Well, sort of.

First I’m going to say something here to those involved in the debate who may read my post: Friends are hard to come by; I have friends on “both sides” and my intent is to keep it that way. On the other hand, good friends are even harder to come by and this post may result in my finding out whether my current circle is bound to yield more, less, or any.

I count the following among my friends:  Scott Greenfield, Norm Pattis, Brian Tannebaum, and “Gideon.” I have high hopes for a number of others I’ve recently met on the Internet, including (but not limited to!) Mirriam Seddiq, Mark Bennett, and several others who recently joined with Norm, Mirriam and me to try out a new project called BCOTUS.

One thing I’ve learned in my 51 years of life — soon to be 52, assuming I can hang in there another month or so — is that I need more than a couple of friends.  I actually need more than a couple.  Sure, I enjoy having lots of friends, too.

I’d enjoy even just one friend.  For what can bring greater happiness to a life than knowing there is someone who will share a thoughtful conversation and, at the end of it, even if the conversation was “unhappy,” will still be glad to call you “friend” when the dust settles.

Yet I need more than one friend because — well, because I appreciate more than just the enjoyment that comes from having someone to value who also values me.  I appreciate that people are different and that the experiences I have and the things that I learn — particularly the ways in which I can become a better and more interesting person — are enhanced by these differences.  One person reminds me that I need to push myself harder and to remember not to just go with the flow; another reminds me that I should occasionally stop and marvel at the flow and how it structures the more mundane tasks of life, so that I can focus on other things.  One friend’s focus causes her to pull my attention to this thing I would not have noticed on my own; another’s focus brings to my attention that thing I and my other friend missed.

No matter what you hear, there’s no such thing as a “self-made man.”  Or woman.  We are all influenced by our interactions with others.  The more frequent and deeper the relationship, the more we are influenced.

And so I am ever on the quest for friends both for the enjoyment it brings to life and for the opportunities it gives me to grow and learn.  I am forever floating trial friendship balloons.

The Internet and my sometimes infrequent but irrefragable drive to write have allowed me to float a number of trial friendship balloons that would not have been possible otherwise.  I discovered the blogosphere, or, as some lawyers prefer, the blawgosphere.  I have read the blogs and blawgs of and started getting to know a number of really cool people on the Interwebs. Thank goodness for tubes!

But while the Interwebs have made possible contacts that were unthinkable just about 15 years ago, they can also be difficult places to find solid friendships.  IRL — “in real life” — people rub up against one another and, when they find themselves disagreeing with one another too much, when they find they too-frequently rub one another the wrong way, they avoid one another.  Balloons, of necessity, have thin skins.  They pop; the friendship ends.  You go your separate ways.  And if some of your friends hang out with your former friend, well, it’s not usually a problem because knowing your feelings, they’ll be unlikely to discuss it around you and you may not even know they still associate.

But Interwebs are stickier.

And I’m deliberately mixing metaphors because it’s my blog and I can do that if I want.

Some people whom I like and respect quite a bit have gotten into a tiff. I guess I can call it that. (For you youngsters, we aren’t talking about image file types here.  And I’m not Canadian, so I didn’t even think about Toronto!)

One group I deeply appreciate has a pet peeve about the Interwebs and lawyers who use them in certain ways.  In particular, they appear to dislike the use of the Interwebs for marketing purposes.  They think that people who use the Interwebs for marketing purposes are hiding a deeper inability, lack of skill, or other weakness which makes them not the best material for becoming good lawyers.  Or perhaps they think that if one focuses on becoming a good lawyer instead of marketing oneself, the clients will follow.  Maybe all the above.

They might be right.  I don’t know.

There is a growing group that thinks the single-mindedness of the first group is — shall we say? — misguided.

The Interwebs being what they are, there have been a few barbs traded here and there over the issue.  (Issues?)  Some balloons appear to have been popped, or are at least in danger of being popped.

