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Had liberal talk show hosts of the past, like an Al Franken, Jerry Brown or Mario Cuomo, won far more listeners than Rush Limbaugh, one suspects that Sen. Feinstein would see little need for new laws. And we would probably now be spared the present sour-grapes cries about fairness.

Who was Rush Limbaugh before he was the biggest thing ever to hit talk radio? Of course he was a nothing. A non-entity loved only by his mother. However, through talent, drive, luck and perserverence, he has built himself up to where he is today.

Look at the Liberal side of things, and you have Al Franken, Jerry Brown and Mario Cuomo. All of these men were accomplished and successful in their fields before they made the jump to talk radio. This previous success allowed them to enter at the top of the liberal talk radio heap. Unfortunately, the talents that led to their success in other areas clearly do not apply to the business of running an effective talk radio program.

The reason Conservative talk radio elevates a talented nobody while Liberal talk radio preserves mediocre but famous people goes back to core ideology. Conservatives believe in the power of the marketplace to deliver goods and services efficiently and optimally. Therefore you have tens of thousands of Rush Limbaugh wannabes toiling in their various fields. The ones who do well predominate and the ones who do poorly fail. Rush Limbaugh climbs to the top, but there are thousands who fall, unnoticed and unlamented, on the wayside, every year.

Liberal talk radio, on the other hand, does not trust he market. It is subsidized, so it does not have to reward success. Therefore, the limited number of top slots cannot be allocated to those who claw their way out of the pack, because there is no clawing in Liberal talk radio. Everybody involved has to succeed, because failure is not permitted.

So there has to be some other mechanism for allocating the top slots. Clearly this is being done on the basis of being famous and successful in some other field. The central control picks people they feel who are likely to succeed, rather than accepting people who have already succeeded. So you get talk radio mediocrities like Franken, Brown and Cuomo, who may have no more ability in the field of talk radio than three names you could pick at random from the New York City phone book. But once they are in the position of top dog, that slot is filled, and no young, talented wannabe is going to be able to climb into that spot.