FOIABlog: What Do The Mid-Term Elections Mean For FOIA?

From FOIABlog:

Gazing into the crystal ball, one can see positive and negative fallout from the midterm elections that saw a change in leadership in the House of Representatives.

The positive is that there may be more oversight of the Executive Branch, which will include FOIA Operations. House Leadership may use their new powers to have actual hearings concerning FOIA Operations, especially in those agencies that view the twenty working day time to respond to FOIA requests as a guidepost, not a law. Agencies such as Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services ("CMS" a component of the Department of Homeland Security) and FEMA (a component of the Department of Homeland Security) take yearsto respond to simple FOIA requests. The previous House Leadership failed to ask any questions about this practice, of course four years ago, when the new House Leaders were in power, they failed to use their oversight practice on FOIA Operations. However, this time, the President is in an opposition party so they may take the opportunity to tweak his administration for this failure (which started in many cases in the George W. Bush administration or earlier).

On a negative note, many FOIA Operations are clearly underfunded. With a large deficit, no one is going to be in the mood to increase spending for what many consider a discretionary practice (even though I fail to see how informing the public on what its government is doing is discretionary). So, I don't see the budgets of agency FOIA Operations increasing -- those agencies that are swamped will continue to have to get by with less, which is not a good thing for the agencies or requesters.

Finally, I don't see much FOIA legislation taking place. While there are a number of things that could be fixed in the current FOIA law, I don't foresee them taking place during the upcoming Congress. For instance, the current discretionary disclosure standard could, and should be put in the actual FOIA. However, the administration will say it is our policy (albeit without any statutory authority to get judicial review of whether an agency reviewed the documents for this purpose--it is my belief that many do not) and the new House Leadership, eyeing the White House in 2012 will want to preserve its next President's FOIA options--no matter what they say about their belief in transparency.

The most important FOIA venue in the next few months will be the Supreme Court, where a number of FOIA issues are pending, such as whether corporations have privacy under the FOIA's privacy exemptions (such as Exemption 7(C)). I believe Congress will react to these decisions rather than proactively moot those disputes.

What do the FOIA blog's readers think the new Congress will do?

Virginia Closes Borders to Proposed DC Raccoon Relocations

From the "they can't make this stuff up" department, this item from the Washington Examiner today:

Virginia won't accept the District's unwanted raccoons, opossums and other "nuisance" critters, calling into question key components of a D.C. Council bill designed to make life easier for pesky animals.

The legislation introduced by Ward 3 Councilwoman Mary Cheh sets new standards for the treatment of wild animals by the professionals hired to boot the critters out of homes received tentative approval from the full council last month. The new law would limit the tools wildlife managers can use to kill the beasts. In many cases it requires the animals to be kept alive and relocated "to safe location where nuisance problems are unlikely to occur."

But "since relatively few areas within the District of Columbia are likely to meet this definition, we are concerned that wildlife control operators may be inclined to transport the nuisance wildlife into Virginia for release," Robert Ellis, deputy director of the commonwealth's Bureau of Wildlife Resources, wrote this week in a letter addressed to Council Chairman Vince Gray.

If wildlife managers want to transport their catches across the Potomac River, they'll have to get special permission from the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. Ellis told The Washington Examiner that they won't receive permission.

"We really see no reason for them to bring these animals here," Ellis said. "We have our own nuisance animals, more than we can handle."

The term "nuisance animal" covers every animal imaginable, Ellis said, and it's simply illegal for any wild animal to be transported across state lines without permission.

Ellis said he sent the letter because "we wanted to make sure [the Council] is aware that Virginia won't be able to accept these animals."

In the letter Ellis suggested the Council adopt language specifically prohibiting exporting captured animals outside of the District, have the District Department of Environment clearly inform wildlife managers that transporting the animals across state lines is illegal.

Cheh did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon...

President Obama's Post-Election Press Conference

From WhiteHouse.gov:

Q    Is there anything in the “Pledge to America” that you think you can support?

