Reaction to court ruling on ‘Hillary: The Movie’ depends on whose ox is gored

The reaction to Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling in the case of “Hillary: The Movie” is stark in its contrast.

Predictably The New York Times lamented the ruling freeing corporations and unions to freely spend money on political messages at any time.

“The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights,” Times editorialists proclaimed. “It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate.”

It takes The Wall Street Journal editorialists to point out the hypocrisy of that argument.

“The Court’s opinion is especially effective in dismantling McCain-Feingold’s arbitrary exemption for media corporations,” the WSJ editorial points out. “Thus a corporation that owns a newspaper — News Corp. or the New York Times — retains its First Amendment right to speak freely. ‘At the same time, some other corporation, with an identical business interest but no media outlet in its ownership structure, would be forbidden to speak or inform the public about the same issue,’ wrote Justice Kennedy. ‘This differential treatment cannot be squared with the First Amendment.’”

There is no rationale for exempting the news media from restrictions any more than an argument could be made that news media corporations could have their free speech and press rights abridged simply because they are operated by corporations.

Censorship of a message because of it content or its advocate is unconstitutional on its face.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in the 5-4 ruling, spells this out in no uncertain terms.

“The law before us is an outright ban, backed by criminal sanctions. Section 441b makes it a felony for all corporations — including nonprofit advocacy corporations — either to expressly advocate the election or defeat of candidates or to broadcast electioneering communications within 30 days of a primary election and 60 days of a general election,” he writes. “Thus, the following acts would all be felonies under §441b: The Sierra Club runs an ad, within the crucial phase of 60 days before the general election, that exhorts the public to disapprove of a Congressman who favors logging in national forests; the National Rifle Association publishes a book urging the public to vote for the challenger because the incumbent U. S. Senator supports a handgun ban; and the American Civil Liberties Union creates a Web site telling the public to vote for a Presidential candidate in light of that candidate’s defense of free speech. These prohibitions are classic examples of censorship.”

Even President Obama railed against the ruling in his usual populist paean against all things profitable. He called the decision a victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and other powerful interests, saying the ruling will lead to a “stampede of special interest money in our politics.” The AP said he pledged to work with Democrats and Republicans in Congress to come up with a “forceful response” to the high court’s action.

Free speech is meant to give all citizens access to every viewpoint available. Just because a union or a corporation is an assemblage of people pooling their resources to make their message more loudly and frequently heard does not make that message automatically inferior and unworthy of dissemination. The citizens, the voters are perfectly capable of rejecting a bogus argument no matter how much money is spent on it.

The Timesmen make no bones about the reason for their disdain of this decision. First, they compare this ruling their favorite strawman, Gore v. Bush, which they still insist robbed Gore of the election though every recount of the “uncounted” ballots has shown Bush the winner.

“With one 5-to-4 decision, the court’s conservative majority stopped valid votes from being counted to ensure the election of a conservative president,” the editorial claims. “Now a similar conservative majority has distorted the political system to ensure that Republican candidates will be at an enormous advantage in future elections.”

It is not the so-called corruption of the process they oppose, but who is advantaged, in their view.

Here is a trailer for the movie the McCain-Feingold Act said you could not watch, because you are too stupid to figure out it is a hit piece from an evil corporation out to steal the country and your soul:

New media failing in filling the news gap

So, how’s that getting-all-your-news-for-free-off-the-Internet thing working out for you so far?

How’re those millions of barefoot bloggers pecking away on their tiny keyboards, freely tweeting and facebooking their information to friends and neighbors, doing at making the old media obsolete and superfluous?

Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has conducted a study that gives us a glimpse at how that is, in fact, working out. During one week in July of 2009 researchers took a close look at news reporting in Baltimore, Md., focusing on six major news events — who did original reporting, who broke the news, who was most thorough in reporting the news.

They found most of what the public learned about local events that week came from traditional news media, and most of that from the newspaper.

That’s not the say the newspapers are doing as good a job as they once did, considering the economic pinch, there is little evidence yet of anyone or any news model filling the gap.