Myself, I don’t want to see this.  I value all my friends and potential friends.  The danger from watching the balloons pop and fall from the sky is that it makes me want to come to the rescue.  But people don’t always want you to try to salvage their friendships from the wreckage of a popped balloon.

I can respect that.  Some friendships are just not meant to last.  No matter how sad it makes me to see these things happen, each person has to decide which, how many, what kind of — pick your flavor — balloons they wish to keep aloft.

Another danger comes when Person A sees that my own friendship balloons are still aloft, and one of the passengers is Person B who has fallen from Person A’s balloon.  Sometimes this can make them question where my “loyalties” lie.

Let me interrupt my thinking for just a moment here.  (Thinking, by the way, is exactly what’s happening here.  Like Scott Greenfield, I’m a true believer in the Shakespearean theory of writing.)  Lest anyone become confused, no one has yet questioned my loyalties.  No schoolyard games of “if you like him, you can’t like me” have broken out.  Yet.  I’m simply talking about the dangers that can happen as balloons begin falling from the sky.

And I’m writing this post specifically because, if I can’t stop others from sacrificing their own balloons, I want to keep all of mine intact.  If no one takes anything else away from this post, I am hoping they will at least take away that fact.  Because I’m not a piece of property — nor is my friendship — to be “owned.”  Nor do I have limitations such that I can’t be friendly with multiple people, some of whom may not completely enjoy one another’s company.

Grow up in a family like mine and you get used to differences of opinion, taste, attitude, idiosyncrasy, or what-have-you.

If it happens, in the course of our friendship, that I say I disagree with your point of view, or that I agree with another’s point of view, or — god forbid! — I don’t agree with either of you, this does not mean I’m hoping to pop our balloon.  Being your friend does not mean that I will always agree with you, any more than you will always agree with me.  Being your friend means that I will always value you.  Or maybe I should say, I will always value you.  For there is enough about you aside from whatever views I may find disagreeable that I nevertheless am glad I know you.

So, please.  If you must pop one another’s balloons, let’s keep ours intact.

But given what’s going on around the rest of the country, “Meltdown” seemed the more appropriate choice.

And while this post does mention fossil fuels, you’ll be happy to know the “meltdown” has nothing to do with global warming and the disappearance of snow and ice at Earth’s poles.

On the other hand, maybe you won’t be.  When it comes down to it, there’s no reason to be happy about Unspun™ coming out of hibernation.

After all, Unspun™ was originally created by me because I got tired of all the “spin” that was coming from the then-relatively nascent abandonment of old-style news reporting.  Faux News started it (of course, as one would expect of typically-stupid reactionary right-wing Americans, they pronounce and even misspell “Faux” as “Fox”), but these days, it’s the paradigmatic news form.

For me, I became an attorney, thinking I might help improve the world — ha! have I learned a lot over the last few years! — and Unspun™, I hoped, would be less necessary after we voted out the party and its Decider who made the Orwellian warp necessary in the first place.  I turned my attention to legal blogging and decided to leave the political and social commentary to others.

A man’s gotta make a living. Or at least try to.

Alas, I was seduced by a new Decider, an even better Orwellian by the name of Barack Obama.  A man not at all afraid to take responsibility and promise change before actually doing neither.  “Yes, we can!  ¡Sí, se puede!,” he told us, and the mere fact that America was about to elect an African-American as President caused me to believe, if only for a moment, that he was right.

The fact that “we can” was being translated as “se puede” in Spanish should have been my first clue that something was not right.

To simplify things only a bit, “yes, we can” is not a literal translation of sí, se puede. In fact, there is no good literal (that is, word for word) translation of the phrase. Sí clearly means “yes,” but se puede is problematic. “It can” comes close to its literal meaning but leaves out the vague sense of emphasis and/or completion that se provides.

But I’m not writing this article as a Spanish lesson.  Maybe I can do that another day.

I’m writing to say, primarily, that Unspun™ is coming out of retirement and to explain why.

