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Government Should Stay Out of Media, Let the Press Fend for Itself
Tweet Share on Facebook October 20, 2009 Comment (16)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Writing in Monday's Washington Post, former executive editor Len Downie and Columbia University Professor Michael Schudson offer a menu of options to save print journalism by creating mechanisms to bring "public sources of support" for news reporting.
Saying that "American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting news reporting," Downie and Schudson argue that government must take a leadership role and subsidize the news gathering process because "What is paramount is preserving independent, original, credible reporting, whether or not it is profitable, and regardless of the medium in which is appears."
Among their recommendations is for the Internal Revenue Service or Congress to "clarify tax regulations to explicitly allow new or existing local news organizations to operate as nonprofit or low-profit entities, allowing them to receive tax-deductible donations, along with advertising revenue and other income." Also, they want the Federal Communications Commission to create a "national Fund for Local News" out of the fees it collects "from or could impose on telecom users, broadcast licensees or Internet service providers." The money from this fund, Downie and Schudson suggest, would be distributed in competitive grants issued by "independent state Local News Fund Councils to local news organizations for innovations in local news reporting and ways to support it."
Both of these are monumentally bad ideas, in no small part because they make the government and media partners in the news business.
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Dismal Foreclosure Numbers Could Be the Tip of the Iceberg
Tweet Share on Facebook October 16, 2009 Comment (18)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
As the U.S. economy collapsed last fall, due in no small part to bad home loans made in the subprime market, the Democrats and the Republicans both made a lot of noise about the need to shore up the housing market to prevent further foreclosures.
Unfortunately, all the talk has produced little positive result. Figures released Thursday show that nearly 1 million properties went into foreclosure in the third quarter of 2009. That's an increase of 5 percent from the previous quarter and nearly 23 percent from just one year ago.
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Forget Daggett the Spoiler, New Jersey Will Vote Gov. Jon Corzine Out
Tweet Share on Facebook October 15, 2009 Comment (11)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The New Jersey gubernatorial race is coming down to the wire with no clear winner in sight.
The latest polling shows the race narrowing significantly, with the Republican challenger, former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, now leading incumbent Democrat Gov. Jon Corzine by just one point.
Part of the reason the race appears so close is the presence on the ballot of Chris Daggett, a liberal Republican turned independent who once worked for former GOP Gov. Tom Kean. Most analysts consider Daggett, currently polling at somewhere around 13 percent, a spoiler, someone who could draw enough regular Republican votes away from Christie to allow Corzine to squeak back into the governor's mansion by a nose.
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Obama, the Anti-Reagan, Is Failing on the Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook October 14, 2009 Comment (11)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The No. 1 issue for President Obama, the issue on which his presidency will likely succeed or fail, is the state of the U.S. economy. And, as it now stands, he's failing.
It's true that the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a key economic indicator, is now back up around 10,000 but, contrary to what he promised when pushing his economic stimulus package, unemployment continues to rise and is now over 9 percent.
The administration's response to all the bad news has been to continue to blame George W. Bush for leaving things in a mess. Richard Rahn, a founding member of the supply-side school of economics, makes a persuasive case that this is nonsense, and that Obama must now take ownership of the economy's problems.
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Race-Baiting Opposition to Rush Limbaugh's Bid for the NFL's St. Louis Rams
Tweet Share on Facebook October 13, 2009 Comment (50)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Washington lawyer DeMaurice Smith wants talk radio's Rush Limbaugh to fail.
Smith, the executive director of the National Football League Players' Association, is trying to make America's football players part of an effort to oppose a bid by Limbaugh and others to purchase the St. Louis Rams football franchise.
In an e-mail to the union's executive committee, ESPN reported Sunday, Smith said he had spoken to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell about the possibility of the league awarding the franchise to Limbaugh and his co-bidders, raising concerns about it while using the language of Limbaugh's political opponents in describing him by implication as a divisive figure who stands for "discrimination and hatred."
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Corzine Should Apologize to Christie for Weight Ad in N.J. Governor's Race
Tweet Share on Facebook October 8, 2009 Comment (7)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine needs to apologize.