THE PRESIDENT:  You know, I’m sure there are going to be areas, particularly around, for example, reforming how Washington works, that I’ll be interested in.  I think the American people want to see more transparency, more openness.  As I said, in the midst of economic crisis, I think one of the things I take responsibility for is not having pushed harder on some of those issues.  And I think if you take Republicans and Democrats at their word this is an area that they want to deliver on for the American people, I want to be supportive of that effort.

I'd like to see more transparency and openness, myself...

Eric Cantor's Manifesto for the Republican Congressional Majority

The title is "Delivering on Our Commitment" and it has been posted on Scribd, here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/40885401/Cantor:

In the attached document, Delivering on Our Commitment: A Majority to Limit Government and Create Jobs, I outline some thoughts on how we can begin that effort.Included is a particular focus on a sustained effort on jobs, reducing government spending, putting in place a new standard for prioritizing legislation, and how we strengthen oversight.

In thinking about and preparing this plan, I found myself guided by one simple proposition which I believe will be instructive for our efforts over the next two years: “Are my efforts addressing job creation and the economy; are they reducing spending; and are they shrinking the size of the Federal Government while increasing and protecting liberty? If not, why am I doing it? Why are WE doing it?”

I would greatly appreciate any thoughts, feedback, or suggestions you may have. I know that by changing the culture and focusing on our priorities, ours will be a lasting and worthwhile legacy: that we will achieve what we said we came to accomplish, and in so doing, deliver on the type of conservative governance that has been promised.

Document of the Week: CAMERA's Report on NPR's Federal Funding

Written by Alex Safian in the aftermath of NPR's Juan Williams firing controversy, the October 27, 2010 CAMERA report makes a convincing case that NPR benefits from taxpayer subsidy, contra public claims to the contrary made by the network's chief executive:

In the wake of National Public Radio's firing of Juan Williams, NPR chief Vivian Schiller has defended her network, in part, by claiming that NPR is a purely private organization that gets essentially "zero" taxpayer funding....

Other National Public Radio staffers and officials have made similar assertions in the past, despite the fact that such claims are blatantly deceptive.

In fact NPR does receive large amounts of taxpayer money, but via the equivalent of a shell game – for some years now instead of the taxpayer money going directly from the taxpayer-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to NPR, it has gone to the local affiliates as "community service grants," which the stations then turn around and send to NPR to help pay for the right to broadcast the network's programs.

Before 1989 the money paying for the programming went directly from CPB to NPR, and the local affiliates had nominal membership dues, ie they got the programming for essentially nothing. Since then the money has been laundered thru the affiliates, which have to pay substantial amounts for the programming.

When this change occurred it materially affected NPR's financial statements, and the network had to note it and explain it in an attachment to their IRS-required Form 990. Here's an excerpt of that attachment:

This return reflects a change in NPR's method of obtaining funding for its operations. Commencing in its Fiscal Year 1987, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives money from Congress to fund public radio, increased significantly the proportion of that money it gave directly to qualified public radio stations, and reduced significantly the proportion of that money it gave directly to National Public Radio. National Public Radio in turn increased significantly the amount of dues its member stations must pay for membership and programming services in order to obtain sufficient funds to operate....

As a result of these changes, the bulk of NPR's revenue now comes from membership dues, a significant portion of which is attributable to program-related services.

Of course, it may no longer be the case that the bulk of NPR's revenue comes from membership dues, but the point is clear: NPR is still receiving substantial amounts of taxpayer money from the CPB, but this money goes through the affiliates rather than straight to NPR....

In addition, in NPR's latest Form 990, it admits that its operating costs were paid for largely by those program fees:

Operating costs were met by program fees paid by public radio stations that broadcast NPR programming, as well as grants and contributions from foundations and corporations. (page 17 of NPR's IRS Form 990 for TY 2007)

Is NPR's Lobbying Illegal?

