The Week in Pictures -- Post-Debate Edition

From the guys at Powerline Blog:

Takes a moment for this to sink in fully.

No, there’s no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment

From Eugene Volokh:

I keep hearing about a supposed "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment, or statements such as, "This isn't free speech, it's hate speech," or "When does free speech stop and hate speech begin?" But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. ...To be sure, there are some kinds of speech that are unprotected by the First Amendment. But those narrow exceptions have nothing to do with "hate speech" in any conventionally used sense of the term.

This is something liberals need to understand. They love the Constitution as a living document and want to change it to reflect THEIR values. They don't understand the purpose of the Constitution is to protect the minority, something they will be in ceryt soon, hopefully for a very long time.

Chick-fil-A Aids Drivers Stranded by Winter Weather

From Breitbart's Big Government:

After leaving, several of his employees returned to the store saying that the roads were nearly impassable and many other motorists were already stranded on the side of the road, some for seven and eight hours already.

"Our store is about a mile and a half from the interstate and it took me two hours to get there," manager Audrey Pitt told Fox News' Todd Starnes. "It was a parking lot as far as I could see."

Some of the stranded drivers just abandoned their cars and ended up at the Chick-fil-A to take shelter.

From there, Meadows and his staff decided to lend a kindness to all those stranded motorists. They jumped to their stations and cooked up some 200 sandwiches, then threw on their cold weather gear, trudged out to the highway, and began to hand out food and water to the stranded motorists.
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The store also refused to sell anything that day. Everything they did that day was for public service.

"We're not open for business," Pitt said. "We're just feeding people who are hungry."

Chick-fil-A came under the national spotlight in 2012 as millions of Americans supported the company when same-sex marriage advocates attacked COO Dan Cathy for his publicly-stated Christian views. The controversy helped push the restaurant chain's sales to $4.6 billion in 2012.

This is a prime example why this company should be one of the companies admired for their corperate policies. Not vilified because the owner does not have the "right" beliefs.

Wisconsin Political Speech Victory - A judge blocks subpoenas against conservative allies of Scott Walker.

From the WSJ Opinion Journal:

Chalk up a big victory for the First Amendment. On Friday a Wisconsin judge struck a major blow for free political speech when he quashed subpoenas to conservative groups and ordered the return of property to the targets of a so-called John Doe campaign-finance probe.

John Doe probes operate much like grand juries, allowing prosecutors to issue subpoenas and conduct searches while gag orders require the targets to keep quiet. We wrote about the kitchen-sink subpoenas and morning raids by special prosecutor Francis Schmitz that targeted dozens of conservative groups that participated in the battle to recall Republican Governor Scott Walker ("Wisconsin Political Speech Raid," Nov. 16, 2013).

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The order is all the more remarkable because it bluntly rejects the prosecutor's theory of illegal coordination between the groups and the Walker campaign. Wisconsin's campaign finance statutes ban coordination between independent groups and candidates for a "political purpose." But a political purpose "requires express advocacy," the judge wrote, and express advocacy means directly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate.

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The John Doe process has become a political weapon intended to serve partisan ends regardless of the law. Kudos to a judge who was brave enough to read the law and stop it, but there's more free-speech defending to do.

Seems like they are using Chicago Style tactics in Wisconsin. The Libs can't stand the fact that lost at the ballot box MULTIPLE times, so they are using the same tactics that the Obama Regime is using against their opponents, Silence through intimidation.