The world is, as I alluded to above, in the midst of a meltdown.  And many of the responses to the difficulties spewing into the world — whether below or above the waterline — are quite frankly not only ridiculous, but more harmful than the problems which inspire them.

Sooner or later, people are going to start to realize that no small part of the cause is the irrefrangible deficiency inherent in Democracy.  Mob rule has never been a successful method for governance.  That’s why the Founders of the United States feared it so much.  What we’re seeing going on around us is to a large degree the result of America’s — and the world’s — increasingly stupid embrace of Democracy.

California, so near as I can tell from personal knowledge, has embraced Democracy the longest and most seriously of all the States.  For that reason — or so it appears to me — California is suffering the more serious effects of meltdown.  (Not counting what BP is now doing to the coastal states; the real impact of that will not really be fully felt for some years, and it, too, will eventually be felt right here in California.)

The thing that scares me is that when people begin to understand the drawbacks of unbridled Democracy, they embrace Deciders who are firm in their convictions and whose simplistic promises give them comfort.  We don’t want to hear how bad things are.  We don’t want to hear that we cannot afford unlimited government “bailouts” that give corporations and individuals everything they could ever want.  What we want to hear is “yes, we can!”

Down that road lies Fascism. The pure forms of Democracy have ultimately led to Tyranny since at least 594 B.C.E.

Perhaps that’s why James Madison said,

Democracy is the most vile form of government… democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention: have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property: and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

And it’s already happening.  In California, Steve Poizner, Carly Fiorina and, to arguably a lesser extent, Meg Whitman, are trying to out Mussolini one another in the race to govern on behalf of Californians.  (Poizner and Whitman are running for Governor; Fiorina is vying to represent California in the U.S. Senate.)

All these people are busily clouding the issues.  Fiorina, to give just one example, says,

I am an optimist and believe that people will make the right choices about their lives and their leaders if they know the issues and are equipped with the facts. So let’s talk about the issues…

On that same webpage, she is quoted as saying,

Tax, spend and borrow is not a governing philosophy, it’s a cycle of dependency.

Like it or not, though, taxing, spending and even borrowing are neither a governing philosophy nor a cycle of dependency.  Wording it this way is just political craptrap in the best Orwellian tradition.  Taxing and spending is a sad necessity; borrowing is, admittedly, less so.  (I would have no problem with a constitutional amendment that forbade governments from borrowing money.)  Without taxing, the government has no money to spend; without money to spend, the government cannot pay employees who deliver vital services, including building roads and bridges to somewhere, as well as maintaining fire and police departments.  “Carly” appeals to the lowest common denominator by arguing that these things lead to “dependency” instead of pointing out that most of these services are enabling.  If you have trouble imagining what it takes to move around California without roads and bridges, for example, just go to the library — another enabling service funded by taxes — and pick up a history book.

Appealing to the worst in human nature is also the reason these candidates are hammering away at the “illegal immigrant problem.”  It’s also perhaps the scariest of their tactics.  This appeal to all that is ugly amongst us is the sort of thing that allows for the restriction of civil rights that is prerequisite to a fascist government.  To the extent that we may actually have a “problem” with undocumented people entering the United States without proper authorization, saying that Arizona got it right isn’t the solution.

For all the above reasons — and more — Unspun™ is coming out of retirement.  I’ll still be blogging about law and disorder on my two law blogs, but Unspun™ is the more appropriate avenue for political and social commentary.  Since I can no longer remain silent on those issues, since I can no longer maintain a focus entirely on law (which, partly for the above reasons, is going through its own Meltdown), Unspun™ will live again.

Y porque yo puedo.

Years ago, I “blogged” — although it wasn’t called “blogging” then — by hand-coding pages whenever I had something new to say. Due to the labor involved in hand-coding, I usually only “blogged” about once a week or so. However, as my now-nearly-a-thousand posts on this blog alone show, I enjoy the writing.

