From the Archives: Porn king Larry Flynt defends free speech in Charlottesville

Porn king Larry Flynt defends free speech in Charlottesville
November 6, 2011 9:24 PM MST

Self-described smut peddler and free speech advocate Larry Flynt appeared at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville on November 4 to discuss the 1996 Milos Forman-directed film based on his life, The People vs. Larry Flynt. The screening was sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.

Flynt had earlier spoken at the University of Virginia in November 2000 with his friend and courtroom adversary, the late Jerry Falwell, as part of a lecture tour in which they talked about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988), in which a unanimous court upheld Hustler’s right to engage in political parody even if the object of that parody (Falwell) had hurt feelings as a result.

That case originated after Hustler, one of many adult publications operated by Flynt, had run a satirical advertisement for Campari in which Falwell allegedly endorsed the liqueur and revealed that his first sexual experience was in an outhouse with his mother. Falwell sued for libel and lost, but won damages in a Roanoke federal court for “intentionally inflicted emotional distress.”

‘One Nation Under Sex’
After the film and discussion, Flynt autographed copies of his new book, One Nation Under Sex, for about 100 fans. The book, coauthored by David Eisenbach, looks at American history through the prism of the sex lives of presidents and first ladies.

As the crowd dispersed, Flynt answered questions posed by reporters from radio station WINA and the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner.

Noting that many people yearn for a simpler time when their own moral values seemed to be shared by the rest of society, Flynt said that “nostalgia affects people usually in a very positive way but the world goes on.”

What needs to be understood, he said, is that “the big thing is, you’ve got to accept the rights of other people. We pay a huge price in this country to live in a free society and we’ve got to tolerate things that we don’t necessarily like so we can be free.”

Reconciling religion with freedom
Flynt added that “unfortunately, my friend Jerry Falwell never seemed to be able to reconcile the Bible with people who wanted more individual freedom.”

Larry Flynt

Supporting the idea of moral values is fine, he said, “if they work for you or your family, but if they don’t, you should not seek to impose your values on other people.”

While Jerry Falwell is dead, his son continues to run Liberty University in Lynchburg, but Flynt is not impressed with that institution’s legacy or mission.

“I know that whole family,” he said. “I’m not looking to pick a fight with them [but] they bring people like Michele Bachmann to the college and the whole nation knows about it.”

Flynt chuckled and then trailed off as he shook his head ruefully: “If they’re holding Michele Bachmann up as an example of greatness, she makes people who find Sarah Palin challenging…”

Flynt’s dismissive tone indicated he does not hold either Bachmann or Palin in high regard.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 6, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Sarah Palin and Joe Heck at RightOnline 2012: Video

Sarah Palin at RightOnline

RightOnline is an annual conference sponsored by Americans for Prosperity that brings together political leaders, political pundits, political bloggers, and others involved in the free-market movement to meet each other, talk about issues, and learn about techniques to improve communication in the online world of both journalism and social media.

This year RightOnline took place at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas.

The the featured speaker on the opening night of the conference, June 15, was former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who was also the 2008 Republican nominee for Vice President.  In the years since Palin resigned mid-term as Alaska's chief executive, she has become a political commentator for Fox News and has also raised a stir with her talent for using social media (particularly Facebook) for promoting her views.

I caught Palin's speech on video and posted it to YouTube after I returned home to Charlottesville from Sin City. Including a brief introduction by AFP president Tim Phillips, the address lasts just about 35 minutes.

The next afternoon, because the conference was occurring in Las Vegas, the local Member of Congress -- U.S. Representative Joe Heck, a physician and Iraq War veteran -- addressed the lunchtime crowd. Congressman Heck spoke about the use of social media by his colleagues (he mentioned the Republican New Media Caucus, which is co-chaired by First District Virginia Representative Rob Wittman).

Here's the video of Joe Heck's speech. He is introduced by AFP vice president Tracy Henke.

Watch this blog for more video from RightOnline 2012.

