Priceless would describe the red faced Liberal Party leader Stéphane of Dion as he, without time to gather buzz and spin lines, tried to tell the Canadian people why letting them keep more of their own money is bad. Hilarious. Will he then, he of such strong objection and so caring, gather with Layton (who is able to say anything he likes since he knows it matters not a speck) to bring down the government?

“We will choose our time when we decide to put this government down,” he said. “It will not be tomorrow.”

Pure comedy gold. One truly needed to see his face as he spoke this drivel and made his objections to tax cuts along with the other two party leaders. Go gather in your little enclaves and compose your missives with which to tell the populace how you know far better how to spend the money earned by the people. Can't wait.


Canada : Tories Offer GST, Income Tax Cuts in Mini Budget

[globeandmail] : OTTAWA — The Conservative government, apparently swimming in more cash than even the most optimistic economist had predicted, will fulfill a campaign promise to cut the GST and introduce income tax cuts that will be felt when Canadians file their taxes for the current year.

The multi-billion dollar package of tax relief announced Tuesday by Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is intended to appeal to voters as Parliament prepares for a potential spring election. Even after the tax cuts, which will amount to more than $10-billion in the current fiscal year, there will be a projected surplus of $11.6-billion.

“We haven't seen taxes this low since Lester B. Pearson was prime minister,” Mr. Flaherty bragged in the opening lines of his mid-term economic statement.

“Canada has emerged as a shining example in an economic universe of rapid change and uncertainty. We are leading the way with our tax cuts, our debt reduction and our focused and responsible spending.”

Among the highlights:

• The Goods and Services Tax will be cut an additional 1 per cent as of Jan. 1, leaving the federal consumption tax at 5 per cent. The GST cut will cost the government about $5.5-billion. But the GST credit for low-income Canadians will remain at its current level, said Mr. Flaherty

• The basic personal income-tax exemption will increase to $9,600 from the current $8,929, retroactive to 2007. And it will increase again to $10,100 as of Jan. 1, 2009.

• The government is reducing the lowest personal income-tax rate to 15 per cent from 15.5 per cent, a retroactive change that will also be felt at tax-time this coming year.

• There will be a cut to corporate taxes of 1 per cent in 2008 with on-going reductions that will see business taxes fall down to 15 per cent by 2012 from 22 per cent today. That will leave Canada with one of the lowest corporate tax rates among the industrialized economies.

• The government will still have $10-billion in surplus cash to apply to the national debt.

Mr. Flaherty said his new personal income-tax measures will remove an additional 380,000 low-income Canadians from the tax rolls altogether.

“By reducing the GST, our government has fulfilled a key campaign commitment and kept its word to Canadians,” said Mr. Flaherty.

Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe was quick to reject the mini budget, saying his MPs will vote against it Wednesday afternoon. NDP Leader Jack Layton also said he couldn't support Mr. Flaherty's update because it failed to take the balanced approach of targeted tax relief.

That left the ball firmly in the court of Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion, who put questions of a snap election to rest late Tuesday.

“We will choose our time when we decide to put this government down,” he said. “It will not be tomorrow.”

The mini budget was intended as a poison pill for Mr. Dion, who objects to the GST cut on grounds that it is poor fiscal policy, but has said previously that he won't bring down the government over it. The Liberals brought in their own income-tax cuts in the dying days of the Paul Martin government but those were reduced when the Conservatives came to office.

“We are back where we were in 2005 about the income tax. The government increased your income tax,” said Mr. Dion, adding that he supports the corporate tax cut.

But he was unequivocal about the GST.

“It's a mistake. It will not help the productivity of our country, it will not help our families as it should. It's a big mistake,” Mr. Dion said.

During the 2006 election campaign, Stephen Harper made a two percentage point cut to the-then seven per cent GST the top item of his five-point agenda. The rate was dropped to six per cent during the Conservative's first budget. The second instalment was promised before 2011.

Mr. Dion is not alone in his objection to the GST cut. A group of 20 economists surveyed last week by The Globe and Mail were unanimous in their rejection of the Conservative plan as a tax-cutting priority for Canada.

All 20 economists said other tax cuts would be better for the country.

“It doesn't do anything to improve the performance of the economy,” Toronto Dominion chief economist Don Drummond said earlier Tuesday on CBC.

“The only way I can benefit from a cut (to) the GST is if I consume more. But we're already consuming an awful lot. We have a very low savings rate. On the other hand, if we look at our personal income tax system, for a lot of families, they get to keep less than half of the last dollar that they earn.”

Mr. Flaherty's economic statement comes on the eve of Halloween and the one-year anniversary of the government's controversial income trust tax, when the Tories broke an election pledge to protect trusts. He made the statement at the National Press Theatre because the NDP blocked unanimous consent to allow the update to be delivered in the Commons.

