“Hide your children! The British are coming!!”

From the mouths of militiamen came the now-famous warning: the British had invaded, and the time to fight for independence had arrived.

Today, nearly a quarter-millennium after the colonists’ struggle, some citizens see a new threat after the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals handed down two key free speech decisions this week.

By Harvey Silverglate,

My wife and I wish to commend the staff of The New Yorker. They have finally realized that the level of political rhetoric in this country has fallen so low that the only appropriate response is satire. There is no way that I could have possibly responded to my critics and detractors as effectively as has the artist who drew that cover.

By Wendy Kaminer,

Barack Obama is poised to become “our first president who is a civil libertarian,” Jeffrey Rosen wrote hopefully and not without reason, less than 6 months ago. But it didn’t take long for the audacity of politics to expose the naivete of hope. Today, given Obama’s support for the grossly and gratuitously anti-libertarian FISA amendments (painstakingly explored by the tireless Glenn Greenwald,) civil libertarians are likely to vote for him with a lot more resignation than enthusiasm.

By Harvey Silverglate

Three cheers for Margery Eagan for her July 8^th Boston Herald column’s deft skewering of those who have reacted with horror and, even worse, threats of future censorship toward this year’s Beverly Farms Horribles Parade, posted on YouTube. Eagan alone appears to understand the appropriateness of the biting – even crude and vicious – satire directed at the whole brouhaha over whether a group of teenage mothers-to-be in Gloucester got together to plan their deliveries at about the same time.