PTBC Town Square

Juan Williams’ firing fires up Americans asking, “Why taxpayer subsidies to ‘public’ media?”

2010-10-23T10:08:21-08:00

A quote from Seth Lipsky in the Wall Street Journal today:

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Mr. [Juan] Williams, a distinguished figure, has already landed on his feet, with a multi-year contract and an expanded role at Fox News. When the next Congress takes up the NPR question, I hope it considers the lesser lights who have to go out to raise capital to set up their own platforms. Who is going to give them a leg up if they are having to compete with the government of the United States?

I always ask the question here, and not just rhetorically by the way, although you’d think it was as judged by the lack of response, “What kind of government competes against its own citizens?” I mean I really wanted you to ask yourself, and come up with an answer, and post it here, for all to see. But never mind that for now.

In the wake of the outrageous and very revealing (and I think milestone) firing of liberal good-guy Juan Williams from the left-wing National Public Radio (NPR), for simply not toeing the line as documented in the left-wing media guidebook, and for not being excruciatingly politically correct (in other words not speaking left wing/progressive), Americans are asking why it is that American taxpayers are subsidizing the NPR — to the tune of perhaps $3 million dollars per year, representing only 1-3% of their annual budget.

Canadians will take a double-take at that paltry amount, knowing that here in Canada, the state-owned — state OWNED, mind you — and very much state controlled — CBC is funded by taxpayers to the tune of in excess of $1.5 BILLION per year, directly and indirectly. Perhaps much more if you include all the various “cultural” grants and subsidies and programs to fund “Canadian programming”, and myriad programs to support “the arts” (which, alas, has largely become code for, in this case, other left-wing advocacy and causes).

This, in a country with 1/10 the population of the U.S., and an economy measuring an even lesser fraction. But they also know, if they bother to think about it, that in addition to vast sums of taxpayer cash, the state-owned media also enjoy all sorts of government dictated protections from market competition, including rules and regulations and laws of several kinds, and moreover, the bully-pulpit protection courtesy of all the progressives in government bureaucracies, now fully ensconced within government by successive years of liberal-left/progressive rule. And still more protection from what is, irrefutably, a progressive, left-wing media (even the private “competitors” to CBC seem happy to have CBC on board), and of course from the reliably left-wing members of academia, virtually all of whom work within a state-owned, state-funded academic complex, and are therefore state-employed. And politically, (if the forgoing wasn’t enough for you), protections from progressives found within all the Canadian political parties, including even the so-called Conservative Party, which has in fact come out and publicly endorsed the state-owned media. And then of course in the many public sector and other left-wing labor unions, whose members’ salaries we ultimately pay, and from the many other leftists, more generally, who support them all.

Juan Williams —one of my favorite liberal-left Fox News Channel contributors, substitute-hosting Bill O’Reilly’s O’Reilly Factor last night, in one of the most timely and delicious news media-related coincidences in weeks. The upshot after his firing from NPR: we’ll see more of him now on Fox News Channel, possibly more substitute hosting of Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor, as he has often done in the past.

And after that double-take, they’ll summarily go back to sleep. And I’m talking about the conservatives among us. This does not make me proud to be Canadian. When Americans see wrong, they lash out and make it right. The tea party comes to mind — and the outcry from all sides over the firing of Juan Williams. When Canadians see wrong, they zip up, trying not to be rude, or something, even while progressives in and out of government run roughshod over them and their nation.

I should know, because I’ve been questioning the existence of (among other things) the state media — the CBC — for years now, laying out example after example of the harm it causes to the freedom of people and to the nation as a whole, and nobody even posts a comment any more. Nobody lifts a finger. Nobody even cares, at least not overtly. “Eureka!” cry the progressives of the nation. “We’ve done it!” and then more quietly, because that’s what they do as wolves in sheeps’ clothing, “Now onto the next step in our Fabian Socialist quest!” And thus there’s a huge cry for nationalized daycare (and “early learning” —wink!) and other specious state-owned, socialist programs, even while we’re in hock up to our eyeballs.

Here’s more points made today in the excellent column by Seth Lipsky:

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The Real Case for Defunding NPR
My quarrel with government subsidies is that they cast a chill over the markets in which entrepreneurs seek to raise capital for highbrow journalism.

• South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint issued a statement saying that he would introduce a bill to end federal funding of public broadcasting.

• More than once I have been interrupted, while singing the song of quality journalism to a potential investor, to be asked, “Isn’t this already being done by public broadcasting?”

