Flag@WhiteHouse.gov

Sid Salter gets it right on his blog.

When protesters from the left — environmentalists, labor unions, the pro-choice lobby, civil rights advocates, health care reform advocates, anti-war activists, you name it — take to the streets, disrupt speeches or public meetings or shout down speakers, it's hailed as political activism and noble expressions of dissent. Most of the time, those protests are cloaked in the most noble of terms: "Speaking truth to power."

But when protesters from the right — TEA party organizers, the pro-life lobby, gun owners, veterans groups, fiscal conservatives, capitalists, free marketers and anti-immigration groups — take to the streets, disrupt speeches, or shout down speakers, they are tarred by the federal government as right-wing extremists and it is suggested that their ideas are subversive in nature.

Moveon.org is billed as "Democracy in action."

But the National Taxpayers Union and similar organizations are part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy."

It's disingenuous in the extreme for the Obama administration to complain about organized opposition to some of his initiatives — not while the administration itself is a well-oiled public relations machine churning out an electronic torrent of e-mails, tweets and other digital information designed to sway the public toward supporting its goals or opposing those who questions them.

We have the leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives - the Speaker of the House and the Democratic Majority Leader - calling dissent "Un-American" in a guest column in a national newspaper.

We have the White House Deputy Chief of Staff calling on Democrats that get "hit" by dissent to "punch back twice as hard.”

We have the White House asking citizens to forward to the Obama Administration emails that conflict with their message on health care, "If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov." I'm not sure if the "flag" references Old Glory or whether it references our new patriotic duty to identify dissent and inform the government, or maybe both.



The Obama Administration might be violating the law with flag@whitehouse.gov, not that most media outlets are reporting it. Can you imagine the outrage if the Bush Administration had asked citizens to forward "fishy" emails of dissent against the war in Iraq? There would have been talk of impeachment.

"The White House is in bit of a conundrum because of this privacy statute that prohibits the White House from collecting data and storing it on people who disagree with it," Judge Andrew Napolitano, a FOX News analyst, said Friday.

"There's also a statute that requires the White House to retain all communications that it receives. It can't try to rewrite history by pretending it didn't receive anything," he said.

"If the White House deletes anything, it violates one statute. If the White House collects data on the free speech, it violates another statute."

Napolitano was referring to the Privacy Act of 1974, which was passed after the Nixon administration used federal agencies to illegally investigate individuals for political purposes. Enacted after Richard Nixon's resignation in the Watergate scandal, the statute generally prohibits any federal agency from maintaining records on individuals exercising their right to free speech.

What would our Founding Fathers think?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.