So when I discovered blogging software many moons ago, I was more than a little overjoyed. (I forget exactly when I started using blogging software, but it was certainly before June 2003, as this post shows.) At that time, I was blogging as both “Winkola” at www.winkola.com and “TechStop™” at www.techstop.com. (Winkola links to Unspun™ now; TechStop™ is up for sale and is still at www.techstop.com.)

As Winkola, I was already blogging on political issues. Faux News “reporting” style was gaining a foothold everywhere, it seemed, and I decided that it was time to start fighting the spin doctors. I registered www.unspun.us and started blogging here at Unspun™ sometime in September of 2003.

Since then, I’ve experimented with various programs from Radio Userland to CityDesk® to MovableType® and now to WordPress™.

But WordPress™! Wow! The more I use it, the more impressed I become. Recently, I added the Blog Stats module and found I was able to easily see exactly who was linking to Unspun™. I could search Google and had done that periodically, but the Blog Stats module makes it really easy. The exact page linked to me can be opened right in my Dashboard window.

That’s when I realized that my transitions from one piece of software to another have broken some links other people were using for my articles. My posts with MovableType® used numbers, such as “http://www.unspun.us/archives/000520.html” instead of easier to parse names like http://unspun.us/politics-in-general/dirty-liberal-ideas-trial-lawyers/ which make more sense to humans.

This, of course, will not do. If people take the trouble to link to me, I want to be sure their readers can find the right post. Thanks to WordPress®, the Dashboard and Blog Stats module, I’ve spent this morning going through and fixing those I could find.

With somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 posts, I’m sure I’ll never really get everything fixed. If you happen to find a broken link at Unspun™, please let me know! (If you don’t know my email address, just leaving a comment to this post will work the best.)

Meanwhile, thanks to those who have continued to read and link to Unspun™ through the years! And if you’re a blogger, check out WordPress™!

Unfortunately, Unspun™ gets blasted by hundreds of comment spammers per day; close to a thousand some weeks. MT gave me no easy way to moderate or block these.

The Akismet plug-in for WordPress™ does. The switch to WordPress™, however, has not come without its own problems.

The problem is that WordPress™ relies upon PHP code, plus a whole bunch of other stuff concerning which I’m not all that well-versed. I couldn’t just write HTML the way I did with MT to easily create my own designs. After weeks of hunting for a theme that was basically what I wanted and for which I could apply my meager coding skills to give it the necessary facelift to make it look like Unspun™, I settled on Cutline.

Cutline comes with it’s own support website. That probably should have been my first clue that this was not going to be easy. And, sure enough, it hasn’t been. This is primarily because the instructions on the Cutline site frequently reference things that don’t appear to exist. “Page slug,” for example, seems to be important to Cutline’s instructions. Yet there seems to be no such thing in either versions 2.5 or 2.6.1 of WordPress™. Similarly, the instructions sometimes refer to a link called “Presentation.” As with the page slug…well, as my dad would say, “There ain’t no such aminal.”

For now, I appear to have most of what I want out of the theme. I even managed to successfully upgrade WordPress™ from 2.5 to 2.6.1 without disrupting the work I’d already done modifying Cutline. ((As usual, I had some help from Joni!))

The only thing that doesn’t work is the Archives link, although most pages have a list of the Archives on them, right below the Categories links, anyway. Still, if anyone knows how to fix this, I’d love to hear it.

And don’t bother pointing me to the Cutline page on creating archives and about pages, or the one on enabling the “About” and “Archive” pages, or even the one on how to add navigation links. I’ve read ‘em. They didn’t help, for the reasons noted above. I’ve been at this for most of today and Cutline has cut my mind — a thousand little mental papercuts.

I’ll try again another day. For now, just use the links in the left-hand column for browsing archives.

This doesn’t mean there won’t be any of the old political posts of the past. I am, after all, a political being. And in fact, when I started writing this post, I was originally going to make it about the McCainations of a particularly facile lying candidate whose name you’ll probably never guess.