Be sure to visit my CafePress store for gifts and novelty items!
Read my blog on Kindle!
Follow my tweets on Twitter! 

See my articles on Examiner.com!

'Schilling Show' Host to Guest on 'Fox & Friends'

Local Charlottesville radio talk-show host Rob Schilling will be a guest on "Fox & Friends" later this morning on the Fox News Channel. The segment is set to air at 8:45 a.m. (Eastern Time).

Schilling, a former member of the Charlottesville City Council, is getting national attention for a post to his show's blog about an Albemarle County middle-school teacher who seems to be indoctrinating her students about politics, rather than teaching them about civics and government. Schilling's guest spot on "Fox & Friends" will anchor a discussion about the responsibilities of teachers to be evenhanded in their discussions of current issues.

His blogpost features photographs from Henley Middle School teacher Margie Shepherd's classroom and states:

Proudly promulgated in Mrs. Shepherd’s cultivation chamber, is a printed, bingo-like game piece mocking Republican Alaska Governor and former Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin. This derisive display, apparently acquired from the web site, Palin Bingo, ridicules Gov. Palin via association of her likeness with a number of traducing terms and by displaying a banner over her head, which reads, “AIR SPACE.”

How might this inappropriate and partisan political display affect the comfort level of any child in that classroom who happens to support Governor Palin and/or the Republican Party?

In addition to the insulting insinuation that Gov. Palin is an “airhead,” the same classroom is rife with “ecological,” “United Nations,” and “pacifist/peace” propaganda, all posted with no counterbalancing counsel for pupils’ perusal.

Quoting extensively from an Albemarle County school policy manual, Schilling concludes that Ms. Shepherd's teaching methods are at odds with the rules of the school division.

The story that Schilling broke on his blog (and that he has discussed briefly on his WINA-AM radio program) has already been covered by WCAV-TV in Charlottesville, not once, but twice.

Be sure to visit my CafePress store for gifts and novelty items!
Read my blog on Kindle!

2012 GOP Presidential Poll

As the nation enters the Obama-Pelosi-Reid years, a small group of political activists has its eyes on the next presidential election cycle. Since the campaign for 2012 begins today, I am interested in your views on will win the Republican presidential nomination four years from now.

This little poll is obviously not scientific (those types of polls won't be published for at least several days), but it will give a snapshot of the views of readers of this blog (and others who may find it on other web sites) about what to expect in 2012.

Comments welcome, of course.






Be sure to visit my CafePress store for gifts and novelty items!
Read my blog on Kindle!

Politics at 'The New Yorker'

That staid journal that is read more often for its cartoons than its articles (take that, Playboy!), the venerable New Yorker, has three good political reports that are worth a look.

The first is a profile of Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, written by Raffi Khatchadourian. Here's a sample paragraph:

For many people, including skeptical libertarians, Barr still has the reputation of a partisan, but his self-imposed exile from the Republican Party is representative of a broader disaffection among conservatives who did not immediately rally behind McCain. Republicans in the mold of Barry Goldwater, who believe in small government, minimal constraints on the free market, and expansive civil liberties, have become profoundly uneasy about the direction of the country under President Bush, who has presided over the largest increase in federal spending since the Great Society, raised the national debt to more than ten trillion dollars, suspended habeas corpus for enemy combatants, and recently proposed the seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout of Wall Street. David Boaz, the executive vice-president of the Cato Institute, and David Kirby, the executive director of America’s Future Foundation, have argued that, because of such policies, the libertarian vote, which for decades has been solidly Republican, “may be the next great swing vote.” According to surveys, as much as a fifth of American voters hold libertarian values, and in recent years more than seventy per cent of them have voted as Republicans. But Boaz and Kirby noticed that in the 2004 Presidential election only fifty-nine per cent of them voted for Bush, and between the midterm elections of 2002 and 2006 three million of them drifted away from the Republican Party—a shift that Boaz and Kirby argue “may well have cost Republicans control of Congress.” In this year’s Republican primaries, Ron Paul, the congressman from Texas and a longtime libertarian, earned more than twenty per cent of the vote in Idaho, Washington, Montana, and North Dakota. “His supporters are the equivalent of crabgrass,” Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist, told Time. “It’s not the grass you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff.” In August, Newt Gingrich warned that if McCain chose as his running mate Senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut, Barr would win fifteen per cent of the vote.

