"""""""Shut Up, They Explained
The left's regulatory war against free speech.
Shut Up, They Explained
The left's regulatory war against free speech.
BY BRIAN C. ANDERSON
Wednesday, January 25, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
The rise of alternative media--political talk radio in the 1980s, cable news in the '90s, and the blogosphere in the new millennium--has broken the liberal monopoly over news and opinion outlets. The left understands acutely the implications of this revolution, blaming much of the Democratic Party's current electoral trouble on the influence of the new media's vigorous conservative voices. Instead of fighting back with ideas, however, today's liberals quietly, relentlessly and illiberally are working to smother this flourishing universe of political discourse under a tangle of campaign-finance and media regulations. Their campaign represents the most sustained attack on free political speech in the United States since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. Though Republicans have the most to lose in the short run, all Americans who care about our most fundamental rights and the civic health of our democracy need to understand what's going on--and resist it."""""
Anderson then exposes the statists behind this movement. It should come as no surprise that fascists like George Soros lead the way. So is the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Ford Foundation(Nothing to do with Ford cars anymore). There's a reason why in my lobbying reform post that I pushed for full disclosure of these "non-political" foundations.
"""Mr. Treglia urged grantees to keep Pew's role hush-hush. "If Congress thought this was a Pew effort," he confided, "it'd be worthless. It'd be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain." At one point, late in the congressional debate over McCain-Feingold, "we had a scare," Mr. Treglia said. "George Will stumbled across a report we had done. . . . He started to reference the fact that Pew was playing a large role . . . [and] that it was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress. . . . The good news, from my perspective, was that journalists . . . just didn't care and nobody followed up." The hoaxers--a conspiracy of eight left-wing foundations, including George Soros's Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation--have actually spent $123 million trying to get other people's money out of politics since 1994, Mr. Sager reports--nearly 90% of the spending by the entire campaign-finance lobby over this period.""""
And now, John McCain and the rest of the anti-freedom statists are after the blogsphere.
"""""Campaign-finance reform now has the blogosphere in its crosshairs. When the Federal Election Commission wrote specific rules in 2002 to implement McCain-Feingold, it voted 4-2 to exempt the Web. After all, observed the majority of three Republicans and one Democrat (the agency divides its seats evenly between the two parties), Congress didn't list the Internet among the "public communications"--everything from television to roadside billboards--that the FEC should regulate. Further, "the Internet is virtually a limitless resource, where the speech of one person does not interfere with the speech of anyone else," reasoned Republican commissioner Michael Toner. "Whereas campaign finance regulation is meant to ensure that money in politics does not corrupt candidates or officeholders, or create the appearance thereof, such rationales cannot plausibly be applied to the Internet, where on-line activists can communicate about politics with millions of people at little or no cost."
But when the chief House architects of campaign-finance reform, joined bySens. McCain and Russ Feingold, sued--claiming that the Internet was one big "loophole" that allowed big money to keep on corrupting--a federal judge agreed, ordering the FEC to clamp down on Web politics. Then-commissioner Bradley Smith and the two other Republicans on the FEC couldn't persuade their Democratic colleagues to vote to appeal.
The FEC thus has plunged into what Smith calls a "bizarre" rule-making process that could shackle the political blogosphere. This would be a particular disaster for the right, which has maintained its early advantage over the left in the blogosphere, despite the emergence of big liberal sites like Daily Kos. Some 157 of the top 250 political blogs express right-leaning views, a recent liberal survey found. Reaching a growing and influential audience--hundreds of thousands of readers weekly (including most journalists) for the top conservative sites--the blogosphere has enabled the right to counter the biases of the liberal media mainstream. Without the blogosphere, Howell Raines would still be the New York Times' editor, Dan Rather would only now be retiring, garlanded with praise--and John Kerry might be president of the U.S., assuming that CBS News had gotten away with its falsehood about President Bush's military service that the diligent bloggers at PowerLine, LittleGreenFootballs and other sites swiftly debunked.""""""
Well, if McCain's buddy bureaucrats want to pick a fight with me after I kick his arse out of Michigan in 2008, I'll give them one. All the way to the Roberts/Alito Supreme Court.
The Fairness Doctrine is threatening to make a comeback as well. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D) of New York makes this arrogant comment about too much freedom. The Fairness Doctrine regulated political speech.
Small wonder, then, that House Democrats proposed two bills in 2005 to bring the Fairness Doctrine back--and as a law, rather than a mere regulation. Rep. Louise Slaughter of New York, who introduced the first of the two bills, says that right-ruled radio is a grave threat to American freedoms, "a waste of good broadcast time, and a waste of our airwaves." People "may hear whatever they please and whatever they choose," she tells PBS's Bill Moyers, in a statement as incoherent as it is illiberal. "And of course they have the right to turn it off. But that's not good enough either. The fact is that they need the responsibility of the people who are licensed to use our airwaves judiciously and responsibly to call them to account if they don't." In other words, people can't be trusted with freedom but need the supervision of a paternalist government.
Hanoi John Kerry also chimes in.
"""There has been a profound and negative change in the relationship of America's media with America's people," John Kerry told the Boston Globe's Thomas Oliphant after losing the 2004 presidential race. "We learned that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning," he said, inaccurately. "But there's a . . . submedia that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information," he complained. "This all began, incidentally, when the Fairness Doctrine ended," Mr. Kerry maintained. "You would have had a dramatic change in the discussion in this country had we still had a Fairness Doctrine in the course of the last campaign."""
You mean Dan Rather the liar? Or Jayson Blair and Fox Butterfield of the NY Times?
These are scary times for supporters of Free Speech. It is under dire threat by the left and a few RINOS. The establishment left especially despises blogs, talk radio, and non-beltway filtered media. Consistantly anti-freedom, these are usually the same people who oppose the Second Amendment. As Anderson points out, George Soros's prints are on this. These people like McCain, Slaughter, Kerry, and others will continue to be pushing to destroy the first amendment until they are destroyed politically.
They all need to be taken out election time. Our nation's freedom depends on it.
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