Mick Stockinger's blog

Citizenship is not something people think about, until its underlying attitudes are lost to the culture. Its notable that in socialist paradises like Canada and the U.K., governments are having to teach active citizenship in the schools to combat the natural lesson of socialism--citizenship is about entitlement.

Nowadays we discuss democracy in terms of elections, but its power lies in the the personal sense of ownership, the individual's sense of responsibility towards the community. The famous tale of Thermopylae in which three hundred Spartans defended their country against thousands of invading Persians is really a demonstration of the relative power of citizens over royal subjects. The Persians were willing to kill for their emperor, but the Spartans, Thespians and Thebans were willing to die to defend their communities, Moreover, the Greeks elevated their sacrifice to a supreme expression of democratic virtue. The citizen had transcended the ancient tribal paradigm. A man would naturally give his life to protect his family, but the Greeks sense of family was transformed--their countrymen were now their family.

The Romans understood the power of this concept and incorporated it into a symbol of the Roman Republic--the Fasces. Its symbolism is obvious--strength through unity. The Romans forged a durable empire less through conquest (which of course every transient empire had done until then...), then by extending Roman citizenship to conquered people. The concept was so powerful, it has been copied universally, although imperfectly every since. American national symbolism is replete with fasces (the arrows in the eagles claw, the pillar's of Lincoln's throne within his monument, 'E Pluribus Unum" on our money...)

Yet symbols are only reminders of abstract facts. When the facts disappear, the symbol becomes meaningless--or worse, available for hijacking. The Swaztika used to be a good luck charm and was used on maps to mark temples, but its modern meaning is altogether different these days.

This is a long, but necessary prelude to understand something Dallas News columnist Rod Dreher wrote.

Dave was hot. And Dave was pretty much right on the money. We talked for a while longer about Bernie Madoff, AIG, the government bailouts, how the responsible are going to have to bear the burdens for the irresponsible – and how those most to blame for this catastrophe are likely to get away with it.

"My dad, he's in his 80s now," Dave said. "He's only got a fourth-grade education and has been a working man all his life. Even now, he can't wait to get up in the morning and get out to work on appliances. I talk to him every night, and we talk a lot about this economic mess. Sometimes he'll get to crying, saying he doesn't know where this country is going, and it scares him."

My wife came outside with a check. Dave put it in his overalls pocket, picked up his toolbox and went to his next job. I thought about him all day long. Dave is just one ordinary working stiff, but he was onto something, and he was onto something big.

What happens when people like him become convinced that the system is set up to reward lobbyists, lawyers, rent-seekers, developers, corporate interests, special-pleaders and sundry freeloaders lining up to nuzzle the ever-expanding government teat – all at their expense? What happens when the repairman loses faith in the institutions of government, of commerce, of civil society? When the kind of man who makes up America's backbone concludes that nobody else seems to believe in the common good anymore, so why should he?

I fear we're going to find out before too much longer. And we're not going to like it.

We may find three hundred men to stand in the breech to defend their countrymen with their lives, but we will consider them suckers rather than heroes. AIG employees, many of them no longer with the company, received "retention" bonuses, and for all the grandstanding by Barney Franks etal, the Democrats knew about it, in fact, they engineered it. Rome was looted by its "citizens" long before Alaric and his Visigoths appeared at the gates, and so it is with this country as well. The top to bottom corruption of our democratic institutions has destroyed the real source of our power--our unity.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is publishing its last paper edition today, joining the Rocky Mountain News and several other smaller papers in giving up a one hundred and forty-six year traditional business model. Instead, SeattlePI.com will become a web-only product hard to distinguish from the Huffington Post.

The Seattle PI has seen its circulation decline from 200,000 to 117,000 and in fact the decline might be even more precipitous is one accounts for the changes in accounting rules for circulation. On the other hand, its on-line operations log 50 million page views a year, so its clear that some value exists in the brand.

The real question is, how much value?

