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Nominate-best-2010
  • May 31, 2007
    By Wendy Kaminer
    With key facts still in dispute, I hesitate to judge the conduct of public health officials in the case of the man with drug resistant TB who flew back and forth to Europe in early May. But there seems to be no dispute that the man had been informed of his diagnosis and advised not to travel before he boarded the plane, so I don’t hesitate to blame him for knowingly exposing other people to infection.

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  • May 28, 2007
    By Wendy Kaminer
    Even free speech absolutists ought to sympathize with abortion providers and patients who want to prohibit anti-abortion protests in close proximity to clinics -- especially in Massachusetts. In 1994, when John Salvi shot up two local reproductive health care clinics, killing two people and wounding five, he left more than grief and carnage in his wake; he also left behind fear and a sense of vulnerability among people who continue to provide and seek abortions today.

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  • May 18, 2007
    By Wendy Kaminer
    In 2005, when the Bush Administration pressured the Public Broadcasting System into dropping an episode of a children’s show with a sympathetic view of a gay family, liberals rightly yelled censorship, decrying the Administration’s bullying and PBS’s failure to resist it. This month, when the Congressional Hispanic Caucus pressured Ken Burns into “amending” his upcoming PBS documentary on World War 11 to include interviews with Latino veterans, many liberals barely seemed to notice.

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  • May 15, 2007
    By Harvey Silverglate

    The mourning period that followed Ronald Reagan’s death three years ago, in which even his fiercest critics agreed to temporarily bite their tongues, clearly won’t apply to the recently deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell. His corpse had barely turned cold before the media erupted into a debate over the demagogue’s true legacy.

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  • May 15, 2007
    By Wendy Kaminer
    The next time “progressive” students at Tufts, Brandeis and other schools try to censor speech they consider harassing, abusive, or otherwise harmful psychologically, they might want to consider this lawsuit recently filed in Cook County, Illinois:

    “A girl and her grandparents have sued the Chicago Board of Education, alleging that a substitute teacher showed the R-rated film "Brokeback Mountain" in class,” the Associated Press reports.

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  • May 09, 2007
    By Wendy Kaminer
    According to the Washington Post, revelations of warrant-less wiretapping by the Bush Administration have provoked dozens of lawsuits against phone companies charged with unlawfully cooperating in violating the privacy of their customers. Verizon has come up with a novel and nervy defense, arguing (with a straight face) that the suit against it should be dismissed because it violates the company’s First Amendment rights to convey information to the government.

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  • May 09, 2007
    By Harvey Silverglate

    It was bound to happen. Whenever the nation experiences an orgy of hypocrisy and self-righteousness like the Don Imus affair, it so often turns out that a leader of some holy crusade lives in the proverbial glass house.

    And so it was when the nation’s self-appointed religious maven from the left, Rev. Al Sharpton, seeking as always to outdo the fundamentalists on the right, found himself in precisely the same boat in which he’d placed, just a few short weeks ago, the hapless radio shock-jock.

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  • May 07, 2007
    By Wendy Kaminer
    “When does free speech become hate speech?,” a Fox News correspondent asked recently in a reviewing yet another free speech controversy at Tufts University. The question itself reflected the common misconception that speech rights do not or should not include the right to engage in whatever is popularly considered hate speech.

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  • May 02, 2007
    By Wendy Kaminer
    It may not be news that public officials sometimes use escort services and enjoy extra-marital perks; but a Washington D.C. madam (or, rather, alleged madam,) outing her clients is not the “non-story” that Harvey considers it. Hypocrisy among public officials is usually worth reporting, however unsurprising it may be.

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  • May 01, 2007
    By Harvey Silverglate

    “Ducking for cover,” roared the headline on page 3 of the May 1st Boston Herald. It would have been an appropriate headline for a story on the state of daily life in Baghdad, where a slew of recent bombings claimed the lives of more than 1,600 Iraqi civilians. Instead, the headline refers to the dozens of disgraced D.

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