Conservative Rumblings

Section: Opinion/Editorial
Published: Helium (http://www.helium.com/items/806002-giving-illegals-roadmap-citizenship)

Giving illegals a roadmap to citizenship that does not involve returning to their country of origin is basically handing out a reward for illegal behavior, and rewarding illegal behavior simply encourages more illegal behavior. If we reward illegals who are already here and are already breaking the laws, nothing will stem the tide of illegal migrants that come rushing over ALL our borders in response to such amnesty. And it is amnesty; calling it anything else is just a politically-friendly euphemism.

There is a roadmap to citizenship for illegals: they need to leave the country for at least a year, and then attempt to re-enter legally. They need to apply like everyone else, with no special treatment.

Think of the damage amnesty for illegals would do to legal immigration. On one hand, you have the immigrants who spent the proper time and effort to immigrate legally. They did things the way they were supposed to, many times at great expense and sacrifice. On the other hand, you have these criminals who have been leeching off our society for, in some cases, years upon years. Instead of doing something to support the legal immigrants, who went about the process the correct way, we give freebies to criminals who abused our system. Does this encourage legal immigration? Of course not; it encourages future generations of immigrants to come in illegally.

It is sheer insanity to reward criminals. What if we applied this theory to, say, car thieves? Should car thieves have this path to freedom that involves releasing them from prison for no reason and acting as if they never committed a crime? That’s not even an efficient analogy, to be honest, because illegals are getting more than their freedom; they are being given essentially a free ride for all the time they already spent here, breaking our laws and taking advantage of our system.

The simple truth is that illegal immigrants are criminals by their very label. I have a brain aneurysm every time I hear a politician say that they want to “deport all those illegal immigrants that have committed crimes.” What about the very crime of BEING illegal?

Rewarding criminal behavior is taking a step down a very treacherous road, a step that should not be taken for any reason, political or otherwise. Criminals belong being punished, not being given special treatment.

Section: Opinion/Perspective
Published: Northern Star, November 15 2007 Issue

An Internet search can provide vast amounts of specific information, but not without sifting through piles of distracting data.

For example, if you wanted to find information on the Civil War Battle of Antietam and you went to Google, you would find about 575,000 results. That’s quite a lot of information to wade through, and it may or may not be usable.
Most likely, you won’t get through more than four or five pages of results. The Antietam search is also on the small end of what you will usually find using Google; sticking with historical battles, the Battle of Marathon pulls down 2.3 million, and the general term of World War II - try 183 million.

Since the Google search algorithms use page views and external links to rank their results, chances are extremely good that an off-the-beaten path source with some really good information is probably hidden behind hundreds of thousands of other so-so sources that you will never wade through.

So, if Google is giving you information overload, where can a self-respecting student go to get good information for a research paper?

Enter the NIU University Libraries article database, a massive repository of quality sources easily available to students.

Remember my first search, the Battle of Antietam? Well, after perusing the history section of the NIU library database, I came across a database entitled “Civil War Letters and Diaries.” Within 20 seconds, I found about 100 letters and diary entries, written by Civil War soldiers and civilians, that mentioned the Battle of Antietam. How’s that for some primary source material? Imagine trying to sift through the 575,000 results on Google and come up with something as rock solid as that.

Besides its own extremely thorough collection of sources, the NIU library database also provides thousands of starting points that lead to other credible sources of information.

In my Antietam example, I did a page search on the history section of the database for the terms “Civil War,” (press ctrl+f in your browser and type in your query; very useful when you are trying to find a specific term in a long document). I found, near the bottom of the page, a link to a huge Civil War database maintained by the University of Tennessee.

All of these results are what I found under one section of the history database. This is only a small example of what awesome power you can wield with this database at your fingertips. The databases include everything from the history section we’ve already explored, medical terminology, social studies, legal information, math and statistics and everything in between.

Granted, the NIU database can seem a little overwhelming at first, just like a random Internet search, but the distinct and clear advantages it has over just a simple search engine are huge. For starters, all the sources are legitimate, which is usually a huge time sink for anyone researching on the Internet.

Secondly, the information is sorted very well, allowing you to quickly and efficiently find exactly what you need.

To access the database, head to www.ulib.niu.edu, click on “Students,” then click on “Find Information” and then “Articles and more.” The process is slightly different based on whether you are on-campus or accessing it from another location, but the general steps are the same.

Note that you will have to login using your Z-ID number if you are off-campus, but once you have done that, you are off and running. Just remember to cite your sources.