“The local papers, however, are also offering less than they once did,” the study found. “For all of 2009, for instance, the Sun produced 32% fewer stories on any subject than it did in 1999, and 73% fewer stories than in 1991, when the company still published an evening and morning paper with competing newsrooms.  And a comparison of one major story during the week studied — about state budget cuts — found newspapers in the area produced only one-third as many stories in 2009 as they did the last time the state made a similar round of budget cuts in 1991, and the Baltimore Sun one seventh as many. Yet the numbers suggest the addition of new media has not come close to making up the difference.”

Even when non-traditional news outlets — such as the local police department’s Twitter feed and a local blogger — “broke” stories, it was the traditional media that fleshed out the story and more widely disseminated it until someone took notice.

For example, a blogger reported that the local bus service planned to put listening devices on buses to deter crime. A  Baltimore Sun reporter noticed the item and started writing about the plan, which promptly was dropped over privacy concerns.

Here are a couple of key findings from Pew:

— “Among the six major news threads studied in depth — which included stories about budgets, crime, a plan involving transit buses, and the sale of a local theater — fully 83% of stories were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information. Of the 17% that did contain new information, nearly all came from traditional media either in their legacy platforms or in new digital ones.”

— “General interest newspapers like the Baltimore Sun produced half of these stories—48%—and another print medium, specialty newspapers focused on business and law, produced another 13%”

Parsing words in the Constitution to make them meaningless

The questions being raised as to whether the national health care reform bill is constitutional should give pause to those who hold the Constitution dear, if there are any of those befuddled folk left.

Sen. John Ensign tossed out in his speech on the Floor of the Senate Tuesday questions about whether requiring people to purchase health insurance violates the taking clause of the Fifth Amendment — an argument worthy of thorough judicial review.

But I’m still pondering the whole original intent of the general welfare clause and whether it even allows the federal government to basically redistribute income under the guise of the “general” welfare.

How can the Louisiana Purchase and the Omaha stakes — giving Louisiana extra money due to Katrina and exempting Nebraska from paying its portion of Medicaid, while every other state must tax its citizens to cover this unfunded mandate — jibe with the welfare clause?

I know Justice Benjamin Cardozo folded, spindled and mutilated that qualm during the New Deal by upholding the old age pension and unemployment compensation portions of Social Security. He dismissed classic arguments about the differences between particular and general welfare by granting Congress “middle ground” and room play around in the “penumbra.”

Thomas Jefferson laid down the anti-penumbra argument rather precisely in 1791:

“For the laying of taxes is the power, and the general welfare the purpose for which the power is to be exercised. They are not to lay taxes ad libitum for any purpose they please; but only to pay the debts or provide for the welfare of the Union. In like manner, they are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose.

“To consider the latter phrase, not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please, which might be for the good of the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.”

To get a bit more analysis of the meaning the general welfare clause I turned to Seth Lipsky’s new book “The Citizen’s Constitution: An Annotated Guide.”

He quickly reminded of a little grammatical chicanery attempted at the time of the drafting of the Constitution by one Gouverneur Morris, who plotted to change the comma after the word excises to a semicolon, precisely for the purpose of expanding the spending power of Congress.

The paragraph in question reads, “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;”

Lipsky noted, “Had Morris won his semicolon, the spending power would be separate and without limitation.” Oh, the power of a tiny dot.

Lipsky, a former editor at The Wall Street Journal, also singled out the writings and views of Alexander Hamilton, who said appropriation should be “general and not local;” James Madison, who vetoed the Bonus Bill; James Monroe, who vetoed the Cumberland Road Bill; Andrew Jackson, vetoed the Maysville Road bill.

As for the phrase about “all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States,” Lipsky notes this too is pretty much a lost cause. He writes that the Supreme Court dismissed this silly notion by writing, “It was settled fairly early that the Clause does not require Congress to devise a tax that falls equally or proportionately on each State.”

