Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Freedom of speech is not going away in the United States of America . It’s gone -- Ben Stein . If you enjoy diaries and are unfamiliar with Ben Stein’s, you will find it in The American Spectator, monthly. Bright, light, and fun—but not the latest, which he entitles “Outraged Sadness.” It is in the April issue. Stein is an actor, writer, lawyer, and son of esteemed economist Herb Stein. He and his make-up artist were chatting while he waited for his turn before the camera. He told a joke in which Barack Obama figured. Unbeknownst to them, someone was taping them. Next day he was summoned to the front office. The executives were scandalized at his “racism.” A fighter against racism even from childhood, he was outraged. “Can’t talk about that.” There are already many things we no longer are free to talk about. Examples: Stein gives the example of Global Warming. “The debate is over. The issue is settled.” Gore gave the message to the eager media. The media passed the mess...

After being forced underground for ten years at a cost of £1 million a year, the price of bodyguards in Merry Old England, Salman Rushdie, author of the Satanic Verses -- which got him a fatwah from the Ayatollah Khomeini – has lost none of his fizz. "Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family,” Rushdie said during a recent interview , “there's not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted wearing the veil. "I think the battle against the veil has been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women, so in that sense I'm completely on [Leader of Britian’s House of Commons Jack Straw's] side.” And here’s the fizz: “He [Straw] was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which they do. I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women." Although the fatwah against Rushdie presumably has been removed, opinions of this kind are not likely to earn the ...