Is that needed? McCain-Feingold was rendered moot by Hussein by his credit-card overseas fundraising plot and his switch from public limits to unlimited private without losing a stroke. Perhaps our best tactic is to assume it never was a law, which is what our opposition does. Whenever we engage in a fight with the opposition and agree to use logic and the rule of law, we start out handicapped. The old Soviet Union was notorious for that tactics: "What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable."
As far as the threat of the fairness doctrine, a similar tactic may be our best strategy. Simply ignore it. We have the technology and the expertise to go around them. Offshore servers, satellite radio, etc. They can't put us all in jail. With respect to the internet, a recent survey showed more people would prefer to give up their TV's than their internet connections. Government may have waited too late to try and control the internet. It's now Too Big to Fail.
Just a couple of thoughts while waiting for the coffee to brew early on a Saturday morning...
Is that needed? McCain-Feingold was rendered moot by Hussein by his credit-card overseas fundraising plot and his switch from public limits to unlimited private without losing a stroke. Perhaps our best tactic is to assume it never was a law, which is what our opposition does. Whenever we engage in a fight with the opposition and agree to use logic and the rule of law, we start out handicapped. The old Soviet Union was notorious for that tactics: "What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable."Assuming that FR lacks the resources to mount its own Supreme Court case, can we not at least submit a "Friend of the Court" brief raising the above points?
As far as the threat of the fairness doctrine, a similar tactic may be our best strategy. Simply ignore it. We have the technology and the expertise to go around them. Offshore servers, satellite radio, etc. They can't put us all in jail. With respect to the internet, a recent survey showed more people would prefer to give up their TV's than their internet connections. Government may have waited too late to try and control the internet. It's now Too Big to Fail.
"Civil disobedience" is a far more credible threat from the marginalized than from the comfortable. We just sell our stocks - and then FDR junior just uses the resulting disruption as justification for why the old ways just don't work anymore, and we need to be more like the Soviet Union than Russia is. Everything will be Bush's fault, in the same way that everything was "Hoover's fault" when the Depression hung on for Roosevelt's first two terms.Let's face it, satellite radio is a ghetto in the sense that its receivers are very far from ubiquitous. I for one can't recall having seen one in the wild. We need Talk Radio to be accessible on mainstream receivers that everyone can casually tune in. And certainly the "Fairness" Doctrine was imposed before and, having never been declared unconstitutional, will always hang over our heads as something the socialists will make seem to be a legitimate option. Chuck Schumer's fascist comment comparing conservatism to pornography needs to be slapped down. Obama's approach will be to attack the stations carrying Talk Radio with the same sort of "community action" that did so much for the country by "eliminating redlining" so that banks had to lend money out without serious expectation of repayment. We will need serious unity to face that threat down.
The solution I propose is to go on the attack against the Fairness Doctrine before Obama and Schumer can even get off the ground. A SCOTUS holding that the government cannot enforce its opinion of "objectivity" on the public discourse would IMHO carry that attack forward very well - and let's face it, the modicum of conservatism in the Kennedy Court (that's what it is, when Justice Kennedy's opinion is always the majority opinion), plus a very marginal toehold in the Senate (depending at best on people like John McCain and Olympia Snowe), is all the government we have any hope of influence in at the moment.
A SCOTUS holding that the government cannot enforce its opinion of "objectivity" on the public discourse would have the following implications:
- protection of FR.
- protection of Talk Radio on the AM band where it now flourishes.
- weakening of the legitimacy of Homogeneous JournalismTM, in the sense that the FCC would not have the authority to label broadcast journalism "in the public interest." And that, IMHO, would convert "the public airwaves" into property the ownership of which the government could not condition on "good behavior" of the broadcaster. Which sounds awful to Chuck Schumer. The present system is of course far worse.