Fake News Practiced by All the Media

Is a reduction of federal government spending for a few days by 13% really a government shutdown? Of course not, though that was all that happened the last time Congress did not agree on a new budget authorization in time.  Especially not when government spending is at least four times that of a legitimate government abiding by the principle that its proper function is only to protect every American individual's right to life, liberty, self-ownership, property, freedom of conscience, freedom of association, freedom of speech and press, the freedom of self-defense, the right to the ownership of one's own labor and the fruits it produces, the freedom to trade and to contract, and the pursuit of one's own happiness -- all while free from others, including the government, initiating the use of force against the individual.

Yet once again, such a trivial prospective reduction in government spending on the 100th day of the Trump administration is being called a government shutdown.  Fox News, CNN, ABC, and NBC are all guilty of this alarmist, Yellow journalism.  It is a lie that promotes interest in their broadcasts. They clearly believe they are promoting their own self-interest with a lie.  Americans should be angry about this misrepresentation of the facts by our Fake News media.

Democrat Senator Durbin Questions Freedom of the Press

On Fox News Sunday, Democrat Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois questioned whether bloggers were protected by the 1st Amendment under freedom of the press.  Let us re-read the 1st Amendment of the Constitution and see if his doubts about the rights of bloggers to write as an exercise of their freedom of conscience makes any sense at all.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The breadth of this amendment as a means to allow individuals to use their minds, to produce their own ideas, and to make those ideas known to others is the unifying theme of this amendment.  Most people at the time of its adoption believed that this amendment guaranteed a broad freedom of conscience.  Certainly Thomas Jefferson and James Madison thought so.

When the amendment was written, the written word could only be distributed to others by using a rather expensive invention, the printing press.  But note that the amendment also allowed people to speak freely, to assemble and share ideas, and to complain to or seek reforms by the government.  In this context, it is not possible to believe that the 1st Amendment was only intended to allow those who distributed their ideas using a printing press to exercise their freedom of conscience.  I do not see the People then as thinking that freedom of the press was something that belonged only to someone who had made an investment in a printing press.  The core idea of the 1st Amendment was to allow people to use their minds and to share their ideas with others.

No, it seems very clear that the dissemination of an individual's ideas and thoughts by right was to be broadly protected by this amendment.  That being the case, the freedom to write down one's ideas and to disseminate them was to be protected from any abridging acts of Congress.  Thus, the right of bloggers to write down their ideas and to make them available to others for reading is clearly protected by the 1st Amendment.

With experienced Senators such as Dick Durbin showing such profound ignorance of the 1st Amendment, it is no wonder our government has become such a constant threat to the rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own body, mind, and labor, and to the pursuit of personal happiness.

To be sure, there is considerable evidence that Dick Durbin is less ignorant than a man of evil intent.  He, like all socialists, is only too happy to mislead the many who are uninformed about their individual rights.  Persons asserting their individual rights are necessarily a major problem for the supporters of Big Government and socialism.

If Falsely Accused of Racism You Had Better Not Work for Obama

A short video of Shirley Sherrod, the Georgia Director of Rural Development, made the rounds on YouTube on Monday and seemed to imply she was a racist.  She was forced to resign from the Agricultural Department on Monday as the result of three phone calls made by Cheryl Cook, the USDA's deputy undersecretary, who stated that the White House demanded her immediate resignation.  In the video, Sherrod had stated that she made less than her full effort to save the farm of a white farmer in Georgia from foreclosure.  The video was a snippet of a talk she gave to a local Georgia chapter of the NAACP back in 1986.  In the rest of the talk, she had told the story of how she had come to realize while helping the white farmer that race was not the issue.  The farmer's wife came out on Tuesday with the dismayed statement that Sherrod had played a critical role in saving their farm from foreclosure and was forever her friend.

