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To: jpl; fporretto; walford; rwfromkansas; Natural Law; Old Professer; RJCogburn; Jim Noble; ...
Marching on the SCOTUS won't accomplish anything. They have lifetime tenure and couldn't care less what the people think of them.

The Senators on the other hand still have to answer to the people to some degree. They're the ones we really have to lean on. We need to let them know that if Bush's nominees don't get voted they'll get booted out of office just like Tom Daschle was. And I'm talking about both Democrats and fake Republicans like Arlen Specter and his ilk.

Ultimately we must have a Congress which will stand up on its hind legs and take responsibility. Congress can limit the jurisdiction of the court, and Congress can impeach inJustice Kennedy for imposing laws on us that the Congress didn't vote for and the president didn't sign.

Congress can impeach a judge as easily as it can impeach a president for going to court and lying to get a suit against his own person wrongly decided in his favor. The Senate may not convict, but perhaps we need to see how many judges are content to boast that they beat a rap with a majority in the House and Senate on record that they should not remain in office.

Finally, at least one branch of the government must stand up the the Democratic Establishment of reporters and the judges and politicians who toady up to journalism and in turn get political cover from journalists. I am one who believes that broadcast journalism is illegitimate because the government created broadcasting (as opposed to Marconi's mere "radio transmission") by allocating broadcasting "rights" to a few and censoring all the rest of us.

The First Amendment does not state that journalism, or any of its practitioners, is a public service. The First Amendment asserts that newspaper publishing - that book publishing or any genre of printing or speaking - is a right of the people, rather that a privilege which the government may lawfully superintend. And it adds that the people - not the owner of The New York Times alone but the people, without distinctions or classes or titles of nobility - have the right to express their political opinions and desires among themselves and to the government.

The fundamental fact of politics is that journalism is politics. The facts and logic simply will not sustain the contrary assumption that journalism is public service. If you assume that journalism is politics the fact that journalists do hit pieces on politicians and political parties which they do not favor is no stranger than water flowing downhill rather than up. If, counter to all reason, you assume that journalism is public service, 60 Minutes II launching utterly tendentious assault on the Republican Party and George W. Bush last October seems completely inexplicable. And you have no explanation, not only for the tendentiousness of CBS but for the fact that mainstream journalism would not tell the simple declarative truth that the "memos" upon which CBS relied were rather crude forgeries.

It is all very well for The New York Times, or for any other newspaper-publishing private enterprise which are under no obligation to eschew political tendentiousness to engage in politics under the protection of courts which recognize the applicability of the First Amendment to newspapers. But CBS and the other broadcasters are given license to practice politics in a way that government censorship of we-the-people denies you and me the privilege of doing.

That injustice is rationalized by the claim that the government-licensed broadcasters are performing public service with which your having an equal right to transmit would interfere. In fact of course, the broadcasters behave politically like the rest of journalism, as the 60 Minutes II fraud makes excruciatingly clear. And like the rest of journalism, the broadcasters compound the partisanship by loudly trumpeting their own superiority over the "partisanship" of people who modestly admit that they are not objective (and who do so, frankly, because unlike journalists they lack the propaganda power to withstand the ridicule they would incur if they did otherwise).

Everyone has had the experience of yelling back at the radio or TV, but almost no one presumes to do so with a radio transmitter. If the First Amendment applies to broadcasting by CBS it also applies to broadcasting by you or me. Under the Constitution you have, theoretically, the same rights as anyone else.

If you really believed that the First Amendment applies to broadcasting, why wouldn't you be broadcasting yourself?!

Is it time for a March on the SCOTUS and the Judiciary and the Senate?
Free Republic | March 2, 2005 | Jim Robinson

811 posted on 03/07/2005 6:22:53 AM PST by conservatism_IS_compassion (The idea around which liberalism coheres is that NOTHING actually matters but PR.)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

Media bias bump.


812 posted on 03/07/2005 6:59:31 AM PST by E.G.C.
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