All Baseball Players Should Look Like This

Coincidence? Accidental Muting? Devine Intervention? You Be the Judge

There is no reason to suspect that AT&T plans to ignore anyone’s first amendment rights just because they lobby to eliminate net neutrality. You can just take their word for that and go on with life as usual.

And while you are going on with life as usual, you might want to believe AT&T’s claim that they accidentally muted the negative references to Bush in their Blue Room web cast of Pearl Jam’s performance at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago. Someone accidentally muted only those few words.

AT&T does not deny that the words, “George Bush, leave this world alone” and “George Bush, find yourself another home,” were censored. They claim it was a mistake, made by Davey Brown Entertainment, the company hired to edit excessive profanity or wardrobe malfunctions.

Adam Smith, Davey Brown Entertainment executive, accepted responsibility for the company’s mistake. (My apology to those who were holding out for divine intervention.) Nicole Vandenberg, spokeswoman for Pearl Jam says the group is not satisfied. I’m with them. I share Nicole’s opinion that it is unlikely the editor mistook the edited word for profanity.

I consider myself exceptionally well versed in profanity and can’t think of any profane words that rhyme with or sound like any of these: “George Bush, leave this world alone,” and “George Bush, find yourself another home.” Please let me know if I have overlooked profane words, or if our society adopted a few of these as profane when I wasn’t paying attention.

Pearl Jam issues this statement: “This, of course, troubles us as artists but also as citizens concerned with the issue of censorship and the increasingly consolidated control of the media. AT&T's actions strike at the heart of the public's concerns over the power that corporations have when it comes to determining what the public sees and hears through communications media." And, “What happened to us this weekend was a wake-up call, and it's about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band."

Tim Karr, of the Save the Internet coalition reports several previous incidents in which AT&T appears to have acted in bad faith toward public interest. That concerns me enough that I want to learn more about this situation and follow it closely.

I hope anyone who has more information will share it here.

Take This Sign and Shove It – Where?

I have signed every ‘Impeach Bush’ petition put before me. If I owned them, I would gladly wear an ‘Impeach Bush’ tee shirt everywhere I go. My car sports a number of anti-Bush stickers. If I could get up there, I would paint ‘Impeach Bush’ on my roof.

So, it surprised me when I was not immediately moved to defend the ticketed man in this article: Kent officer tickets man for ‘Impeach Bush’ sign. I am (obviously, after the second paragraph) a strong supporter of the first amendment, and I continue to exercise this right even as it is being whited-out of existence.

However, the author’s attempt to sway me (even to my own side) by the use of “soft-spoken” offended me. Laws should apply the same to soft-spoken teachers and raging bartenders, so I don’t need to read his profession or emotional status before I see the rest of the story. I have nothing against soft-spoken people or teachers in general, but this started me out on edge and on the wrong side of my natural position.

I also learned in that first line that this soft-spoken teacher had placed is sign in a public garden, twisting what should have been my knee-jerk reaction to this story yet again. That made his display unlike my tee shirt, my car, and my roof, and more like the ten commandments in the courthouse or classroom. Ouch. At this point, I was close to disliking ticketed guy for testing me.

Fortunately, I continued to read. Ticketed guy won back my heart when I read that he and his friends think Bush’s Iraq invasion is illegal and immoral, and they have placed hundreds of anti-war signs around several states. I forgot about the author’s attempt to influence me and thought about looking up ticketed guy to see if he needed my help at that point. But the public property thing still bothered me.

A cop added the final twist. When ticketed guy asked how his placing the ‘Impeach Bush’ sign differed from the real estate signs others had placed on private property, the cop’s response was, “You don’t know the difference?”

Ticketed guy’s attorney said the difference is that one is commercial and the other political and political messages don’t have the same protections. Ticketed guy can remain soft-spoken if he wants; this makes me want to scream. Public property and private messages are – well, public property and private messages – so this is not logical.

The article goes on to explain how, sometimes, this same community allows politicians to place signs on public property during campaigns. To me, this means individual cops get to decide which political messages they allow and which they don’t. And that seems wrong to me.

I am interested in reading your comments. Should any private signs be allowed on public property? Can anyone present justification for allowing some and not all?