On Monday, the President of the national NAACP, Benjamin Todd Jealous, called for Sherrod's resignation because the NAACP has a zero tolerance policy for racism.  This followed closely on the heels of Jealous calling the Tea Party movement racist.  On Tuesday, the NAACP changed its mind, when someone finally checked on the testimony of Eloise Spooner, the farmer's wife.  The NAACP blamed Fox News and Tea Party activist Andrew Breitbart for their error, despite the fact that the NAACP had the complete speech given by Sherrod in their possession and could have reviewed it before calling for her resignation.  Fox News did not have that complete video.  Finally, the media also talked to Sherrod, which the White House was unwilling to do.  But, on Tuesday, the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, defended his demands for Sherrod's immediate resignation.  He made it clear he is afraid of rumors of racism.

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, that maven of careful fact-checking of the left, laughed that Fox News had covered the Sherrod incident and had not early picked up on the problem with the out-of-context video clip.  Neither had the other news outlets who covered the story on Monday.  Yet, according to Maddow, Fox News alone caused Sherrod to be "fired."  Fox News was only one of many to initially get the story wrong.  This is not good, but neither is it good for Maddow to follow up an out-of-context story by trying to turn it into another out-of-context story.  This just makes her a laughingstock.  It is not the first time.

More damning yet, how could the White House call upon a federal employee to resign without even listening to her side of the story first?  What kind of jerk employer would call for a resignation and never bother to check into the context of an accusation?  If Fox News was at fault, at least it might have been alerting people about a matter that needed further looking into.  The White House and the Secretary of Agriculture should have done that looking into it before asking for a resignation.  And having made a colossal mistake, they should be prepared to admit it now.

Who does Shirley Sherrod blame for her "firing?"  She blames the White House and the NAACP.  Strangely enough, she is not blaming Fox News.  She says the NAACP's high profile claims that the Tea Party movement is racist caused them to prematurely call for her resignation.  One might expect that opposition to racism should be based on a concept of justice, but it is now clear that both the NAACP and the White House are sadly deficient in the concept of justice.

Glenn Beck and Atlas Shrugged and The Road to Serfdom

I saw the 8 June 2010 Glenn Beck show in its rerun slot from 2 to 3 AM this morning.  He was primarily talking about F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, but he held up Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged on at least three occasions during the show and said he was going to talk more next week about Ayn Rand, George Orwell, and F. A. Hayek and their important roles in the support of Capitalism at the expense of socialism.

The program talked with an economist, Yuri Maltsev, Prof. of Economics, Carthage College, who left the Soviet Union, who had read The Road to Serfdom there in a locked room and upon swearing that he would tell no one he had read it and that he would not talk about it.  The intention was that if a few economists read the book, they might find a way to improve the floundering Soviet economy by stealing a secret or two from a great proponent of Capitalism! 

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. of the Ludwig von Mises Institute was also a guest on the show and summarized what he thought were the main points of The Road to Serfdom.  To summarize what Woods said were Hayek's main three points:

• The worst people rise to the top planning and leadership positions, because all they promise is a lie.
• They are unable to deliver basic goods and services, not even toilet paper, toothpaste, or condoms.
• Everyone must abide by the central planner's priorities, so no one is allowed to live their own life.

Check Out PJTV, Please

PJTV is a relatively new source of information on the Internet with a strong individual rights message and much good reporting.  Bill Whittle, Steven Green, Scott Ott, Joe Hicks, Yaron Brook, Andrew Klavan, Crowder, Dana Loesch, Dr. Peter Weiss, Glenn Reynolds, Sonja Schmidt, and Roger L. Simon are among the many commentators and reporters on PJTV.  This is a group with a pretty consistent pro-individual rights and free market message.  I really appreciate their work.

Here is a message from Bill Whittle in his Afterburner program on why and how we should support the Tea Party movement and the general re-awakening of the people for more limited government and for our individual rights.  This is not a typical program, but it does display the viewpoint of PJTV pretty well.  Of course, most commentaries are on a more specific current issue.  Most are lively, fun, and many are funny.