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Rep. John Boehner: Pelosi-Rangel really is ‘mother of all tax hikes’
[examiner] : WASHINGTON - American families are feeling the crunch of spiking energy costs, runaway college tuition, ever-burdensome home mortgages and steadily rising prices for consumer goods.

These and other cost-of-living increases are eating away at the family budget — making every dollar earned and saved even more valuable. The very last thing families need is to see more of their paycheck confiscated by Congress.

Unfortunately, the U.S. House that already has passed $100 billion in tax increases this year to pay for bigger government and wasteful pork thinks otherwise. Last week, led by the Ways and Means Committee chairman, Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., congressional Democrats unveiled a breathtaking proposal: the single largest tax increase in American history.

It’s not often that we can speak in such absolute terms, but in this case, there is no way around it. Dubbed the “Mother of All Tax Bills” by Rangel and embraced by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who told reporters last Thursday that she “certainly” supports the tax increase, this monstrosity would raise taxes on everyone: from the very poor to the very rich and everyone in between.

Indeed, with a price tag of $1.3 trillion — yes, that’s “trillion” with a “t” — the Mother of All Tax Bills is actually more like the Mother of All Tax Hikes. And to make matters worse, the Pelosi-Rangel plan kills tax cuts enacted by Congress in 2001 and 2003, making it a $3.5 trillion tax hike in total. Could the news get any worse for American families, farmers, small businesses and other job providers? Not likely.

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Budget Policy: An oft-heard criticism leveled at President Bush is that he's a "record spender." And because it's repeated by those at both ends of the political spectrum, it sounds right. But that doesn't mean it is right.

[ibd] Bush is "arguably an even bigger spender than LBJ," says a story from McClatchy Newspapers on the president's fiscal record. Pretty tough words, given that LBJ conducted both a war in Vietnam and a War on Poverty simultaneously, racking up huge gains in spending over his term and a half in office.

The McClatchy piece says discretionary spending under Bush has risen an inflation-adjusted 5.3% in his first six years, outstripping the 4.6% under Johnson — and way above President Reagan's meager 1.9%. By "almost any yardstick," the article continues, Bush "generally exceeds the spending of his predecessors."

"Any yardstick," that is, except the most important of all — spending as a share of GDP. On this, Bush is actually lower than most of his predecessors. Spending as a share of GDP is the most important measure of the size of government, since it measures what government actually takes from the national economy. [...]

For the record, Bush came into office in January 2001, a time of unique challenges both to our nation's economy and to its security. They included a stock collapse that erased $8 trillion in national wealth in the space of a few months, a first-ever terrorist attack on U.S. soil that killed 3,000, and a recession that Bush inherited but didn't cause.

If Bush had pushed to cut the budget in 2001, he might well have been impeached for economic incompetence. A decline in spending would have hurt the economy in the short run, extending the recession and making the recovery in jobs even tougher.

The relevant facts are that, over the past three years, federal spending as a share of GDP has been remarkably stable: 20.2% in 2005, 20.3% in 2006 and 20.2% in 2007. And over the same period, the deficit has been cut in half as a share of GDP.

If you really want to worry, look long-term. Bush has tried to do something about runaway entitlements but has gotten no help. As GAO chief David Walker has noted, $50.5 trillion in entitlement spending looms in the next few decades — with no way to pay for it.

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[hughhewitt] : Incredibly, no one at The Plank has posted anything about the Beauchamp meltdown. As Dan Rather --obviously TNR editors' role model-- would say: "Courage."

HH: Mark Steyn, we’ve also got the New Republic back with Private Beauchamp, or however you say his name, coming clean in transcripts published at the Drudge Report. Do you expect the New Republic to stay in stonewall mode?

MS: Well, what is interesting about this is that the New Republic is doing everything that left wing media accuse the Pentagon and government of doing, which is stonewalling, obfuscating, and not getting the facts out, and not clearing the air. It seems pretty obvious what happened. You only run a story like this if it absolutely stands up. They…this guy slandered the troops. He said the troops desecrate graves and go around with children’s skulls on their heads as mementos, they deliberately run over dogs, and they insult physically disfigured women. Now you can only run a story like that if all the elements hold up. This guy basically distanced himself, he refused to stand by his own story, and the New Republic, instead of making it a Scott Beauchamp issue, which is what it was, he was the author, they could have disowned him and apologized for running the piece, they basically have been dishonest with their readers, and dishonest with their…it’s no longer a Scott Beauchamp issue. It’s a New Republic issue. And my friend, my old friends from up in Canada, the New Republic is owned by Canadians, by the Asper family from Winnipeg, a great Canadian family, and I hope that the Asper family will assert their control over the New Republic, and end this squalid editorial regime that has behaved disgracefully over the last ten weeks.

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Audiences reject Iraq war at box office
[wshtimes] : It doesn't matter how many Oscar winners are in front of or behind the camera — audiences are proving to be conscientious objectors when it comes to this fall's surge of antiwar and anti-Bush films.

