firstamendment

By Nick Rahaim One of the most hotly contested bills in the California state legislature is one you have probably never heard of. Tech blogs are buzzing about AB 1668, which was introduced by Mark Leno (D-San Francisco). The bill would require that documents produced by government agencies be created in an “open extensible markup language-based, XML-based file format,” or more simply put, an open file format for all text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents. Open

Don Imus, Snoop Dogg and the 1st Amendment: Suppose the “marketplace of ideas” stops buying “bitches,” “hos” and the N-word? By Peter Scheer Don Imus may be gone, guilty of one too many assaults on his audience’s sensitivities and sensibilities, but outrage over racist shock-talk in the mass media continues to build, with hip-hop lyrics the most likely, and most deserving, next target. If “bitches,” “hos” and the N-word were to disappear from our public

More on Josh Wolf Scheer’s column on the denouement of Josh Wolf’s case, published as an Op-Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, brought this response from Sarah Phelan writing in the Bay Guardian: Who blinked? Josh Wolf is out of the clink, but the debate about why he was freed continues Listen to the Stanford Current’s interview with Scheer on Stanford radio. And here’s Wolf’s reply to the interview.

Blogger-Journalist Josh Wolf must be the first journalist to go to jail to protect evidence he didn’t have. By Peter Scheer That journalist Josh Wolf is out of jail is a good thing. No 24-year-old should rot in jail for seven and a half months–the longest incarceration of a journalist in American history–for doing what he thinks is right (even if he’s wrong). But now that Wolf’s protracted legal battle is finally and thankfully over,

A California Perspective on AG Alberto Gonzales’ Problems By Peter Scheer The spectacle of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales twisting in the wind, struggling to explain one misstatement after another about the purge of eight US Attorneys, presents a number of ironies, especially to observers in California. For starters there’s Congress’ feigned dismay in discovering that federal prosecutors are subject to political pressures in their handling of cases that are of interest to members of Congress.