I hope you will watch a number of their programs and that if you like them, you will subscribe and support this very wonderful attempt to make a more libertarian viewpoint available to the People.  I have been impressed with its quality and the rate of expansion has been quite surprising.  That is probably because it is meeting a great need.  The Tea Party movement has fed a desire in many people for a new viewpoint on our freedoms and government, and PJTV is providing that.  Fox News is at least not consistently anti-individual rights and anti-free markets, but its reporters and commentators offer a mix of many viewpoints.  This is not bad, but those of us who understand the real issues and want our government to pursue a consistent policy of protection for the equal, sovereign, and unalienable rights of the individual will find a TV news-like supplement such as PJTV a more concentrated and consistent source of the news of interest to us.

Net Neutrality Enforcement by the FCC and Free Speech

Net Neutrality is a term that brings back memories of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requiring that conservative as well as liberal viewpoints had to be aired on television networks, local TV stations, and radio stations after the events of the late 1960s led many to believe the country was about to fall into the hands of socialists.  Ayn Rand, perhaps due to her early experience with a country having been taken over by socialists when she was a child in the Soviet Union, was in favor of this requirement as a last gasp attempt to prevent a socialist takeover in the United States.  This was one of the few major issues that I disagreed with her on.  While the socialists were hurting the country, I did not think they were on the verge of taking the USA over and putting it under their control.  I thought that Americans who believed in the principle of individual rights still had sufficient means to make use of their free speech rights.  I thought it was dangerous to do anything that would interfere with free speech and set a precedent for such interference in the future.  This turned out to be the case.

Moving to the present and the recent past, we have heard a great many complaints from the socialists associated with Obama and the Democrat Congress about people with viewpoints in opposition to theirs.  This atmosphere of control over speech by the left has long been the rule on most college campuses.  An intricate matrix of politically correct viewpoints are allowed and those with viewpoints outside this matrix are called bigots, rednecks, NASCAR people, trailer trash, and racists.  Students not on board are threatened with expulsion and faculty with a failure to gain tenure.  The socialists clearly do want this same politically correct culture of restricted free speech to be transferred into every American's life.  In many companies, particularly large ones with considerable government business, political correctness rules the day.  Obama's and his comrade's comments about Fox News have not only expressed dislike of that organization's multivariate viewpoints, but have sometimes suggested a desire to limit what it can say with regulations and controls.  Other of his friends have expressed a desire to control what is said on the Internet.  This is hardly surprising given that the left, wherever it has free reign, as it does on most college campuses, has always lost its interest in free speech.  In fact, no socialist country ever tolerates free speech in the way we have traditionally in the United States.

With this as background, let us consider what Glenn Beck has to say in the video clip of a part of his program here.

While much of what he says is true, some perspective is needed.  First, the primary issue of Net Neutrality is whether the companies that operate the lines that provide us with our Internet information should continue to be able to manage the flow of data to optimize the overall service.  As is the case with all resources, bandwidth on these Internet lines is finite.  It is not always the case that everyone hooked up to such a line can upload and download as much data as they wish.  The lines sometimes become overloaded.  The most vociferous and determined company opposing Net Neutrality is Comcast.  This is probably because Comcast has less bandwidth than, say, does Verizon in many areas.  They have no choice but to limit user access in some way.  Allegations have been made that they limited that access in ways that gave their own content an advantage over the content of others.  This may be true, but it is not clear that the issue was one of their trying to cut off socialist or conservative viewpoints from their subscribers.  Some companies, especially those who dealt with large files that they want to send to their customers and who take in large files sent to them from their customers, do not like the fact that Comcast sometimes did not allow a large file to be uploaded at a particular time when they had too little bandwidth to meet the demand.  All the other major Internet line providers also assert that they need to manage their bandwidth also, since all of them have finite bandwidth.  The Net Neutrality proponents do not want any special restrictions aimed at them, despite the fact that they produce many large files that rapidly fill the finite bandwidth of the Internet provider's lines.

Some socialist organizations have banded together with the large file handling point-to-point companies in favor of Net Neutrality.  Why?  Probably because they simply want to get the power of the FCC expanded to give them the power to regulate the Internet.  And yes, they no doubt do want the FCC to later use this power to regulate the Internet to control the viewpoints expressed on the Internet.  That is not the immediate issue being addressed at this time, however.  These socialist organizations are also trying to establish their expertise on such Internet matters and gain publicity.