One reason I’ve not posted anything for awhile here is that the blog has been in need of an overhaul, ever since Amazon decided to make it more difficult to embed books for sale by making the old code break. Another reason, though, has been that this election year, I’d not fully made up my mind which candidate I was going for. I’m still uncertain about how I feel about my decision, but I think I’ve made it. After all, if you have to stoop to the level that the McCain camp is stooping to these days, there’s something dramatically wrong with you not just as a candidate, but as a human being. And I’m still in favor of trying to keep human beings in office.

One thing I did not miss about being gone was the spammers.  Although the ability to comment on Unspun™ has been turned off for perhaps a year now, they’re still trying.  Since moving from MovableType™ to WordPress™, the spam comments have been coming in by the hundreds per day.  Fortunately, WordPress™ allows me to keep readers from ever having to see the spam.  So commenting is possible again, but the comments are moderated.  As in the past, I will post anything that isn’t spam, even if it’s unkind to me.

I also didn’t miss the incredible time sink that some of my past writing could become, but I miss writing.

So (I think, anyway), I’m back.

Until then, of course, the usual beautiful images, links, etc., aren’t here. It may take weeks, since my law practice sometimes interferes with my ability to spend time on the blogging stuff, but I’ll get everything ported over sooner or later. The articles themselves should still be here (although no longer with the links that were known to Google. Alas, I’ll have to live with that. My readership dropped so much after what A-plus.net did to me a couple years ago anyway that it probably doesn’t matter.

Time to rebuild.

Stay tuned.

Unfortunately, the Powers That Be over at MovableType thought that they should decide how people run their blogs. They apparently decided that the ability to completely block spammers was Not A Good Thing™. Who knows what muck got stuck in the creative synapses when they were making this decision? Certainly not me.

*sigh*

I used to blog daily. Perhaps I even wrote overmuch. At one time, this blog had an average of 250 readers per day. In those days, I ran my own server and maintained my own software. Then I decided that I would go into law and needed someone else to handle fighting off the asshats (children, mostly) who learned how to press the “go” button on someone else’s “hacker toolkit.” These bozos couldn’t hack their way out of a paper bag, but they could download software written by others who sometimes could. Occasionally, they’d figure out how to successfully get the toolkit to actually work and — voilà! — they’re “hackers.”

Yeah…right.

Well, anyway, my first attempt to hand over responsibility to someone else was to sign up with A-plus.Net’s hosting service. After all, some of my domain names were registered there. (As they expire, I’m planning to gradually move them to Network Solutions because of what happened.)

A-plus.Net gave me space and ability to install MovableType. To test things, I started by moving some domains I don’t really use much — Chafowitz™ and TechStop™ for starters. Things seemed fine. So eventually I moved Unspun™.

The blog was up and running and everything seemed fine. For about 24 hours. Then, suddenly, everything stopped working overnight. And I could not figure out why. After dinking around with everything for a bit, I realized that somehow my domains were all disabled. Turned off. Not working. No web pages. No email (which, of course impacts my ability to do business in my law clerking office). No nothing.

Aplus never said anything to me about this. They just shut me down. When I contacted them to find out what was happening, I was told I was using up too many calls to the database server, supposedly generating thousands of calls per second. Nothing like that had happened when I was using the identical software and set-up on my own computers, but Aplus would not listen — nor would they respond to my requests for log files to prove what they were saying was true.

We argued about this for awhile — lawsuits have still not been ruled out — and eventually I was forced to give up and find another hosting company. No choice. I needed email to communicate with my clients and Aplus was refusing to turn things back on.

I moved everything to LivingDot — with whom I’m very happy — but it took about two weeks to get everything re-configured and transported. (I had moved things slowly, one domain at a time, when I went from my own servers to Aplus. I had no such opportunity after they unceremoniously shut me down.)