The on-line version of this institution is going to be a much, much smaller, a literal inversion of circulation measured in hundreds of thousands, and revenues measured in millions. A successful version of the SeattlePI will be roughly equivalent to a nice plumbing business.

Even that is a very optimistic scenario. With all of its advertising slots fully subscribed at a CPM rate of eight bucks per thousand, one is only looking at revenues around 1.2 - 2.0 million dollars a year with the current traffic. Profits will be a fraction of that. To paraphrase a Morgan Spurlock comment, that's telephone bill money, not rent money.

The bottom line is that the newspaper industry still doesn't have an on-line business plan and that has big implications for how Americans get their news.

Paradoxically, in the news business, the low cost of content delivery is accompanied by the high cost of content creation--reportage. The other important factor is how the internet destroys the concept of 'local'. Why do you really need a Seattle PI when Seattle isn't a meaningful concept on the internet?

When you understand these factors, the future of on-line news becomes rather obvious.

Big. Really Big.

SeattlePI.com is a model for the future, but by model I mean like airplane model--a toy-sized replica of a functioning mechanism. What newspapers still have not grasped is that not only has the internet destroyed their content delivery model, its destroyed the notion of local.

If you look through your newspaper, there is comparatively little that you could legitimately call local news. Sports and local politics is almost the only truly local content a newspaper has. Everything else is subject to economies of scale.

The on-line news entity of the future will be a multi-media site with a single IT office for the entire nation, or perhaps even many nations. There is really no reason why you couldn't handle news for every English-speaking country in the world from one facility staffed by a passel of webmasters and IT people.

The impact on reportage will be even more dramatic. A future of independent contractors--bloggers by any other name. I think its entirely conceivable that two or three people could make a nice living reporting sports in Salt Lake City. They conduct interviews, report games, take video and do everything we've come to associate with sports reporting, and sell that product as content for anyone who will pay for it. Certainly there will still be "in-house" reporters, but they will become increasingly rare, perhaps confined to Washington D.C. and other major power centers. The vast majority will essentially be blogger content with a distinction between professional and amateur, original reporting and commentary/special interest--but still blogging.

Like the IT department, advertising sales benefits immensely from the kind of radical centralization I'm talking about, closely resembling Google's sales operation.

The new balance of radically reduced overheads and unheard of page views (Google magnitude) makes for a viable business model, but for whom? The internet and software giants are well-placed with technical resources and existing sales organizations to do very well, but Newscorp, NBC and Time-Warner already have the expertise and infrastructure of cable television, which depends heavily on their affilates for content. I actually put my money on these boys and girls--Fox, CNN and NBC could be the only news media left standing at the end of the day.

I think it rolls out this way: Newspapers continue to go out of business entirely, or try their hand at on-line only. The attrition is devastating, but the survivors are acquired by Newscorp, etal who absorb their sales and web departments into their own, leaving a few reporters working out of their homes or small offices to continue delivering content. The new media giants customize their content for each locality (like the Examiner is already doing).

This of course flies in the face of the Democrat's disingenuous call for "localism" in media, but they can't fight the economics--it will happen, but should they worry? Should Republicans worry? No more so than they do now. The current Pravda model of editing is stupid in the extreme, since it essentially cedes market share to rivals who are only too willing to report what the other guy won't. This is intensified by the realities of the Internet model, which--once again--has no concept of local.

Oddly enough, for what looks like an effective news monopoly, I think you'll actually see a greater diversity of views. Without the traditional local news media monopolies, it becomes nearly impossible to foist objectionable views by sandboxing a market. I took a walk with the lovely bunny this past Sunday because of the beautiful weather we're having and I couldn't help but notice all the newspapers still on the walk at six o'clock in the evening in spite of the fact that they are delivered before 7:00 in the morning. Its an odd reality that in very conservative Utah, the main newspapers are irredeemably liberal, yet that doesn't mean that you can actually get people to read them. I asked my neighbors what the deal was with the newspaper still on the walk in the early evening, and without exception I heard the same thing, "we don't actually read it, we just get it for the sales flyers..." It was an "ah ha" moment for me, because that's precisely why we still get a Sunday paper...

