by INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY

When Mark Lloyd was appointed July 29 as the chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission, a nation focused on ObamaCare and a deteriorating economy took little notice. But as angry constituents flood town hall meetings and call in to talk radio, a man dedicated to silencing them sits at the right hand of the president.

They share a common hero — Saul Alinsky — who wrote the community organizer’s bible, “Rules for Radicals.” It speaks of confrontation or, as candidate Obama put it, of “getting in their faces” as a way to obtain power, not from the people or for the people, but over the people.

Lloyd has written that we make too much of the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of speech and the press — for “the purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.”

We thought we were democratically governed. We thought we could vote as we choose after a vigorous and open debate. Once the major networks served as information gatekeepers controlling what we saw and heard. Now talk radio, the Internet and cable news have enhanced democracy by promoting the free flow of information and discourse. Lloyd wants to stop all that.

Fox News host Glenn Beck has done yeoman work in exposing this threat posed by Mr. Lloyd. He points out that in his 2006 book, “Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America,” Lloyd wrote: “It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. . . . This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. . . . At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.”

Lloyd wants to restore local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations and ensure greater local accountability over radio licensing. The kicker is he would also require owners who refuse to give up profitable air time in the name of “localism” to pay a fee to support public broadcasting.

He proposes using the existing FCC “localism” requirement, which can mean anything from running more public service announcements to putting Janeane Garofalo on after Rush Limbaugh. Local community organizers would be encouraged to harass conservative stations by filing complaints with the FCC.

He essentially proposes extorting money from broadcasters who have the audacity to air the likes of Beck, Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham, all of whom have competed in the marketplace of ideas and won in the ratings, and use it to fund those outfits nobody wants to listen to — like NPR and Air America.

As Lloyd writes, the “part of our proposal that gets the dittoheads (Rush Limbaugh fans) upset is our suggestion that the commercial radio station owners either play by the rules or pay.” Or worse.

The FCC could then say they had enough justification to revoke a station’s license if they didn’t comply or pay a fee. In true Alinsky style, shut them up by shutting them down.

Lloyd praises Hugo Chavez’s “incredible revolution” in Venezuela and the way “Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country” by imposing restraints on cable TV and revoking the licenses of more than 200 radio stations” that insufficiently toed the Chavez party line.

Lloyd long ago declared war on unbridled talk radio and cable news. He wrote that “our work was not simply convincing policy makers of the logic and morality of our arguments. We understood that we were in a struggle for power against an opponent, the commercial broadcasters.”

When Mark Lloyd talks about diversity, it is not diversity of opinion. As in the ’60s sci-fi series, “Outer Limits,” his advice is to “sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear.”

Never accuse the Associated Press of being hidebound by journalistic tradition. In a sharp break with past practice, the once-venerable news service is providing its 1,500 member papers with ready-to-run stories produced by “independent” reporters and editors.

Earlier this summer, the 163-year-old news cooperative announced it would distribute “watchdog and investigative journalism” penned not by its own staff or that of member papers, but by four outside groups: the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, Calif.; New York-based ProPublica; and two D.C. outfits, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University.

AP, itself a not-for-profit enterprise, identified the four organizations as “civic-minded” nonprofits. They also all have decidedly liberal sponsors. A cursory glance at the “independent” news shops reveals their reliance on left-tilting patrons such as the Knight Foundation and leftist donors such as financier Herbert Sandler and currency speculator George Soros.

Sandler and his wife, Marion, founders of ProPublica, are generous givers to Democratic candidates and left-wing causes including the Center for American Progress and ACORN, the ethically-challenged radical action group. Soros, an early backer of CAP as well as the radical MoveOn.org, poured tens of millions into attacks on President George W. Bush.

AP calls the exercise an experiment. The readers and editors of the wire’s member papers must be cautious consumers.

Readers will need to pay closer attention to bylines and other identifications to see who is behind a particular article. Is the reporter employed by the newspaper or AP? Or is it someone working for a third party with a political agenda?

Hometown editors will need to work a little harder, too. AP has a reputation for delivering clean copy, if sometimes incomplete stories. But now, serious editors are obligated to scrutinize AP copy for bias as closely as the work of their own staff.

Besides exercising due diligence, local editors will need to level with readers. That will mean clearly identifying “outsourced” pieces as coming from ProPublica or CIR, via AP, rather than merely slapping the wire service’s tag on an activist shop’s work.

AP’s rationale for embracing nonprofit journalism is that struggling newspapers, large and small, are shedding staff. Shrunken newsrooms no longer have the manpower or expertise to root out corruption by digging into government contracts, travel records or zoning changes.

Nonprofit journalism certainly can serve the public interest. But “outsourcing” the shoe leather means fewer investigative or enterprise stories will be written by reporters accountable to employers with a stake in the community. Increasingly, readers will be asked to trust the integrity of journalists paid by “independent” groups whose donors and goals aren’t so clear.

