Free speech in jeopardy; Sen. Bingaman hopes 'Fairness Doctrine' is reinstated

MarkLevinFan.com ^ | October 22, 2008 | Sergeant Tim

[Ouderkirk]

Freedom of speech must never be suppressed, except for criticism directed at minorities, non-Christian religions, homosexuals, communists, illegal aliens, and other constituencies of the Democrat party.

[bamahead]

Senator Bingaman also said all media should be regulated "at a higher level."



Libertarian ping! Click here to get added or here to be removed or post a message here!

[Tijeras_Slim]

I heard this live yesterday. Following Bingaman’s remarks, the program director Pat Frisch came on with Jim and blasted Bingaman as an “idiot”.

It was great local, angry radio. The callers were besides themselves with anger at this clown.

[Hat-Trick]

So, now that we have government ownership of banks, Bingadork wants to increase government regulation of the media as to speech and content. Lining right up alongside with the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Castro, Chavez, Kim Jong-Il and the Mullahs.

Incremental socialism will be the death of this Republic.

[BigEdLB]

A historical reminder for Mr. Bingaman :

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

A little history lesson for Mr. Bingaman. Some people are voting for Obama out of fear in the economy. Because a Republican is president, people say they will vote Democrat under the misguided notion that simple party change will make things better. People who vote on that basis are not voting to institute an Authoritarian dictatorship. It is pocketbook only. And Mr. Bingaman and his friends would be well advised to leave issues such as this "fairness doctrine" alone. Or else the blowback would dwarf the ACORN induced fraudulent lanslide that might occur on November 4th.

[gwilhelm56]

“Senator Bingaman also said all media should be regulated “at a higher level.”
My definition of “Fairness Doctrine” Talk Radio ...

70 versions of AUNT JANE’S MEATLOAF
40 More Authors about Kennedy’s Assasination
and the RACIER, MORE DARING shows ... Call a random PAYPHONE somewhere in USA and INTERVIEW Whoever Answers.

Hey BINGAMAN you IDIOT.. Tell the TRUTH ..you just want to silence CONSERVATIVE TALK..
OH that’s right, you’re a Democrat... your Tongue will fall out if you tell the TRUTH!

[rawhide]

The problem is “who” gets to decide what is fair? The answer shows the unfairness of any ‘Fairness Doctrine’.

[Frantzie]

Listen up folks. We are going to donate, volunteer and GOTV to beat Obama. I think we may shock Pelosi and get the House back because we are mad.

After we win we are going to go after the RINOs 24x7. We are going to tell McCain and Palin don’t even think about amnesty. We also want something done about breaking up ACORN and prosecuting the people at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The GOP better wake up including my moron RINO governor Charlie Crist.

We also enmasse decide to end newspaper subscriptions and TV viewing of these traitors who tried to sell us out in the MSM during this election.

The Wall Street Journal will be the first I cancel. I will subscribe to IBD. Satellite TV is going next. Fox appears to no longer be our friends. We fight with RINOs and hit the MSM in the pocketbooks.

[SoCalPol]

*Bingaman hopes ‘Fairness Doctrine’ is reinstated*

Just as a vote for Perot and not for Bush 41 gave us Clinton
All the Third Party WingNuts who won’t vote for McCain and
want to ensure an Obama victory will be the first to wonder what happened to Free Republic and Conservative talk shows. They can thank themselves for helping to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine

[wolfcreek]

I think the good Senator from NM, who belives the fairness doctrine has worked so well in the past, is after a larger (and much more modern) venue. THE INTERNET

[Matchett-PI]

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

I suggest those who are pushing for the “fairness doctrine” begin with the people Orson Scott Card is writing about below. Otherwise, they’ll have no credibility with intellectually honest people. bttt

ttp://www.meridianmagazine.com/ideas/081017light.html
Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor’s note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper ­ almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President’s Men and thinking: That’s journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor ­ which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house ­ along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It’s as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. “Housing-gate,” no doubt. Or “Fannie-gate.”

