Just damn.
If you want on the list, FReepmail me. This IS a high-volume PING list...
Posted on 03/12/2004 3:12:36 PM PST by mhking
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Communications Commission said on Friday that Clear Channel Communications Inc. should pay the maximum penalty of nearly $250,000 for airing a sexually explicit radio broadcast.
Clear Channel, the nation's largest radio-station owner, should pay $247,500 -- the maximum indecency fine allowable by law -- for an episode of "Elliot in the Morning" that aired on stations in Washington, D.C., Virginia and Delaware, the FCC said.
A Clear Channel official said the company would investigate the situation.
"If we made a mistake, we'll certainly live with the consequences," said Andrew Levin, Clear Channel executive vice president for law and government affairs.
The U.S. government agency, which regulates radio, television, wire, satellite and cable communications, said Clear Channel deserved the maximum fine as it has repeatedly broadcast indecent material in the past.
The FCC proposed fines of $27,500 each for nine separate broadcasts of a show that used explicit language to discuss the talents of pornographic film star Ron Jeremy.
The three Clear Channel affiliates aired the show on the morning of March 13, 2003, and rebroadcast segments later that day, the FCC said.
For years, the agency's commissioners have said that indecency penalties are too small to deter inappropriate behavior.
Congress has moved this year to dramatically hike the fines.
The U.S. House of Representatives voted Thursday to increase maximum fines to $500,000 per violation.
Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat, said the FCC should have considered revoking the stations' broadcast licenses.
"The time has come for the Commission to send a message that it is serious about enforcing the indecency laws of our country," Copps said in a statement. "That message has yet to go forth."
Commissioner Kevin Martin, a Republican, voted to impose the maximum fine, but noted that Clear Channel has already agreed to pay a large fine for past indecency violations and has taken steps to prevent future incidents.
Earlier this month, Clear Channel agreed to pay $755,000 for airing indecent material by another disc jockey, Bubba the Love Sponge.
Clear Channel fired Bubba about a month after the FCC proposed the fine.
The "Elliot in the Morning" show now has a new management team and broadcasts with a seven-second delay, Levin said.
"We've taken steps to make sure that all the folks who work there understand what's acceptable and what's not," he said.
Just damn.
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Libertarians join forces with modern liberals in opposing censorship, though libertarians are far from being modern liberals in other respects. For one thing, libertarians do no like the coercion that necessarily accompanies radical egalitarianism. But because both libertarians and modern liberals are oblivious to social reality, both demand radical personal autonomy in expression. That is one reason libertarians are not to be confused, as they often are, with conservatives. They are quasi- or semiconservatives. Nor are they to be confused with classical liberals, who considered restraints on individual autonomy to be essential.
The nature of the liberal and libertarian errors is easily seen in discussions of pornography. The leader of the explosion of pornographic videos, described admiringly by a competitor as the Ted Turner of the business, offers the usual defenses of decadence: 'Adults have the right to see [pornography] if they want to. If it offends you, don't buy it.' Those statements neatly sum up both the errors and the (unintended) perniciousness of the alliance between libertarians and modern liberals with respect to popular culture.
Modern liberals employ the rhetoric of 'rights' incessantly, not only to delegitimate the idea of restraints on individuals by communities but to prevent discussion of the topic. Once something is announced, usually flatly or stridently, to be a right --whether pornography or abortion or what have you-- discussion becomes difficult to impossible. Rights inhere in the person, are claimed to be absolute, and cannot be deminished or taken away by reason; in fact, reason that suggests the non-existence of an asserted right is viewed as a moral evil by the claimant. If there is to be anything that can be called a community, rather than an agglomeration of hedonists, the case for previously unrecognized individual freedoms (as well as some that have been previously recognized) must be thought through and argued, and "rights" cannot win every time. Why there is a right for adults to enjoy pornography remains unexplained and unexplainable.
The second bit of advice --'If it offends you, don't buy it' -- is both lulling and destructive. Whether you buy it or not, you will be greatly affected by those who do. The aesthetic and moral environment in which you and your family live will be coarsened and degraded. Economists call the effects an activity has on others 'externalities'; why so many of them do not understand the externalities here is a mystery. They understand quite well that a person who decides not to run a smelter will nevertheless be seriously affected if someone else runs one nearby.
