Will any of the lawmakers, journalists, labor leaders and other activists in attendance at Fighting Bob Fest repudiate the notion, made by a speaker there, that protesters should escalate their harassment from beer to urine?

Don’t hold your breath.

[Madison, Wisc…] Thousands of liberal political activists, gathered here Saturday for an annual conference, cheered and laughed as a speaker recounted the recent assault of a GOP lawmaker. The crowd attending the Fighting Bob Fest also rejoiced at the suggestion that protesters, instead of dumping beer over the heads of Republicans, should urinate on them.

“This is Wisconsin, this is the place where you had some guy pour a beer on the head of a Republican State Senator?” said Fest speaker Greg Palast as the crowd erupted with cheers. “No, no, no, that’s all wrong. You can’t do that. That’s just wrong. I’m from New York. If you’re going to pour beer on a Republican, you have to drink it first.”

The crowd can then be heard breaking out in loud and sustained cheers and laughter.

(more…)

There are many battle fronts in the war for human freedom, but perhaps the least-appreciated of these is the battle over America’s communications and media marketplace and whether free markets or government mandates will ultimately rule them.  This battle takes on added importance since all other public policy debates depend upon an unfettered press and robust, independent channels of communication.

What many on the far Left have long understood, and many defenders of freedom have failed to appreciate, is that the battle for control of media and communications policy is fundamentally tied up with the broader war for control of our economy and society. “Instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we learned that unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution,” argues the prolific Marxist media theorist Robert W. McChesney. “While the media is not the single most important issue in the world, it is one of the core issues that any successful Left project needs to integrate into its strategic program.”

Normally we wouldn’t need to pay attention to what unrepentant ‘60’s radicals or neo-Marxist university professors think about media and communications policy. In this case, however, it is essential we pay attention. First, McChesney is right in one sense: history reveals that almost every successful effort to impose sweeping controls over an economy / society was accompanied by government efforts to control press and communication systems. If the State is going to have any luck gaining widespread and far-reaching control of an economy, gaining more control over “the Press” — which means all of us these days — becomes an essential part of the “strategic program” for control. Second, we need to pay attention to these radicals because McChesney and the group that he and John Nichols of The Nation co-founded — the insultingly misnamed Free Press — have given this fight new immediacy with their relentless agitation for media and communications policy “reform.”  And they are not the only ones. (more…)

In the battle over media and communications freedom, no group poses a more serious threat to a free and independent press than the insultingly misnamed regulatory activist group Free Press. Along with their founders, the prolific neo-Marxist media theorist Robert W. McChesney and Nation correspondent John Nichols, Free Press has engaged in relentless agitation for a truly radical media and communications policy agenda, and their influence is now spreading throughout the Obama Administration.

The Free Press-McChesney blueprint for media “reform” reads more like a script for State servitude. On the regulatory side, they call for media ownership restrictions, “localism” mandates, “Net neutrality” regulations, price controls on broadband, advertising and copyright restrictions, and layers of additional regulatory edicts.  Once all that red tape smothers the life out the independent press and private communications providers, they plan to have the State step in become the primary benefactor of the Fourth Estate and high-tech infrastructure. For starters, McChesney and Nichols advocate a $35 billion annual “public works” program for the press modeled after the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal era. Their media WPA would include a “News AmeriCorps” for out-of-work journalists, a “Citizenship News Voucher” to funnel taxpayer support to struggling media entities, a significant expansion of postal subsidies, a massive new subsidy for journalism schools, corporate welfare for newspapers sufficient to pay 50 percent of the salaries of all “journalistic employees,” municipal government ownership of press and infrastructure, and many more bureaucratic programs. (more…)