During that time, I saw my readership drop from an average 250 per day to an average of 80 per week. Also, because of a change in the way the blog operated, the Google links to my articles were no longer accurate. (The blog switched from a numbering system to a “partial title” or “naming” system for the target URLs.) The blog readership still has not recovered significantly. No doubt some of that is because I’m not writing as much (and the most recent writing is just not as interesting).

I’ve lost some — most, actually — of my desire to write about politics and social issues. Seems no one really gives a damn anyway. And, hey, as I’ve said many times before: I don’t have kids. If you all aren’t worried about the world you’re leaving them, why should I be? I’ll be an attorney soon. I’ll make some good money. Maybe I’ll become a selfish Republican and worry only about myself and my own creature comforts — damn the future. Damn you and your children. You can try to figure out how to feed them while paying $15 for a gallon of gasoline. You can figure out where they’ll live when there are no more unpolluted spaces. You can figure out what they’ll eat when there’s no more usable farmland. You can figure out where to bury them when the Bush Administration sends them off to our next unjustified war.

Oy. There’s an awful lot of writing here for an entry entitled “No Comment.” Where was I going…..?

Oh yeah. I really wrote all that to write this: To those few readers who might still visit the blog, some other things are changing. Because the MovableType people have decided that they, and only they, will decide who can post comments to my blog if I turn on commenting, I have turned off commenting. At least for the time being. If you have comments to post here, you’re just going to have to email them to me. You can probably guess the email; I’m not going to post it up here for spammers to mine. I get enough of that already.

Maybe someday I’ll turn commenting back on again. But until MovableType gives me back the ability to block posts I don’t want, or until I switch to another kind of blogging software that does, the rest of you will have…

…No Comment.

I’ve said, “To hell with the rest of you” and I’ve decided to become a Republican. From now on, I will only look out for myself. I will make a lot of money (I’m told that once I become an attorney, that will be even easier than now). I’m going to forget about our constitutional system — which is dead now anyway — and live like the rest of you. No more conservation efforts. No more trying to convince anyone to live lives that are friendlier to the planet, or the animals and people (oops, I’m being redundant!) on it.

Well, okay…I’m kidding.

Sorta. I’m not going to become a Republican.

As for the rest of it, well, it doesn’t really matter what I do, because the rest of you are going to sit still and do nothing while people like this take over the judiciary.

Meanwhile, people like this will continue the drive to recreate Afghanistan’s Rule of the Taliban right here in the United States.

Why? Because YOU will do nothing.

I just spent five hours — couldn’t sleep last night — writing a blog article on the Constitution. I tried to create a screenshot of an email I had received that was going to be the finishing piece of my post.

Outlook 2003 appeared to be locked up. So I clicked the “x” in the corner to close it.

Unfortunately, the system apparently had already closed it for me. Immediately underneath it was the article I was writing. So the click I intended for Outlook registered on the article.

And five hours of work vanished right before my eyes.

The First Amendment is different, however, in that it has a greater potential to affect us all — either as purveyors, or as consumers, of information. We don’t have the benefit of not caring because it only affects people we don’t like.

In the old days — as old people like me are wont to say — people who wanted to “publish” something had a relatively difficult task before them.

Forget the issues involved in building up a readership. Those problems continue to plague anyone who wants to publish today, from Air America to those who would enter “the traditional press” to bloggers. The problems facing pre-blog, pre-Internet, pre-computing days were much steeper than that. Technology was unsophisticated and expensive; compared to today, it was the Dark Ages even for printers until around the mid-1400s when Gutenberg invented the first printing press. Even after that, if an ordinary person wanted to have something printed, she was out of luck unless she could convince a printer to print it.

One of the drawbacks was that the narrow distribution of presses made it easy for anyone who wished to control the flow of information. And those in power did just that.