Nebraska and Louisiana, over in the penumbra, have their fair shares of health reform costs picked up by Nevadans. Uniform means what Congress says it means.

One senator’s deal is another’s bribery

The Washington Post story in the Review-Journal Sunday reported that Sen. Harry Reid had netted the 60 votes needed to move forward on health care reform. The last holdout was Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

To sway the reluctant senator, the Post said, “Nelson also secured full and permanent federal funding for his state to extend Medicaid eligibility to everyone below 133 percent of the federal poverty level. The bill would require all states to do so, but Nebraska alone would not be required to pay a portion of the additional cost after 2016.”

Sound familiar? That is the similar to the deal Reid temporarily cut for Nevada and three other states back in September. At the time, even Democratic Senators balked.

“Under Mr. Baucus’s original proposal,” The New York Times reported then, “the federal government would have paid 87 percent of the new costs in Nevada. Under the modified version, the federal government would pay 100 percent of the new costs for the first five years. Severe financial problems have prompted Nevada and other states to cut spending and furlough workers, and some states have even considered releasing prison inmates to save money.”

The Review-Journal quoted a Reid statement at the time,  “I promised the people of Nevada that I wouldn’t support any health insurance reform proposal that wasn’t good for our state, and I meant it.”

Some senators balked then at the favoritism. Will they again? Or has the deal been struck?

Oh, and is that state requirement to pick up the tab for Medicaid counted by the CBO in its deficit projections?

Saints and heretics debate climate change scripture

As President Obama limps home from Copenhagen with the noncommittal commitments to kind of keep an eye on greenhouse gases but no treaty, the actual debate over global warming might be heating up in a positive way.

On Friday the Washington Post carried an article by the oracle of global warming and inventor of the 1999 hockey stick graphic Michael Mann explaining away the rhetoric, bluster and threats in those purloined e-mails from the University of East Anglia.

On the same day, The Wall Street Journal printed an op-ed by global warming doubter, not really denier, Patrick Michaels, of whom, in one of those aforementioned e-mails, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientist remarked, “Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.”

Michaels explains how the acolytes to global warming have manipulated the “bible” of atmospheric science through intimidation and terminations.

Mann uses his newsprint space to explain away the “trick” and the “hide the decline” comments and debating Sarah Palin rather than real scientists.

Michaels notes that Mann and others did much car for a paper he published in “Climate Research” in 2002 arguing the global warming dogma overstated the effects of carbon dioxide. In response, according to Michaels, Mann called on his colleagues to put “Climate Research” out of business.

“Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal,” Mann wrote in one of the e-mails. Half the editorial board of “Climate Research” resigned.

Another editor at another publication, Yale’s James Saiers, also was soon gone, says Michaels.

“The result of all this is that our refereed literature has been inestimably damaged, and reputations have been trashed,” concludes Michaels.

Meanwhile, Mann repeats the line about consensus, remarking, “The scientific consensus regarding human-caused climate change is based on decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world. The National Academy of Sciences has concluded that the scientific case is clear.”

Must be scripture.

This ain’t my first rodeo

Trevor Brazile ropes and ties a calf in 8 seconds.

The closest I ever came to rodeoing was the time Grandpa Hicks put me on Skeeter and sent me down to the lower pasture to bring back the cows for the evening milking.

Now, I say pasture in the kindest North Texas sense — a relatively open area dotted by scrub oak, mesquite, nettles, sandburs, cockleburs, goatheads, needle and Johnson grasses, populated with scorpions, red ants, sidewinders, diamondbacks, jackrabbits and coyotes. It was a place where the butcherbirds hung their prey, young snakes, on the barbed wire (I was a grown man before I learned it was barbed wire and not Bob wire.) fence to keep the other vermin from stealing their victuals. Etched throughout this verdant landscape were gullies as deep as a man on horseback.

It hadn’t changed a whole heck of a lot since Gen. Philip Sheridan rode through in 1866 and panegyrized the place by proclaiming, “If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.”

