Harassment and Propaganda

Harassment and propaganda in Communist China in the three weeks following the announcement of Nobel Peace Prize for prisoner of conscience, Liu Xiaobo - IFEX:

In the three weeks since the Nobel committee announced that is awarding this year's peace prize to jailed Chinese intellectual Liu Xiaobo, around 100 people (Liu supporters, students, lawyers, journalists and bloggers) have been placed under house arrest or subjected to increased police surveillance, or have disappeared ...

Reporters Without Borders is launching a petition for Liu Xiaobo's release before 10 December, the date of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo: http://en.rsf.org/petition-liu-xiaobo,38708.html.

Please sign the petition to release Lieu Xiaobo before December 10. Thanks.

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Free Speech +1 Religion -1

Chalk one up for free speech, whatever you may think of Geert Wilders. A Dutch Court is poised to dismiss a case of hate speech and incitement to violence against Mr. Wilders, who is an outspoken critic of the religion of Islam. Curiously, the reluctant prosecutors in this case had argued for the defendent — "Criticism of a religion is not punishable". The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Lost Cause Against Wilders: ... Then the politically charged trial took another twist last week when one of Mr. Wilders' expert witnesses, the Arabist Hans Jansen, wrote on his website that a member of the judiciary had tried to influence him. He said that at a dinner party before he was supposed to testify, one of the appeals judges whose decision compelled the prosecutors to press charges tried to "convince me of the correctness of the decision to take Wilders to court."

Thomas Jefferson, one of our founding fathers forewarned 231 years ago:

To suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own.
--- Thomas Jefferson. Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:302, Papers 2: 546.

Admit it, Texas Board of Education, the fellow was truly a visionary!

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More Tea Party Hilarity

More Tea Party Hilarity -- RollingStone.com:

Quelle surprise! So it turns out that one after another of the Tea Party candidates is in one way or another mooching off the government. The latest series of hilarious disclosures center around Alaska’s GI-Joe-bearded windbag Senatorial candidate, Joe Miller, who appears to have run virtually the entire gamut of government aid en route to becoming a staunch, fist-shaking opponent of the welfare state.

Tea Party is nothing but a bunch of hypocritical religious conservatives masquerading as libertarians. All they want is a big government of them, by them, for them!

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