Reportage sourced from independent contractors makes this scenario increasingly impossible to sustain. Not only are they subservient to market tastes, but they can no longer hide behind the skirts of the institution. If no one is reading their stuff, they won't have a job.

There is always the prospect of political interference in how this all develops, but frankly I like the way the future of journalism looks.

Mitt Romney weighs in on the AIG bonus scandal and reminds us what a tragedy it is that he's not the President.

The news that employees at AIG are on the verge of being rewarded $165 million in bonuses at a time when the insurance giant is on the verge of collapse is rightly shocking to taxpayers who have pumped billions into the company to keep it afloat. Of course, the Obama administration was wrong to initially defend the bonuses as contractually obligated. In 1990, I was asked to assume the CEO position at the management consulting firm Bain & Co., then in acute financial distress. The need to restructure was paramount or else the company would fail, leaving 1,000 employees without a job. We renegotiated debt with bankers. We rewrote leases with landlords. We designed a whole new governing system. We also had to convince the founding partners to turn back profits they had already taken out of the company. Of course, we had no legal basis for making such a request, but without a shared sacrifice we couldn’t keep the company alive. Generously, the founders returned the money, putting us on a path to stabilizing the firm and turning it over to new leadership. It’s difficult to understand why the same lesson about shared sacrifice is lost on AIG’s executive team and their government overseers.

The odd thing is that Mitt Romney has proved conclusively that rescuing things is good politics. While the resurrection of Bain & Co. made Romney a rich man, the Lazarus routine on the Salt Lake 2002 Winter Olympics made him governor of Massachusetts. Its hard to image Obama etal wanting to fail, but as even Obama supporters are discovering, hope, finally, isn't a strategy.

Not long ago, after a string of especially bad days for the Obama administration, a veteran Democratic pol approached me with a pained look on his face and asked, "Do you think they know what they're doing?"

The question caught me off guard because the man is a well-known Obama supporter. As we talked, I quickly realized his asking suggested his own considerable doubts.

Yes, it's early, but an eerily familiar feeling is spreading across party lines and seeping into the national conversation. It's a nagging doubt about the competency of the White House.

The worries have turned into polite pleas and gentle criticism from such Obama supporters as Ignatius and Broder of the Washington Post.

Everyone is dancing around the real cause of public disgust here--the AIG folks are doing nothing that Congress hasn't been doing for two months now--raiding the hen house.

Wallstreet attracts greedy bastards the way dumps attract seagulls, but they are pikers compared to Congress. The collusion of the Obama White House with Nancy Pelosi's mafia in the House resulted in a stimulus bill that delivered a mere 7% of its near trillion dollar price tag for actual economic stimulus this year. Even Bernie Madoff didn't have the balls for a rip-off on that scale.

This isn't lost on Americans, 82% of which regard the recent antics of Congress as deeply worrisome. Like Broder and Ignatius, they are holding on to vain hope that Obama actually does have a plan. He doesn't.

Who is more stupid, the King of fools, or the fools that made him King?

It was interesting contrasting this morning rant with Camille Paglia's usually honest, if not always accurate assessment of the the political milieu.

Leadership apparently means something very different to liberals than it does to conservatives, a fact that liberals are only too willing to exploit when it suits their purposes. When Bush failed to show leadership, he was properly castigated even by his ideological confederates. When Obama fails to show leadership (which apparently is every waking moment), his ideological confederates blame his subordinates.

Heads should be rolling at the White House for the embarrassing series of flubs that have overshadowed President Obama's first seven weeks in office and given the scattered, demoralized Republicans a huge boost toward regrouping and resurrection. (Michelle, please use those fabulous toned arms to butt some heads!)

First it was that chaotic pig rut of a stimulus package, which let House Democrats throw a thousand crazy kitchen sinks into what should have been a focused blueprint for economic recovery. Then it was the stunt of unnerving Wall Street by sending out a shrill duo of slick geeks (Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag) as the administration's weirdly adolescent spokesmen on economics. Who could ever have confidence in that sorry pair?