In the instances when that or similar questions were put to me, I was not even seeking to raise capital for broadcasting but rather for small newspapers—the Jewish Forward, in the 1990s, and then the New York Sun. And I wasn’t entirely hapless. Many millions of dollars were eventually invested in the two newspapers, and any failures they met were not the fault of the government, but were entirely my own.

I have often wondered, though, what effect the government subsidies have on the broader world, in broadcast and print, of quality journalism. I recognize that the percentage of NPR’s funds coming from the taxpayers is but 1% or 2%, or between $1.5 million and $3 million. But whatever the scale, seed capital from a credible investor is an enormous help to any effort, and my own experience is that it would have been easier to raise capital had there been no government-funded competition.

• That would be entirely consonant with the school of economics known as public choice theory, which views the government as having its own economic interests and the state as not a protector but a competitor of private enterprise.

Read the column.

The giant untold story of the U.S. mid term elections 2010: Obama and Palin

2010-10-24T09:15:07-08:00

I think Drudge’s front page today tells the underlying story of the election of 2010. And guess who’s winning?

Obama and his left-wing team of self-anointed progressive elites are getting set to lose badly, as even their New York Times division is admitting today that the Dems could lose both the House and maybe even the Senate.

The woman all of the liberal-left media tried their hardest to politically assassinate — Sarah Palin — and her much ridiculed by the media “mama grizzlies” and the tea party she helps lead, are set to take over the reigns of legislative power, or at least nearly so. Thank God.

Let’s remember those who declared with such authority that Sarah Palin was “useless” and an “idiot” and would and should just “go away”, and who would “go away” if “we” (as if we all agree) just “ignore her”.

Great advise, National Post — and hi all you other Obama lovers besides National Post: CBC and all of the other exactly lockstep like-minded Canadian media and all liberals! You all couldn’t have been more wrong about how this thing would turn out. Your advocacy and messaging and advice to the masses has failed miserably. You are not on our side.

I couldn’t have been more right, and I couldn’t be more happy today.

Power to the politicians

2010-10-24T08:14:45-08:00

One of the most unpleasant words in the English language is, “amalgamation.” It is a bureaucracy’s way of creating growth, by taking discrete things, such as municipalities—with their particular histories and political cultures—and putting them into an amalgam, under the effective control of higher authorities, of “experts” such as themselves.

Yes, the word came apparently from Arabic, “al-malgham,” like much of our medieval scientific vocabulary. But, as typically, the Arabic came from Greek: “malagma,” a softening substance. Our medieval alchemists, who’ve had a bad rap for several of their more speculative enterprises, did a lot of “useful” work, too, such as finding new ways to “amalgamate” mercury with gold, silver, and other metals, to make things like dental fillings. The very extraction of gold from ore was an amalgamative process; unspeakably dangerous and poisonous, but effective.

I often suspect that is an adequate definition of “empiricism”—the discovery of unspeakably horrible but very efficient ways to get results, also known as the “scientific method.”

The prestige of empirical science has fallen like a moral shadow over the activities of modern man. Bureaucrats seeking control over every aspect of human life have invoked science, and scientific vocabulary. In Ontario, as in almost every other jurisdiction of western statecraft, municipal affairs have become a kind of “science.” Almost everywhere, “amalgamation” has been the means to soften the hard particularities of place and time and person, and create instead some pliable substance that the bureaucrat can mould in his own image.

The words “Regional Municipality of” nicely summarize two generations of bureaucratic effort to strip the citizens of Ontario of any power they had to control the circumstances in which they live. Amalgamations of municipal governments, school boards, and planning agencies across vast areas leave the normal voter and taxpayer, who must work for a living, with roughly the same say over what happens in his own neighbourhood as over ice formations on Hudson’s Bay.

That is, incidentally, why the turnout in municipal elections tends to be so distressingly low. The citizens are not entirely stupid. They know their municipalities are little more than branch offices of Queen’s Park, whose fiscal arrangements are, in turn, with Parliament Hill. And so they show more interest in provincial and federal elections.

