"Retard." It is still legal to say it. But should it be?

While most of the world is latching onto Twitter as a lifeline to break through the media clutter in desperate times, an increasing number in Hollywood are seeing it as something else entirely; a threat to everything they hold precious.

We've always thought the Supreme Court could be livened up with more dog fights. Now, thanks to a controversy over something called "free speech," we're getting our wish. And the result could rip the liberal set asunder!

Speaking of idiotic uproars over cartoons, at colleges: The guy who drew the Danish Muhammad cartoon that set off worldwide riots is coming to Yale—the provincial little school whose University Press allows religious psychos to dictate what it publishes.

Julie Hilden is not happy with Google. The company was "cowardly" and "fence sitting" in a lawsuit exposing an anonymous blogger who badmouthed a model, the lawyer wrote on FindLaw. In other words, Blogger.com doesn't have your back, namecallers.

That which we feared most hath come to pass: Mean, anonymous people are being forcefully purged from the internet, with lawsuits. First the skankblogger affair, and now it's happening again! Uh, sort of.

Harvard Medical School tried to tell its own students they couldn't speak to the (scary) media without the school's official permission. Shut up, college—literally! Haha. No we did not go to Harvard, why? Luckily!

Earlier this year, the government passed a new law that totally kneecapped the ability of marketing wizards to educate the public on how awesome cigarettes are, in Flavor Country (America). Luckily, the media's favorite lawyer is on the case!

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor helped crush the dreams of a teenage girl last year by joining in a ruling that let a school punish a student for calling its superintendent a "douche bag" on her blog.

Back in the day, bloggers who didn't do any reporting like Mickey Kaus and Jeff Jarvis and probably Glenn Reynolds used to spend a great deal of time talking about how the blogs (specifically their blogs) would soon supplant the "Main Stream Media" forever. Well, some years have passed, and the MSM is in dire straits, but blogs have not really made much of a dent in CNN and the New York Times' market share, eyeballs-wise, and the boundary-blurring has manifested itself mainly as old school publications getting a little more "webby" in tone and content. There is one metric, though, that has bloggers pulling ahead of their MSM counterparts: jail time! The Committee to Protect Journalists just released its 2008 prison census, and as you can see in the attached pie chart, internet people finally make up a greater share of the journo prison population than snooty newspaper jerks. Way to go, internet, and Burma! [CPJ]

Hey, you know what will be nice? Whoever the hell Barack Obama appoints to the FCC can't possibly be as incredibly asinine as the current crew. Back in 2004, popular singer Janet Jackson's nipple destroyed America's innocence forever. The FCC fined CBS stations $550,000 for allowing the nipple to terrorize the children. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the fine, because the FCC has for decades not punished fleeting, incidental nudity on television, and also because come on get over it. But the FCC is now appealing to the Supreme Court, which may find in their favor! The Supreme Court is already dealing with the FCC's fight with Fox. Fox's crime? Allowing Bono to swear on television. We want Bono off our televisions as much as the next guy, but the new FCC policy of allowing incidental, fleeting profanities in some instances, like news programs or in Supreme Court oral arguments regarding profanity, while handing fines out for random cursing during live award shows is maybe a bit arbitrary and capricious, right? Still, the FCC is liking its chances in the Fox case, and so they are going to fight the nipple thing to the bitter end. Because the founding fathers always intended us to be a nation of prudish vulgarians. (It's in the Constitution's special Unrated edition.)

In America (the Land of the Free) you can't win a libel suit unless you can prove not only that what was published was false, but also that it was published with actual malice—i.e., you must show that someone meant to hurt you on purpose with false information. But in the UK, the situation is the opposite; it's up to the publisher to prove what they wrote is true. So offended parties from across the world practice "libel tourism," filing suits in the UK against writers and media outlets who have only sold a few copies there, in order to take advantage of the crazy English laws. Luckily our (USA) legislators have now done something useful by protecting gossip sites like us from libel suits across the pond. Here's how one evil Saudi billionaire is helping Gawker write more freely: Commentary has a think piece out this month on new legislation signed by New York's heroic blind governor last spring, which allows judges here to invalidate libel judgments obtained in countries with lesser free speech protections (hello, UK). The prime motivation was reportedly the nonstop libel tourism of Khalid bin Mahfouz (see below), which threatened to bankrupt some journalists. Huzzah for our right to write things, and yours to read them! Here are some of recent history's most notable libel tourists:

