I watched him last night parry with a somewhat bemused Karl Rove as he inveighed against the personal brutality of the web and its effect on chilling the incentive to go into public life or public service. He acknowledged that there was no solution, given the ubiquity of the web and the First Amendment. And I sympathize with the gawkering everyone gets for even tiny mis-steps in their lives. Nonetheless, the alternative is pretty dire. Look at Britain where legal "super-injunctions" against the press are increasingly common and increasingly used to protect the powerful from scrutiny. To wit: Fred Goodwin, the head of the Royal Bank of Scotland when it went belly-up and was bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of over $30 billion, has sought a secret legal injunction against any press mention of an alleged affair between him and a senior colleague:
The existence of the draconian injunction – so strict it prevents Sir Fred being identified as a banker – was disclosed by John Hemming, a back-bench Liberal Democrat MP, in a question during a business debate at the House on Thursday morning. His comments are protected by parliamentary privilege.
He said: "In a secret hearing Fred Goodwin has obtained a super-injunction preventing him being identified as a banker. Will the government have a debate or a statement on freedom of speech and whether there's one rule for the rich like Fred Goodwin and one rule for the poor?"
Britain has a last resort: Parliament where anyone can say anything without fear of being sued for libel. Goodwin, of course, cuts a particularly noxious profile:
Sir Fred, nicknamed Fred "the shred" for his management style … left [RBS] with a pension of £700,000 a year and a lump sum of nearly £3 million. Following a public outcry he later agreed to reduce his payout by £200,000 a year.
The Dish 