The Obama Youth
Selwyn Duke
It really does seem that the more evil a movement is, the more likely it is to enlist children in its cause.  (Well, they really do make beautiful little human shields.)  Most of us have now heard about the "Sing for Change" video, in which 22 young, impressionable victims of misguided parents are singing a song in homage to Barack Obama as if he's a god.

California Court Delivers A "Slapp" In The Face To Civil Public Discourse
Rachel Neuwirth
I frequently express my opinions on the Internet, and as a result I have as much of an interest as anyone in this country in preserving the right to freedom of speech. I am passionately committed to this right, which is enshrined in the First Amendment to our Constitution.

Palin Phenomenon Accelerates Downfall of Old Media
Christopher Adamo
The 2004 contest between President Bush and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry marked the beginning of the end for the old media monopoly. On the one hand, clumsy media attempts to fabricate a story, complete with phony documents hastily fabricated using modern word-processing software, clearly indicated that CBS bigwig Dan Rather and his minions were stumping for Kerry.

Obama Mocks McCain’s War Injuries
TruthNews Commentary
Just when it seems the Democrats can't sink any lower, they manage to surprise you. After a week in which Barack Obama defended himself from charges that he referred to Sarah Palin as a pig in lipstick, the Obama campaign has now unveiled an ad that mocks John McCain for his war injuries.

Press Watchdog: "Fantastic Lies" Dominate Russian Coverage Of War
Oleg Panfilov, the director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations in Moscow, is currently in Tbilisi. Panfilov spoke to Dmitry Volchek of RFE/RL's Russian Service about the difficulties of reporting the conflict both inside and outside Georgia.

Solzhenitsyn: One Book That Shook The World
How much impact can one book have? If that book is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," quite a bit. When it was published in the West in 1973, Solzhenitsyn's most famous work reverberated loudly on both sides of the Atlantic. U.S. forces were withdrawing from Vietnam. Detente and peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union were in vogue.

Free Press Remains Elusive In Ex-Soviet States
It's been more than 15 years since the fall of the Iron Curtain, and several states that once were firmly in the Soviet sphere of influence are now members of the European Union and NATO. But people living in many of the former Soviet republics still face challenges, including getting access to the news that's taken for granted in the West.

Personal Freedoms and the Internet
Ron Paul
The most basic principle to being a free American is the notion that we as individuals are responsible for our own lives and decisions. We do not have the right to rob our neighbors to make up for our mistakes, neither does our neighbor have any right to tell us how to live, so long as we aren’t infringing on their rights. Freedom to make bad decisions is inherent in the freedom to make good ones.

US Web-Based Companies’ Foreign Operations Probed
Global Internet use continues to expand, with the highest growth rates in countries like China that restrict their citizens' access to the Web. U.S. lawmakers are pressing American Internet-related companies to take stronger steps to fight Web censorship by foreign governments, and have crafted legislation to that end.

French Court Overturns Libel Verdict In Al-Dura Case
A French appeals court on Wednesday ruled that media watchdog Philippe Karsenty did not libel France 2 TV and its Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin when he accused them of ‘staging’ the dramatic video footage of 12-year old Mohammed al-Dura apparently dying in his father’s arms at a flashpoint junction in Gaza in September 2000.

US Official Affirms Need for International Broadcasting
The top official for U.S. government international broadcasting says threats to press freedom around the world are boosting the need for accurate, objective transnational news sources. James Glassman is chairman of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, which overseas the Voice of America and more than half a dozen other U.S. international broadcasting agencies.

Anti-war Rhetoric: A Work In Progress
Jon Kyl
Writing for the Weekly Standard, American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick Kagan recently examined how anti-war leaders have been forced to change their rhetoric in response to the continuing stream of positive developments in Iraq. Kagan correctly observed that the initial criticisms -- "the surge has failed, Iraqis will never reconcile, Iraqi troops won't fight, violence won't fall or, if it does, it won’t stay down -- have fallen by the wayside as they have been visibly disproven one by one."

New Report Finds Global Media Freedom Down in 2007
The U.S.-based organization Freedom House says media freedom declined in many parts of the world last year. The group's annual study of reporters' freedom says 42 percent of the world's people live in countries without basic freedom of the media. The report is titled A Year of Global Decline. Freedom House Executive Director Jennifer Windsor says that decline continued a six-year trend, and setbacks in media freedom outnumbered advances two-to-one.