Section: Opinion/Perspective
Published: Northern Star, November 9 2007 Issue

When I got the e-mail saying NIU was partnering with Ruckus to give students free music, I wanted to commend the university for trying to do something like this for students.

As a transfer student from Waubonsee Community College, where the administration often went out of its way to make things more difficult for students, this really impressed me.

I still want to commend them for trying, but unfortunately, when I spent some time investigating Ruckus, my optimism turned to disappointment after downloading and setting up the player and seeing how it all worked.

Basically, you have to download the incredibly unintuitive Ruckus player, which meshes with Windows Media Player (only the newest version, of course). After you have that whole mess installed, you can begin downloading music.

The problem with this music, however, is the insanely strict DRM (digital rights management) codes attached to every song.

The songs are given in .wma format, the Windows Media Audio file, which means, you guessed it, they are incompatible with iPods and iTunes.

You can only put the music on “Play for Sure” devices (such as the Microsoft Zune player), and only after you sign up for the “Ruckus to Go” subscription service.

With all due respect to the four NIU students that use “Play for Sure” devices, the rest of the modern world is using iPods, and this music will not play on them.

The songs each have a license that lasts one month, so you have to renew it at that time or the song will refuse to play. Perhaps more aggravating is the fact that you cannot burn the songs to a CD (even once).

So, if you use a CD player or your car as your main source of listening to music, Ruckus is essentially worthless.

Since you can only use the music on a computer and not in a CD player or non-“Play for Sure” device, it also becomes problematic for those of us who don’t do our homework sitting at our computer.

This situation is sort of like giving someone a coupon for unlimited free hamburgers at McDonalds, but the burgers you get can only be bun, ketchup and pickles, without the burger itself.

You want to say thank you, but then you realize you really haven’t gotten anything worth thanking someone for and you wish they hadn’t gotten your hopes up to start with.

It sounds pretty ungracious to trash something being given to students for free, but I want to use this to illustrate a bigger point. The reason this music is useless is because of the copy protections put in place to combat music piracy.

This makes the Ruckus music situation a microcosm of what is wrong with digital music.

Criminals are still going to be criminals. Making it harder to steal music isn’t going to stop them. Instead, they will just put more effort into it and break the codes anyway.

Every version of DRM has been cracked in some way, and this version is no different. It will be broken, and all of this will be for naught.

These so-called “protections” are only inconveniencing the criminals. They are not stopping them. The protections are, instead, putting up roadblocks for legal users.

I buy all my music legally on iTunes, but as more and more companies put ridiculous copy protections on their music, legal users are forced to pay the price for the illegal downloaders who steal music.

Perhaps what NIU should have done was partner with independent artists who would have welcomed a chance to get their music distributed for free. That way they could have accomplished their mission of giving students free music, but without the copy-protection mess Ruckus brings us.

Section: Opinion/Perspective
Published: Northern Star, November 1 2007 Issue

Students often cite cost as one of the main reasons for not keeping their computers safe.

After all, does anyone really have this insatiable urge to shell out $90 for a security suite from Norton Anti-Virus?

Thankfully, that $90 can be spent elsewhere, because you can protect and defend your computer from viruses and spyware on a very low budget – for free, in fact.

Setting up your computer to be protected is not exactly a fun job. It’s much easier to run the no-firewall, no-anti-virus route. Easier, that is, until you get infected and your computer begins to run so slow that the Comcast Slowsky turtles pass you on the information superhighway.

Chuck Downing, NIU professor of operations management and information systems, explains that virus and spyware protection is critical for two reasons.

“First, to avoid the hassle and inconvenience of having a slow or stalled computer: Many spyware programs redirect your attention to other Web sites and advertisements and can dramatically slow or even disable your computer,” he said. “The second reason is to protect against theft, disablement and liability.”

Downing said that the second reason is actually the more serious of the two. If someone uses your computer as a “springboard” to attack another computer or network because your system was not secured properly, you will be liable for the damages caused on the other end - a concept called “downstream liability.”

BROWSER

The first step in defending your computer is using the proper browser. Internet Explorer, despite its current 80-something percent market share, is a terrible piece of technology. Nearly every virus and piece of spyware is written with Internet Explorer and Windows in mind.

I’ve worked in the computer industry for six years. Of the scores of infected computers I’ve saved from spyware and virus attacks, the vast majority owe their infections to one of two sources: The user intentionally installed something filled with worms, i.e. Kazaa, or they used an unsecured browser (Internet Explorer) that was compromise.

