the repression & censorship will never end, will it?

From: Bob Harris

First Amendment? What First Amendment?

Wednesday, 08 December 2004
This is amazing, one of those so-stupid-and-wrong-it's-hard-to-imagine-even-the-Bushies-could-do-it things:
In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.

The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States.

Here's what this means: the memoirs of last year's Nobel Peace Prize recipient cannot be legally published in the United States. Seriously. Pasternak? Sakharov?
Solzhenitsyn? F*** 'em. Aung San Suu Kyi? Screw her. A book by Mandela during Apartheid? No -- not without the Big Brother's permission.

This flies in the face of everything this country is supposed to stand for.For more, go visit the PEN American Center. Before they're all strapped to gurneys and shipped out of the country, denounced as "delusional."

How massive will the file labeled "we are so f'k'd" become?! How many parallels with dictatorships will it take before people wake up?! Every day the news terrifies me!