"Authors, Artists & Friends" Series

Come hear John Ziegler discuss the death of free speech. It’s on Saturday, June 23, 10 am. It’s free, and it’s at the Glendale Public Library.

Radio talk-show host and TV commentator John Ziegler examines how the news media has created arbitrary, biased, and illogical rules for determining what can and cannot be said in the public arena. He details how in almost every major case of "speech and punishment" in modern America, the guilty verdict was wrong and unjust.

John Ziegler is a veteran of the radio and television industries who has been on the air in several major markets including Raleigh, Nashville, Philadelphia, Louisville, and Los Angeles, where he currently is the host of the evening show on KFI, the most listened to talk-radio station in the country. He has frequently served as a commentator on local and national television shows and as a columnist for numerous newspapers and prominent websites.

If you can’t make the event, or what to know more, check out his book, The Death of Free Speech: How Our Broken National Dialogue Has Killed the Truth and Divided America, an objective, credible, provocative, and entertaining look at one of the most important and underreported realities in American society. No one is in better position to tell this story than John Ziegler as he warns that this most cherished constitutional right is in grave jeopardy.

This Week in Reading June 10 -16

Along with a trio of Nobel Prizewinners this week, (Saul Bellow, Yasunari Kawabata, William Butler Yeats), there may be some other very fine writers who may yet win one. And if there ever was a Nobel Prize for mystery writers Dorothy Sayers would surely have won one. Certainly, if there was one for quotations year after year, before Nobel even lived, John Bartlett would have deserved one too.

However, the week that includes Flag Day is as significant for the democratic milestones that happened as well as the literary ones. Just as the author list has lawyers, businessmen and presidential candidates, and Nat Hentoff, one of the most outspoken and reasonable free speech advocates of his time, the event list includes the birthday of Anne Frank who reminds us what freedom is, and the signing of the Magna Carta which still informs our concepts of freedom.

This Week's Question: Which of this week's authors called William Shakespeare "an upstart crow?"

Answer to Last Week's Question: The first guest Bill Moyers interviewed on his new weekly program, Bill Moyers Journal, was Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. If you can get yourself away from that night's Daily Show, the next gathering of people at the Glendale Central Library to discuss issues raised as Moyers Talkers is Thursday, June 21, 2007 at 7:00 PM in the upstairs Computer Learning Center.