Both "In the Valley of Elah" and, more recently, "Rendition" drew minuscule crowds upon their release, which doesn't bode well for the ongoing stream of films critical of the Iraq war and the Bush administration's wider war on terror.

"Rendition," which features three Oscar winners in key roles, grossed $4.1 million over the weekend in 2,250 screens for a ninth-place finish. A re-release of "The Nightmare Before Christmas" beat it, and it's 14 years old.

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[dailymail] : Conservative blogs are ineffective?

Let’s go to the board, shall we?

Who stopped the nomination of Harriet Miers?

Who stopped amnesty for illegal aliens?

Who helped get FISA extended this summer?

Who is fighting pork and winning a battle here and there?

Above all, who hung in there — and hangs in there — on the Iraq War?

They call us 29 percenters or whatever Bush’s job approval is. We hang in there because we believe in freedom and the liberation of Iraq. We know our history. We know right from wrong. We hate war, but we know this is a battle that is fought either over there or over here.

What have the lefty blogs done? Ask Sen. Ned Lamont.

They haven’t stopped the war. They haven’t gotten one piece of legislation worth a spit signed into law. A $7.25 an hour minimum wage? McDonald’s pays $8 to start in West Virginia.

They take credit for getting a Democratic Congress. Mark Foley may disagree. But they have become prima donnas. It is comical to watch Reid and Pelosi hop to the command of their little masters — Lord Fauntleroys all. Impeach Bush. No, stop the war. No, raise taxes. No, inpeach Bush. No, stop the war.

All the lefty blogs have done is throw their own feces at the zookeepers.

Righties have hung in there. We know we’re right. We don’t have to scream and make monkey shines. We simply accomplish things.

Carter joined the Marines in the 1980s, so I figure he is old enough to remember when all conservatives had Rush Limbaugh in the media.

Now there’s Fox News, Drudge, and a whole lot of people on the Internet keeping the media honest.

Ask Dan Rather. Ask Jamil Hussein. Ask Scott Thomas Beauchamp.

Not everyone agrees with one another all the time on the right. There are security conservatives, fiscal conservatives, liberty conservatives and of course, family values conservatives. Most of us are a little bit of each.

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[nro] - It has now been revealed that (a) Beauchamp declined to stand by his story, and (b) the editors spoke with him and knew this weeks ago. Presumably The New Republic's readers are relatively relaxed about the editors colluding in slandering the troops at a time of war: only uptight squares get hung up on that sort of thing. But they ought surely to be concerned at the abuse of trust perpetrated by the magazine against its own readers.

The New Republic is currently owned by my old friends and compatriots, the Asper family. Back when I toiled for the company in Canada, David Asper publicly told one of his own newspapers to "put up or shut up". He should have said the same months ago when The New Republic was bragging about its commitment to rigorous and open investigation of the matter. The magazine is unable to "put up", so it has shut up, and hopes that its silence will help the story die in the shadows. Beauchamp's 15 minutes are up. The issue now is the magazine's conduct, and the Aspers should recognize that and act accordingly.

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[michaelyon] All describe the bizarro-world contrast between what most Americans seem to think is happening in Iraq versus what is really happening in Iraq. Knowing this disconnect exists and experiencing it directly are two separate matters. It’s like the difference between holding the remote control during the telecast of a volcanic eruption on some distant island (and then flipping the channel), versus running for survival from a wretch of molten lava that just engulfed your car.

I was at home in the United States just one day before the magnitude hit me like vertigo: America seems to be under a glass dome which allows few hard facts from the field to filter in unless they are attached to a string of false assumptions. Considering that my trip home coincided with General Petraeus’ testimony before the US Congress, when media interest in the war was (I’m told) unusually concentrated, it’s a wonder my eardrums didn’t burst on the trip back to Iraq. In places like Singapore, Indonesia, and Britain people hardly seemed to notice that success is being achieved in Iraq, while in the United States, Britney was competing for airtime with O.J. in one of the saddest sideshows on Earth.

No thinking person would look at last year’s weather reports to judge whether it will rain today, yet we do something similar with Iraq news.

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Dishwashers For Clinton

[wapo] Donors whose addresses turn out to be tenements. Dishwashers and waiters who write $1,000 checks. Immigrants who ante up because they have been instructed to by powerful neighborhood associations, or, as one said, "They informed us to go, so I went." Others who say they never made the contributions listed in their names or who were not eligible to give because they are not legal residents of the United States. This is the disturbingly familiar picture of Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign presented last week in a report by the Los Angeles Times about questionable fundraising by the New York senator in New York City's Chinese community. Out of 150 donors examined, one-third "could not be found using property, telephone or business records," the Times reported. "Most have not registered to vote, according to public records."