Free market economists are particularly vulnerable to the libertarian virus. They know that free economic exchanges usually benefit both parties to them. But they mistake that general rule for a universal rule. Benefits do not invariably result from free market exchanges. When it comes to pornography or addictive drugs, libertarians all too often confuse the idea that markets should be free with the idea that everything should be available on the market. The first of those ideas rests on the efficacy of the free market in satisfying wants. The second ignores the question of which wants it is moral to satisfy. That is a question of an entirely different nature. I have heard economists say that, as economists, they do no deal with questions of morality. Quite right. But nobody is just an economist. Economists are also fathers and mothers, husbands or wives, voters citizens, members of communities. In these latter roles, they cannot avoid questions of morality.
The externalities of depictions of violence and pornography are clear. To complaints about those products being on the market, libertarians respond with something like 'Just hit the remote control and change channels on your TV set.' But, like the person who chooses not to run a smelter while others do, you, your family, and your neighbors will be affected by the people who do not change the channel, who do rent the pornographic videos, who do read alt.sex.stories. As film critic Michael Medved put it: ' To say that if you don't like the popular culture, then turn it off, is like saying if you don't like the smog, stop breathing. . . .There are Amish kids in Pennsylvania who know about Madonna.' And their parents can do nothing about it.
Can there be any doubt that as pornography and depictions of violence become increasingly popular and increasingly accessible, attitudes about marriage, fidelity, divorce, obligations to children, the use of force, and permissible public behavior and language will change? Or that with the changes in attitudes will come changes in conduct, both public and private? We have seen those changes already and they are continuing. Advocates of liberal arts education assure us that those studies improve character. Can it be that only uplifting reading affects character and the most degrading reading has no effects whatever? 'Don't buy it' and 'change the channel,' however intended, are effectively advice to accept a degenerating culture and its consequences. The obstacles to censorship of pornographic and viloence-filled materials are, of course, enormous. Radical individualism in such matters is now pervasive even among sedate, upper middle-class people. At a dinner I sat next to a retired Army general who was no a senior corporate executive. The subject of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs came up. This most conventional of dinner companions said casually that people ought to be allowed to see whatever they wanted to see. It would seem to follow that others ought to be allowed to do whatever some want to see.... Any serious attempt to root out the worst in our popular culture may be doomed unless the judiciary comes to understand that the First Amendment was adopted for good reasons, and those reasons did not include the furtherance of radical personal autonomy.
Civil freedom . . . is not, as many have endeavoured to persuade you, a thing that lies hid in the depth of abstruse science. It is a blessing and a benefit, not an abstract speculation; and all the just reasoning that can be put upon it is of so coarse a texture as perfectly to suit the ordinary capacities of those who are to enjoy, and of those who are to defend it. Far from any resemblance to those propositions in geometry and metaphysics, which admit no medium, but must be true or false in all their latitude, social and civil freedom, like all other things in common life, are variously mixed and modified, enjoyed in very different degrees, and shaped into an infinite diversity of forms, according to the temper and circumstances of every community. The extreme of liberty (which is its abstract perfection, but its real fault) obtains nowhere, nor ought to obtain anywhere; because extremes, as we all know, in every point which relates either to our duties or satisfactions in life, are destructive both to virtue and enjoyment. — Edmund Burke
Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed. The degree of restraint it is impossible in any case to settle precisely. But it ought to be the constant aim of every wise public council to find out by cautious experiments, and rational cool endeavours, with how little, not how much, of this restraint the community can subsist; for liberty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened. It is not only a private blessing of the first order, but the vital spring and energy of the state itself, which has just so much life and vigour as there is liberty in it. But whether liberty be advantageous or not (for I know it is a fashion to decry the very principle), none will dispute that peace is a blessing; and peace must, in the course of human affairs, be frequently bought by some indulgence and toleration at least to liberty: for as the sabbath (though of divine institution) was made for man, not man for the sabbath, government, which can claim no higher origin or authority, in its exercise at least, ought to conform to the exigencies of the time, and the temper and character of the people with whom it is concerned, and not always to attempt violently to bend the people to their theories of subjection. The bulk of mankind, on their part, are not excessively curious concerning any theories whilst they are really happy; and one sure symptom of an ill-conducted state is the propensity of the people to resort to them— Edmund Burke
I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of that society [The Revolution Society], be he who he will: and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct. — Edmund Burke
In some people I see great liberty indeed; in many, if not in the most, an oppressive, degrading servitude. But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths.— Edmund Burke
