IANAL, but, AFAICT, speculation and innuendo most definitely are protected. "Real" journalists do that sort of thing all the time.

e.g. Headline: Is Obama a Muslim? Story: Of course he isn't...

Most people just read the headline. A few months later, their brains will have filtered out the smaller words and just remember "Obama, Muslim". That's one of the big reasons so many people today still believe he is.

I don't remember the target, but I remember a long-running smear campaign a few years back. Some guy registered a domain named something along the lines of so-and-so-is-not-an-idiotic-jerk.com then put up a website full of innuendo. Things like "Are the rumors that so-and-so molests children true? We here at so-and-so-is-not-an-idiotic-jerk.com don't believe them for a second. Anonymous sources claim that so-and-so enjoys torturing kittens, but we don't think those sources are credible."

IIRC, the legal battle was pretty spectacular. After the website owner won, they kissed and made up. He transferred ownership of the domain to his target, and it's been largely forgotten. I'm not having any luck tracking it down on google, so this is hearsay and should probably be ignored.

We also have a lot of leeway when providing examples. It would probably be libel for someone to write "Alex Greeley, of Frog Leap, ND sells illegal fireworks" (I intend that example to be completely fictional. If there is such a person and place, I apologize profusely. I did not mean anything by it). But I could have used a real person and place and probably gotten away with it just fine.

Anyway. What you can't do is come out and make inflammatory declarative statements directly. She apparently wrote that the behavior of some lawyer (who she named) in some case (which she cited) was criminal. No evidence beyond an anonymous source. "Real" journalists can't get away with that sort of thing.

To me, that's why this ruling is so scary. It doesn't seem relevant to the case at hand.

The thing is, Americans take freedom of speech and the press very seriously. Or, at least, we should.

There's a vital reason they're enshrined in the very first Amendment. Right behind freedom of religion. These principles are much more serious than libel and slander. We should be extremely wary of anything that threatens them.

The really sad thing is that corporations donating money for political ads is considered protected free speech. Just more proof of who owns 'our' government.

I'm not claiming that libel/slander are good things. Or even that they aren't serious. Just that this sets the precedent that anyone without the 'proper' credentials can now be suppressed. Say, anyone who questions the official 9/11 story, or criticizes the reasons for going back into Iraq, or points out skeletons in a politician's closet...the potential for abuse here is pretty much limitless.

I'm not going to do your research for you <G>, and I'm not sure I believe a minimum wage is "worthless."

It's a really long topic for discussion. But the basic overview (AIUI) runs along these lines:

A worker's own self-interest keeps the boss from royally fucking him. If he isn't satisfied with how much he's getting paid, he's free to get another job. If no one else is willing to work at that rate, then the boss has to make a better offer.

The idea behind strikes and unions is very closely tied into this. If you have useless dangerous jobs that you could train a chimp to do, and feel like it would be worth $1 an hour to have a human do it instead, that worker really does not have any bargaining power. If all your valuable skilled workers go on strike to get him some safety equipment, it's a lot more likely to happen.

With no minimum wage, if you have three cushy jobs that are worth $3 an hour to your business, you could hire some unskilled teenagers to do them at that rate. They get cushy jobs and start gaining experience in the work force (which is a really important thing to keep in mind). With minimum wage, you have to hire one person to do all 3 jobs, which makes them a lot less cushy and destroys two jobs.

That "gaining experience in the work force" is a really important factor to consider. In a lot of ways, we're still in the middle of the worst economic disaster since the Depression. We have a lot of kids in their mid-20s who are living at home and have never had a job. The entry-level ones they should have worked in high school are filled with people in their mid-30s or 40s who are desperately trying to support families. This kind of long-term unemployment is disastrous for many aspects of their lives. If they could get some job, any job, for $2 an hour...I suspect most would turn their nose up at the chance. But I'm sure some would jump at it.

In my mind, that's kind of where the argument loses at least a little steam. With no minimum wage, the bosses could fire the middle-age people and easily replace them with eager younglings for, say, 1/3 the price. But, if they're willing to do the work for less, shouldn't that option be available to them? I mean, this seems like basic "supply/demand" and "right to make your own decisions about how you spend your time" to me.

In a lot of ways, that ties in with the idea that illegals "steal" American jobs because they work for so little, undercutting minimum wage. There may be some truth to this. I don't really know what (if anything) it says about the minimum wage discussion. OTOH, I've worked for a few people who strongly preferred hiring illegals. Not because they're cheaper (we got paid the same) but because they work so much harder.

Personally, I think minimum wage is, at best, a band-aid on a much bigger problem. We get focused on questions like it and ignore the more fundamental questions. (Whatever they may be).

I know this isn't the answer you're looking for. But hopefully it's a little more useful than Arlet's.

That last part is really the misconception that underlies one of the core truths of our culture. The idea that those things should be locked up and dribbled out in exchange for work.

If that changes, so will pretty much everything else about our reality. Personally, I think this would be a really Good Thing.

Historically speaking, abundance-style cultures like smbell is talking about are much happier all around. They're still human, so of course those problems are still present. But they're much less prevalent. Because their people are so much happier the ones in scarcity-driven cultures like ours.

How many "primitive" cultures have we run across who voluntarily embraced our way of life?

Redistribution is just another word for theft.

Imagine a society in which there aren't any "poor", because everyone has free and open access to the resources that matter (food, most importantly). There'd probably still be the rich, because of the originally mentioned tendency of some to accumulate junk they don't need, but, really, who cares?

I think the industrial revolution is really just the tip of this sort of iceberg. _Cradle to Cradle_ has a very interesting perspective on it.

Personally, I think your "solution" is pretty much exactly the wrong direction. Until we get to the GP's "Sci-Fi Paradise", central planning and collectivism are inevitably doomed. I'd like to see basic life-style guarantees (not income. But, say, food, clothing, and shelter) for everyone, but I don't know whether that's actually a realistic expectation. Or even a worthwhile goal. If there's an unlimited food supply, we have to start talking about population control, which turns into a very ugly conversation very quickly.

I just don't believe that government should be involved in charity. I guess it would be all right if contributions were completely voluntary, but then we could have a private non-profit organization (or, even better, organizations) handle it all instead.