This appears to be another instance in which a Clinton campaign's zeal for campaign cash overwhelms its judgment. After the fundraising scandals of President Bill Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign, the dangers of vacuuming cash from a politically inexperienced immigrant community should have been obvious. But Ms. Clinton's money machine seized on a new source of cash in Chinatown and environs. As the Times reported, a single Chinatown fundraiser in April brought in $380,000. By contrast, 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry raised $24,000 from Chinatown in the course of his entire campaign.

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Canada : The Protection Racket We Call Government
[nationalpost] One of the constitutional guarantees Canadians enjoy is security of the person. It sounds too good to be true, and it is. A constitution obviously can't guarantee that no harm will come to us -- that would be impossible. All it can guarantee is our right to protect ourselves.

And so Canada's constitution does -- on paper. In reality, the state limits our right to security by putting restrictions and conditions on self-defence. When it bans the use or concealment of weapons, along with such things as body armour, or certain breeds of guard-or attack-dogs, the state breaches a guarantee it is constitutionally obliged to make.

It also assumes an obligation it cannot fulfill. A state that limits people's ability to protect themselves becomes responsible for their protection. Every victim of a mugging, robbery or rape that might not have occurred if the perpetrator had reason to think the victim might carry a concealed weapon has -- or ought to have -- a lawsuit against the government.

This isn't just a Canadian thing. Our governments follow the historic lead of all authorities that equate state monopoly on force with civilization. Show me a person who finds self-defence uncivilized, and I'll show you a friend of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Also a friend of Robin Hood, ironically. Outlaws like Robin and his merry men approve of the defenceless being "civilized" -- that is, the civilized being defenceless -- as much as the sheriff and his merry deputies do. Monopoly on force is the name of the game, and both cops and robbers want it.

In 18th-century France, revolutionary authorities would have kissed any abjurer of self-defence on both cheeks. "You're so civilized, madam," Dr. Guillotine would have said to the Canadian Coalition for Gun Control's Wendy Cukier. "Welcome to the Reign of Terror. Why should you bother getting up every time you hear a noise in the night? The state will deter all your assailants with my marvellous machine. Have you seen it? No miss, no mess. Humane. The blade runs on tracks."

"Yeah, real civilized, buddy," Al Capone would have added from across the pond 150 years later. "Why pack a gun? My boys will protect you."

Protection rackets still flourish, whether organized by Chicago gangsters, the agents of Canada's gun registry, or the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The deal is always the same:

1. Citizen promises to pay protection money ("tax") promptly.

2. Citizen undertakes not to violate racketeer's monopoly by protecting himself (well, he may lock his doors and windows, but keep no vicious dogs and certainly no firearms).

3. Racketeer agrees not to rob, rape, mug and massacre citizen himself, at least not without a good reason -- such as, say, former U.S. attorney general Janet Reno's troops had at Waco. In addition, racketeer may provide citizen with a phone number to call if anybody else is trying to mug, rob, rape or massacre him.

What, as a matter of interest, happens if citizen reaches Protection Central on the phone? Well, they'll send the closest available unit of protection racketeers -- sorry, peace officers -- to his rescue. Great, and what does citizen do with robber-mugger-rapist in the meantime? Why, he asks him to please wait.

Will he wait? Well, if he's half as civilized as other Canadians, yes.

But for Pete's sake, if he were civilized, would he be a robber-mugger-rapist in the first place? Chances are the creature loading your stereo and silver on the pickup in the driveway is a ferocious sociopath, a moral derelict, who understands nothing but the growl of a Rottweiler

Cut to our less civilized neighbour south of the border. Between 1988 and 1996, the number of U.S. states where ordinary citizens could legally carry concealed handguns rose from nine to 31. In 1996, the University of Chicago released a nationwide survey seeking to determine what impact, if any, the new state laws have had on major crimes.

The study found that in states where carrying concealed weapons became legal for people with no criminal record or mental illness, homicide had been reduced by 8.5%. Rape was down by 5%, and aggravated assault by 7%.

It wasn't the use, or even show of force -- victims pulling guns on assailants -- that brought down the numbers. The reduction was due to general deterrence: the awareness of would-be predators that their potential prey may be armed.

Based on the Chicago figures, if we had passed a law in this country letting citizens carry concealed weapons when the Americans did, it might have saved 48 lives in that year alone. In 1988, there were 565 reported homicides in Canada.

But Canada isn't the United States. We wait for the government's cops -- or the government's doctors. If they come in time, we live; if not, heigh-ho. We're civilized. [georgejonas]

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Reid letter sells for $2.1 million on eBay

[wnd] A final eBay bid of $2.11 million secured a letter from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that demanded an apology from radio talk host Rush Limbaugh over his "phony soldiers" comment.

On his show today, Limbaugh announced the winning bidder was Betty Casey, a noted philanthropist and trustee of the Eugene B. Casey Foundation in Gaithersburg, Md.