Use Avant Browser (www.avantbrowser.com), a little known browser that views Web pages just like Internet Explorer (so you don’t have the compatibility or plug-in problems that sometimes plague Mozilla Firefox), but it is far more secure, quicker and more stable. Avant gives you built-in, tabbed browsing, an ad blocker, a pop-up blocker and many other useful security features.

ANTI-VIRUS

Head over to www.grisoft.com/free and download AVG Anti-Virus, the free edition. This anti-virus is easily one of the best anti-virus programs, as it runs in the background, instantly scans everything that downloads your computer, including Trojan horse worms that download themselves to your temporary Internet files, downloads new virus definitions in seconds each day and has a fantastic e-mail scanner.

The best testament I can give to the power of this program is the number of viruses I pulled off a single client’s computer – 45,000 - and I did this after the client’s Norton Anti virus program removed a whopping nine viruses and called the computer “clean.”

FIREWALL

For a free firewall, there is none better than ZoneAlarm (www.zonealarm.com). You have to navigate the site a bit to find the free version, but it’s there and it’s good. The firewall can monitor each piece of incoming and outgoing traffic and also has an emergency stop button that can be used to instantly shut down an Internet connection if necessary.

SPYWARE

I suggest, for most users, a two-tiered approach for spyware detection and removal: Lavasoft’s Ad Aware (www.lavasoft.com) and Spybot Search and Destroy (www.safer-networking.org). More advanced users should check out HijackThis (www.merijn.org/programs.php), but that program requires far more experience than the first two.

Ad Aware is an extremely simple program that will find many pesky pieces of spyware with little input from the user. You install, you run and you quarantine.

There are rarely any false positives, and the program does a stand-up job of eliminating many light threats. Spybot is slightly more difficult to use but catches a wider array of enemies. The program is quick and efficient, and while it does catch more false positives than Ad Aware, it is easy to uncheck those and move on.

Regularly running these two programs on your computer - whether you think you are infected or not - is good practice, because they can often find an infection in its infancy, when it is easy to remove without resorting to drastic measures.

Overall, Downing does not believe students protect their computers well enough.

“Most college students have simple or no anti virus software, and use a reactive - rather than proactive - strategy of protection,” Downing said. “They go on about their business and hope that nothing will happen.”

With these free options, more students should be able to protect themselves from the swirling hordes of viruses and spyware lurking just outside their firewall.

Section: Opinion/Perspective
Published: Northern Star, October 25 2007 Issue

We get emotional when our favorite sports team wins and loses – it’s just a simple fact of our society because of the emphasis that we place on sporting events.

If you were to walk into work or school and declare that you were in a rotten mood “because the Cubs lost,” no one would question you. It’s not necessary to have a real reason to be upset. Forget the “rough weekend” or “case of the Mondays” excuses. In 2007, your favorite team losing a game can cast a pall over you that is accepted by society as a good reason to be depressed for the next two weeks.

When Bad Rex showed up to deliver his opus during last year’s Super Bowl and the Bears were cast down by Indianapolis, the depth of the depression radiating from the Chicago area was palatable and somewhat disturbing.

How many people remembered that this was a game and that it was supposed to be fun?

There is a line between healthy support for your favorite team and an obsessive streak that can be detrimental to you and those around you and, unfortunately, fans are crossing this line.

Many fans are much larger stakeholders in their team’s welfare now than in past years. A study in Psychology Today magazine calls these types of fans “high-identifiers,” fans that they say have “extreme emotions in the face of defeat, compared with average sports fans.”

These labels used to be most often applied to the fans who really went over the edge and jumped onto the field of play, pummelling the guy sitting next to them or engaging in some other sort of outlandish behavior.

Increasingly, however, more and more fans are starting to drift toward the “high-identifier” category. Sporting events are transcending hobbies and pastimes and becoming emotional crutches, and that change in our thinking is not healthy.

When the hardcore fan becomes a part of the team, their health, both mental and physical, can become tied to the team’s performance. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explained that the team can literally become an “extension of the fan’s ego,” and when the team does poorly, the fan begins to feel tired, despondent and depressed.

If your favorite team decides to go on a massive losing streak and you are living and breathing every play, you are going to go down with them. Questioning the meaning of life because your favorite player just blew a tight game is just a little beyond the realm of healthy sporting fervor.

It’s important to not get too high or too low on your team. When my D’Backs finished off the Cubs a couple weeks ago, I was cautiously optimistic about their chances against the Rockies. Obviously, they got absolutely destroyed in the NLCS by the suddenly unbeatable kids from Denver, but at that point, it was something to shrug off.

