Enemies of Free Speech

Some folks are only in favor of free speech as long as they agree with the content of that speech. If popular speech was all we worried about there would have been no need for the First Amendment. But government censorship is not all that we need to fear.

Last Wednesday ftrradio.com was subject to a Denial of Service attack. Hundreds of simultaneous connections were made from the same IP address. Each connection would drop after 62 seconds and then reconnect. The effect was to tie up all of the ports on our Internet radio station so that nobody could connect and hear our programming. Ironically the attack came from the network of the Random House publishing empire. Random House has yet to respond to a complaint sent to their abuse and hostmaster e-mail addresses.

Today the forces of tolerance struck again. ftrradio.com had put up a site called RespectTheGreatGame.com. We wanted to know why Major League Baseball, who have had a policy against hate speech since at least the era of Marge Schott, had a virulent hate monger like Keith Olbermann as one of their official bloggers. We put up a video with some of Olby's nastiness, links to other examples, and a petition. We weren't calling for a boycott of MSNBC or Major League Baseball, we just wanted to ask why MLB thinks this purveyor of hate speech was an acceptable spokesman.

14 hours after the site went live and we announced it with a press release and assorted tweets on Twitter, the site was hacked and the data base corrupted. Right now we just have the skeleton of the site restored, and the original Olbermann video montage. But if you want to understand why the site was put up in the first place, please read this eloquent piece from our friends at Liberty Pundits.

The RespectTheGreatGame.com site will be back. Olbermann may be able to get people from his own network pulled off the air for not kissing his, er, feet, but this is still America.