Here's where we play Goofus & Gallant, European nations edition. Gallant Denmark stood up in favor of the rights of publishers when those stupid, mediocre cartoons about the prophet Muhammed caused worldwide outrage and riots a couple years back. Goofus Netherlands, on the other hand, recently threw a cartoonist in jail for drawing cartoons that might be offensive to Muslims. By all accounts the cartoonist, "Gregorius Nekschot," is offensive to Muslims. That makes his arrest no less phenomenally stupid.

This is why Google has spent a decade collecting and preserving all the information it can gather about everyone on Earth: so it can prove in a court of law that your neighbors are perverts. There's an obscenity trial going on down in Florida, where life itself is generally obscene, against an icky hardcore pornographer (first they came for CumOnHerFace.com, and I said nothing, because I preferred alt-porn). In an obscenity trial, the prosecutors must prove that the material is in violation of "community standards." This is, obviously, a ridiculous yardstick. Everyone who watches movies knows that just below the friendly surface of American Suburbia lies violence, depravity, secret gay neighbors, and Dean Stockwell in eyeshadow. But jurors like to pretend that they've never enjoyed a little Skinimax. This is where Google—and your deepest, darkest secrets—come into play!

Remember Alex Kozinski, the 9th Circuit Court Judge who's been forced to recuse himself from an obscenity trial because of BESTIALITY PORN POSTED ON HIS WEBSITE? What a wacky story, right? Hah! That maroon! Yes well it turns out it's actually a depressing tale of outright journalistic malfeasance that could impact an important first amendment case, but whatever. The Judge, Alex Kozinski, has already declared a mistrial, and all that's left is for his wife to pen angry letters to blogs. It's all the L.A. Times' fault!

The Los Angeles Times revealed that 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alex Kozinski was hosting some porny images of girls done up like cows and other niceties on what he thought was a private server. Smut pundit Susannah Breslin suggests that now Judge Kozinski himself may be the one testing the limits of the "2 Girls, 1 Cup defense" that defendant Ira Isaacs was going for. Namely, that what was once "obscene" is now merely "shocking" and fine for the whole family to make YouTube response videos about.

A young man in Saudi Arabia (he is delivering a kidney to his father—no joke!) reports that the site of Fouad al Farhan, the Saudi blogger jailed last year, is blocked. Along with Radar, Fleshbot, and Craigslist Casual Encounters. [Kidney and the Kingdom]

Internet nerds became terribly excited recently when Twitter sprung a man from jail, but it's worth noting that in most of the world, blogging is much, much more likely to send you to to clink. While there are a number of bloggers whose eternal imprisonment—possibly in the Phantom Zone—we fantasize about daily, we grudgingly admit that throwing bloggers in jail for blogging is probably bad. So as a public service, we're here to tell you where not to blog if you value your freedom. China and Iran probably get the most press for their blogger crack-downs, and Malaysia just arrested a blogger this week, but if there's anything we learned from skimming the site of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, it's this: don't Tumblr in Egypt.

America's very very close friends in the Saudi government arrested and detained a young blogger named Fouad Farhan, shut down his site, detained him for four months without charges, and finally released him on Saturday. Thankfully, they have a very very good explanation for all that: "'We have ... what we call electronic crimes—any kind of violation related to computer and technology and so on,' Interior Ministry spokesman Gen. Mansour Al Turki told the Monitor when asked why Fouad Farhan had been jailed. [...]'And I believe his main case was like violating personal rights.... Like when I go for example on the Internet or I go on any electronic media and I use your name and your personality and I criticize ... or offend you without being able to introduce evidence of what I'm saying.'" So. He was arrested for electronic crimes. Farhan could still be prosecuted for his "electronic crimes" despite the release. Farhan's worst electronic crime against the government?

After Bjork repeatedly yelled, "Tibet!" during a concert in Shanghai last week, Chinese officials decided to "tighten its controls over foreign singers and other performers." Yelling "Tibet" broke a law, and so the Chinese people can no longer have nice things such as concerts. [Reuters]