My grandparents churned their own butter and smoked their own meat. Grandma Hicks could snag a fleeing pullet by the leg with a length of wire and wring its neck in seconds, leaving the headless bird to run around for a minute or so till it could be picked up and plunged into boiling water, then plucked for a fried chicken dinner with biscuits, gravy and all the fixin’s.

At night as we listened to radio with the glowing De Forest tubes, the only thing to read was the Bible and the Sears & Roebuck’s catalog, which, when the new one arrived, would be, shall we say, recycled.

Every year we’d go to the Chisholm Trail Roundup in Nocona. This was back when the factory still made boots and leather goods, like my three-fingered baseball mitt that had to be oiled and tied around a baseball to form anything resembling a pocket. Every year they’d introduce Miss Enid Justin, the owner of the boot company. It was always “Miss” Enid Justin.

The Chisholm Trail Roundup had no lasers or fireworks or ear-splitting rock music, but it did have a booming-voiced, smart aleck announcer who would trade snappy patter with the rodeo clown during the bull riding events. We sat on cold, splintering wooden bleachers in boots and jeans and hats. Not in an 18,000-seat arena.

This was back when the stars of the sport were Casey Tibbs and Jim Shoulders.

Today at the National Finals Rodeo at the Thomas & Mack the star is 33-year-old Wise County roper Trevor Brazile. Unlike most in the sport Brazile has earned a couple million dollars in prize money over the years, as well as a barnful of gold buckles. Most cowboys are lucky to cover their expenses — pickups, horse trailers, horses, tack and gear, as well as fuel for vehicles, horses and selves.

On Saturday, our rodeo reporter Jeff Wolf, who also covers auto racing, wrangled me a press pass and took me down to the pressroom in the bowels of the T&M to meet the assorted rodeo officialdom. Along the way we bumped into Clark County Commissioner Tom Collins and T&M manager Pat Christensen. I was just there to show the flag for the paper, to show the rodeo the newspaper welcomed them, so maybe they’d think of us when there are news scoops to reveal.

I shook hands with and joked with everyone from the head honcho to the doctor to the hangers on. But I had one boon to ask. If Trevor Brazile happened by, might I get a chance to shake his hand and say hello?

Just before the rodeo was to start, they brought through the pressroom mild-mannered, soft-spoken, polite-as-hell Brazile. I shook his hand and wished him luck from a Wise County expatriate, who, like a kid collecting autographs, could now tell his family back home he’d actually met the star of the rodeo circuit. He is from Decatur. I am from Bridgeport, 11 miles down the road, and Decatur’s arch rival in high school sports. Perhaps, this being Las Vegas and all, you’ve heard that old craps shooter’s plea: “Eighter from Decatur, county seat of Wise.”

As a lagniappe, I also shook the tiny, soft, splayed hand of bashful 2-year-old Treston, who, like his dad, was dressed in black from hat to boot. If I live so long, perhaps someday I can say I met him when …

Wolf talked the rodeo communications director into letting me sit in the press box up at arena side for a couple of go-rounds, where I dusted bits of arena floor kicked up by passing riders off my program and watched poor Trevor Brazile finish almost out of the money in both calf (I refuse to call it tie-down roping as a sop to the animal rights whiners.) and team roping.

The closest I ever came to that kind of rodeo action was because I did not know Skeeter was a cutting horse. I think I was about 10. For the purposes of this story and an aversion to too much self-embarrassment, I’ll not admit to being any older. Only my mother could proffer a contrary accounting, and she doesn’t own a computer.

So, when I got down to the pasture where that half dozen or so head of docile milk cows were grazing, either through some unintended signal from me or his own instincts, Skeeter decided that one suckling calf keeping devotedly near its mother just had to be cut out of the herd for purposes only Skeeter could fathom.

In the Texican lexicon skeeter is short for mosquito, another blood-sucking denizen of those parts, which darts about in the air, changing directions so fast as to defy the laws of physics. If you’ve not had the pleasure of seeing one work, that’s what a good cutting horse does. It dashes and stops and cuts back, doing whatever it takes to prevent that calf from doing what it instinctively wants to do, rejoin the rest of the herd.

