Whaddayaknow, my alma mater is a red light zone for free speech. Strangely, of the 5 Claremont colleges, only four are listed (no Pitzer), and only Mudd gets a red light. Here are their reports on all the colleges in California.
This merely goes to show that reading the letter of the law and ignoring the practice of its enforcement is stupid.
Read the "MORE..." for an example which rebuts this silly characterization.
For example, at the end of Fall semester, we'd always spell out "FUCK" in Christmas lights on one of the dorm walls. People would annotate the FUCK wall with whatever they wanted -- usually 8 1/2 by 11" sheets of paper with class numbers, profs' names, jokes ("ME!!! ... please"), whatever. This seems like a direct violation of the stated obscenity policy. Sure, there were complaints, but people are still doing it (or they were last Christmas).
I invite you to just try that at most other college campuses in North America today. Berkeley, for example. Or Scripps.
And don't get me started on the other uses for Christmas lights (scroll down about 2/3 of the way)
Famed Liberal Author Assaults Heckler
"I'm for freedom of speech"
I've never heckled anyone; I think it's low. But by God, I want to heckle someone around Al Franken now in the hope that the bastard would assault me. I would a) not merely let him off with broken glasses and b) press assault charges. What a despicable man.
UPDATE: Yes, this is out of my usual line, but this really pisses me off. Violence has no place in American politics, and it saddens and angers me to see people being assaulted by private citizens. (Obviously, having uniformed security remove a heckler from a closed private location is something entirely other.) This is not in the least uncharacteristic of Franken; he's been spoiling for a fight for years now.
The worst thing about this incident, though, is that it could be read to support the idea that the US is becoming unstable and trending towards dictatorship. Political violence was a tactic employed by the Nazis, Bolsheviks and probably every other totalitarian movement.
UPDATE at 7:56PM: CNN has a much more charitable description of the incident. I'm skeptical: I believe that the LaRouche people were trying to disrupt the candidates' speeches, but why did Franken get involved? I don't see why it was necessary for a media figure to help out the security people at the Dean event but not the Lieberman or Kerry ones. In any case, Franken may not be as crazy as I thought earlier.
Who really cares?
Oh, OK, I guess I do. Otherwise I wouldn't have loaded CNN's primary results page already.
I hope that Dean doesn't get demolished. Not because I think Dean is more likely to lose against Bush eventually, and not because I want Dean to stay in the race as long as possible spending down his massive war chest in attack ads targeted at Kerry and Edwards. Though that would be nice.
The main reason I want Dean to stay in is because I have some friends who are pro-Dean. One of them actually went to Iowa. Here's a picture of Adam with Peter Jennings.
Right now it looks like Kerry, Dean, somebody. Polling data is collated here if you want to take a look, but even if all the undecided swung for Dean, he'd still be #2, and if they all went for Edwards, he'd only be tied with Dean.