It was the largest bid ever in an eBay charity auction, breaking the $800,000 mark paid for a Harley Davidson motorcycle bearing the signature of "Tonight" show host Jay Leno.

"The Eugene B. Casey Foundation believes freedom of speech is a basic right of every citizen of this country," the foundation said in a statement on the auction. "Their purchase of the smear letter was to demonstrate their belief in this right, and to support Rush Limbaugh, his views, and his continued education of us."

Meanwhile, Limbaugh chastised Reid for taking credit for the money raised by the letter during comments to colleagues today on the Senate floor posted by Breitbart.tv.

Reid is trying to "horn in" on the effort, said Limbaugh, who pointed out the Nevada Democrat has not apologized for accusing him of smearing troops who opposed the Iraq war.

"Now he has the audacity to climb aboard this, praising the effort, saying he never knew it would get this kind of money," Limbaugh said.

Directing his comments to Reid, Limbaugh said, "It wasn't your letter that raised this money. It was your abuse of power that is responsible for raising this money."

If it were any other letter by Reid, he said, "people wouldn't pay a dime for it."

"This one represents an abuse of power by a U.S. senator, who after besmirching me by name on the Senate floor, gets a hold of my syndicate partner, asking him to confer with me about something he thought improper," said Limbaugh.

'That is why your letter is historic," he continued. It's "a full fledged, undeniable, 100 percent abuse of power."

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Select A Candidate

Answer the 11 questions below to find out which candidates are most aligned with your views and opinions. This quiz is not meant to pick your candidate for you. It is designed to inform the public of the various stances candidates make. Results are not scientific. [quiz]

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Fairness Doctrine:

[ibd] The Democrats' assault on the First Amendment has run into a wall. Republican Rep. Mike Pence is determined to see that freedom of speech isn't repressed in the U.S. as it is in tin-pot dictatorships.

For years, the political left has been setting the country up for a rerun of the Fairness Doctrine, looking for a Reichstag fire to whip up public support for a regulation that is clearly unconstitutional despite the Supreme Court's absurd 1969 ruling.

The Fairness Doctrine was instituted in 1949 as a Federal Communications Commission rule that required broadcasting licensees to provide balanced views on controversial issues. A Democratic Congress voted to turn it into law in 1987, but Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill and the rule was scrapped. In the bloom of freedom, conservative talk radio has dominated.

Which is why Democrats want to revive the Fairness Doctrine.

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Majority of Afghans want foreign troops to stay and fight

[globe&mail] A strong majority of Afghans approve of the presence of NATO-led troops in their country, including from Canada, and want the foreign soldiers to remain to fight the Taliban and support reconstruction efforts.

In a poll of Afghans conducted by Environics Research on behalf of The Globe and Mail, the CBC and La Presse, respondents expressed optimism about the future, strong support for the government of President Hamid Karzai and appreciation for the work being done by NATO countries in improving security.

In Kandahar, where the Taliban is stronger and violence more pervasive, support for the foreign troops was weaker, but respondents still want the soldiers to stay.

According to the survey, conducted between Sept. 17 and 24 with a sample of 1,578 men and women, 60 per cent said the presence of foreigners in the country was a good thing. Only 16 per cent said it was a bad thing, while 22 per cent said it was equally good and bad.

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Silicon Insider: How The New York Times Fell Apart

[abc] Boom! And down goes the biggest newspaper name of all.

As you may have read, yesterday brokerage giant Morgan Stanley dumped its entire stake -- $183 million worth -- in the New York Times, in which it was the second largest shareholder. Not surprisingly, Times stock immediately slumped, bottoming at a nearly 3 percent drop to $18.28 -- the lowest it has been in a decade. [...]

Increased editorial influence on its reporting, an on-going effort to enforce a business model on a market that didn't want it -- the Times wasn't alone in making these mistakes; indeed, they characterized almost every newspaper in America. Which is why they are all in trouble.

But the Times made one more mistake -- one which it alone could make, and which I think ultimately led to yesterday's meltdown. Most newspapers adopted the always dangerous strategy of trying to become more like one's competitors rather than establishing the defensible position of being even more true to oneself. Like most newspapers, the Times decided to become more timely, more hip, and more judgmental than the electronic media -- when it should have become better reported, more objective, and better written; professionalism being the one arena where the new competitors would have a hard time competing.

What made the Times' decision not to pursue this strategy particularly stupid was that it was, after all, 'America's newspaper of record', a role in which it justly reveled. But you can't hold that title while pandering to the political and cultural views of readers on the Upper West Side. And you can't claim "all the news that's fit to print" when you neglect to notice that an American soldier in Iraq just won the Medal of Honor. In the old days, if the Times didn't cover it, it didn't happen. That insulation is long gone: if the Times doesn't cover it, the blogosphere will --

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Regarding the Peace Prize, Nobel defined /envisioned prospective recipients as having "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

Flying around the world in a private jet, promoting a power point presentation and talking about carbon levels seems absent in Nobel's definition.