As college students working and taking huge course loads, do any of us really have the time to become so wrapped up in our team’s destiny that a loss sends us into a haze for the next week?

Step back and remember: It’s just a game.

Section: Opinion/Perspective
Published: Northern Star, October 5 2007 Issue

There’s a reason many students can’t think before noon.

How often have you slammed down a hit of caffeine or sugar and ran out the door to an exam? After all, who has time for breakfast? You need those extra five minutes to jam one more obscure fact that may or may not be on the test into your head.

Well, as it turns out, those five minutes may be better spent getting some nourishment rather than blankly staring at your study guide.

I’m sure you’ve all heard the clichés on TV and the radio about how breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

However, most of it is actually true. According to a study conducted by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1998, “Breakfast consumption preferentially influences tasks requiring aspects of memory.”

Last I checked, exams require quite a bit of memory, so falling into the habit of skipping breakfast isn’t going to work quite so well for anyone trying to ace a test.

Martha O’Gorman, a registered dietician with Recreation Services at NIU, agrees.

“Traditionally, breakfast refers to a meal eaten early in the morning,” she explained. “The crucial element is to eat your first meal within two hours of waking, [and] this meal ideally will include protein as well as carbohydrate.”

“The protein will come primarily from the dairy products or the eggs and, to a lesser extent, the whole grains. But, this first meal might also be a hearty soup, a sandwich, a piece of fruit and a glass of low fat milk consumed at 11 a.m.,” O’Gorman said.

Trying to single-handedly increase PepsiCo and Hershey’s third-quarter profits by another tenth of a percent might taste quite good (believe me, you get no argument from me – I bleed Pepsi); however, it’s not the best choice when you’re trying to use your brain on an exam. In fact, too much caffeine and sugar can actually hurt your ability to recall information.

According to O’Gorman, “Consuming large portions of caffeine or sugary beverages without adequate protein and healthy carbohydrates will likely leave the student feeling lethargic or fatigued in the middle of the exam, just when he/she needs to accomplish their best recall.”

She added, “The biggest detriment for students will be if they are taking an exam or studying for an exam without fueling the brain.”
O’Gorman explained that students who want to improve their exam performance should focus on a “balance in the time and type of meal” to properly fuel the brain.

“Whether maximizing mental or physical performance, eat within two hours of getting up and eat every four or five hours up to the two hours before going to bed. Choose a balanced mix of lean protein, whole grains, fruits, vegetables and healthy fats,” O’Gorman said.

Eating is something you’re going to do anyway, so why not do it right and give yourself a leg up when it comes to that next exam?

The whole allure and uniqueness of zombies is that they are unnatural. They are reanimated dead that shamble and shuffle along while trying to tear the flesh off of live people, and they are just not as fun when they are running while they do it.

The classic tried and true zombie is slow; they shamble, scuffle and groan while relentlessly pursuing their victims. Despite that fact that Hollywood has tried to reinvent the wheel by making several painful movies such as 28 Days Later, zombies are meant to be and have always been slow and methodical.

Normal people move fast, and since zombies are supposed to be unnatural, they should not be doing things that normal people are doing.

Fast zombies, quite frankly, are not as terrifying as slow zombies. Sure, they might be physically more frightening in the sense that you might not be able to outrun them, but physical fear is much easier to overcome than mental fatigue.

Fast zombies will probably catch you, and then you have to fight them off, but that’s not the point of zombies. The point of zombies is the inexorable pursuit of a foe that does not die and does not stop. Fast zombies that can fall on humans without warning take away from the suspense and the take away a fundamental part of what a zombie is: a weapon of psychological terror.

There are many psychological reasons for slow moving zombies. While fending off an attack by lightning quick zombies might be a quick adrenaline jolt, the slow and steady grind of being pursued or hiding from a pack of slow moving and groaning zombies cannot be ignored. The tension level is far higher with slow zombies. Parties of humans trying to elude slow zombies will, at times, be forced to travel within sight and within earshot of the enemy, subjecting them to terrible stresses as they move so close to the zombies eager to rip them to pieces.

With fast zombies, the tension is over far too quickly. There’s not enough time to build the fear, and certainly not enough time for the humans to really think about the situation they are in and really get that cold feeling in the pit of their stomachs.

Despite the fact that slow zombies have been around for years, I do not think they are worn out. On the contrary; zombies are meant to be slow. It’s part of what makes them zombies. When zombies start moving fast and running around like normal people, they lose what makes them “zombies,” and they become, instead, simply monsters, and who is scared of a couple of monsters?

