The Fairness Doctrine was a policy of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was (in the Commission’s view) honest, equitable and balanced.  In 1987, the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine, prompting some to urge its reintroduction through either Commission policy or Congressional legislation^. Currently, there is an outcry to add “fairness” back into talk radio – which is deemed as unfair by liberals, since the radio waves are dominated by talk show conservatives.
This is a curious issue, since both liberals and conservatives have had their chance at radio. The public decides who to listen to, who has the highest ratings, hence the resulting sponsor money and potential national syndication. If your show is unpopular, it goes off the air with poor share ratings and lack of adequate sponsorship.

Whatever the reason, this medium does not work for liberals. Perhaps conservatives listen to more radio, and it is a preference issue. Maybe liberals watch more tv and do more internet surfing – who knows? Conservatives may have better hosts. Does it matter? Can / should you legislate “fairness”? Why should we? This seems to be the same thought process that condones children not having to fail, and everyone wanting to feel good about life every day.

The entire premise that we legislate and control what types of shows and how much time they receive, sends a chill up my spine. Freedom of speech is only valid when I am saying what you like to hear? My freedom is constrained to “equal time” of 3 hrs per day, for example? As a radio listener, I have a choice whether to change the station or not – let’s leave the solution to this issue there. Let the people decide with their fingers on the radio dial.

Bob Ney’s best known Congressional work was on the election reform efforts founded in the wake of the confused 2000 voting in Florida, and his support and backing for the “Stand Up For Steel” crusade and resulting laws. From 2001 to 2006, Ney was Chairman of the House Administration Committee. As chair of that committee, he oversaw operations in the Capitol complex and was sometimes known as the “Mayor of Capitol Hill”. Ney also gained notoriety when he mandated, as Chairman of the House Administration Committee, that “french fries” be renamed “freedom fries” on House of Representatives food service menus, to indicate displeasure with France’s lack of support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Before he pled guilty, Ney was identified in the guilty pleas of Jack Abramoff, former Tom DeLay deputy chief of staff Tony Rudy, former DeLay press secretary Michael Scanlon and former Ney chief of staff Neil Volz for receiving lavish gifts in exchange for political favors.

On May 18, 2006, the House Ethics Committee announced an investigation into bribery allegations against Ney, and on August 7, 2006, Ney announced that he was withdrawing from the 2006 election race. On September 15, 2006, the Justice Department filed Ney’s guilty pleas to a charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to a charge of falsifying financial disclosure forms. Both charges are related to actions taken on behalf of Abramoff’s clients in exchange for bribes, as well as separate actions taken on behalf of a foreign businessman in exchange for over $50,000 in gambling sprees at foreign private casinos. Ney is the first member of Congress to admit to criminal charges in the Abramoff investigation, which has focused on the actions of several current and former Republican lawmakers who had been close to the former lobbyist. Ney resigned from the House of Representatives on November 3, 2006. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison. He was released on August 15, 2008 after serving 17 months.
Now? He is becoming a talkshow host…so – when all else fails in life, become a “talking head”.