Normally, most people get to see this performance in a nice flat arena from comfortable seats. Did I mention the gullies? Somehow I managed to stay on Skeeter’s back instead of flying off under the force of kinetic energy as he made all those hair-pin turns and stops.

After awhile, Skeeter decided I did not know what the heck I doing and allowed me to point he toward the barn, leaving behind that calf and all the milk cows with bulging udders. Grandpa was so angry I almost wished I’d tumbled off into a gully so I could at least have Grandma’s sympathy.

As I told the communications director, this ain’t my first rodeo.

Transparency? Or transparent political ruse?

President Obama promised the most transparent administration in the history of the universe. I read the memos. Since then, he’s not quite lived up to the promise, including balking at the reporter shield law and backtracking on the release of detainee interrogation photos.

Now Obama appointee John Berry, head of the Office of Personnel Management, is promising transparency, too.

“I believe we must hold ourselves and the government to a higher standard,” Berry writes in a Nov. 5 memo, “one that honors and supports the President’s strong commitment to a Government that is transparent and open.”

Berry is requiring any appointment of a former political appointee — anyone who held such a job in the past five years instead of the customary year before an election (The fact this covers of the entire Bush administration is surely coincidental) — get prior approval from his office before being named to a competitive civil service job.

The conservatives at Redstate.com smelled a rat and penned a piece headlined: “Obama Administration Intends to Purge Republicans From the Civil Service.”

“Under his new rules, made retroactive for five years, the Office of Personnel Management will examine civil service employees who got their start as political appointees in the Bush administration and terminate those employees,” writes Erick Erickson. “The order is retroactive to 2004, that moment when a number of Republican congressional staffers and others sought to embed into the second Bush administration right after the election.”

I’m not sure the memo requires review of past employees or simply new hires starting Jan. 1, but a loyal bureaucrat could easily misinterpret.

The liberal Media Matters quickly jumped to the defense.

“In fact, the OPM memo does nothing of the sort,” Adam Shah writes. “It merely beefs up current OPM rules aimed at preventing political appointees from ‘burrowing in’ to the civil service, thereby receiving the job security benefits that civil servants — but not political appointees — receive. While the memo states that agencies must seek permission from OPM to hire people as civil servants if they have been political appointees ‘within the last five years,’ nothing in the memo creates authority for anyone to fire current federal employees. Therefore, the OPM memo does not ‘purge’ anybody.”

OK, but if this is no big deal, why the need for the memo in the first place? There may not be a purge but it sure sounds like a hurdle for future civil service jobs for Republicans. A job can’t be denied merely for political affiliation, but everyone knows a lot of excuses can found by true believers.

Rush Limbaugh, of course, found a problem with the memo.

Gawker turns tables on press with public records request

You live by the public records request, you die by the public records request.

John Cook at a Web site called Gawker has turned the tables on the press, especially The New York Times.

Cook and/or Gawker filed a public records request for e-mails between former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s press aides and the press about the time Spitzer was being outed as Client No. 9 in a prostitution ring investigation.  What was found was a remarkably accommodating press.

Gawker also obtained e-mails between the press and flacks for the current governor, David Paterson.

This is a snippet of what Cook writes about the findings:

“And they give the lie to the myth of the vigilant watchdog press that keeps the government on its toes. Next time you hear New York Times editor Bill Keller claim that newspapers are uniquely situated to do the “hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work [of] quality journalism,” remember that his reporter broke the story of Spitzer’s dalliances with prostitutes. But also remember the time his reporter e-mailed the Gov. Paterson’s flack to request permission to call Paterson’s former mistress.

“This first installment documents the shocking amount of control that Keller’s Times allowed Anderson, a former Good Morning America producer and PR veteran of the Clinton White House, to exercise over his paper’s coverage. After bringing Anderson’s world down around her head by breaking the story, Times reporters previewed portions of their stories with her before publication, asked for her permission before contacting sources, and let her tell them how to characterize its reporting in the paper.”