And then there was the fiasco of the ham-handed White House reception for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, which was evidently lacking the most basic elements of ceremony and protocol. Don't they read the "Iliad" anymore in the Ivy League? Check that out for the all-important ritual of gift giving, which has cemented alliances around the world for 5,000 years.

President Obama -- in whom I still have great hope and confidence -- has been ill-served by his advisors and staff. Yes, they have all been blindsided and overwhelmed by the crushing demands of the presidency. But I continue to believe in citizen presidents, who must learn by doing, even in a perilous age of terrorism. Though every novice administration makes blunders and bloopers, its modus operandi should not be a conspiratorial reflex cynicism.

Apparently, liberals really do prefer the French model of government, where the President confines himself to the symbolic acts of a head of state and any political safe activities he chooses. The rest he delegates to the Prime Minister (Nancy Pelosi?)

Just a couple of problems with this. The first is that regardless of how liberals would like Americans to perceive blame and credit, American tradition accords them almost solely to the President. This is of course due to the fact that Americans understand leadership to mean responsibility--a view reinforced every week in the narrative of both professional and amateur sports. Players who blame their teammates or "environmental factors" are condemned as cry-babies and losers.

The second, subsidiary reason is that the very people Paglia castigates aren't holdovers from the hated Bush administration, but Obama appointees. These are his people, and they inevitably reflect his values and judgment. If they are incompetent, arrogant and irresponsible, well its simply a reflection of the values of the Obama administration, and specifically the values of the President.

Its understandable that Obama supporters don't want to believe their eyes and ears, afterall, they elected Captain Kirk, not William Shatner. Nevertheless, the epic fail of this administration is painfully and embarrassingly obvious, and rhetorical efforts to spin only serve to create legions of new beclownments.

What's interesting to me is the pattern I'm seeing. After 9/11, Bush also had this reservoir of goodwill with the American people, so his critics, both conservative and liberal, focused on those surrounding him--Rove, Cheney, etc... Bush was getting "bad advice". Eventually though, Bush's 'good will' tank was on 'E' and the attacks refocused on him. That took years-- this situation is developing on a seemingly impossibly accelerated schedule.

Setting aside the politics, the reality of this administration is devastating. The British PM's office can't find senior American administration officials to talk to about the upcoming G20 summit.

Venting drive plasma, phasers off-line, shields failing. Its Kobiyashi Maru time.

UPDATE: From Small Dead Animals, a recollection by Carol Platt Liebau on Barack Obama's days as President of Harvard Law Review.

When he was at the HLR you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.

A lot of the time he quote/unquote "worked from home", which was sort of a shorthand - and people would say it sort of wryly - shorthand for not really doing much. He just wasn't around. Most of the day to day work was carried out by the managing editor of the Review, my predecessor, a great guy called Tom Pirelli whose actually going to be one of the assistant attorney generals now.

He's the one who did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he'd leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done.

So, you know, you see that and you think, gosh, maybe that's the way the guy operates, hut then you figure ok, obviously he always had his eye on bigger and better things.

This explains a lot, doesn't it?

NBC won't tell you, but I will. Obama just turned the corner on the economy, and I don't mean in a good way.

"What is required is a commander in chief that's looked at like a commander in chief in a time of war," Buffett said.

The coverage of his interview on CNBC is remarkably devoid of long quotes, and if you saw the interview, you'd know why--Buffett was singing a funeral dirge, predicting high double digit unemployment, but more importantly being distinctly, if mildly critical of the Obama administration's response to the crisis.

The media coverage is remarkable consistent--only reporting the most mild criticism and contrasting it with Obama administration official's arguments for patience as well as the inevitable point that the president is still popular.

Well, they have to say something, don't they? Buffett is actually a latecomer to the party, but he's nevertheless a bellwether. His criticism, like Walter Cronkites criticism of the Vietnam war, is a sign that Obama's policy, and its arguments, have failed.

