The McCain campain have been accusing Obama of doing what they’re guilty of themselves for months. I’m not even sure the GOP has done anything else in decades. If anyone’s mentioned this before, I haven’t read the whole thread.
Maybe we could have an “Entertaining Crackpot” Doctrine, to give nutbags free equal time on the airwaves, for the amusement of the rest of us? 
Because I could really get behind THAT!
Mr. Moto, I don’t know if this is what you’re insinuating or not, but you DO realize that the First Amendment does NOT mean that you have a right to be free of criticism. MY First Amendment rights entitle me to say you’re full of shit. As long as I’m not making slandering/libeling you, calling you a pedophile and/or anything like that, or threatening you, I can say whatever I damn well please.
Basically, through her tortured syntax, I’m getting that she feels that HER First Amendment rights entitle her to criticize and attack her political opponents and such-BUT, when the media calls her on it, THEY are infringing on those rights. Because she has the right to do so without anyone offering an opinion in return. Correct?
I did not know she majored in Journalism. That makes it much, much worse. How many professors did she have to blow to get passed in classes?
I don’t know how many professors she blew but apparently she had to go to five different schools, that is probably a lot of profs.
I can’t believe I’m a better constitutional scholar than the VP candidate.
Cite. 
No one could be worse.
Er…my post is my cite?
p.s. I’m also in charge of the Senate.
Yeah, but can you see Russia from your front porch? I can!
After all that all I can wonder is how I can steal Peanut Gallerys user name. No smilie proffered or accepted.
I can see Soviet Canuckistan out my back window! Can I get a cabinet position? I’d prefer something to fit an upright JAMMA-compliant one.
I also hold plenary authority over the Senate whenever a 2/3rds majority of the quorum is distracted by a friendly dog, or when a simple majority of the entire Senate is engaging in either horseplay or roughhousing for longer than fifteen minutes (including any female Senators clapping their hands over their mouths and saying ‘Ummmm!’).
And yet “dragg[ing Bricker] in the mud in every political thread until the SDMB collapses or he leaves, whichever comes first” (as you advocate doing) might. You (and many other liberals) are just acting like assholes. And I say this as a liberal. At least I’ll know whom to blame when there’s no one intelligent to debate with around here. And at least you’ll all be happy sitting around in GD jerking each other off.
Sure, but what you said was:
I just wanted to clarify that. Now, upon rereading it, I’ve noticed that you said “more of the media”, not “more regulatory powers”, so it’s quite possible that I misunderstood you; in which case, my apologies.
OTOH:
I don’t find this too objectionable. I don’t think antitrust laws in general are enforced strongly enough, but that’s a whole 'nother topic, one on which I can admit a fair bit of ignorance.
Cool! Thanks for that.
I don’t think it’s all that bleak. When Air America had a radio station here and wasn’t just on XM, that station offered a variety of political ideas from (seemingly) the whole spectrum of mainstream American liberalism. It’s not like only Republicans listen to the radio, you know. I think there would be a market for contrasting viewpoints if the business environment were more amenable to it.
A note of clarification is in order. I don’t mean that we should convince Bricker to leave. I mean that he will eventually leave someday, or the SDMB will collapse, and until then we should drag him through the mud for fucking with us. One of Bricker’s many virtues is that he is secure enough in the validity of his opinions not to leave just because we give him a taste of his own medicine. In fact, if Bricker is as much like my late father as I think he is, he might even admire us for dishing it out as well as we take it.
I don’t go to GD, nor do I necessarily agree with all SDMB liberals on all/most things. For example, Diogenes the Cynic and I seem to drop the gloves on a regular basis.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Yes, you misunderstood me. I was saying I’d fight the FCC getting control of, say, digital satellite TV the way it has control of free-to-air TV now.
GNU Radio is like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy, the first strong encryption program available to the general public): A long Hail Mary pass just ahead of the laws and societal norms that might make it illegal and immoral. PGP was against government bans on strong cryptography, GNU Radio is against government bans on unsanctioned uses of the RF spectrum, both sending and receiving. It isn’t illegal right now and, hopefully, its existence will make it harder to make it illegal and harder to turn public opinion harshly against it.
How does it compare to the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Salon.com? It certainly can’t compete in terms of the amount of content.
It’s my hypothesis that mainly old people listen to talk radio and watch TV as their main/only source of news and opinion. It’s my further hypothesis (extrapolation of a trend) that the average age of people who only listen to talk radio and watch TV is not going to come back down to where it was in the 1990s. (My cite for TV is a Variety column a few months back reporting on evidence that the median age of TV watchers is now 50. I don’t really have a cite for talk radio.)
(Note that I have no idea about music radio. I suspect it has a broader audience but I know it isn’t relevant to this thread.)
It is amenable to it online. The Internet isn’t a scarce resource in this country anymore: Anyone who is within range of an FM station is likely able to get into a library with Internet terminals at least once a week and have access to a far broader and deeper news and commentary medium than talk radio and TV could ever provide. All it takes on his part is the same curiosity and nous required to vote.
Fifteen years ago this would have been horribly elitist and marked me out as coast-centric. Ten years ago it would have been tone-deaf and marked me out as someone who never had to deal with dialup over old lines. These days, though, it’s neither: ADSL isn’t very fast and it isn’t universal in this country even now, but it is good enough for text-and-images web pages and it is likely in every or nearly every public library.
Meanwhile, radio has remained the same channel-starved analog medium it was in the 1930s when FM was invented. The FCC as we know it is a reaction to that technological strangulation. Encouraging micropower FM and a patchwork of intensely local hobbyist and small commercial stations in every interested region is a way to mitigate the lack of bandwidth.
I would, in fact, support ownership restrictions on micropower stations in return for looser content censorship: Local broadcasts can veer farther into adult content than rebroadcast national feeds are allowed to. I’d even support restrictions on how many channels must be available to local-only stations in any given region. That restricts Randi Rhodes and James Dobson alike, and right now I’m optimistic enough to think something good might come of my big government intrusion. 
And now my big reveal: I think the better micropower radio shows would go online as podcasts, gaining a national audience in a medium that is neither constrained nor censored. It’s the best of both worlds.
I see two possibilities. She knows very well that this isn’t a first amendment issue, but plenty of voters don’t, and plenty of them (particularly her base) don’t think the “MSM” is fair, and so this is a calculated effort to fire up those voters. The other scenario is that she just doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. If I had to bet, I’d put my money on the latter.
Maybe if McCain wins, and she gets to run the Senate, then she can get them to re-write the 1st amendment to fix this obvious oversight by the Founders. That is, afterall, one of the main functions of the Senate.
One problem John, the senate cannot rewrite the 1st Amendment that requires a Constitutional Convention…Were you just talking to the dummies?
Man, sarcasm around here can get real subtle…
Yeah. At lunch I presented this scenario to my kid - a high school senior. Her first comment was, “How can that be a first amendment issue? The media isn’t the government.”
Now, I’m as proud as heck about my kids, and will be the first to brag on them. But it’s just a shame that a governor and VP candidate doesn’t have a better grasp on constitutional law than even the most precocious HS senior!
Not talking to the dummies, but writing something that she might say. Yes, I know the Senate can’t rewrite the 1st Amendment. But does SP know that? There’s no telling…