Readers seeking fairness, balance and truth can hope AP might consider distributing work by independent journalists toiling for nonprofits backed by conservative donors.

For now, AP’s dalliance with left-wing journalism risks an under-the-radar switch on newspaper readers, who don’t tend to notice byline names nearly as much as reporters would like.

The move holds risk for AP, as well. The wire bills itself as “the largest and most trusted source of independent news and information.” That credibility is now on the line.

By John J. Pitney Jr.

Sarah Palin’s resignation and Mark Sanford’s downfall have renewed the media meme that the GOP is “leaderless,” therefore doomed. Google “Republican leaderless” and you get more than 38,000 results.

The GOP has very real problems, but this one is mainly hype. In American politics, the -party that is out of power is naturally leaderless. The United States does not have a parliamentary system with one person heading the opposition. In our system of federalism, bicameralism, and separated powers, the party that does not hold the presidency has many voices. In search of drama, however, journalists depict this normal state of affairs as if it were a terminal crisis. They have been doing so for a very long time.

In 1898, in the middle of the first McKinley term, the New York Times declared: “Facing the greatest questions and the greatest opportunities that have presented themselves in a generation, the Democratic Party is without unity, without a policy, and without a leader.”

Early in the Eisenhower administration, Time magazine used similar language: “Seven months after the great defeat, the Democratic Party is disorganized, in debt and leaderless.” It quoted one Democrat as complaining of the party’s “intellectual anemia” and “almost total collapse of the . . . organization.”

A 1965 editorial in the New York Times lamented New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s decision not to run for president in 1968. (He eventually changed his mind.) His withdrawal removed “a chief spokesman for the forward-looking Republicanism that alone as a political philosophy can compete against the Democrats.” The paper saw no one available to take his place. Figures such as George Romney and Richard Nixon “did not distinguish themselves the last time around and the party remains embarrassingly leaderless.”

Three years later, Nixon was in and the Democrats were out. Columnist James Reston faulted them for lacking a coherent response to Nixon’s policies: “[A]s often as not Democratic alternatives contradict one another, and the party as a whole seems to be settling for the old political rule that it is the business of the opposition party merely to oppose.”

In a 1981 New York Times Magazine piece, Martin Tolchin admired Speaker Tip O’Neill’s mastery of House politics, but lamented: “The Democratic Party is now a leaderless party. Its identity will probably be shaped more by the Reagan Administration than by its own warring parts. The heart of the Democratic strategy — if it can be so dignified — is to await, and exploit, the Administration’s failures.” Even after the Democratic takeover of the Senate in 1986, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post wrote: “Now the Democrats, issue-less and leaderless, will set out to show who won the election. Given their recent record, it will be Ronald Reagan. Lame duck or dead duck, when he quacks they will quake.”

Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory put the Democrats back in power and the GOP back in the “leaderless” box. Right after the 1992 election, one representative observation came from a Knight-Ridder reporter: “Republicans face civil war in their party. Leaderless now and dispirited, Republicans are bracing for a nasty struggle among their contentious factions.”

During the George W. Bush presidency, the Democrats were “leaderless” again. A Gannett story on the 2002 midterm election noted: “Democrats are in disarray and leaderless, with no compelling vision for America.” After Bush’s reelection, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman wrote: “The Democrats are leaderless and reeling, seemingly bereft of inspiring ideas.” A few months later, he returned to the theme: “Leaderless and intellectually rudderless, the Democrats are desperate for issues, and they have decided (to the extent there is a ‘they’) to make a piñata of [Tom] DeLay.” Even after Katrina, The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza said: “Democrats are, at the moment, leaderless. There are few Democrats who command enough attention to make the party’s case to the country.”

In each case, journalists were correct that the out party lacked a comprehensive policy agenda and an overarching leader. But there was no reason to expect such things in the first place, and their absence did not spell doom. After more than a century of periodic “leaderlessness,” both parties are still around.

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By Mark Steyn

Is conservatism over?

Well, of course it is. Everyone from James Carville to Colin Powell says so. “The Republican party is in deep trouble,” General Powell told some group willing to pay him serious money to deliver this kind of incisive insight. “Americans do want to pay taxes for services. Americans want more government in their lives, not less.”

Whether or not they want it, they’re certainly going to get it. And if you like big government now, just think how big it’ll be once both parties are fully signed up to the concept. You’ll recall that General Powell voted for Barack Obama, coming out and publicly stiffing his “beloved friend” John McCain, after years of more discreetly stiffing (in leaks to Bob Woodward and others) his not-so-beloved colleagues in the Bush administration. But, in fairness to the former secretary of state, his breezy endorsement of more government and more taxes is as near as we’ve ever got to a coherent political philosophy from him. If the GOP refuses to take his advice, I would urge him to run a third-party campaign on this refreshingly candid platform.