Two other articles focus on the major parties' vice-presidential candidates.

Ryan Lizza profiles Joe Biden, who was chosen to be the running mate of his former rival for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama. A sample:

On August 6th, Biden said, the Obama campaign “smuggled” him into Minneapolis, where Obama was campaigning, and the two senators stayed up late in a suite at the Graves 601 Hotel working out the details of a potential deal. Obama told Biden that the vetting had gone well—Biden assured me that it was “very complimentary.” Biden happens to be one of the least wealthy members of the Senate, although his family’s joint income was more than three hundred thousand dollars last year. (His wife, Jill, has a Ph.D. in education and teaches at Delaware Technical & Community College.) His relatively straightforward tax returns and uncomplicated financial situation made the process easier. “All these years and you still have no money,” Obama said to Biden, teasingly.

The conversation in Minneapolis ranged from foreign policy and possible appointments to the federal courts to the legislative strategy that would be needed to pass an Obama agenda. Obama wanted to know how Biden had managed his signature achievements—such as the 1994 crime bill, which added a hundred thousand federally funded police officers to city streets. He also tested Biden’s understanding of how broad his role would be, as opposed to that of another contender—apparently, Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of Kansas and the only woman known to be on Obama’s short list. “He said, ‘Well, you know, if I offered this to somebody’—he named her, a person—he said, ‘That person would be very happy if I assigned them to reorganize the government.’ And he said, ‘They’d be very happy doing that. How about you?’ ” That didn’t sound like much of a job to Biden. “No,” he told Obama. “That’s not what I want to do.”

Finally, Jane Mayer traces how Sarah Palin emerged as the leading contender for the Republican vice-presidential nomination. While Palin's name was known among political junkies for months before the GOP convention, she seemed to the general public to have sprung full-blown from the head of John McCain, who decided, without vetting, that he needed to have a Tina Fey lookalike at his side. Mayer sets the record straight. For example:

While Brickley and others were spreading the word about Palin on the Internet, Palin was wooing a number of well-connected Washington conservative thinkers. In a stroke of luck, Palin did not have to go to the capital to meet these members of “the permanent political establishment”; they came to Alaska. Shortly after taking office, Palin received two memos from Paulette Simpson, the Alaska Federation of Republican Women leader, noting that two prominent conservative magazines—The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—were planning luxury cruises to Alaska in the summer of 2007, which would make stops in Juneau. Writers and editors from these publications had been enlisted to deliver lectures to politically minded vacationers. “The Governor was more than happy to meet these guys,” Joe Balash, a special staff assistant to Palin, recalled.

On June 18, 2007, the first group disembarked in Juneau from the Holland America Line’s M.S. Oosterdam, and went to the governor’s mansion, a white wooden Colonial house with six two-story columns, for lunch. The contingent featured three of The Weekly Standard ’s top writers: William Kristol, the magazine’s Washington-based editor, who is also an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and a regular commentator on “Fox News Sunday”; Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor and the co-host of “The Beltway Boys,” a political talk show on Fox News; and Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist.

By all accounts, the luncheon was a high-spirited, informal occasion. Kristol brought his wife and daughter; Gerson brought his wife and two children. Barnes, who brought his sister and his wife, sat on one side of Governor Palin, who presided at the head of the long table in the mansion’s formal dining room; the Kristols sat on the other. Gerson was at the opposite end, as was Palin’s chief of staff at the time, Mike Tibbles, who is now working for Senator Stevens’s reëlection campaign. The menu featured halibut cheeks—the choicest part of the fish. Before the meal, Palin delivered a lengthy grace. Simpson, who was at the luncheon, said, “I told a girlfriend afterwards, ‘That was some grace!’ It really set the tone.” Joe Balash, Palin’s assistant, who was also present, said, “There are not many politicians who will say grace with the conviction of faith she has. It’s a daily part of her life.”