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[SPPI] 35 Inconvenient Truths: The errors in Al Gore’s movie.

A spokesman for Al Gore has issued a questionable response to the news that in October 2007 the High Court in London had identified nine “errors” in his movie An Inconvenient Truth. The judge had stated that, if the UK Government had not agreed to send to every secondary school in England a corrected guidance note making clear the mainstream scientific position on these nine “errors”, he would have made a finding that the Government’s distribution of the film and the first draft of the guidance note earlier in 2007 to all English secondary schools had been an unlawful contravention of an Act of Parliament prohibiting the political indoctrination of children.

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Fairness Doctrine Makes No Sense in Today’s World

Fred Thompson on Fairness Doctrine,October 8th, 2007 [fredfile]

[NOTE: The American Spectator reports this chilling news]:

Rep. Henry Waxman has asked his investigative staff to begin compiling reports on Limbaugh, and fellow radio hosts Sean Hannity and Mark Levin based on transcripts from their shows, and to call in Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin to discuss the so-called “Fairness Doctrine.”

“Limbaugh isn’t the only one who needs to be made uncomfortable about what he says on the radio,” says a House leadership source. “We don’t have as big a megaphone as these guys, but this all political, and we’ll do what we can to gain the advantage. If we can take them off their game for a while, it will help our folks out there on the campaign trail.”

This news about Democrats trampling on the First Amendment for political purposes ties into Fred’s latest commentary. –Sean]

Whether it’s the situation in Iraq, talking about the economy, or the culture, conservatives and like-minded people are putting up a fight on TV, radio and alternative forms of media, and challenging what Democrats and some in the mainstream media would like to set as conventional wisdom. So – big surprise – Democrats are crying foul and are literally trying to change the rules. The latest example of this is Democrat attempts to pull the Fairness Doctrine out of the dustbin of history.

The Fairness Doctrine is an artifact from the days when there were only a handful of television channels and radio stations on our dials. Then, there might have been something to the fear that somebody might get control of all the media outlets in an area — so equal time rules were put in place.

As television and radio stations increased, it became clear that the rule was a bust. Instead of protecting free speech, it imposed costs on broadcasters that killed political discussion entirely. Why run the risk of dealing with anything controversial and having the regulators and the lawyers come down on you? Instead of talking about issues, news directors used stopwatches to measure candidates’ airtime.

Finally, in 1987, the Federal Communications Commission ended the antiquated policy. Today, with more cable, satellite, and local access TV channels than anybody can keep track of — the equal time rule makes even less sense. Throw in the Internet, podcasts, and satellite radio, and it’s absurd.

The real issue here is not what you “can” see or hear — which is what the Fairness Doctrine was about originally. It’s what you’re “choosing” to see or hear.

Insiders say it was the collapse of the radio station “Air America” that led to this attempt to retool the Fairness Doctrine as a form of de facto censorship. I guess the idea is that, if you can’t compete in the world of ideas, you pass a law that forces radio stations to air your views. In effect, it would force a lot of radio stations to drop some talk show hosts — because they would lose money providing equal airtime to people who can’t attract a market or advertisers.

The funny thing is that the success of the current crop of radio talk show hosts is due, in part, to a lot of people’s perception that broadcast television doesn’t give the views of their audience a fair shake. Maybe I shouldn’t admit it, since I dabble in radio myself, but this media used to be viewed as a kind of broadcast ghetto. The bicoastal elite had such a grip on the major newspapers and television networks; they pretty much ignored the hinterlands. It was media flyover country.

Now congressional leaders say they want to “level the playing field” there too – meaning they want to diminish the importance of conservative talk radio. In other words, they don’t trust the results of freedom and the marketplace. Why am I not surprised?

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RIAA Wins File-Sharing Jury Trial

[newsfactor] The Recording Industry Association of America won a critical battle in the fight against digital piracy on Thursday. A federal jury found a Minnesota mom guilty of sharing copyright-protected music online and decided $220,000 was fair recompense to the record labels.

The plaintiffs, which include Virgin Records, Sony BMG, Capitol Records, Arista Records, Warner Bros., UMG Recordings, and Interscope Records, claimed Thomas distributed 1,702 copyrighted audio files on file-sharing network Kazaa in 2005.

The precedent-setting case is part of the RIAA's campaign against file-sharing piracy. The RIAA has launched more than 20,000 lawsuits since it set out on its zero-tolerance campaign to stop digital piracy in September 2003. Some suits settled out of court. Others were dismissed. This was the first time a case went before a jury.

Four reasons why the RIAA won a jury verdict of $220,000: [here]

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RIAA Convinces Jury to Impose Fines for File Sharing

Four years after it began, the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) campaign to intimidate music fans by randomly singling out individuals for lawsuits has, for the first time, made it to a jury trial.

