Jewelry, 1137 N. Scottsdale Road.

America. Oh yeah.

Adult film star Jenna Jameson on Monday drew a lively crowd of more than 200 people to Scottsdale City Hall, where City Council members picked through a laundry list of options to tighten up their sexually oriented businesses ordinance.

The meeting went late into the night with no decision as of press time.

The owners Scottsdale’s two strip club said the new rules are oppressive and will make it nearly impossible for them to continue running businesses that have been part of the city’s hospitality scene for decades.

“What you have in your hands tonight is a ‘Put us out of business card,’” said First Amendment attorney Dick Hertzberg, who represents Jameson. “Why don’t you give her a chance. Let her run her business for a few months and see how it goes. What’s wrong with fairness?”

Also appearing at the podium was Scott Bergthold, the attorney that Jameson dubbed “a hired gun for the Christian right,” who helped Scottsdale draft its new law.

So Scottsdale, AZ’s strip club industry was humming along until Jenna Jameson bought herself a club – then the Christian right with their big money lawyers decides that they’ve got to stop her from doing business. Great.