It will be interesting to see what else those 1,300 pages of e-mails reveal.

Memo to self and staff: Be careful what you write to people whose e-mail is subject to public records requests.

Shield law compromise is better than nothing

After the White House earlier scuttled a proposed reporters’ shield law by demanding the final say should lie with the executive branch, it looks like a compromise has been reached that most can accept as better than the status quo of jailing reporters for refusing to reveal sources.

Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, was quoted as saying, “This is a huge deal, but it’s not a done deal, and quite honestly, until all of the media coalition members sign off on it, it’s not a deal.”

Under the compromise reached between the White House and Senate Democrats, judges would be the final arbiter in civil and criminal cases. In civil cases the party seeking information from a reporter would bear the burden of proof. In criminal cases the reporter would have to prove that the public interest in free flow of information out weighs the needs of prosecutors for the information.

A judge would not be able to block a reporter subpoena if prosecutors show a terrorist attack could be prevented or there would be significant harm to national security. How strong that evidence might have to be remains to be seen.

In an editorial today, The New York Times gave a tentative endorsement.

Now it is up to Sen. Harry Reid to put the measure to a vote.

 

There is no compromising with fanatical, irrational, militant religious zealots

Hillary Clinton in Pakistan this week. (AP Photo/Mansoor Ahmed)

 

The Obama administration is a little late to the party. While this week Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others are speaking out against a U.N. resolution aimed at fighting so-called defamation of religions, an earlier compromise hatched by the administation gave up too much ground.

Michael Posner, the assistant U.S. secretary of state for human rights, democracy and labor, worked with Egypt to draft compromise language that condemns religion-oriented harassment and discrimination. He has been quoted as saying the administration wanted to distinguish between defamation and harassment.

Marci Hamilton

FindLaw.com columnist and law professor Marci Hamilton argues the administration bent over too far.

That compromise “expresses its concern that incidents of racial and religious intolerance, discrimination and related violence, as well as of negative racial and religious stereotyping of religions and racial groups continue to rise around the world, and condemns, in this context, any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence, and urges States to take effective measures, consistent with their obligations under international human rights law international human rights, to address and combat such incidents …

“Recognizes the positive contribution that the exercise of the right to freedom of expression, particularly by the media, including through information and communication  technologies such as the Internet, and full respect for the freedom to seek, receive and impart  information can make to the fight against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance and to preventing human rights abuses, but expresses regret at the promotion by certain media of false images and negative stereotypes of vulnerable individuals or groups of individuals, and at the use of information and communication technologies such as the Internet for purposes contrary to respect for human rights, in particular the perpetration of violence against and exploitation and abuse of women and children, and disseminating racist and xenophobic discourse or content …”

Clinton was quoted this week as saying Monday, “Some claim that the best way to protect the freedom of religion is to implement so-called anti-defamation policies. … I strongly disagree. The protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faiths will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions.”

But Hamilton notes that Clinton also has been less firm.

“According to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,” Hamilton writes, “the original proposed resolution against religious defamation was unacceptable to the United States because ‘[t]he protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faith will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions.’ However, according to The Associated Press, Clinton also ’said that the United States was opposed to negative depictions of specific faiths’ — which sounds very much like an anti-free speech position.”

The professor says the administration, instead of acceding to any compromise, should have attacked the resolution head on, reminding the world what Americans think of militant Islamists who wish to destroy American and American values.

“To take a position in favor of suppressing speech about religions — especially at this time in history — is to choose to put aside one of our most important weapons against death, oppression, and tyranny,” she writes. “Offering a ‘middle ground’ cedes far more ground than the Islamic countries supporting the resolution– especially those who are host to militant Islamicists yet fail to effectively combat them — deserve on this point.”

Hamilton calls the administration a disappointment when it comes to freedom of religion and free speech.

You can’t compromise with irrational fanatics, and the best way to combat them is freely and fully attack their premises as every available opportunity, until the world shuns them and their false beliefs.