Jacob Weisberg NEWSWEEK From the magazine issue dated Dec 22, 2008

Corruption in Illinois is mainly pedestrian and shameful. In Louisiana, it’s flamboyant and shameless. With the unmasking of Gov. Rod Blagojevich as a kleptocrat of Paraguayan proportion, Illinois now has a real chance—if the allegations prove true— to defeat Louisiana in the NCAA finals of American political corruption. The land of Lincoln boasts some impressive stats. Dick Simpson, a political scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says more than 1,000 people have been convicted in political corruption cases since 1971, including an astonishing 30 aldermen. If Blagojevich goes to prison, he will be the fourth of the last eight governors to wear stripes, joining predecessors George Ryan (racketeering, conspiracy, obstruction), Dan Walker (bank fraud) and Otto Kerner (straight-up bribery). Should he be assigned to the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., Blagojevich could become the first governor to share a cell with someone he defeated at the polls. But don’t count Louisiana out. According to the Corporate Crime Reporter, it was No. 1 for the period between 1997 and 2006 with 326 federal corruption convictions. That’s a rate of 7.67 per 100,000. Illinois had 524 convictions in the same period, but with a larger population, its rate was only 4.68, which puts it an embarrassing sixth. And Louisiana can boast some impressive streaks. In 2001 Jim Brown became the third consecutive insurance commissioner to be convicted. Rep. William Jefferson, who was just defeated for re-election following corruption charges, apparently liked cold, hard cash so much he kept bundles of it in his freezer. His brother, sister and niece recently joined him under indictment. (Jefferson, his brother and niece have pleaded not guilty; his sister has pleaded guilty.) Corruption in Illinois grows out of a tradition of patronage politics—not just the old Democratic machine in Chicago, but also a Republican machine in the suburbs. Even as old-school politics has faded, however, scandals in Illinois have retained their ward-boss flavor. They still tend to revolve around petty, methodical rake-offs from the quotidian operations of government: liquor licenses, elevator inspections, speeding tickets and, above all, hiring. The paradigmatic Illinois crook was Paul Powell, who served as secretary of state in the 1960s. When Powell died, his executor found shoeboxes filled with $800,000 in cash (along with 49 cases of whisky and two of creamed corn) in the Springfield hotel room where he lived. The money had been collected in $5 and $10 increments from applicants who wanted to make sure they passed their driving tests. Under the old Richard J. Daley machine, city workers had to kick back about 5 percent of their salaries to the political organization that guaranteed their jobs. When, on a tapped phone line, he allegedly insisted that “you don’t just give it away for nothing,” Blagojevich was applying an old precept—though possibly for the first time at a senatorial level.
The Louisiana pathology is slightly different. Wayne Parent, a professor of political science at LSU, explains that with the discovery of oil and gas around 1912, politicians in the dirt-poor state suddenly controlled a gold mine in tax revenue. “They could spend this money virtually unsupervised,” he says, “as long as they threw enough crumbs to the masses to satisfy them.” This was the formula of populist governors Huey Long; his brother, Earl Long; and Edwin Edwards. Louisiana politicians have always liked big bribes for big projects better than crooked little schemes: Edwards, for instance, is serving time for collecting a $400,000 gratuity in exchange for a casino license.
The stylistic differences between Illinois and Louisiana can be described as David Mamet vs. Walker Percy. The corruption culture in Illinois tends to be mingy, pedestrian, shameful. State legislators who sell their votes for $25 cash in an envelope (a scandal of the 1970s) do not tend toward braggadocio. When former House speaker Dan Rostenkowski was caught filching postage stamps from the House post office, he pleaded guilty and apologized.
Louisiana’s culture of corruption, by contrast, is flamboyant and shameless. Earl Long once said that Louisiana voters “don’t want good government, they want good entertainment.” He spent part of his last term in a mental hospital, where his wife had him committed after he took up with the stripper Blaze Starr. When Sen. Allen Ellender died in office in 1972, Governor Edwards didn’t try to auction off his seat. He appointed his wife, Elaine, possibly to get her out of town. When Edwards ran for governor again in 1983, he said of the incumbent, “If we don’t get Dave Treen out of office, there won’t be anything left to steal.” Raised among figures like these, Louisianans tend to accept corruption as inevitable and to forgive it easily.
In recent years, however, Illinois and Louisiana seem to be copying each other. With Blagojevich, Illinois corruption has gone carnival. And since Katrina, Louisianans seem to have lost their zest for the big heist. There’s been no sympathy for officials caught siphoning disaster funds. It’s going to be a close contest again this year, but I’m betting on the Fighting Illini to claim the national championship.

Before friendly audiences, Barack Obama speaks passionately about something called “economic justice.” He uses the term obliquely, though, speaking in code – socialist code.
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY 6/2008

During his NAACP speech earlier this month, Sen. Obama repeated the term at least four times. “I’ve been working my entire adult life to help build an America where economic justice is being served,” he said at the group’s 99th annual convention in Cincinnati. And as president, “we’ll ensure that economic justice is served,” he asserted. “That’s what this election is about.” Obama never spelled out the meaning of the term, but he didn’t have to. His audience knew what he meant, judging from its thumping approval. It’s the rest of the public that remains in the dark. “Economic justice” simply means punishing the successful and redistributing their wealth by government fiat. It’s a euphemism for socialism.
In the past, such rhetoric was just that – rhetoric. But Obama’s positioning himself with alarming stealth to put that rhetoric into action on a scale not seen since the birth of the welfare state. In his latest memoir he shares that he’d like to “recast” the welfare net that FDR and LBJ cast while rolling back what he derisively calls the “winner-take-all” market economy that Ronald Reagan reignited (with record gains in living standards for all). Obama also talks about “restoring fairness to the economy,” code for soaking the “rich” – a segment of society he fails to understand that includes mom-and-pop businesses filing individual tax returns. It’s clear from a close reading of his two books that he’s a firm believer in class envy. He assumes the economy is a fixed pie, whereby the successful only get rich at the expense of the poor. Following this discredited Marxist model, he believes government must step in and redistribute pieces of the pie. That requires massive transfers of wealth through government taxing and spending, a return to the entitlement days of old. Of course, Obama is too smart to try to smuggle such hoary collectivist garbage through the front door. He’s disguising the wealth transfers as “investments” – “to make America more competitive,” he says, or “that give us a fighting chance,” whatever that means.