Without “the press” — which originally meant, of course, “the printing press” — it’s pretty much a sure bet that we, as a society, would not be where we are today. Other technologies would not be as advanced as they are. The invention of the press allowed for the widespread dissemination of knowledge, including medical knowledge, knowledge about agriculture and all other forms of technological know-how that has made our way of life possible. Without the press, there would likely have been no cars, no skyscrapers, no bridges on the order of the Golden Gate in San Francisco and definitely no Apple computers.

In the days of King George III, the press — now arguably meaning “the group of news publishers who owned printing presses” — were frequently arrested and/or subject to what we call “prior restraint” (being forbidden from publishing without some government official checking the story to make sure it was okay with them for you to publish it; you couldn’t publish until they reviewed it and you had permission). I say “arguably,” because the King not infrequently cracked down on publishers of books as well as “newspapers” or “gazettes.” And it didn’t just happen in the realm of King George III; the monarchs of other countries similarly controlled publication of things they didn’t like.

And so when the United States of America was founded, the set of Amendments to the Constitution known as “The Bill of Rights,” began by enshrining freedom of belief, thought and communication:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. —
U.S. Const. Amend. I (emphasis added).

Over time, "the Press" (usually with a capital "P") came to mean a specific group of newspaper owners and reporters. With the advent of technology — and before Faux "News," CBS, ABC and the others became 24-hour commercials and wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Republican Party — this definition extended to television news station owners and reporters. Although still applicable to publishers of books, it came to be wedded in the mind of most people to those who owned high-profile channels for the ready dissemination of information.

Today, we don't need printing presses. Citizens (almost) regardless of social standing — even some relatively "poor" people living in one-room apartments and some inmates in prison — have access to technology that allows them to accomplish what could only be done with a printing press in the past.

Among the technologies available to these "ordinary" folk are the Internet and blogs. In no small part because of the transformation of the meaning of the word noted above, these folk are not known as "the Press."

And therein lies the rub. For over time, the current King George — King George, Jr. (the Georges having abandoned the numeric designators of their intellectual [and I use that term loosely] ancestors) — and his cronies have been quite successful at controlling the traditional Press. They have paid "journalists" to shill for them. They have installed "journalists" who write for fake news agencies approved by Republicans into White House briefings to lob emotionally-laden softball questions for the Republican White House to respond to with more propaganda. (This, of course, is the natural outgrowth of "news" entertainment where one reporter plays stupid and asks another reporter questions to which he or she already knows the answer, so it will look like a live interview.)

Whether we realize it or not, the White House — which has directly attacked other constitutional rights relating to the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and even Eighth Amendments "in the interest of national security" — has found a way to neutralize the First Amendment.

Except for some bloggers.

And that pisses off those in power. They can't stand the idea that there are folk out there who can publish at will. And even though our government today is little more than a front for a Coalition of Corporations, it's not just the government that wants to shut up bloggers. Freedom of speech and the press is much too serious a right to be left alone — or left to the government. Corporations such as Apple Computer are taking a direct, hands-on approach.

Information may want to be free. But free information does not readily fuel profits. Even RedHat figured that out.

If corporations such as Apple Computer had existed in the 1700s, you can bet your butt there would have been no American Revolution. The so-called Federalist Papers would never have been published. But even more than that, we would all still be living in the Dark Ages not just with respect to political freedoms, we'd be literally "in the dark" because things like light bulbs would probably not exist.

"Progress" (such as it is) does not happen without a free press.

Are bloggers part of "the press" protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States (made applicable to the States by the Fourteenth Amendment)? That depends on how you define "the press." It's worth remembering — as I noted above — that "press" as used in the Bill of Rights referred to printing presses, not "news organizations," faux or otherwise.

I wonder if the "strict constructionists" (ha!) and "originalists" (ha! ha!) on the Supreme Court will argue for the understanding of "the press" the Framers must have had in mind when the First Amendment was written.

Somehow, I doubt it.

Meanwhile the rest of us might consider this: It was essentially the invention of the printing press that put an end to the time period officially known as the Dark Ages.

And some people are working very hard these days to turn out the lights.