Guantanamo Bay is vital for the survival of our country. Each captured terrorist imprisoned there is one less threat to our country, and one less extremist that is out there ready to strap a bomb to his body and blow up innocent people.

We are at war with a force of people whose sole mission is to destroy our country and our way of life. During wartime, it is acceptable (in fact, necessary) to take prisoners.

The lives of American citizens are the responsibility of the US Government. Putting terrorists in Guantanamo saves American lives, and thus, I have no problem with it existing. I’m not concerned about my tax dollars being spent to keep Guantanamo running. I’d rather that the money be spent there, protecting our country, than lining the pocket of yet another corrupt member of the House of Representatives.

If we close Guantanamo, what happens to the terrorists we capture? Are we supposed to just kill them outright? Well, then we would be no better then they are. We can’t just catch them and then let them go, because then they are back on the battlefield and back trying to kill Americans. Guantanamo is the solution, and it needs to remain open and running as long as there are extremists out there trying to annihilate our nation.

Honestly, we treat the prisoners down there much better than the terrorists treat the prisoners they take. They aren’t starved, they are allowed to pray, and they do not have to endure daily beatings. If Guantanamo was really the gulag it is portrayed to be, then the prisoners would be locked away in solitary rock-walled cells with no light, no water, no books, no food and a pig. The terrible atrocities you hear on the news about Guantanamo are not even close to accurate; the whole ‘Koran in the toilet’ debacle (that cost many people across the world their lives when Muslims rioted) was false information and completely fabricated. We are Americans; we are not butchers and we are not savages. We don’t abuse these people, even though many of them would not hesitate to kill as many of us as they could if given the chance.

Quite frankly, despite the fact that we obey the Geneva Conventions when dealing with this prisoners, we need to remember that the men imprisoned in the Bay do not deserve the rights enjoyed by citizens of this country, because they are not Americans; they are the enemy, soldiers in a war who are fighting to destroy everything we believe in, and they were caught while trying to kill or help kill American citizens. They are prisoners of war, and Guantanamo Bay is one of the most important fronts of the war on terror.

Years ago, computer and video games took skill. On the Sega Genesis, if you didn’t throw the ball at your receiver at the right time in College Football 97, you didn’t complete the pass. In Goldeneye 64, if you didn’t aim your gun at the enemy and pull the trigger, you didn’t kill them (believe me, I learned the latter the hard way many, many times).

Those were the days; those with skills won, and those without went home licking their wounds, swallowing their pride, and hoping to improve before the next gaming session.

Being good at a game took some effort; not a monumental/obsessive 15 hours a day practicing kind of effort, but at least someone couldn’t pick up a brand new game and be “owning” in an hour.

Those days are sadly gone. With the advent of auto-aim, auto-pass catch, and auto-everything else, games just aren’t what they used to be.

I probably sound a crotchety old guy yelling at the whippersnappers running around in front of his house with this article, but in my ripe old age of 21, that’s almost what I feel like sometimes when I see how absurdly easy new games have become, and how punk kids think they are “all that” because they can master multiplayer Halo in an hour.

Newsflash: that game is not difficult, it has no plot, and Master Chief is no match for a crowbar (inside PC vs console joke).

I will admit that I expect the easiness, to an extent, from console games. Consoles are already operating at such a handicap comparing to PC games (with regards to graphics and controls, mostly) that you have to dumb down the game a bit to make it work.

After all, when you have an X-Box controller that has, what, two-dozen buttons, and you face that against a keyboard and a mouse that has over a hundred keys and the most dynamic controller in existence, there are going to be allowances.

However, even PC gaming, the most hallowed and uncorrupted form of gaming in my book, has seen some disturbing cross pollination from the console gaming wave of luxury. The first time I played Counter Strike, I died so fast and so many times, I had no clue what was going on.

From my vantage point, enemies appeared from nowhere, my weapon never fired correctly and I spent a lot of time studying the floor and the ceiling.

I ended the game with one kill to match 25 deaths, and knew then and there that if I wanted to play the game against the type of people that just gave me a thrashing, I had to put in a bit of time to learn the ropes.

This is no the case anymore. Now, you can pick up a game and “learn” it in an hour or two. What happened to destroy gaming as we know it?

Well, the problem is something that, in my opinion, can be described in two words: “The Mainstream.” You’ve heard the term before, I’m sure. “The Mainstream” is what “everyone” is doing, don’t you know?

The “Mainstream” likes results, and they like those results quickly, with a bottle of Dasani on the side, thank you.