One of Powell’s more famous utterances was his rationale, after the 1991 Gulf War, for declining to involve the U.S. military in the Balkans: “We do deserts, we don’t do mountains.” Actually, by that stage, the U.S. barely did deserts. The first President Bush’s decision, at Powell’s urging, not to topple Saddam but to halt the coalition forces at the gates of Baghdad sent the world a message about American purpose whose consequences we live with to this day. As for the Kurds and Shiites to whom it never occurred that the world’s superpower would assemble a mighty coalition for the purpose of fighting half a war to an inconclusive conclusion, Saddam quickly took a bloody revenge: That’s an interesting glimpse of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Colin Powell’s much-vaunted “moderation.”

So I have no great regard for Powell’s strategic thinking, at home or abroad. As the general sees it, the Republican party ought to be a “big tent”: Right now, the tent is empty, with only a few “mean spirited” and “divisive” talk-radio hosts chewing the limbs off live kittens while gibbering to themselves. By comparison, over in the Democrat tent, they’ve got blacks, gays, unions, professors, Ben Affleck: diversity on parade.

In fact, the GOP’s tent has many poles: It has social conservatives, libertarians, fiscal conservatives, national-security hawks. These groups do not always agree: The so-cons resent the libertarians’ insouciance on gay marriage and abortion. The libertarians don’t get the warhawks’ obsession with thankless nation-building in Islamist hellholes. A lot of the hawks can’t see why the fiscal cons are so hung up on footling matters like bloated government spending at a time of war. It requires a lot of effort to align these various poles sufficiently to hold up the big tent. And by the 2006 electoral cycle, between the money-no-object Congress at home and a war that seemed to have dwindled down to an endless, half-hearted, semi-colonial policing operation, the GOP poles were tilting badly. The Republican coalition is like a permanent loveless marriage: There are bad times and worse times. And, while social conservatism and libertarianism can be principled to a fault, the vagaries of electoral politics mean they often wind up being represented in office by either unprincipled opportunists like Arlen Specter or unprincipled squishes like Lincoln Chafee.

Meanwhile, over in the other tent, they celebrate diversity with ruthless singlemindedness: In the Democrats’ parade, whatever your bugbear, government is the answer. Government is the means, government is the end, government is the whole magilla. That gives them a unity of purpose the GOP can never match.

And yet and yet . . . Last November, even with the GOP’s fiscal profligacy, even with the financial sector’s “October surprise,” even with a cranky old coot of a nominee unable to articulate any rationale for his candidacy or even string together a coherent thought on the economy, even with a running mate subjected to brutal character assassination in nothing flat, even running against a charming, charismatic media darling of historic significance, even facing the natural cycle of a two-party system, the washed-up loser no-hoper side managed to get 46 percent of the vote.

Okay, it’s not 51 percent. But still: Obama’s 53 percent isn’t a big transformative landslide just because he behaves as if it were.

To put it in Powellite terms, the general thinks the Republican party is in the desert, when in fact it’s climbing a mountain. All things considered, the resilience of American conservatism is one of the most remarkable features of contemporary Western politics. It’s up against significant members of its own party. It’s up against media for whom the Democrats’ positions are the default positions on almost anything that matters.

Consider this cooing profile of Secretary Powell from Todd Purdum in the New York Times back in 2002: “Mr. Powell’s approach to almost all issues — foreign or domestic — is pragmatic and nonideological. He is internationalist, multilateralist and moderate. He has supported abortion rights and affirmative action.”

So supporting “internationalism,” “multilateralism,” abortion, and racial quotas means you’re “moderate” and “nonideological”? And anyone who feels differently is an extreme ideologue? Absolutely. The aim of a large swathe of the Left is not to win the debate but to get it canceled before it starts. You can do that in any number of ways: busting up campus appearances by conservatives, “hate speech” prohibitions, activist judges’ more imaginative court decisions, or merely, as the Times does, by declaring your side of every issue to be the “moderate” and “nonideological” position — even when, in many cases, the “extreme” position is supported by a majority of voters. Likewise, to Colin Powell, it’s Ann Coulter who’s “vicious,” not Michael Moore, who compares the jihadists who blow up Western troops in Iraq to America’s Minutemen and gets rewarded with a seat next to Jimmy Carter in the presidential box at the Democratic convention.

It’s a mountain, and it’s getting steeper. Promises of “free” government health care will make more voters susceptible to the blandishments of the nanny state. The Democrats have plans for talk radio and the Internet that will diminish conservative voices. Another retirement on the Supreme Court, and the First and Second Amendments will start getting nibbled away. Obama’s buddies at ACORN, already under investigation in multiple states over fraudulent voter registration, will have a prominent say in the 2010 census.

But, when the going gets tough, you don’t, as General Powell advises, “move toward the center.” You move the center toward you, as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did. It’s harder to do it that way, but if it’s a choice between more government and more taxes, or more liberty and more opportunity, I’ll stick with the latter, and so should the Republican party — however difficult it is. Unlike Colin Powell, conservatism does do mountains.

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