Despite the RIAA's previous claim that defendants have no right to a jury trial, Jammie Thomas had her day in court in front of a jury sworn to examine the evidence in a fair, impartial manner. The verdict is now in: Thomas was found guilty and is liable for $220,000 in penalties -- $9250 per song.

But despite the verdict, tens of millions of Americans will continue sharing billions of songs, just as they have since Napster let the P2P genie out of the bottle nearly eight years ago. Every lawsuit makes the recording industry look more and more like King Canute, vainly trying to hold back the tide. As for EFF, we continue to believe there is a better way forward.

Read the highlights from Capitol Records v. Thomas in our complete post: [here]

For the Ars Technica article, "RIAA anti-P2P campaign a real money pit, according to testimony": [here]

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Obama Stops Wearing Flag Pin

[breitbart] Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he doesn't wear the American flag lapel pin because it has become a substitute for "true patriotism" since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Asked about the decision Wednesday in an interview with KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Illinois senator said he stopped doing so shortly after the attacks and instead hoped to show his patriotism by explaining his ideas to citizens.

"The truth is that right after 9-11 I had a pin," Obama said. "Shortly after 9-11, particularly because as we're talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security.

"I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest," he said in the interview. "Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testament to my patriotism."

*Ed - It's not the wearing or not of the flag pin, it's the pathetic reasoning offered for not doing so.


Obama body language during the playing of the national anthem

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UK Schools Must Warn of Gore Climate Film Bias

[dailymail] Schools will have to issue a warning before they show pupils Al Gore's controversial film about global warming, a judge indicated yesterday.

The move follows a High Court action by a father who accused the Government of 'brainwashing' children with propaganda by showing it in the classroom.

Stewart Dimmock said the former U.S. Vice-President's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is unfit for schools because it is politically biased and contains serious scientific inaccuracies and 'sentimental mush'. [...]

Mr Justice Burton is due to deliver a ruling on the case next week, but yesterday he said he would be saying that Gore's Oscar-winning film does promote 'partisan political views'.

This means that teachers will have to warn pupils that there are other opinions on global warming and they should not necessarily accept the views of the film.

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[ibd] Ever since the Sept. 10 testimony of Gen. David Petraeus, we've heard less and less from the mainstream media about the war in Iraq. The old adage "no news is good news" has never been truer.

That the media are no longer much interested in Iraq is a sure sign things are going well there. Instead, they're talking about the presidential campaign, or Burma, or global warming, or . . . whatever.

Why? Simply put, the news from Iraq has been quite positive, as Petraeus related in his report to Congress. Consider:

• On Monday came news that U.S. military deaths in Iraq fell to 64 in September, the fourth straight drop since peaking at 121 in May and driving the toll to a 14-month low.

• Civilian deaths also have plunged, dropping by more than half from August to 884. Remember just six months ago all the talk of an Iraqi "civil war"? That seems to be fading.

• The just-ended holy month of Ramadan in Iraq was accompanied by a 40% drop in violence, even though al-Qaida had vowed to step up attacks.

• Speaking of al-Qaida, the terrorist group appears to be on the run, and possibly on the verge of collapse — despite making Iraq the center of its war for global hegemony and a new world order based on precepts of fundamentalist Islam.

• Military officials say U.S. troops have killed Abu Usama al-Tunisi, a Tunisian senior leader of al-Qaida in Iraq who was responsible for bringing foreign fighters into the country. Not surprisingly, the pace of foreign fighters entering Iraq has been more than halved from the average of 60 to 80 a month.

• Last month, 1,200 Iraqis waited patiently in line in Iraq's searing heat to sign up to fight al-Qaida. They will join an estimated 30,000 volunteers in the past six months — a clear sign the tide has turned in the battle for average Iraqis' hearts and minds.

• Finally, and lest you think it's all death and destruction, there's this: Five million Iraqi children returned to school last week, largely without incident, following their summer vacations.

None of this, of course, is accidental. The surge of 28,500 new troops announced by President Bush last February, and put in place in mid-June by Gen. Petraeus, seems to have worked extraordinarily well. Al-Qaida, though still a potent foe capable of committing mass atrocities, has been backpedaling furiously.

"They are very broken up, very unable to mass, and conducting very isolated operations" is how Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson described al-Qaida's situation in comments this week.

Things have gone so well, in fact, that leading Democratic contenders have stopped calling for a "timetable" for withdrawal and can't even promise they'll remove all the troops by 2013.

In short, the U.S. is — yes, we'll use the word —winning the war against al-Qaida. And not just in Iraq. In fact, the only way we won't win is if we do something very stupid — such as letting the overwhelmingly negative media convince us we can't do what we clearly are doing.


