Speech

Washington. -- Could Leonard Jeffries be right? He is the racist and anti-Semite who until last year headed the black-studies department of the City College of New York. He was removed from that post after he delivered a speech in which he talked of an anti-black ''conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood'' by ''people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani.''Mr. Jeffries didn't lose his tenured professorship, and he kept his $70,000 salary. But that didn't stop him from suing the college and recovering $400,000 for the violation of his First Amendment rights.

Strange bedfellows have teamed up in defense of the First Amendment, which is under attack by equally strange bedfellows. The conservative Rep. Henry J. Hyde, R-Ill., introduced a bill to ban campus codes against ''hate speech.'' Cheering him on was the liberal Nadine Strossen, head of the American Civil Liberties Union.At issue are the ''sensitivity codes'' by which a number of American colleges and universities hope to teach their students basic kindergarten manners. Most of the codes ban racism, sexism and other intolerant ''isms.

Would The Sun please stop printing letters or articles that promote the idea of "freedom of speech" in Super Bowl Ads? If one would like to admonish Susan Reimer to purchase her own Super Bowl ad, fine, but do not include allusions to freedom of speech because CBS and other like media are not government entitites. No Constitutional issue of speech is implicated without the government stopping speech. Last I looked CBS is not the U.S.A. Super Bowl ads are a commercial venture. If one wants to buy an ad and a media outlet wants to air it, done deal.

When Gov. Martin O'Malley takes the stage at the Democratic convention to give the most important speech of his political career, he'll have to deliver on one deceptively simple goal: He'll need to make people want to hear more. As an increasingly polished speaker and in-demand message man for his party, O'Malley will have an opportunity in Charlotte to solidify his standing as a possible presidential candidate in 2016. He'll also get the chance to redeem himself from the last time he stood on a convention stage eight years ago and flubbed it with a speech criticized as pretentious.

Building atop the rotten foundation it laid three decades ago, the Supreme Court late last month struck down the "millionaire's amendment," a federal law that helped keep congressional elections competitive when a candidate used a personal fortune to fund a campaign. The law could have applied to 28 or more races this year. The court's ruling in Federal Election Commission v. Davis repeatedly references its 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which wrote between the lines of the First Amendment passage, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech," to declare that spending money to influence elections is constitutionally protected free speech.

It's not that Cal Ripken Jr. is at all ungrateful, but you've got to understand, over the past few months, virtually everyone he encounters goes through the same two-step greeting. First, they want to congratulate him. Tell him he's the greatest, how well-deserved this Hall of Fame induction really is and how Baltimore and the Orioles and human existence as we know it just wouldn't be the same without him. "When people say congratulations to you all the time or they kind of place you on a little higher pedestal than you think you deserve, it makes you feel a little uncomfortable," Ripken conceded yesterday.

WASHINGTON -- Reaction to President Bush's latest Iraq war speech was mixed yesterday, with Democrats largely scorning his remarks and Republicans voicing optimism that it signaled a shift toward a more informed discussion of the road ahead. But fewer Republicans appeared to go out of their way to talk about Bush's appearance at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Among those notably silent: one of two Republican congressmen from Maryland, where antiwar sentiment is running high. Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest did not respond to repeated requests to his office for comment.

WASHINGTON -- The overture for the Senate's campaign finance opera was operatic indignation about President Bush's decision against cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Reformers said the decision was a payoff for the coal industry's campaign contributions. But natural gas interests, rivals of the coal interests, suffered from Mr. Bush's decision -- yet they gave Republicans more money ($4.8 million) last year than coal interests gave ($3.37 million). The "reforming" senators began their reforming by legislating for themselves an even stronger entitlement to buy television time at a discount, and by voting themselves a right to take larger contributions (up to $6,000, rather than just $1,000)

Gov. Martin O'Malley has postponed his State of the State address Wednesday to avoid a conflict with President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech planned for later that day. O'Malley becomes the second governor to shift his annual address because of Obama's schedule. Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, a Democrat like O'Malley, made a similar decision earlier in the week. O'Malley's address will now be Feb. 4, rather than Jan. 27. Asked about the conflict earlier in the week, O'Malley's office said the date would not be changed.

FYI Because of the holiday, box office does not appear today. It will be published later this week.