Palin was joined by her lieutenant governor and by Alaska’s attorney general. Also present was a local woman involved in upholding the Juneau school system’s right to suspend a student who had displayed a satirical banner—“Bong Hits 4 Jesus”—across the street from his school. The student had sued the school district, on First Amendment grounds, and, at the time of the lunch, the case was before the Supreme Court. (The school district won.)

During the lunch, everyone was charmed when the Governor’s small daughter Piper popped in to inquire about dessert. Fred Barnes recalled being “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.” It didn’t escape his notice, too, that she was “exceptionally pretty.”

This issue of The New Yorker also has an article that gives hope to those of us who still have creative ambitions long past the date we might have been considered precocious. Malcolm Gladwell writes about the difference between youthful genius and artists who succeed much later in life in an article called "Late Bloomers."



Be sure to visit my CafePress store for gifts and novelty items!
Read my blog on Kindle!

Sarah Palin Visits Richmond

The McCain campaign misled thousands of its supporters in Virginia today, disappointing many of them in the process.

Last week, the campaign announced that vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin would be appearing at a rally in Richmond. The venue was to be the Arthur Ashe Center.

The response was so overwhelming that, two days before the rally (which was scheduled for Columbus Day), it was announced that the venue had been changed to the Richmond International Raceway in Henrico County.

According to the raceway's web site, it can seat up to 112,000 people. So it was not much of a stretch to think that there would be no problem in finding seats for the thousands of people likely to attend.

Attendance was sure to be high, especially since the weather forecast was for clear and sunny conditions with temperatures in the mid- to high 70s -- summer weather for mid-October. Since Monday was a holiday, many people would be free from work and school and able to attend. (Others, of course, would just play hooky.)

To the surprise of many, rather than holding the rally inside the racetrack, campaign organizers had erected temporary bleachers on the RIR parking lot, bleachers which could hold about 2,500 people -- 3,000 if they really were packed tight.

That left 15,000 to 20,000 people standing in line when the rally area was filled up, and standing outside the security perimeter when the rally began and the signs began to wave and the music began to play.

I was lucky. I was among those who got the "best of the worst" in the standing room area -- flush up agains the security fence with a clear view of the podium (so I was actually able to get some good video and photos -- see below).

Others were not so lucky, and were so far away from the action that even the heavy-duty sound system was not sufficient to make Governor Palin's speech audible for them. (Chants of "louder, louder" could be heard from that section of the audience, only to be misinterpreted by the candidate as heckling.)

Had the McCain campaign announced that the rally would be held "on the grounds of the Richmond International Raceway," I would not be so critical of it for being misleading. Sometimes accuracy is the best public relations.

Let's just hope, for the sake of John McCain and Sarah Palin, that this discourteous treatment of supporters and potential voters did not also dissuade some of them from casting their ballots for the Republican ticket on November 4.

With that bit of scolding out of the way, let me turn to a new target.

Sarah Palin announced, before her stump speech, that she had brought "a special guest" with her from Virginia Beach. That guest turned out to be the son of country-music legend Hank Williams, who was invited to sing the national anthem.

What a mistake that turned out to be!

Singing without accompaniment, Hank Williams, Jr. -- most famous in his own right for composing the theme song for Monday Night Football on ABC -- absolutely butchered "The Star Spangled Banner." He started off-key, and only got worse from there.

Put in as kindly a fashion as possible, Williams delivered an idiosyncratic rendering of our national anthem -- and I use "render" in the sense of "tearing into pieces." He was off the beat, improvised his own melody, and just about embarrassed himself and Governor Palin in the process.

Were it not for the crowd singing along -- and singing it correctly -- Williams would have been booed off the stage. And he would have deserved it. His performance made one long for Roseanne Barr.

Want proof? Here's the video.

I have posted more photos from the Richmond International Raceway rally over on Facebook.