Of course, we should remain alert to any increase in the powers of the FCC in any case.  It has much too much power now and it does have a lot of potential for the future misuse of that power specifically to allow those in power to squelch viewpoints at variance with their own.  The FCC has always tended to act in restraint of the free markets and this has never been a good thing.

Fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. ruled on 6 April 2010 that the FCC has failed to show that it has the authority under Title 1 of the Communications Act of 1934 to tell broadband Internet providers how they could manage their finite bandwidth issues.  At least, the FCC could not do it the way they were attempting to do it.  Being a grasping federal agency always looking to expand its power, the FCC will try and try again to gain control over the Internet, but it has not yet found the formula for doing so.

Government Thugs Extort Bank of America

Today, Judge Andrew Napolitano announced on Fox News that several government agency officials threatened to remove Bank of America members from the Board of Directors if they did not continue with the government demanded purchase of Merrill Lynch for $50 billion. Bank of America auditors had discovered that Merrill Lynch was only worth $35 billion and Bank of America had a clause in their agreement to purchase Merrill Lynch that allowed them to back out of the deal if ML was worth less than $50 billion. They consequently told the government that they were going to back out of the deal, but a number of government officials from the Treasury Department and other agencies with power over the bank refused to let them exercise their escape option. Later, Bank of America found that ML was worth not more than $34 billion due to bonuses paid.

The government forced Bank of America to take TARP bailout money, which they may have needed due to the very bad deal in acquiring ML that they were forced into. A $16 billion loss will cause most any company some considerable pain! But, the federal government does not own any voting stock in Bank of America and should have no say in who serves on the Board of Directors. It can threaten the bank with audits and many very costly and time-prohibitive requirements as part of its massive regulatory control over banks and the financial industry. So, this is what it did and the executives of the Bank of America did not have the courage to then announce to the public that the executive branch of the federal government was using extortion to force the bank to throw away $16 billion of stockholder's investment, while making depositor's risk escalate.

Similar instances of federal government extortion are becoming commonplace under the despotic regime of Obama. His government is simply an extortion ring on a massive scale. In addition to the threats against individual companies to confiscate and destroy their property and wealth, Obama has used extortion to gain unprecedented control of the financial industry and the auto industry.

He is threatening to takeover the health services industry, which is already being squeezed by the various Medicare, Medicaid, and new prescription drug benefit programs. These government programs have long driven up the costs of private insurance, since the privately insured have long subsidized the government insured. The government is now moving to increase the number of people insured by government insurance massively. This will massively drive up the cost of private insurance until no one can afford private insurance and all private insurers are driven out of the market. The government will be left in control of all payments and in complete control therefore of the entire health care industry. There will no longer be any control on costs, except the limiting of services and the rationing of care. Medical equipment will become obsolete as it has in the United Kingdom and in Canada. Fewer able people will choose to enter the field as doctors, pharmacists, nurses, and administrators. Bureaucrats will tell doctors what medical procedures to follow. Our medical system quality will collapse and the wait for low-quality care will become life-threateningly long, as it has been in Canada and the U.K. Efforts to make innovative improvements and new developments in medical care will decrease, both due to shortsighted government efforts to cut costs and because the personal motivation of researchers and doctors will decrease.

The Capitalist system of free markets allows individuals to choose the goods and services they want and also makes huge quantities of decision-making information available to them. This system requires that the laws be known and stable. It requires protections of property rights and the roles of investors and employers. These are very much among our individual rights whether as investors and employers or as consumers and employees. When our government forsakes its responsibility to provide these protections and instead becomes an organized gangster mob shaking down businesses, whole industries, and their customers, the Capitalist system of free choices collapses. Tyranny is all that remains. Obama is the head tyrant and he has a strong following of thugs in the upper echelons of the Democrat Party and among his appointments to powerful positions in the executive agencies who also lust for unbridled power. There are still further long-term government employees who also too much enjoy power when the President and high-level appointees do not set a higher-minded standard for good, limited government. The damage to our society is massive.