Among his proposed “investments”:

• “Universal,” “guaranteed” health care.
• “Free” college tuition.
• “Universal national service” (a la Havana).
• “Universal 401(k)s” (in which the government would match contributions made by “low- and moderate-income families”).
• “Free” job training (even for criminals).
• “Wage insurance” (to supplement dislocated union workers’ old income levels).
• “Free” child care and “universal” preschool.
• More subsidized public housing.
• A fatter earned income tax credit for “working poor.”
• And even a Global Poverty Act that amounts to a Marshall Plan for the Third World, first and foremost Africa.

The seeds of his far-left ideology were planted in his formative years as a teenager in Hawaii – and they were far more radical than any biography or profile in the media has portrayed. A careful reading of Obama’s first memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” reveals that his childhood mentor up to age 18 – a man he cryptically refers to as “Frank” – was none other than the late communist Frank Marshall Davis, who fled Chicago after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his “subversive,” “un-American activities.”
As Obama was preparing to head off to college, he sat at Davis’ feet in his Waikiki bungalow for nightly bull sessions. Davis plied his impressionable guest with liberal doses of whiskey and advice, including: Never trust the white establishment. “They’ll train you so good,” he said, “you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that sh**.” After college, where he palled around with Marxist professors and took in socialist conferences “for inspiration,” Obama followed in Davis’ footsteps, becoming a “community organizer” in Chicago. His boss there was Gerald Kellman, whose identity Obama also tries to hide in his book. Turns out Kellman’s a disciple of the late Saul “The Red” Alinsky, a hard-boiled Chicago socialist who wrote the “Rules for Radicals” and agitated for social revolution in America. The Chicago-based Woods Fund provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to hire Obama. In turn, Obama would later serve on the Woods board with terrorist Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground. Ayers was one of Obama’s early political supporters.

A perfect storm of statism is forming, and our economic freedoms are at serious risk.

Fictional corrupt politicians are a mainstay of The Wire, David Simon’s celebrated television series about life on the Baltimore streets. But the show’s creator says he fears a real-life explosion of rampant corruption in American political life if the newspaper industry, in which he worked for more than a decade, is allowed to collapse. In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the award-winning writer and producer launches a tirade against newspaper owners who, he says, showed “contempt for their product” and are now reaping the whirlwind. But he rejects the idea that newspapers should seek ways to embrace the new world of free information, arguing that they must urgently start charging money for content distributed online. “Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model,” says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. “To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.” The only hope, Simon insists, is for major news outlets to find a way to collaboratively impose charges for reading online, and to demand fees from aggregators such as Google News, which profit from their journalism. “If you don’t have a product that you’re charging for, you don’t have a product,” he says. “If you think that free is going to produce something that’s as much of a cost centre as good journalism – because it costs money to do good journalism – you’re out of your mind.” The number of readers willing to pay a small fee each month might never rival the heyday of newspaper circulation, but it would attract enough “people who care what’s going on in the world” to fund crucial reporting, he maintains. “And once they do that, and go to Google and Yahoo and every other search engine and say: ‘No, ain’t no free.’” He scoffs at the notion that amateur “citizen journalism”, or new online-only outlets, might take the place of newspaper reporters: “The internet does froth and commentary very well, but you don’t meet many internet reporters down at the courthouse.”
Critics of the paid model for online news argue that it has been tried and rejected – notably at the New York Times, which abandoned its TimesSelect service in 2007 – and that those instances in which it has proved successful, including the Wall Street Journal, are exceptional cases. They say media outlets must find ways to embrace and profit from the exposure offered by aggregators such as Google News, and that walling off their material will hasten their irrelevance. Anti-trust laws also present severe legal obstacles to collaboration between news organisations. Jeff Jarvis, a new media consultant who writes a column for the Guardian, said: “The traditionalists are trying to transplant elements of the old business model into a new business reality … when you put your content behind a wall, you lose more than you gain. You lose a lot of readers and the advertising revenue associated with them, you lose the ability to be discovered by new readers, you lose out to free competitors, of whom there’ll be an unlimited supply, and you lose influence, because you’re taken out of the conversation.”

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