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President Thompson

[americanthinker] Conventional wisdom is hardening around the proposition that Fred Dalton Thompson is too lazy, ill-prepared, tired, old, lackluster, inexperienced, inconsistent and bald to make a successful run for President.

Of course, conventional wisdom rarely gets anything right. When it does, it's only by accident.

In this case conventional wisdom is not just wrong but comically so. Thompson will win the Republican nomination for two reasons. First, he's a very impressive candidate. Second, there's no realistic alternative. He will win the general election for the same two reasons.

Let's start by considering the Thompson's Republican competition....

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No more Fox & Corkum!? That is sad news and will leave a gaping void...

Best wishes gentlemen, your work will be missed!

Fox & Corkum : Final Bow

[C&F] With mixed emotions I announce: John and I will no longer be producing editorial cartoons. John will continue posting his work at his blog, John Cox Art, and he and I will continue working together on various projects, but there will be no more regularly scheduled editorial cartoons. The Web site will remain running indefinitely, as a means to market our books and as an archive of our work.

Let me start by saying that quitting editorial cartooning has been one of my toughest decisions. Having such a creative outlet for expressing my opinions is immensely satisfying. It's an art form I've admired for decades, so I do not take lightly having the opportunity to work in the medium and to have that work seen by others. One of my proudest moments came soon after 9/11 when I held in my hands our first published cartoon. It was easy to feel useless, even helpless, in the weeks and months following the attacks. But to be able to fight in the battle of ideas was empowering.

For better or worse, I've always had to approach the editorial cartoon work as a "part time" career. I never quit my "day job" as co-owner of a small newspaper publishing business. The editorial work, though intellectually rewarding, is not very rewarding financially. Furthermore, researching the cartoons, writing/designing them, managing the blog, publishing the books, marketing them, and running the business side all take an enormous amount of time.

All of that comes with the territory, of course, and John and I have done pretty well over the last six years. We're fairly well known on the Internet, we have a few newspaper and magazine clients, we've self-published four books, and we've made some money, if not a living. But lately, for reasons I won't go into here, I can no longer afford to divert so much time and attention away from my publishing business and other personal concerns, such as my family.

I also want to stop focusing so much of my creative energy on negative aspects of daily life. There's still an ideological battle to be fought, not to mention an actual war, and I will stay engaged in some form and medium. But at this point, anything seems more appealing than immersing myself in the sewer of daily politics.

That said, I imagine we won't be able to resist creating an occasional editorial cartoon. And if we do, we'll post it here.

Over the years we've received many letters of encouragement from all over the world and from all across the political spectrum. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Of course, we've received our share of criticism too, but surprisingly little of the hate mail so common on the Internet. We're thankful to all of you who have shared our work with others, bought our books and products, and stood beside us along the way, even if not on every issue.

There are many people we're grateful to for their support, from bloggers, to clients, to friends. I can't begin to list them all here; hopefully you know who you are. But there are two "firsts" I want to mention by name. Robert Tracinski was the first to publish one of our editorial cartoons (see the cartoon here) in the November 2001 edition of The Intellectual Activist. And Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs was the first major blogger to regularly post our work on the Internet (see the cartoon here). They both saw value in our work, and we thank them for publicizing our cartoons when others wouldn't.

And finally, though John and I will continue to work together, I want to say that it's been an honor and great fun to work with him on these editorial cartoons. Though we had collaborated for years prior to starting the editorials, we discovered that there was a lot to learn about working together on a near daily basis, and from two different cities. There's been plenty of give and take. But ultimately we were able to say to one another "split the balloon with his head" or "make the worm neck longer" and be completely understood. John breathed life into the cartoons by giving the characters emotion and humanity. We simply could not have produced this work separately, and I will be forever proud to have the work bear our names.

And so, we take our bow.

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[bbc] Actress Lois Maxwell, who starred as Miss Moneypenny in a string of James Bond movies, has died aged 80.

Maxwell starred alongside Sir Sean Connery in Bond's first movie outing, Dr No, in 1962. She played the role until 1985's A View To A Kill with Sir Roger Moore, who told the BBC she had been a "great asset" to the early Bond movies.

"I think it was a great disappointment to her that she had not been promoted to play M - she would have been a wonderful M..."

"It was a great pity that, after I moved out of Bond, they didn't take her on to continue in the Timothy Dalton films." - Roger Moore

Maxwell starred in 14 Bond films as the secretary to M, the secret agent's boss and head of the secret service.

She appeared in more movies than any of the actors who played the lead role in the spy series, including Sir Sean Connery and Sir Roger Moore. Only Desmond Llewelyn, who played gadget man Q 17 times before his death in 1999, starred in more films.

Aged 58 when she made her final Bond appearance, she was replaced by 26-year-old Caroline Bliss for The Living Daylights.

transmission on Monday, October 01, 2007 at 1:29 PM | Permalink