The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression issues awards annually to recognize the most egregious limitations on free speech in the US, in violation of the core First Amendment principle that you cannot be punished for expressing an unpopular view. Four of nine awards went to high school administrators or staff for the always-popular tactic of punishing kids whose opinions differ from theirs. Other winners include New York police who imprisoned a man for writing his elected officials, and Indiana prosecutors who had a man jailed for 15 days for burning a flag when the US Supreme Court overturned an identical ban a decade earlier. (found at MetaFilter)

Blocks of programming at Lifetime and Oxygen suddenly understand why all their obvious signals aimed at Showtime Too have been politely ignored.