Another measure of NPR's dependence on taxpayer support is its lobbying to preserve the taxpayer dollars going to the CPB, which then flow to NPR's affiliates. According to its 990, in FY 2007 NPR spent a substantial amount, more than $456,000, on such lobbying.

Now under federal regulations (U.S.C. Title 26, §4911) non-profits are generally prohibited from any substantial lobbying (that is, attempting to influence legislation), but there are exceptions.

Before looking at the exception NPR is using, let's look at the network's legally required description of its lobbying, on page 63 of its Form 990:

NPR has been involved in the following lobbying activities – appropriations for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, ...

That is, the first item listed is preserving the taxpayer funds that go to the CPB, which NPR claims it is not dependent on!

Now, if as NPR claims to the public, they really got no funding from the CPB, then their lobbying would be blatantly illegal. That's because for NPR the only applicable exception to the prohibition on lobbying is the "self-defense" clause, and in particular the part referring to the "continued existence" of the organization. Here's the text of that exception clause (U.S.C. Title 26 § 4911(d)(2)(C) ):

appearances before, or communications to, any legislative body with respect to a possible decision of such body which might affect the existence of the organization, its powers and duties, tax-exempt status, or the deduction of contributions to the organization;

In other words, the loophole that NPR exploits to lobby congress proves that it itself believes public funding, and CPB funding in particular, is crucial to its existence. Why won't NPR admit this to the public? Indeed, why does it disingenuously claim the opposite?

What is the total amount of taxpayer funding for public radio?

According to the CPB's Public Broadcasting Revenue: Fiscal Year 2008, public radio got at least 26% of its revenue from public sources, including the Congressional appropriation to CPB, Federal Grants and Contracts, Local Governments, State Governments and State Colleges and Universities, an amount that totals almost $252,000,000 dollars. (derived from Table 2) By far, most of this taxpayer-based funding for public radio goes to NPR and its affiliates. A relatively small amount goes to other public radio, such as the egregiously biased, lunatic fringe Pacifica Radio, which is so extreme in its coverage of Israel that it actually makes NPR sound reasonable.

The bottom line is that contrary to NPR's claims, the local affiliates are using taxpayer money, much of it funneled through the CPB, to pay for NPR's programming, which they otherwise could not afford. And without that money that is then sent to NPR, the network could not survive. Which is why NPR fights so hard to maintain and even increase that taxpayer funding.

Charlie Clark on the Higher Cost of American Higher Education

His review of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It, as published in AARP Magazine:

If you can afford to plunk down the cash to buy a Lexus — and do it each September for four years running — you're probably not flipping out about sending your kid to college. But even bottomless moneybags hate rip-offs, which is close to the way many renowned American universities come off in Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It


The authors — Andrew Hacker, a political science professor at the City University of New York, and Claudia Dreifus, a New York Times contributing writer who teaches at Columbia University — are out to spread itching powder beneath the robes of academe. "The American way of higher education puts a premium on prestige," they opine, "making a fetish of brand names and using price as a guarantor of quality." This $420 billion industry, they write, has proliferated to the tune of 4,352 educational franchises nationwide, yet somewhere during that growth spurt it lost track of its original purpose: "to challenge the minds and imaginations of this nation's young people, to expand their understanding of the world, and thus of themselves."

The question mark in the book's title is designed to cast doubt on the value proposition of today's conventional, and costly, college experience. Many of the book's jabs — at professors who shun teaching, at the "intercollegiate arms race" waged over cushy student amenities such as recreational climbing walls and specialized cafeteria food — are familiar. But Hacker and Dreifus have also done enough new research to fire some jarring blasts at formerly unassailable brands.

