Yeah...she's also married to one of the largest defense contractors on the coast and calls herself antiwar too. We refer to her as Joanne Lieberstein in Southern Cal.

Ah, good ol' Joe.

I was young and foolish enough to believe that his bullshit would've been a wake up call to fellow classical liberals, but it wasn't.

Yep - brings me back to the good old days of faux-news trotting out a 49 R-senators and Joe as a "bipartisan vote"

There's a real battle going on within the Democratic party now and she sounds like the latest victim.

The "energy" with the far left is a nice way of describing the gravity that's shifting all political affiliations.

Liberal is also taking on new meaning as more "conservatives" are willing to accept socially liberal ideal (gay marriage)as well as more likely to defend constitutionally liberal ideas such as freedom of speech which the far Left is bent on suppressing.

That's all really in the mainstream now. The far Left also includes full on Socialists which in turn have created reactionary Nationalists. May you live in interesting times.

Stop it with the 'suppression of freedom of speech' nonsense.

Freedom of speech means the government can't arrest you for what you say. That's IT. Nothing more, nothing less. It does not mean freedom from consequences.

Your name can be dragged through the mud on social media. Your business can be boycotted out of existence. Universities can choose to not have you speak on their campuses. These are all perfectly legal and constitutionally protected ways of expressing disapproval of hate speech. None of them involves the government.

So until you show me where the left is having the government ARREST people for what they're saying, knock it off.

Tax dollars support a lot of things. There's a big difference between receiving money from the government, and being *part* of the government. Hell, that's why Republicans love privitization--they can operate using tax dollars without being part of the government.

No, I won't stop because it's called the Overton Window and allowing it to become acceptable to riot, block, and threaten people for their views is a dangerous path to be on.

You're either not paying attention or just agree with everything that's going on. I'm going to bet the latter since this kind of response really comes across as canned and poorly thought out. Freedom of Speech is an ideal. It is an ideal that precedes government to which the US Constitution alludes and subsequent judicial decisions have come to ingrain in our culture.

Your issue is with private citizens, not the government.

Citizens are protesting, blocking, and threatening what they consider to be unacceptable positions. Protesters are going to protest, and have the right to do so. The government's job is to prevent violence or crimes from occurring, not providing you a protest-free venue. No one is getting harmed without it being considered a big deal (which is not to say that people are not being harmed) on both sides.

Until I see the far right denouncing the exact same behavior, perhaps I'll find your hand-wringing over your loss of 'freedom of speech' just a tad disingenuous.

Your link is a red herring. Abortionists are not speakers, and abortions are not speech. This has no relevance to the discussion. It reveals the weakness of your position that you are reduced to citing someone utterly divorced from the conversation at hand.

I mean... it's pretty easy to find this stuff.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/24/republican-lawmakers-introduce-bills-to-curb-protesting-in-at-least-17-states/

https://action.aclu.org/secure/nd-standing-rock-sioux-tribe

Much less the President's attacks on the free press.

Abortionists are citizens and so have the same right to your definition of 'freedom of speech' even if they have 'inconvenient views'. Abortion is a legal action (being blocked, threatened) in the same way you are complaining speaking on universities is being blocked/threatened.

So yes, it is relevant in that you can't stand for one and not the other. Either people should be allowed to do legal things without being threatened/harmed or they should not. You (and the side you represent) do not get to be the arbiter of what is and isn't speech/allowed/protected.

When you stand up for ALL Americans, including those that hold legal views different from your own, I will have some sympathy for your "terrible" plight of not being able to speak at universities without protesters showing up.

When I discover that the person I am conversing with can’t understand the distinction between a commencement address and a dead fetus I know that the conversation has run its course.

I'm not here to argue whether you agree or disagree with the politics of an action.

Regardless of what you say, both actions are currently legal and for both actions people are being harassed and physically harmed. To avoid being a hypocrite, you cannot say one action, protected by law, does NOT deserve to be protected and then cry that another action, also protected by law, is being suppressed.

If you were TRULY concerned about the 'ideal' of freedom, that anything protected by law should actually be protected by law, then you would cry out against injustice, harassment, and physical violence in any of its forms. However, as you, norok, and fish have patently shown, you only care about injustices happening to conservatives at the moment.

Even more ironic is that your solution would be to remove the very freedom of speech (protesting) that these American citizens are participating in against you.

Should there be violence, harassment, or threats? No. However, I expect you to clean up your house before you start crying 'oh god oh god the fascists are coming for us'.

In all honesty, I pity you. You do not appear to have the ability to see the argument from outside yourself and your own locked down viewpoints. Once you have shown cognitive dissonance, there's very little chance that an outside party will change your mind.

Taxman’s absurdly narrow (re) definition of free speech is an integral tactic of the left’s suppression of speech. Violent intimidation on university campuses is redefined as “speech”, while the silenced speech itself is erased, by denying any speech suppression has occurred. It’s textbook Orwell.

The fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists.

Not really. She's definitely no victim.

She's been CA Senator for 25 years now and can take care of herself. There's a reason she runs virtually unopposed every election, with only some token R tomato-can trotted out every election on the ballot (even with CAs open primaries). And she's got the money, connections, and ruthless savvy to put out just about everyone who wants to come after her lights if she wanted to.

This just sounds like the start to the 2018's out here. Should be fun - maybe California will get that Rosanne Barr / Cindy Sheehan gubernatorial ticket thing going again.

Wrong word perhaps. Let's go with casualty or 'subject of'

I have many friends that live in Democrat strongholds like Washington, California, and Chicago where the Republican party is a complete non-factor and races are between two flavors of Democrats. In Chicago especially I wonder if they'll ever figure out a pattern for their troubles.

As a gun toting liberal I loath this woman. She badivally stands for everything that I don't agree with in the Democratic platform and very little of the good. I've been voting away from her my entire life. The Democrats need to learn that people have changed. We vote on issues and policys how we decide on not how party lines tell us we should.