I've been thinking about something recently and I figure the NB's could have some good insight.

Is it possible to be truly capatilistic AND patriotic? 

It seems to me that if you are a true capatilist, then country allegiance takes a back seat to the market place.  Given a conflict between the two, a true capatilist would have to side with the market.

So is it possible to be a patriotic capatilist?

Recently, the rumblings of support for the so-called “fairness doctrine” have begun to surface. The goal, according to the proponents, is to somehow legislate into existence some kind of counter to the 900-pound gorilla known as conservative talk radio. Air America Radio was intended to be that agent of balance, but despite the infusion of millions of George Soros money and the Star Power of Al Franken, it has been unable to gain nationwide traction with listeners or advertisers. AAR has lost several stations and last October filed for bankruptcy.

Faced with this failure and the continuing strong growth of conservative talkers like Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, and Savage, progressives seem intent on legislating what the free market failed to deliver.

The Fairness Doctrine was adopted by the FCC in 1949 in a time when frequencies were limited and the Commission was being flooded by license requests for new stations. In 1949, media outlets were considered “public trustees,” instead of private businesses. As the Museum of Broadcast Communications explains, “…broadcasters should make sure they did not use their stations simply as advocates with a singular perspective. Rather, they must allow all points of view. That requirement was to be enforced by FCC mandate.” (http://www.museum.tv...)

The doctrine was swept away in the flood of federal deregulation instituted by President Ronald Reagan. Within a few years, it became apparent that the cries of conservatives who felt their point of view wasn’t fairly represented by what they termed “The Main Stream Media” were legitimate. Conservative talkers began cropping up, most notably Rush Limbaugh, and saw their market share and popularity explode. That genre fuelled a resurgence in conservative political activity and many analysts point to that influence as being directly responsible for the Republicans gaining control of both houses of congress in 1994, for the first time in 40 years.

Liberals saw quickly that talk radio could move political mountains, and Democrat party officials strove mightily to carve out their own electronic beachhead, an effort that has largely failed.

Now, Democrat political leaders have begun to campaign for fairness legislation with a growing fervor. As this movement begins to catch momentum, it is apparent that the supporters are moving forward in ignorance of the inexorable effects of the “law of unintended consequences.” Defined by Rob Norton of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (http://www.econlib.o...) as “…actions of people—and especially of government—always have effects that are unanticipated or "unintended."

In this case, while supporters are convinced that this move will level the playing field, and perhaps eliminate these vexing influences, they are also ignorant of the other effects such a doctrine would impose. For example...

-- National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System will be required to surrender 12 hours of their programming day to programs favorable to conservative issues.

-- Journalists will be required to identify both sides of a given issue in the lead paragraphs of their stories. Front page space will be halved, in order to ensure lawful reporting of both points of view.

-- In schools, conservatives could use the fairness doctrine to force equal-time discussions on matters such as intelligent design, and the sizeable amount of research identifying climate change as an effect of the dynamic forces of nature, rather than blaming the whole thing on "rich republicans."

-- College campuses would be required to allow conservative speakers in the same numbers as those espousing progressive points of view. And students would not be allowed to protest their presence.

-- Government research grants would have to be evenly distributed among researchers, meaning anthropogenic global warming advocates would be forced by law to share those monies with those individuals and groups performing contrary research. And the media would be forced by law to equally report the results of such research.

So you see, the imposition of a fairness doctrine works both ways. Progressives need to think long and hard about the real results before legislating an artificially level playing field.

http://race-the-sunset.blogspot.com/

I've been reading a great book about the formation and operations of the American Volunteer Group (AVG), aka "The Flying Tigers", who were one of the most heralded combat units in WWII.  The basis for the AVG was that some forward-thinking Americans knew that war with Japan was coming, that we needed to gain combat experience against them before we went to war, and that helping China fight Japan was a good way to start getting our licks in early.  And on an operational basis, we had to protect China and its resources from falling into Japanese hands, and to do that we had to keep the Burma Road (the main supply line for the Chinese) from being destroyed.  The Chinese military couldn't do it alone, and they needed our help.  Unfortunately, there were a lot of people who felt that we had no business fighting overseas, and there was law after law passed to prevent us from engaging in conflicts outside the U.S.

The AVG was only formed, and became a tremendous asset to the U.S. war effort, because of a highly complex series of lies, misinformation, shadow companies, bribes, payoffs, nepotism (FDR's uncle was hired to lobby FDR), and a lot of concious decisions to break laws.  

Can you imagine such a effort being tried today... as the CIA leaked stories of shipments of fighter planes, bought through shadow corporations, being sent to China to the New York Times?  As the NYT fulfilled it's self-defined need to help our enemies by exposing vital operations that are needed to ensure our national security?  Sure, the American people would have been well informed that many Americans had broken many U.S. laws, and there would have been tremendous political fallout... but the Burma Road would have been lost, and with it China and it's natural resources, to the Japanese, which would have greatly changed the course of the war.

It's kinda scary to realize that we could have lost the war in the Pacific if the MSM of the 1940s had acted like the MSM of today.  Now we're just losing the war on terror because of it.

Hey all, I'm listening to the evil talk radio right now in AZ where I live.

Get this, our Sheriff Joe Apio created a new "hot line" last week to call in and report Illegal's. Apparently over 300 people have called so far. At this point Sheriff Joe has done nothing with the phone calls into the hot line. What is interesting and what has happened in response, is that the illegal alien Latino groups (with the backing of Mary Rose Wilcox who is the Democrat, 5th District Supervisor) have created there own "hot line" to get this - report people, that reported people to the Sheriff's hotline.

Now looking at this, isn't this the same or at least similar to the kind of intimidation that the "flying Imams" are trying to do in going after the "John Doe's" so they can sue these people for reporting suspicious behavior?

In further thought, isn't this what our government TOLD us to do after 9/11? You know, if it looks suspicious or out of place report it? I hope this does the exact opposite of what the Democrats are expecting and it pisses people off even more and motivates the citizens to call the Sheriffs hot line to the point of 1000's of calls a day to it (hell I can name 10 locations myself - it's ridiculous here in Arizona).

I'll look forward to any debate on this, and sadly my opinion of Democrats acting as Socialist Elitist has been re-enforced again *sigh* How can someone hate themselves so much?

Here is a cool story about my Chicago Bears. They received a humanitarian award for their efforts as a team and an organization to give back to the community.

If conservatives are RIGHT, then liberals must be WRONG.
Thompson/Rice

Have you noticed the following on the coverage of Michael Vick:

1. Plenty of Richmond references (implies white and south)
2. Jury pool will be comprised of rural, not urban (implies white)
3. No mention of Virginia Tech (implies people of white conservative Virginia will not support Vick)
4. Groups protesting Vick not labeled properly as the liberal whack jobs they are (ignores liberals protesting a sports hero of a mostly liberal group)
5. MSM trying its best to spin the white v. black issue
6. Reference to judge nominated by George W. Bush in 2002 (unlike Hazelton PA judge Clinton reference omitted in illegal immigrant lawsuit)

Sad state of affairs for a man who has all the opportunity in the world and the MSM spinning it like it will be the white man putting him in jail. 

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