ARTS & FARCES internet

Ever since the United States invaded Iraq last spring, there have been scattered reports that the Bush administration is conducting surveillance of antiwar activists. To date, the only resulting prosecution for protesting the war has been that of Brett Bursey, the individual who carried a “No War For Oil” sign in a “restricted area” at the Columbia, South Carolina airport. He was charged at the federal level—by Strom Thurmond, Jr. no less—with threatening the president’s safety after South Carolina dropped trespassing charges.

A recent move by federal prosecutors in Iowa may indicate that the Bush administration plans to step up surveillance and prosecution of antiwar activists, shredding the First Amendment in the process.

A federal judge in Des Moines, IA has subpoenaed Drake University to obtain records about a gathering of antiwar activists last November including members of the National Lawyers Guild. Four of the participants of the November antiwar forum were also subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury.

Last September, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty formed the Minnesota Citizens Forum on Health Care Costs. The citizens forum was, of course, packed with Pawlenty’s political and business cronies. One of the first things of substance the forum did was commission a telephone survey of the state’s citizenry with regard to healthcare issues. Imagine Pawlenty’s surprise when the survey, conducted 19 - 30 November and sampling the responses of 800 individuals, yielded wildly different results than those expected:

• Four out of five Minnesotans believe all Americans should have healthcare coverage, even if it means raising taxes.
• 56 percent favor a single-payer universal coverage system run by the government over a private system.
• More than 90 percent of those surveyed said people should not be turned away from the healthcare system and that availability of healthcare shouldn’t depend on income or employment.

Yet, as Britt Robson notes in “Against Our Will” in tomorrow’s City Pages, “Pawlenty acted against the overwhelming will of the people during the last legislative session, when he rammed through a budget that deprived an estimated 38,000 Minnesotans of access to health care in order to forego a tax hike. (And only a last-minute infusion of federal money and the tenacity of DFL Sen. Linda Berglin prevented that number from climbing to 60,000.)”

Robson reports that Health and Human Services Finance Committee chair Fran Bradley has chosen to discredit the survey based on the methodology used. This is surprising, to say the least, because the survey’s methodology is transparently outlined in its opening slides.

Quoting Bradley as saying that the survey results don’t make for a “mandate majority,” Robson reminds us, “If 80 percent isn’t a mandate, then Pawlenty, who was elected with just a little more than half that percentage, certainly had no mandate to balance a $4.2 billion state deficit without raising taxes.”

All indications point to an interesting legislative session for Minnesota.

This smells like a stunt, but the New York Post, not the most credible of corporate media sources, is reporting that Al Franken “body-slammed” a Dean heckler at a rally yesterday in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Apparently a Lyndon Larouche supporter began heckling Howard Dean and Franken grabbed him from behind and threw him to the ground. “I’m neutral in this race but I’m for freedom of speech,” Franken told the Post, “which means people should be able to assemble and speak without being shouted down.”

Franken isn’t denying the take-down, instead apparently relishing it: “I got down low and took his legs out…. I was a wrestler so I used a wrestling move.”

Chalk it up as the first full contact event of the 2004 election cycle.

In another clear sign that the federal judiciary intends to reign in the Bush administration, Judge Audrey B. Collins of the Los Angeles District Court has struck down a portion of the USA PATRIOT Act. Citing First Amendment issues, Judge Collins found the part of the law prohibiting providing “expert advice or assistance” to known terrorists “impermissibly vague.”

The case, brought by The Humanitarian Law Project, involved organizations and two citizens involved in providing nonviolent support and relief to Kurdish refugees in Turkey seeking self-determination.

The “expert advice or assistance” part of the USA PATRIOT Act has been used several times to prosecute citizens alleged to have provided “material support”—ranging from money to Internet services—to suspected terrorists.

The decision, which the Bush administration will almost certainly appeal, marks the first judicial challenge, albeit partial, to the USA PATRIOT Act.

“The movie and music industries have succeeded in lobbying lawmakers to allow them to tighten their grips on their creations by lengthening copyright terms. The law has also extended the scope of copyright protection, creating what critics have called a ‘paracopyright,’ which prohibits not only duplicating protected material but in some cases even gaining access to it in the first place.” So writes NYU graduate magazine journalism director Robert S. Boynton in a New York Times magazine article this morning.

The entertainment cartel has taken less than a decade to decimate the cultural heritage of the entire society. The cartel has accomplished it’s goals by methodically warping Thomas Jefferson’s notion of copyright as a necessary evil as outlined in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, giving Congress the authority to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” As a result of this decimation, the flow of creative works entering the public domain has been systematically reduced to a trickle. As Lawrence Lessig notes, in 1973 more than 85 percent of copyright owners elected not to renew their copyrights. The 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act lengthened copyright terms for an additional 20 years and applied the extension, retroactively, to existing works.