Consider this article by Kyle Smith. (H/T Jihad Watch)

Excerpt:

When it comes to the First Amendment, Team Obama believes in Global Chilling.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor who has been appointed to a shadowy post that will grant him powers that are merely mind-boggling, explicitly supports using the courts to impose a “chilling effect” on speech that might hurt someone’s feelings. He thinks that the bloggers have been rampaging out of control and that new laws need to be written to corral them.

…Sunstein is President Obama’s choice to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

Cass Sunstein’s new book explains how he would like to regulate free speech.

Sunstein questions the current libel standard – which requires proving “actual malice” against those who write about public figures, including celebrities. Mere “negligence” isn’t libelous, but Sunstein wonders, “Is it so important to provide breathing space for damaging falsehoods about entertainers?”

Recall my previous post about the Democrat bill that would criminalize blogging.

Excerpt:

Under a recently-introduced bill, H.R. 1966, bloggers would face up to two years in prison if they “harass” public figures by criticizing them in a “severe, repeated, and hostile” manner, and thereby cause them “substantial emotional distress.”

This makes me think also about my previous post about the Democrat Speaker of the House in California who said that dissenting speech is terrorism.

The Road to Serfdom

The greatest economics book of the 20th century was F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom“, which is analyzes the history of socialism and fascism in Nazi Germany and Russia. This book is #1 on Human Events’ Top 10 books every Republican should read.

Human Events writes:

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) was an Austrian economist awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974. He defended capitalism and individual liberty against collectivism. In “The Road to Serfdom,” he describes how government planning of the economy leads to tyranny. President Reagan cited Hayek as one of his favorite economists. “To decentralize power is to reduce the absolute amount of power, and the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize the power exercised by man over man,” wrote Hayek. “Who can seriously doubt that the power which a millionaire, who may be my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest bureaucrat possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends how I am allowed to live and work?”

I have a friend who is a Democrat, and every time I run these steps toward fascism by him, he never objects to them. There is a powerful impulse on the left towards controlling people’s choices to reproduce, earn, spend and work. Democrats believe that they are enlightened, so enslaving others is permissible for them. People today are willing to trade their liberty for a government handout, such as socialized health care.