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite he placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot he free. Their passions forge their fetters.— Edmund Burke
I have no idea of a liberty unconnected with honesty and justice. Nor do I believe that any good constitutions of government, or of freedom, can find it necessary for their security to doom any part of the people to a permanent slavery. Such a constitution of freedom, if such can be, is in effect no more than another name for the tyranny of the strongest faction ; and factions in republics have been, and are, full as capable as monarchs of the most cruel oppression and injustice. It is but too true, that the love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is but too true, that there are many, whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness, and insolence. They feel themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy. This desire of having some one below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all,— and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling Church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from a jail. This disposition is the true source of the passion, which many men, in very humble life, have taken to the American war. Our subjects in America; our colonies; our dependants. This lust of party-power is the liberty they hunger and thirst for; and this syren song of ambition has charmed ears that one would have thought were never organised to that sort of music. — Edmund Burke
Liberty, such as deserves the name, is an honest, equitable, diffusive and impartial principle. It is a great and enlarged virtue, and not a sordid, selfish, and illiberal vice. It is the portion of the mass of the citizens, and not the haughty licence of some potent individual or some predominant faction.— Edmund Burke
"Statesmen, my dear Sir, may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand. John Adams
"The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People in a greater Measure, than they have it now, they may change their Rulers and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting liberty." John Adams
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams
"Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not only of all free government, but of social felicity under all governments and in all the combinations of human society." John Adams
"Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator, for he is entirely a dependent being....And, consequently, as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should in all points conform to his Maker's will...this will of his Maker is called the law of nature. These laws laid down by God are the eternal immutable laws of good and evil...This law of nature dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this... Sir William Blackstone
"Bad men cannot make good citizens. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience are incompatible with freedom." Patrick Henry
"If thou wouldst rule well, thou must rule for God, and to do that, thou must be ruled by him....Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants." William Penn
You, johnmorris886 defend tyranny. Smarten up.
"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." -- Daniel Webster
"The Constitution is a written instrument. As such, its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when it was adopted, it means now." -- South Carolina v. United States, 199 U.S. 437, 448 (1905)
"If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates, but let there be no change by usurpation; for though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed." -- George Washington, Farewell Address, September 17, 1796
This isn't tyrranny. The government is simply hopping on the bandwagon created by public outrage over the levels of smut that have built up after decades of the Left running down our culture with the glorification of smut and violence.
There is NO order with the FCC because they have no guidelines - the FCC can rule anything obscene because they set the standards - standards which are not written down or even definable and are applied arbitrarily. Such a system does not produce the order written rules tend to produce but in reality produce a tyranny.
Any enforcement of rules that are not written down and not definable is a tyranny. That is why we have a written constitution. Tyrannies a run without written laws on the whim of the tyrant. The congress does not even tell the FCC what it considers obscene, leaving it up to the judgments of appointed people.
Conservatives freak out when judges make up rules and laws but for some reason certain "conservatives" have no problem with political appointees making up what is considered punishable speech over the public airwaves. But you can sucker the stupid with talk of morality.
I am all for rules and enforcement of rules for the production of an orderly society. As long as those rules are clearly written and approved into law by the congress and the president.
Analogy: What we have now on our airwaves highway is a road where no speed limits are posted and the cops can write you out a ticket whenever they feel you drove too fast but never telling you what the speed limit so that you may obey it because there is no written speed limit. It is up to the cop at that day and that time and at that location to determine if you are speeding above the speed limit that the traffic cop sets arbitrarily.
I think a better analogy would be reckless driving.
Clear to you now?
Commissioner Kevin Martin, a Republican, voted to impose the maximum fine, but noted that Clear Channel has already agreed to pay a large fine for past indecency violations and has taken steps to prevent future incidents.
Yeah, the Democrat wants to spike Clear Channel (I wonder why?) and the Republican says, hey, Clear Channel has learned its lesson.
Look for Infinity to keep a razor sharp eye on Stern and dump him if he even comes close to "crossing the line".
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