Coyote Blog

In the first of what promises to be the first of a number of lawsuits against 527 groups under the horrendous McCain-Feingold act, the Federal Election Committee is suing the Club for Growth for its television adds in 2000 and 2002.  Essentially, the FEC is attempting to declare the Club for Growth to be under the control of and an arm of the Republican Party, and therefore subject to McCain-Feingold spending and donation limitations. 

This is absurd.  First, current election law and McCain-Feingold are a brazen assault on the first amendment, and shouldn’t apply to anyone.  Second, to the extent that they are allowed to be applied to the two major political parties, their reach should be limited as much as possible to allow private citizens full freedom of political speech.

While the Club for Growth often supports Republicans over Democrats, browsing their web site makes it clear that they are by no means a shill for the Republican party.  They are strong supporters of reduced regulation and taxes, and have been just as hard on Republicans of late when Bush, Delay and Company have apparently abandoned these goals.  I have supported The Club for Growth for years and I am by no means a Republican.

Several lefty blogs have gleefully piled on because they don’t like the Club for Growth.  This is very very shortsighted.  My sense is that the case against CfG is no better or worse than the case they can have against MoveOn or Soros or whatever.  The CfG suit may well be a Trojan Horse first case to immunize the Bush Administration and the FEC against charges that they are going after the President’s critics.  Once immunized, under this theory, lefty organizations will be next. 

Bloggers represent one of the strongest and most vocal constituencies for freedom of speech — we should be united in opposing this kind of action, whoever it is against.

Update:  More from Reason’s Hit and Run

Today, as linked by Hit and Run, the Washingtonian lists a number of blogs that are popular with journalists.  I have no particular problem with the list — I read many of the same blogs myself.  However, this description of the libertarian blog at Reasons’s Hit and Run struck me as odd (emphasis added):

The libertarians behind Reason magazine strike back with
moderate commentary on a variety of topics ranging from public
television to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl.”

I am not sure that many Republicans or Democrats would consider Reason to be moderate.  Its hard to believe that any of us anarcho-capitalist make-government-and-taxes-go-away libertarians would ever be confused with moderates.  Reason has in the last month taken stands against the drug war, against any government intervention into property rights, against the Patriot act, in defense of steroid use, and favoring legalization of prostitution and continued legality of pornography.  Not many red-staters or blue-staters would call that moderate.  It may be consistent, in that it is against statism and for the primacy of individual decision-making, but libertarianism tends to be extreme and uncompromising in these views.  And, while most libertarians are not moderate, most moderates are not libertarians — those who generally call themselves moderate tend to do so because they pick and choose bits of statism from both political parties. 

But there is an explanation for the word "moderate", and it goes back to the crappy civics lessons we all have gotten.  As I wrote before, those civics lessons were the statist’s wet-dream, portraying the range of political thought on a linear scale from socialism on the left to fascism on the right.  In other words, our political choices are defined as running from statist control to… statist control.  In this framework, anyone who is not a commie or a Nazi are put somewhere in the middle, which has been shorthanded "moderates".

This is obviously a stupid framework, and breaks down when libertarians come into the picture.  More modern self-assessment frameworks use grids of at least two dimensions, with at least one dimension being the degree (from none to total) that one accepts state authority over the individual.

Update:  Oops, I missed the fact that some of the Reason writers themselves had much the same reaction. 

Note that this has become, by accident, my growing post on the Canadian Sponsorship scandal.

The Right (justly) is criticized by the Left for interfering with First Amendment rights by trying to legislate morality in broadcast television. 

However, I find that most people who claim to be free speech supporters, well, aren’t.  Here are a couple of examples.

First, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the very heart of the American left, is attempting to regulate political speech by licensing and regulating bloggers, (not to mention trying to reinvigorate the Fairness Doctrine).

OK, so if both the Left and Right are threatening free speech in GWB’s Amerika, then I guess we need to run off to Canada.  However, now we get to watch Canada’s ruling party suppressing reporting on its malfeasance, trying to hold off public disclosure long enough to call elections to keep their jobs.  Even Karl Rove might fear to try that.

UPDATE:  Captains Quarters reports that at least one Canadian web site that linked to their story on the Canada mess is being threatened with legal action by the Canadian government.  Here is the original story, with a description of what’s going on.  Are you tired of Enron-like financial scandals where you have to take someone’s word for it that illegal things are happening, because all the financial shenanigans are too complicated to understand?  Well, this will be a relief, because it is pretty easy to understand that this is bad:

The sponsorship program eventually became a huge slush fund into which over $250
million was poured, over $100 million of which was paid in fees and commissions
to these five advertising firms, with little or any evidence of work done or
value for money.