Counter Strike for PC was one of the most popular PC games of all time, but it never received a following from “The Mainstream” until a butchered and stripped version of the game appeared on consoles, complete with auto-aim, practice bots and simplistic weapon controls. Soon after, the butchery extended to the newest version of the PC version of the game.

It seems that now, no one wants to own a game for months before being able to be competitive; they want to sit down and immediately be a master at the game.
No one wants to put hard work into anything any more, least of all a game, and that’s just a sad development in my eyes.

I always loved the challenge of learning a new game, and I relished the ass-beatings that you have to endure on the way up the ladder.

Now, an afternoon in front of a screen and you’ve learned all you can learn from the game.

Our society’s pathetic “instant gratification” attitude is bad enough in the context of the Iraq War or other things, but now it’s even polluting our games.

By now, most people have heard this story: radio personality makes disparaging comments, and free speech gets trampled on for about the fiftieth time in as many days.

Of course, that’s not the version of the story that you’ll hear about on the evening news, but that’s the version you SHOULD be hearing.

You see, Imus made some inappropriate comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team on his morning radio show, and it didn’t take very long for CBS to bow to political pressure and pull the plug on him, all for exercising his 1st Amendment rights.

My problem with this is that at the current rate of societal whitewashing, the not-too-distant future includes a culture that disallows anyone from making any sort of statement that may offend someone else. Essentially, everyone will be gagged from speaking his or her mind, all in the interests of not hurting someone’s feelings.
If people didn’t want to listen to Imus after what he said, they have the freedom to choose that, and they can tune him out. His show may have lost listeners, lost ratings and eventually lost funding.

Then, CBS could have cancelled it for those reasons, instead of canceling it because of the opinions stated by Imus. Of course, instead of letting that run its course, CBS chose the knee-jerk reaction of dropping the hammer on him.

Regardless of the content, I strongly believe in Imus’ right to say it. Freedom of speech is about giving people the right to say whatever he or she wants, and the right to look like a racist idiot if that’s the path they choose.

This freedom is (supposed to be) undeniable, unless the person in question is doing something illegal and abusing the free speech rights (i.e. making a call for violence).

You see, freedom is an essential and integral part of what makes this country great. Without it, we would never have risen from a colony of Britain to the only superpower in the world in 230 years.

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they added the Bill of Rights when they realized that many fundamental rights were not expressly detailed in first document. One of those rights is freedom of speech, included in the 1st Amendment.

Now, my question is, if the Founders intended for us to have a society where no one ever speaks a word that offends anyone else, why the need for the 1st Amendment?
After all, if everyone agreed with what the other said, there would be no censorship, no stifling of people or the press, and certainly no one getting offended.

Why, then, did they make an amendment to protect speech if that’s the kind of world they intended for us to live in?

The answer is that the Founders did not intend for us to be living in that world.
They did not intend for this country to become a country of fear: fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of offending the wrong person, and, perish the thought, fear of sharing your opinion. The First Amendment was made because the Founding Fathers wanted us to share our views without worrying that doing so would lead to us being persecuted, ostracized…or fired.

His firing was politically motivated, obviously; Al Sharpton, who one of my colleagues so eloquently referred to as the “D-student of the civil rights movement,” and Jesse Jackson, who is quite possibly the biggest hypocrite in the world when it comes to discussing “racism,” both saw an opportunity to get some hard-to-obtain camera time to push their own agendas, while simultaneously pushing CBS to take care of Imus, and voila, Imus is gone.

I daresay that if those two moonbats hadn’t spoke up, Imus would probably have been reprimanded and suspended, but not canned.

My point is that if we go after Imus, then we need to go after everyone. If it’s no longer acceptable to ever offend anyone, then that’s it; there are no excuses, no conditions.

Everyone who makes an offensive comment, in any medium, should be fired under this new system.

Late night comedians, columnists, bloggers, commentators; they all have to go!
Can you see the problem with this? Once the floodgates are open, there’s no stopping it.

It’s very easy to stand up for freedom of speech when you support what is being said, but the test is when someone says something you don’t agree with and you still stand up for his or her rights.

If we started policing the airwaves and taking down everyone who offends someone else, pretty soon we’d have one giant, non-stop PBS telethon, interspersed with Billy Mays and Tony Little infomercials. And I really don’t think anyone wants to see THAT.

In all seriousness, this is one of those watershed events for the subject of free speech. Today, it’s Don Imus.

Tomorrow, it’s you and me. Where does it end?