Tomorrow, Ontario goes to the polls. There are 444 municipalities, according to the website of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. That number is seriously misleading. Most of these municipalities are what is aptly called “lower tier”: that is, utterly powerless. The biggest are “single tier”—huge cities like Ottawa, Toronto and Hamilton that do not even have “lower tiers.” The very name of the ministry gives the show away by revealing that “municipal affairs” are themselves amalgamated with province-wide housing initiatives. The municipality is simply the “service provider” on the spot for grand universal schemes that have “progressively” replaced more ancient ones: in which charity was dispensed directly through family, neighbours, church, and from the pockets of the wealthy, without administrative elaborations. And in which generosity and gratitude——two native human qualities that once animated “municipal affairs”—were factors that had not yet been dispensed with.

At the time of Confederation, the provinces were the size of today’s “regional municipalities,” and the municipalities of town and country were their “lower tier.” As the country has grown in population, the elected authorities have become progressively more distant from the individual. They have also become progressively more powerful over the individual.

If “democracy” is something we want, be it observed that we have much less of it today than we had 143 years ago. And while we still have such democratic theatre as “all candidates meetings,” the chance that the individual voter has some personal knowledge of any of the candidates has become remote.

I think of my own first acquaintance with municipal politics when I was a child, nearly half a century ago, in an Ontario town of 10,000 souls. The mayor was Joe Gibbons. He was a barber. You might not have liked Joe (though he was extremely hard to dislike), but you had certainly seen him. Indeed, you had seen him many times, because the job of mayor kept him on the streets (when he wasn’t still cutting your hair).

Ditto the members of council: all familiar faces. People knew whom they were voting for, and these politicians were directly answerable—on the street—for the decisions they made, or were contemplating.

While “representative democracy” is inevitable, at the higher levels, it has never been necessary at the lowest level, where “direct democracy” has always been possible. As the old citizenship manuals made abundantly clear, power in a “democracy” travelled from the base up. Municipal government was the most important level, because that was where any citizen could participate directly in public affairs. Conversely, there was a word for alternative systems in which power travelled from the top down: “Tyranny.”

Liberals Attempt to Stifle Soldiers’ Ability to Vote

2010-10-24T08:03:34-08:00

The Left has so derailed and so thoroughly misread America that it would be a miracle if they won cheap seats to Leif Garrett’s “I Was Made for Dancin’ Comeback Concert” at the Light-A-Fart Nursing Home in Bugtussle, Texas come November 2nd.

The only way the woefully unpopular progressives can score much on anything in the upcoming mid-terms is via uncut, unmitigated, and unsubstantiated Graysonisms, steering clear of Obama’s policy toxicity, voter fraud, making certain the military doesn’t get to vote, and through ballot box blocking once a Tea Party mark is made.

Yep, the desperate, rudderless Left is freakin’ out and yelling:

- “Bring on the Obama Kool-Aid from election past!”

- “Bring back the effective fraudulent freaks of ACORN, SEIU and their multitudinous gross and seedy Mugabe-esque “Community” organizations to register 100,000 corpses and Disney characters to cast ballots and steal this son of a monkey!”

- “Release the hounds of ‘Aqua Buddha’ and commence the Sabrina the Teenage Witch Hunts!”

- “Someone ‘forget’ to send our troops their ballots!”

- Oh, and I almost forgot: “Unleash the petite one, King Samir Shabazz, with his paramilitary jumpsuit and his baton, dammit! We gotta win this thang!”

How progressive. How hope and changy. How low can you go, BHO?

All of the above smack is repugnant.

However, of the aforementioned ditties, one that really gets me PO’ed is how these socialistic slime dealers and election stealers are trying to keep tens of thousands of our military men and women from receiving their absentee ballots and thus their ability to vote.

Now, the numb nuts in NYC, when busted, said it was an “honest mistake.” I, in part, believe them. To me this is quasi-understandable. Here’s why: We all know the powers that be in NYC were busy kissing Imam Rauf’s Muslim butt over the Ground Zero Mosque, and therefore they probably just forgot to mail out the ballots to our soldiers who’re dodging bullets abroad from … um … Muslims. I get it. They goofed up. I hear it’s hard to multitask when you’re kissing someone’s _ _ _.

Being the Christian dude that I am, I’ll err on the side of grace and grant you that one oversight of 20,000 military absentee ballots mysteriously failing to make it to Afghanistan is possible. But it sure starts looking kinda/sorta weird when it not only happens in New York City but then, coincidently, where thousands of deployed troops failed to get their ballots to vote in this election—as in thousands of troops from thirty-five Illinois counties. That’s THIRTY-FIVE Illinois counties! (Question: what current famous politician whose middle name is Hussein hails from Illinois?)

