For my liberal friends who believe that criticizing or failing to recognize as brilliant those on the loony left is tantamount to suppression of free speech, there is a new TV program for you - The First Amendment Project (Watch What You Say) on the Sundance Channel.

The second episode deals with Amiri Baraka who was New Jersey's poet laureate until the state legislature took it away from him based on some controversial statements he made. Here was his response to that action from his website.

The vote in the NJ Legislature today (38-2) to eliminate the NJ Poet Laureate position is confirmation of the ignorance, corruption, racism and
criminal disregard for the US Constitution.
To their credit Assemblyman, Wm Payne and Senator Donald Tucker were the sole voices trying to up hold the poet's Constitutional First Amendment rights.
But this finally illegal vote is also a violation of Article 1, section 10(1) of the U.S. Constitution ( that neither congress nor the states could pass Ex Post Facto Laws, i.e., a law in the present that will make something that happened before that subject to the contemporary statute
The vote is also an infamous confirmation of the anti-democratic , neo fascist direction that the entire US nation has been headed since the right wing coup that passed as the 2000 National Election that brought to ascendancy and murderous power, a counterfeit President for an increasingly fake democracy.
This attack on the US Constitution has been led by the Israeli Lobbyist Anti Defamation League who cite three lines of a 244 line poem as proof of the poet's
"Anti-Semitism" ("Who told 400 Israeli workers at the twin towers to stay home that day/ Who told Sharon to stay away").
The ADL in characteristic dishonesty claims the mention of Israeli nationals is an attack on Jews, as if they did not understand the difference between the religion, Judaism and the reactionary nationalism of Israeli political Zionism. But that is done to cover the fact that American Jews were left to be killed in the World Trade Center with the rest of we Americans, because ISRAEL REGARDS AMERICAN JEWS AS AMERICANS, FIRST, Whom the ADL and the state of Israel regard only as sources of wealth and influence which they must not lose. Zionist Israel sees the American people the same way, as a cash cow and political justifier of their historic policy of ethnic cleansing of Arabs out of Palestine.
That is why it was Israeli Nationals that were warned and NOT American Jews.

Oh. I am so pissed off at Ariel Sharon for not telling me to stay home from work on 9/11. Doesn't he know how much money I give to Israel?