What we have here is the classic maneuver of the authoritarian, in which they try to make the focus of liberty “freedom from” rather than “freedom to” — it’s infuriating.
Liberty is not about being free from fear, or free from attack. It’s about being free to speak, and write, and assemble, and worship, and all those others things we all have the inherent right to do without any governmental interference.
Authoritarian-minded people perform this trick constantly. By reframing liberty as “freedom from” rather than “freedom to” they make liberty a passive rather than an active feature of American society. Worse, they essentially replace discussions of liberty with discussions of security at all costs. Security is about “freedom from” and liberty is about “freedom to” — don’t let them make you forget this, or confuse the two.
The above is from a well-worth-reading- post on ‘Freedom From’ Versus ‘Freedom To’ posted here by theonetruebix. He links to Ashcroft’s infuriating speech about ‘civil liberties.’

I heard this on the local news last night and I’m glad that CNN.com picked it up.
From that story:
A lawyer was arrested late Monday and charged with trespassing at a public mall in the state of New York after refusing to take off a T-shirt advocating peace that he had just purchased at the mall.
According to the criminal complaint filed Monday, Stephen Downs was wearing a T-shirt bearing the words “Give Peace A Chance” that he had just purchased from a vendor inside the Crossgates Mall in Guilderland, New York, near Albany.
I remember a very similar thing happening during the first Bush war. Crossgates Mall is one of the mega-malls that I never go to unless my mother insists on being taken to Lord and Taylors.
As area resident myrln emailed:
A complaint by the shopkeeper was sufficient to mark them as creating a disturbance and when asked to leave by mall security, they refused and were arrested for trespassing. Creating a disturbance at the mall is apparently a crime. Welcome to America, the Land of the Free, Stupid, and Arrogant. Kiss My Country ‘Tis of Thee a fond farewell; we are hard down the road to fascism, and meanwhile, the Congress is silent…covering their political asses. Every incumbent needs to be defeated next election…tho’ they’ll only be replaced by clones. Feh…this is far worse than the Vietnam era ever was.
I want to wear my Peace t-shirt that I made after 9/11, but I’m afraid if I wear it in public, I’ll get arrested. And then who’ll take care of my mother?
Feh.

Once, there was a bogus fwd-the-email petition going around that purported to be aimed at the United Nations. It was fake, false nonsense. Now, thanks to MoveOn.org, here’s the real thing.
The emergency petition’s going to be delivered to the 15 member states of the Security Council on THURSDAY, MARCH 6.
If hundreds of thousands of us sign, it could be an enormously important and powerful message — people from all over the world joining in a single call for a peaceful solution. But we really need everyone who agrees to sign up today. You can do so easily and quickly at:
http://www.moveon.org/emergency/
The stakes couldn’t really be much higher. A war with Iraq could kill tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and inflame the Middle East. According to current plans, it would require an American occupation of the country for years to come. And it could escalate in ways that are horrifying to imagine.
We can stop this tragedy from unfolding. But we need to speak together, and we need to do so now. Let’s show the Security Council what world citizens think. Sign the emergency petition to the U.N.

I like sitting down with a cup of Earl Grey tea and reading the local Sunday newspaper. As usual, yesterday

Great conversation going on at Full Bleed: Confessions of a Zine Girl: Here We Go Again that began with her annoyance at a newspaper article about blogging that barely included women and moved into Dru