Again, being the gracious guy that I am, if one county forgot to mail GI Joe his ballot, couldn’t that just be a mistake? Okay, I get it, nobody is perfect (cough).

But if two counties do it? Alright, it’s starting to look a wee bit weird, but hey, everyone makes mistakes, eh (choke)?

But when it ramps up to thirty-five frickin’ counties in Illinois forgetting to post ‘em to our warriors in harm’s way while the same scallywags hand-deliver them to inmates in Illinois’ state prison system then all I’ve got to say is please, pettifoggers, go sell crazy somewhere else.

Canada too casual about threats to freedom

2010-10-23T08:41:32-08:00

The serious discussion about Canada’s place in the post-9/11 world at the seat of our government, the Parliament of Canada, will likely not occur.

Canada’s failed bid for the UN Security Council seat should initiate such a wide-ranging discussion, one that informs and educates Canadians even as it draws upon their collective experience and wisdom.

But it will not occur because we have become accustomed to endless churning out of platitudinous party platforms and bureaucratic self-serving statements that frame any issue — even ones of existential nature that demand serious soul-searching and non-partisan study.

It will also not occur because our politicians, like trained seals, waddle behind the public, play safe and, in striving to be all things to the electorate, they become what the poet T.S. Eliot described as hollow men: “Leaning together, Headpiece filled with straw.”

This is not merely a Canadian problem. It is a terrible malaise gripping the heart and soul of the Western liberal democracies.

Any serious discussion about Canada and the world post-9/11 needs to begin by describing how Canada historically stands in relationship to that world.

Though since 9/11 such discussions have been imperative, we have had instead a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Canada is not merely a vast real estate stretching across five time zones. It is deeply embedded culturally and civilizationally in what is the West.

This means Canadians firmly and unapologetically understand and defend, as they did in the past, what marks out the West from the rest of the world.

The one element that defines and distinguishes the West as it evolved — let us say over the past half-millennium that runs through the Age of Discovery, Renaissance, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution and culturally reaches back to ancient Athens, Jerusalem and Rome — is freedom, and freedom is what makes possible all that we so casually take for granted.

Freedom is fragile. But, in the West, freedom’s candle has remained burning as long as it has due to the immense sacrifices of so many in protecting it against those determined to snuff it.

Twice in the last century, and within living memory, totalitarian enemies of freedom — Nazis and Communists — mobilized their resources against freedom and the West.

In our time, Islamists are the ideological successors of Nazis and Communists, and similarly they oppose the freedom the West represents.

Their ideology, Islamism, like bolshevism, is disguised as religion — Islam — and this imperils the West from the inside.

If Canadians are unsure about who they are in the deep sense of belonging to a distinct culture and civilization, then it follows they will remain confused about friends and foes while they are inundated with a diet of pablum-like “good news” stories of globalization.

Moreover, the UN remains, as it was during the Cold War years, the strategic theatre of struggle between friends and foes of freedom.

It was a wake-up call on 9/11, reminding the West, and Canada, how freedom is once again in the crosshairs of its totalitarian foe.

The confusion among Canadians over the loss at the UN indicates how Canada’s defining identity as a western entity has weakened over the recent past.

Saints and sinners, in all faiths

2010-10-23T08:27:56-08:00

Among the hundreds of journalistic tags and clichés I would like to see discouraged, is the term “moderate Muslim.” Not banned and penalized, mind; only flagged and discouraged by our omniscient editors. It is, like most of the others on my private list, a term that does not bear thinking about.

Note, for starters, the implication it carries: of what an “extreme Muslim” might be. The expression, in its usual context, precludes the possibility that a person might take Islam so seriously that he becomes a saint. The assumption is rather that the Muslim “extremist” is necessarily a terrorist, whether in fact or in waiting. Surely I am not the only person to notice that this is unflattering to Islam.

Readers may have to take on faith that there have been many Muslim saints and mystics, a proportion of whom resemble Christian ones. Which is not to say they outnumber the “Jihadis”; numbers are meaningless in questions like this. But the curious might consult, for instance, a translated classic such as the Tadhkirat al-Auliya (Memorial of the Saints) by the 13th-century Persian Sufi, Farid al-Din Attar (he of the Conference of the Birds), available at least in the abridged translation of the great Orientalist, A.J. Arberry.

Or consult the scholar Martin Ling’s study of the early 20th-century Sufi saint, Ahmad al-Alawi, from the Maghreb. Or consider this one aphorism alone: “The furthest of all men from their Lord are those who go most beyond measure in affirming His Incomparability.” The fact he is stressing the immanence of God, in complement to the transcendence, casts a most welcome light on Islamic teaching.