Just as important; the issue has turned from who is to blame for the situation (why Bush of course!) to who is to blame for not solving it.

What we're seeing her is the establishment of a media meme, not unlike the infamous 13 words in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. The effect built over several months, but it marked the moment when the media turned from a largely suppportive-slash-timidly critical role, to the recently concluded pogrom against Bush. Notably, that controversy was also a matter of important players (the CIA) breaking ranks.

Think I'm overstating the case? Consider that as the consensus about our economic prospects are congealing, the media is getting comfortably quoting the most extreme doomsayers. Nouriel Roubini vaulted to prominence by predicting the current economic climate, and is currently predicting a 36 month recession.

The real question here is what the Obama administration will do? Clearly their hope was to push through a far-left political agenda under cover of a massive economic crisis (which incidentally, they screamed bloody murder about after 9/11, when they thought Republicans were doing the same...). The economy would recover by the end of the year, or early 2010 at the latest, leaving them well-positioned for the mid-term elections.

There are signs that Obama has an escape hatch in place.

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is practically alone on the job, working night and day to cope with the worst economic downturn in decades.

Of the 15 key Treasury Department positions that require Senate confirmation, only one has been filled. Stuart Levey, a leftover from the previous administration, who as under secretary of the treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, is not central to the crisis management however.

Its more than a little odd that Geithner has no staff when the President has comfortable majorities in Congress, unless of course Obama is setting up a scapegoat. Its hard to imagine a better one--already reviled as a tax dodger, with no political constituency to back him up, he's a perfect patsy.

That's hardly going to be enough though. Obama is faced with an policy U-turn more drastic that Clinton's embrace of welfare reform in the nineties. His assets are a compliant state media who could spin tax cuts for the rich for their Messiah, but the liberal-left base would not be fooled. Destruction of the free market system is a religious tenet. Obama would be creating serious political problems for himself and the party.

The decision requires someone who can be brutally honest with themselves about political realities. Bill Clinton was well-suited to his similar dilemma, coming from a mixed political environment where success was based on that skill. Obama's political education couldn't have been more different. He's been groomed for success by mentors since his earliest days at Columbia. His decisions have always been about how to avoid choosing any evil by voting present, disqualifying his opponents and message control. In all likelihood, Barack Obama has never had to make a real choice.

My guess is that he'll go with what he knows, which will be to try to disqualify his critics and avoid having to change anything in his program, hoping that the predictions are off-base.

It truly is a historic presidency--no one has ever raised the draw bridge within the first 100 days.

An old friend on mine just got remarried--for the third time. She is drunk with love, text messaging "I miss you" when her new husband is absent for a mere matter of hours. Its terribly amusing, but also a little sad--I remember this same behavior with both ex-husbands. One day she'll walk into the bedroom and see his socks lying on the floor where he dropped them, and the bliss will be replaced with a flash of anger and resentment. The honeymoon will be over.

Maureen Dowd found some socks on the floor.

In one of his disturbing spells of passivity, President Obama decided not to fight Congress and live up to his own no-earmark pledge from the campaign.

He’s been lecturing us on the need to prune away frills while the economy fizzles. He was slated to make a speech on “wasteful spending” on Wednesday.

“You know, there are times where you can afford to redecorate your house and there are times where you need to focus on rebuilding its foundation,” he said recently about the “hard choices” we must make. Yet he did not ask Congress to sacrifice and make hard choices; he let it do a lot of frivolous redecorating in its budget. ...

Blame it on the stars, Rahm, or on old business. But as Shakespeare wrote in “Lear”: “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeits of our own behavior — we make guilty of our own disasters, the sun, the moon, and the stars.”

Maureen is not the only one seeing the full bloom of love wilting under the weight of day to day living with the Obama administration. Jennifer Rubin, in a Pajamas Media post, lists the shocked and appalled Chris Buckley, David Brooks, David Gergen and Marty Peretz, as disappointed former lovers.