Locked in a tight battle for re-election, Corzine, who over the last four years has presided over the disintegration of New Jersey's once robust economy, is telling voters his principal opponent, Republican Chris Christie, is unworthy of the state's highest office because he is too fat.
In a new attack ad the Corzine campaign began airing this week, Christie is shown in slow-motion, emerging from a sport utility vehicle as the announcer talks about how the former U.S. attorney once "threw his weight around" to avoid some traffic tickets.
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Is Harry Reid Planning a Public Option Bait-and-Switch on Healthcare?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 7, 2009 Comment (20)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Last week, members of the Senate Finance Committee voted down two attempts to add a public option to the healthcare bill they were writing. That, in turn, set up a scenario for healthcare gridlock: the Senate unable to pass a bill that included a public option and the House unwilling to pass a bill without it.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, may have come up with a way to thread that needle.
Recognizing that there are not 60 Senate votes for a public option—but that there are almost surely more than 50—writes Susan Ferrechio today in the Washington Examiner, Reid may be planning to move the bill forward without it as a way to secure the 60 votes needed to shut off Republican efforts to filibuster and begin the debate.
Once the bill was on the floor, Reid would then pull a "bait and switch" by offering a public option as an amendment on the Senate floor. Senate experts point out that Reid would still need 60 votes to block attempts to filibuster the amendment—and that a filibuster could still be used to prevent a modified bill that includes a public option from getting a vote on final passage—but getting the bill to the floor changes the nature of the battle. It moves it out of the policy arena and makes it an exercise in raw political power.
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ACORN Scandal Could Embarrass Obama
Tweet Share on Facebook October 6, 2009 Comment (15)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Democrats portrayed Barack Obama's background as a "community organizer" as a plus, something to be admired, something that established his connection to regular people. Even though most people were unable to explain in any meaningful way what a "community organizer" actually did.
You don't hear too much about that aspect of his life these days, possibly because of the questions that keep coming up about ACORN—the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now—and its affiliates: What they do, how they do it, where they get their money, how they spend it, and where the funds that apparently went missing have gone to?
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Democrats Fall Back on Cheap Patriotism as Their Agenda Stalls
Tweet Share on Facebook October 5, 2009 Comment (13)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The Democrats won a tremendous national victory in 2008—and in the ensuing six months managed to squander it.
The party of FDR, JFK, Carter, and Clinton now controls the White House, the House of Representatives, and, by a filibuster-proof 60 vote majority, the United States Senate. At the federal level they have the numbers that allow them to pass any piece of legislation they want without winning a single Republican vote and to have it signed into law. And they're stuck.
They're stuck because the political winds have shifted. Their major legislative and policy priorities—like closing down the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans (however they are defined), ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—are going nowhere. Even on issues they tell us have widespread, popular support like reforming healthcare and the cap and trade energy tax, things have ground to a halt with many analysts wondering if anything will ever be passed on either subject. The vaunted Obama grassroots machine, such an important part of his victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary and over John McCain in the 2008 presidential contest, seems to have all but withered on the vine.
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Democrats’ House-Senate Public Option Impasse Could Kill Healthcare Reform
Tweet Share on Facebook September 30, 2009 Comment (11)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
It's too soon to tell but September 29, 2009, just may be the day that healthcare reform died.
On a bi-partisan basis the Senate Finance Committee rejected Tuesday two amendments, one by West Virginia Democratic Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, and a more modest proposal by Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, to add the so-called "public option" to the healthcare reform legislation currently being written.
Congressional cynics are already describing the votes as "fig leaves," intended to give vulnerable Democrats a "No" vote on the unpopular public option they can point to during their re-election campaigns. And they further predict that, regardless of whatever the Finance Committee produces, the legislation the Senate will finally vote on will either include some type of public option or will lay the groundwork for one in the future.
Taking the members of the committee at their word, or at least at their votes, means the public campaign against public option has had the desired effect—as least as far as the Senate is concerned—setting up a direct conflict with the House of Representatives.