There are many kinds of Muslims, as many kinds of Christians, but the expression “moderate” allows only one kind. I have met, personally, many kinds of Muslims. And as my Spitfire-pilot father taught me, “I have met many kinds of Germans, they are not all Nazis.”

Yet, before gentle reader leaps to the conclusion I am going liberal on him, let me insist that fear of Muslims in “Muslim garb” in airports and airplanes—the sort of thing the black liberal Juan Williams mentioned on the Fox network, that got him canned from his job at National Public Radio—is perfectly reasonable.

Indeed Tarek Fatah, of the Canadian Muslim Congress, was among the first to defend Williams, and mention that he, too, is scared by people like that. He is quoted on the website Daily Caller: “A number of suicide bombers ... have attacked [while] wearing the burka. This is the truth, we should be speaking the truth rather than what people expect us to say.”

A very hard truth is that while there are many ways to be a Muslim, the dominant proselytizing force in the West today, fuelled by oil money, is that of the Arabian Wahabi sect. It offers an ideological, puritanical, violent and intimidating version of Islam; and when it insists that Muslims “dress their part,” and make themselves as visible as possible, it is not advancing a mystical cause.

We have to be able to say that.

As Juan Williams went on to say, on Bill O’Reilly’s TV show, we also have to discuss how to assure the basic rights of Muslims as citizens in Western countries.

For several days this week, on the BBC website, a story at or near the top of the international “most viewed” list quoted the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, declaring, “Multiculturalism has utterly failed.”

Again, I wish journalists would think, and do their homework. For the truth is, Merkel said exactly the same things, in about the same words, when she was leader of the opposition a few years ago; and so did Gerhard Schroeder, the Social Democrat chancellor at the time. So the excitement here is not what politicians say, but when the media listen.

In fact, Germany tightened immigration laws a few years ago, under Schroeder. The same thing has happened, fairly quietly, right across Europe.

In the Netherlands and Scandinavia, it has been happening more noisily, but herein we find a great secret of European politics: that their elites tend to do things by consensus, discreetly, in the spirit of “loose lips sink ships.”

Here in North America, and especially on the other side of our border, we are, by tradition, more open about things, and sometimes our elites take instruction from the people more directly. The paradox is that the sort of things the Tea Party has been demanding, Stateside—checks on immigration, and much else—are more likely to be delivered in Europe.

Cultural differences are real, even within Islam, even across the Atlantic Ocean, and even on either side of the longest North American border. They are even discussed differently.

But one way or another, they need to be discussed.

Obama admin takes credit for Bush wind-farm and tens of thous other jobs

2010-10-22T08:13:20-08:00

President Obama can’t stop blaming President Bush for everything under the sun (“I inherited a deficit….” and “I inherited two wars…” ad nauseam). But when it comes to giving him credit where credit is due, he can’t start. In fact his administration appear to be quite willing to downright lie about it.

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White House takes credit for Bush-era wind farms
Administration claims 50,000 jobs created, but many projects were completed before funds were handed out

By Russ Choma
Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is crediting its anti-recession stimulus plan with creating up to 50,000 jobs on dozens of wind farms, even though many of those wind farms were built before the stimulus money began to flow or even before President Barack Obama was inaugurated.

Out of 70 major wind farms that received the $4.4 billion in federal energy grants through the stimulus program, public records show that 11, which received a total of $600 million, erected their wind towers during the Bush administration. And a total of 19 wind farms, which received $1.3 billion, were built before any of the stimulus money was distributed. (See a list of the projects here.)

Yet all the jobs at these wind farms are counted in the administration’s figures for jobs created by the stimulus.

In testimony to Congress earlier this year, the Department of Energy’s senior adviser on the stimulus plan, Matt Rogers, touted the wind farm program for creating as many as 50,000 jobs. He acknowledges that these figures were provided by a wind industry trade and lobbying group. The trade group, in turn, cites a government study, which found that most of the jobs are short term.

The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University fact-checked that claim, using the federal government’s own documents. Not only were 19 of the wind farms already in place before the first stimulus payments were made, but 14 of them were already sending electricity to the grid.
...