Some will no doubt chortle over the comeuppance of these media know-it-alls, but in some ways they are ahead of many conservatives who keep insisting that Barry is some evil genius with a plan. More on that later...

Its fairly clear to me that Barack Obama thinks there is one set of rules for George W. Bush, and another set of rules for him. Perhaps its because the mommy-media always picked up his socks for him, but whatever the reason, he seems to think that he can forever point the finger at his predecessor or Congress and safely maintain an Olympian detachment and a contrived centrist image. What was generally perceived as a beginner's mistake--the delegation of the stimulus bill creation to Nancy Pelosi, is more recently being recognized as a pattern--let Nancy do the left-wing dirty work to keep Barry's hands clean.

Yet as these pundit complaints reveal, those watching closely are not fooled, and those not watching closely will inevitably ignore such subtle distinctions and lay the blame or credit squarely at the feet of the administration. The Democrat brain trust seem to think that Obama has some sort of Reaganesque teflon suit he can wear to deflect criticism, and blissfully unaware that the teflon was a result of popular policies that actually succeeded. Reagan's landslide reelection could best be summarized by a question he asked in 1980 and then again in 1984--"...are you better off than you were four years ago?" Having done the big things right, the people weren't much interested in the day-to-day ticky-tack.

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With a no confidence vote by the financial markets, the moral hazard of Obama's mortgage rescue plan, increasing unemployment and generally no light at the end of the tunnel, its a stretch to claim that Obama is doing the "big things right". Obama's wrong track numbers are in the red zone, and only an "improvement" relative to the spike in October during the Lehman Bros. debacle. Pollster.com aggregates the polls for an average wrong track number of 59%.

Historically wrong track numbers this high have always signaled an election loss for the incumbent during an election year. Clinton had numbers like this in 1994 when Republicans won 54 seats in the House,12 governorships and 20 state legislatures. It also marked the year that Clinton hired Dick Morris and decided to govern with Republicans instead of minority Democrats.

Currently the administration has some cover as there is still a substantial number of wrong-trackers who blame the Bush administration for the current woes, but both time and the growing disillusionment of the politically informed is going to erode that bulwark, and faster than anyone might expect. Truman's famous "The buck stops here" was less an acceptance of responsibility than a simple acknowledgment of the realities of the presidency.

There is no public consensus accepting the Democrat rhetoric that low taxes caused the current economic nightmare, which is simply counter-intuitive to most people. By contrast, the Republican narrative about how Dodd and Franks forced the banks into making bad loans is entirely plausible. Democrats and Republicans might have differing tolerance for corruption, but both have no trouble acknowledging its existence.

Sky-is-falling conservatives need to recognize the relative contributions of various environmental factors in determining the future political landscape. Only eight years after Nixon resigned, and party affiliation dropped to its nadir, Reagan entered the oval office with a Republican majority in the Senate. 2010 and 2012 could be significantly more impressive than that.

The Democrats have laid the groundwork for an ignominious defeat, but the scale of that defeat is entirely in the hands of conservatives who have an enormous amount of work to do to articulate a modern political program that borrows the best from the past, trashes the worst, and adapts to current issues like the environment, immigration, corporate responsibility, etc...

Yesterday I had lunch with some friends who recounted to me the story of an old neighbor who had built a successful business, sold it for 15 million and then preceded to lose it all--to the point that he was living with his adult children. Sounds terrible doesn't it, but this is American, land of the second acts. The same man ran across an interesting piece of exercise equipment at a trade show, and somehow managed to raise a quarter million to buy the rights. That piece of exercise equipment because the Healthrider--a company he sold for 100 million.

Failure always hurts, but its often a remarkable opportunity to move forward unshackled of the necessity to protect what you have. Republicans don't have to play defense anymore and can build a better future from the lessons learned from the past.

I haven't commented on the current brouhaha over Rush Limbaugh, mostly because it seems like a continuation of the last brouhaha (I love that word...), but the left's comments on Limbaugh are just so damn funny, or insane--I never quite know which.