In exchange for these large contracts for little or no work, Brault kicked
back generously to the Liberal Party, putting Liberal organizers on his payroll
while they continued to perform party work (including, at one point, Prime
Minister Jean Chrétien’s brother, Gaby Chrétien), paying invoices to other
companies for work actually done for the Liberal Party, and giving large
donations — in cash — to the Liberal Party through Renaud or Liberal Party
organizer (and close associate of Public Works Minister Alfonso Gagliano) Joe
Morselli.

Update #2:  Winds of Change has more detail about what is going on and the context of the Sponsorship program.  I remember a while back GWB rightly caught hell for using government funds to promote administration policies.  The sponorship program seems to have gone way beyond this:

An important note the Captain missed – the $250 million Sponsorship Program was
concentrated in Quebec, where it was used to undermine the separatist Bloc
Quebecois. I’ll note for the record that I don’t really have an issue with that
aspect of it, though the Bloc sure does; they’re Canada’s 3rd largest federal
party.

This scandal may well put the separatists in power in Quebec, leading to yet another separation test for Canada.  Its not clear to me how hard, if at all, the rest of the country would fight separation.

Update #3: More on Canadian (non)free speech here.

Update #4: San Francisco officials claim blogs are exempted and some of the quotes in the original article are suspect.  However, to be fair to the original author, there is nothing in writing that blogs are exempted from the regulation – only a verbal assurance.  When evaluating these verbal assurances, remember that when the nationa income tax was initially passed, the country was given the verbal assurance that the tax would never ever apply to more than then richest 1% of taxpayers.

This is a real low both for journalistic and governmental integrity (via Captains Quarters):

The blogosphere buzzed yesterday with the revelation that pundit Armstrong Williams received $241,000 from the Department of Education to promote the No Child Left Behind Act and push other commentators to do the same. Williams did not disclose the payment while pushing NCLB in several columns and on his television appearances; instead, he represented his opinions as his own independent views.

This is simultaneously wrong and stupid.

Television and Radio have always had a very different regulatory regime than any other type of media.  Unlike, say, newspapers or cable TV companies or satellite providers, television and radio companies have to get and continue to renew licenses and are expected operate in the public interest, whatever the heck that is.  TV and radio stations get access to what has become very valuable bandwidth for free, the only cost being that they have to give regulators what amounts to a veto over their content.  Because of this regulatory structure, you get goofy stuff like this:

The Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement bureau has asked NBC for tapes of the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics, apparently in response to one or more indecency complaints.

Its fun to laugh at this stuff, and it drives me crazy, but at the end of the day the problem is not the FCC or Bush or red states or fundamentalists.  The problem is the first-amendment defying concept that the Feds should have any say in media content.  Period.  The FCC is actually in a difficult spot – by law, they have to enforce decency standards, but when they do so, they look like moralistic thugs.

I do not know the history here, but for some reason the US government, perhaps because it was in the throws of the socialist/fascist New Deal era, abandoned all of its traditional and successful models for allocating a newly discovered or accessible resource (in this case, parts of the spectrum) in favor of this public service liscencing approach.  I can think of at least three different models that the US government has used in similar circumstances and that have all worked much better:

• The Homestead Act:  This established the principal of being the first to stake out and improve a resource (in this case parcels of land) in allocating government lands in the west.  Perhaps the best piece of legislation in the history of the country.    Could have easily followed this principle in the broadcast spectrum – an individual or company would have to broadcast continuously on a certain frequency for 2 years to gain permanent ownership
• Mining Law: In some ways similar to the Homestead act, again it grants ownership of a resource to people who add value to it (in the case of mining, to the people who prospected for it and discovered it).
• Outright Sales:  The government does this all the time, including land sales, mineral lease sales (e.g. offshore oil) and more recently cell phone spectrum sales.

Lets end this regulatory structure now:

1. Grant all current licensees ownership of the spectrum they are currently using.  Drop all content-related regulation. 
2. There are many non-licensed outlaw low-power stations operating.  Create a set of homestead requirements that they can get access to their bandwidth if they meet certain requirements within a certain time frame
3. Acknowledge that technology today allows more of the spectrum to be used than channel spacing of the 1950′s allowed.  Open up more of the holes in the spectrum for use.
4. Sell the newly available spectrum