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled “Do Facts Matter?” ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com ] ): “Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury.”

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let’s follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate’s campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an “adviser” to the Obama campaign ­ because that campaign had sought his advice ­ you actually let Obama’s people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn’t listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension ­ so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie ­ that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad ­ even bad weather ­ on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth ­ even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means . That’s how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time ­ and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter ­ while you ignored the story of John Edwards’s own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That’s where you are right now.

It’s not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation’s prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama’s door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe ­ and vote as if ­ President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats ­ including Barack Obama ­ and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans ­ then you are not journalists by any standard.

You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.

[Sergeant Tim]

Yes. More here on that.

http://marklevinfan.com/?p=3595

[Bon mots]

The military may rise up and shoot them. Saving the taxpayers lots of money.

Hmmm....

I find the idea of an American Pinochet intriguing, however... need I remind you...

[Matchett-PI]

“.. I think we may shock Pelosi and get the House back because we are mad. ..” ~ Frantzie

I agree. And we aren’t the only ones.

Here’s an email I got a little earlier from someone I know who has never paid any attention to politics before. He is probably just the tip of the iceberg of others out there who are thinking just like him:

At 11:11 AM 10/22/2008, he wrote:

For the first time in my adult life, I voted in the national election. For that matter, it’s the first time I ever voted. I was one of the undecided voters to begin with, but too many red flags have gone up over the Democratic Party.

There was the slamming, bashing, and sexist slurs against Sarah Palin. That was the second flag, and the one that started turning me to the Republican Party. The first red flag was Obama’s association with a racist, Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

Then, another red flag was Obama’s associations with other unsavory characters. Another red flag was the Acorn corruption. Another red flag was the treatment by the Democratic media of average Joe the plumber. I never once heard Obama come to Joe’s defense, or to tell the Democrats to back off.

The next red flag was Colin Powell. Knowing Colin Powell, this had to be in the planning for a long time. The last red flag that I couldn’t stomach was the little children OBVIOUSLY being manipulated and exploited by the democratic media, and coaxed by their parents, to voice vitriol against Sarah Palin.

After I saw that, I got up off my duff and went to the early voting place and voted straight Republican.

It’s amazing how fearful the Democrats are that they have to resort to these kind of tactics. I watched an interview this morning where the reporter was in a restaurant, and he asked for a show of hands of those who were voting for McCain. Half the room raised their hands. Then he asked how many were voting for Obama. A few of the young people raised their hands AND their voices.

It seems as if the democrats are voting by emotion and prejudice, which both omit logic and sensibility. Do I believe McCain and Palin will win? Are most Americans smart and level-headed?

Steve

[wolfcreek]

Rush suggested a movie called, “The lives of others”. A glimpse into an Obama presidency.

[wolfcreek]

Forgot the link!

http://www.sonyclassics.com/thelivesofothers/swf/index.html

[Birch Barlow]

I would have liked the following questions asked of him:

1 Should TV news and newspapers be subjected to the fairness doctrine?

2 Should Hollywood be subjected to the fairness doctrine?

3 Should the Senate this year be automatically be divided 50/50 despite what the people say just to be fair?

If the people (the market) want to listen to talk radio that is conservative then so be it just like (unfortunately) the Senate would be controlled by the Dems according to the people.

[papasmurf]

The Fairness Doctrine...broadcasting Socialism 24 hours a day!

[dcwusmc]

Nice article. I loathe McLame (so I marked my ballot for Sara Palin) but the writer is so correct in his opinion it’s scary!

[manc]

everyone has to get out, get family, friends work friends etc

if in florida tell them to vote yes on two so we get marriage for one man between one woman and nothing else

no way can we afford to destroy our beloved country and we cannot afford to fail in FL, CA, AZ with the marriage question

we do not want judges making laws up