Limbaugh and his cohorts (Coulter, Hannity, Beck, Savage, and so on), are largely responsible for our toxic political environment. Given major media platforms to launch crude and brutal political and cultural attacks, to demonize liberals, and to use rage as a means of lining their own pockets, these 'entertainers' have poisoned our national discourse.

Once again--the five year old's view of fairness.  I feel bad for being amused at the antics of this pathetic man.  Anything the left says about Republicans is completely justified--any criticism of the left is an outrage.  Yet in his conniption, he does make some good points.

The myth of a technological, grassroots revolution, of prodigious strategic and tactical brilliance, of a do-no-wrong campaign, perhaps the greatest ever run, that myth sounds good, but it's not what happened. The reality was that the 2008 election was the age-old battle of character-building and character-destruction. Obama's team won that battle against Hillary Clinton not just because of Obama's abundant positive traits but because people like Rush Limbaugh gave him a 15-year head start against her. He won it against John McCain because McCain squandered years of character-building by enabling the excesses of George W. Bush and by running an erratic, unfocused campaign that served to highlight the best of Obama's character and the worst of his. Character versus character.

Democratic strategists, busy sparring with Rush Limbaugh, should keep that in mind. The seeds of Democratic defeat are planted not by Republican elected officials, who, like McCain, will carry the Bush albatross for years to come, but by those who can freely fan the flames of outrage, who can fight dirty, who can bend and break the rules with impunity, who can tear down their opponents' integrity and character, and whose apparent reward (as in the case of Ann Coulter) is to be given yet a larger platform.

Ignoring the Herculean efforts to avoid taking any responsibility for left-wing character assassination, the central point is a truism--one campaign, or one side, tries to characterize the other as loathsome creatures of the fetid swamp, while handing out halos and angel's wings to its own side.  More importantly--it works.  George W. Bush went from one of the most popular Presidents in history to one of the most reviled, largely as a result of an orchestrated campaign of unbalanced reporting and sheer, unadulterated hate speech (miserable failure, George Bush doesn't like black people, etc...)  Yet it would be disingenuous not to point out that Bush gave his political enemies the openings, and failed to respond effectively.  Define yourself or others will gladly do it for you.

Which brings us to Rush Limbaugh; he who hopes for Obama's failure with all the fervor of Peter Daou's similar hope that Barry would fail in the primaries.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?  Billy Shakes

Limbaugh of course does something I've never heard any lefty milquetoast do--he elucidates political and economic principles.  He explains <em>why</em> Obama is destroying the country.  The left just tells you something is morally wrong and then demands we bow our heads in shame.

And therein lies the problem.

Its easy to do the rageboy thing when you're in opposition, but the Democrats have to defend actual policies now and attempt to explain their rationale.  They are effectively on Rush's playing field and find they can't bend it like Beckham.

Daou tacitly contradicts his own observation--that one has to respond to the opposition's attempts to define you with your own more positive characterizations.  Since there is no effective response to Limbaugh, Coulter, etal, he goes all Amish on us--shut out the Satanic forces of the outside world and let us join hands in prayer to the black Jesus.

Siege mentality.

I've always believed that the most effective response is to go after those in the media and the political establishment who give them a platform and who legitimize their radical words but not to engage them in a head-to-head (which gives them credence they don't deserve). So by no means am I advocating ignoring them, as some have interpreted from my post.

Well, yes he is--advocating ignoring them.  He just doesn't want to look like he's ignoring them by forbidding all radios, televisions and the internet in the Barack Davidian compound.

Good luck with that.  I don't think we need Rush Limbaugh to point out that no one has any confidence in the Obama financial "rescue" plan and that the Dow is at its lowest point since 1992.

There is a point to this post, and its this--the Fairness Doctrine hasn't gone away--it is in effect the last best hope for Democrats to hold on to political power.  It is no longer a matter of debate but a survival necessity.  The first amendment must die so that Democrat political power may live.