At 03:10 AM 1/20/2014, J.A. Terranson wrote:
Already litigated in the USA, with very strange results: for example, code printed on your T-Shirt is free speech, while the same code may be a munition if instantiated on a processor.
No, that one was never litigated, just administratively ignored. I was half-tempted to submit a FOIA request saying "Where's Raph's T-Shirt?" because his ITAR request for an export permit for the shirt was neither approved nor denied (or at least, it hadn't been replied to at all for quite a long time at that point.) It could only have been litigated if either he'd taken it to court or else they'd charged somebody with a crime for exporting it.
Money == spech (recent SCOTUS explosion of pro corporate diareaha).
Money might not exactly be "speech", but it's certainly "press". It's how you get your speech out to people who might listen to it. I get really tired of the kinds of people whose justification for censoring porn on the internet is "the first amendment's only about political speech" but when somebody actually wants to use it for political speech "no, can't do that, elections are WAY too important to let JUST ANYBODY say JUST ANYTHING they want!"
Too late in the US. And with Roberts being such a young guy, expect no changes for a very, *very*, long time. Roberts's real attraction for Bush was that he believes that anything the Executive Branch wants to do is Just Fine. He's probably more radical than Scalia about that. But while we're probably stuck with Roberts for the rest of my lifetime, the Court's balances can still change.
An American Spring is coming: one way or another. Given Global Warming, it'll probably be what we used to call "winter"...