Few hi-tech company employees and PACS donated more to Repubs than Dems

2010-10-22T07:55:22-08:00

We already know from similar exposés that the vast majority of campaign cash from the media industry’s employees goes to left-wing candidates — liberals, Democrats, progressives of every sort — and in a suitably unbalanced fashion, far outpacing the regular population.

Among the contributions from computer and Internet industry employees, their families, and political action committees associated with computer and internet companies, most of the cash (sometimes vastly more, which strikes me as odd) goes to Democrats this 2010 election season.

Google — long suspected by folks like me of being a barely disguised shill for the left— is the leader here, with $456,119 in contributions to candidates, 75 percent of which went to Democrats. Doesn’t this strike you as odd?

Cisco is the second highest contributor in the industry with $557,919 in donations, 67 percent going to liberals.

Microsoft is the top dollar contributor with 60 percent of its nearly $1.3 million in contributions going to Democrats.

And Intel, with 57 percent of its $373,205 in contributions going to Democrats.

As for the Republican beneficiaries:

Akamai Technologies — 56 percent went to Republicans
Dell — 60 percent to Republicans (I use a Dell!)
Go Daddy (the web-hosting and related services company) — 63 percent to Republicans. (I use GoDaddy!)

High Tech Industry Gives More Money to Democrats
Sixty-six percent of contributions from the computers and Internet industry were to Democrats

New video warning against tax and spend govenments. Liberals, progressives—will be against this.

2010-10-21T12:12:26-08:00

View the video here

Now: thanks to progressives: $13.7 TRILLION debt

When I get on a plane with a group of nuns, I feel wonderful and safe.

2010-10-21T09:52:03-08:00

...But I can’t say that about all groups of people.

Any U.S. federal taxpayer funding of the asinine “public broadcaster”, the left-wing NPR (and yes there is some, though it’s not even remotely comparable to Canada’s 100% state-owned, and fully state-funded radio, television media called CBC, which also gets funding for programming, and laws and broadcasting rules and regulations to protect its existence against market forces) —should be stopped immediately, and a federal investigation launched.

Juan Williams is a champ. NPR is an American national disgrace for its actions last night.

And let me expand my usual mantra for this instance: state-owned, state-run, and state-funded media should be banned in this country, and in America too. I’m shocked that normally sensible Americans still put up with their taxpayer dollars going to a radio network or any news or entertainment media whatsoever.

• National Politically-correct Radio

• Huckabee calls on Congress to cut NPR funding

• FLASHBACK: Soros give NPR $1.8M to hire 100 reporters…

MAMA GRIZZLY ROARS
Now we’re talkin’
(hat tip to Matt for the heads-up)

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Juan Williams: Going Rogue
by Sarah Palin on Thursday, October 21, 2010 at 1:45pm

At a time when our country is dangerously in debt and looking for areas of federal spending to cut, I think we’ve found a good candidate for defunding. National Public Radio is a public institution that directly or indirectly exists because the taxpayers fund it. And what do we, the taxpayers, get for this? We get to witness Juan Williams being fired from NPR for merely speaking frankly about the very real threat this country faces from radical Islam.

We have to have an honest discussion about the jihadist threat. Are we not allowed to say that Muslim terrorists have killed thousands of Americans and continue to plot the deaths of thousands more? Are we not allowed to say that there are Muslim states that aid and abet these fanatics? Are we not allowed to even debate the role that radical Islam plays in inciting this violence?

I don’t expect Juan Williams to support me (he’s said some tough things about me in the past) – but I will always support his right and the right of all Americans to speak honestly about the threats this country faces. And for Juan, speaking honestly about these issues isn’t just his right, it’s his job. Up until yesterday, he was doing that job at NPR. Firing him is their loss.

If NPR is unable to tolerate an honest debate about an issue as important as Islamic terrorism, then it’s time for “National Public Radio” to become “National Private Radio.” It’s time for Congress to defund this organization.

NPR says its mission is “to create a more informed public,” but by stifling debate on these issues, NPR is doing exactly the opposite. President Obama should make clear his commitment to free and honest discussion of the jihadist threat in our public debates – and Congress should make clear that unless NPR provides that public service, not one more dime.

Mr. President, what say you?

- Sarah Palin

Of course the Canadian state-owned CBC’s columnist Heather Mallick described Palin having the look of a “porn actress,” and is someone who is “white trash” and caters to the “white trash” (that’s me and most of you) vote. She thinks Palin is an “Alaska hillbilly.” Her “Husband Todd looks like a roughneck.” So we know what the CBC types would think of Palin’s opinion on this matter.