Take Princeton. A survey of its Class of 1973 found that not a single alumnus had served in a cabinet or sub-cabinet position, in Congress, as a federal judge, or as a CFO or CEO of any major national company. Or take Harvard, where full professors pull down an average annual salary of $192,600, for which some of them teach only one course per year. The sinking prestige of classroom instruction, claim Hacker and Dreifus, is subverting undergraduate education nationwide. For starters, professors — particularly those who have earned the protective shield of tenure — identify more with far-flung colleagues in their disciplines than they do with the supposed "learning community" in which they are embedded. And these "teachers" — researchers, really — propose increasingly recondite subjects as courses simply because those happen to be the ones they are pursuing for their latest journal article or book.

Higher Education? unearths professors who boast of arbitrarily assigning students too much reading. But when the book describes the "predicament" of college students loath to avail themselves of professors' scanty office hours lest they "waste" the time of great minds, the authors' argument gets hard to swallow. Could Hacker and Dreifus truly be unaware of "helicopter parents," hovering over professors to demand that they lavish more time and attention on their precious charges?

How did college get so pricey? The graduate teaching assistant who’s handling your introductory sociology class might blame it on "the intrinsic nature of a bureaucracy to propagate itself." And she or he would have a legitimate point, for the ratio of campus bureaucrats to students has doubled since 1980. Corporate-executive-style compensation levels for superstar campus presidents have hyperinflated tuition bills, too; Elwood Gordon Gee of Ohio State University, Nicholas Zeppos of Vanderbilt University and Shirley Ann Jackson of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute all command million-dollar pay packages.

If Hacker and Dreifus were education czars, they would surely reshape the American campus. But some of their ukases hold more water than others:

1) Subordinate pure research to practical teaching. Achieving this goal would benefit the "undergraduate consumer," to be sure, but where would it leave campus-based researchers on track to cure cancer? One of the "off-label uses" for campus research that emerged from the recent BP disaster, for example, came when fistfuls of Gulf-area college professors suddenly began weighing in with oil-containment strategies they had been pursuing as pure research projects for years.

2) Abolish tenure. The authors contend that it no longer serves its original purpose: to safeguard academic freedom. It should therefore be replaced, they say, by five- to seven-year teaching contracts and cash incentives for earlier retirement.

3) Spend less money ginning up football and basketball fever. Risking coming across as killjoy critics of the sports fandom that boosts colleges' visibility (and, in some cases, alumni donations), they ask why squads from Western Kentucky and Vermont, for example, must travel to California to play Stanford in softball.

The true value of a college degree, Higher Education? reminds us, lies in fostering a student's ability to think independently. To that end, the authors profile 11 moderately priced, publicly funded regional colleges that they believe pull this off. If their picks (listed below) are accurate, the most promising future for higher education may reside in a state U. near you.

Arizona State University
Berea College
The Cooper Union
Evergreen State College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Raritan Valley Community College
University of Colorado
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
University of Mississippi
University of Notre Dame
Western Oregon University

Cook Political Report's Pre-Election Analysis

From the Cook Political Report:

November 1, 2010 
The Cook Political Report's pre-election House outlook is a Democratic net loss of 50 to 60 seats, with higher losses possible. A turnover of just 39 seats would tip majority status into Republican hands. The midterm maelstrom pulling House Democrats under shows no signs of abating, if anything it has intensified. Whereas fewer than a third of Democratic Senate seats are up for election, House Democrats are suffering the full violence of this national undertow. Over a quarter of the entire 255-member House Democratic caucus have trailed GOP opponents in at least one public or private survey, and nearly half have tested under 50 percent of the vote in at least one poll. At this point, only 181 House seats are Solid, Likely or Lean Democratic, while 204 seats are Solid, Likely or Lean Republican, and 50 seats are in the Toss Up column. While there are certain to be at least 43 new members of the House thanks to 41 open seats and two vacancies, between 40 and 50 incumbents (over 95 percent of them Democrats) are likely to lose their seats, making for possibly the largest freshman class since 1992.

Vote Tuesday!

I don't believe in early voting, but do believe in voting on Election Day, after all the arguments have been made, and all the facts that are going to come out have come out...so, I'll be voting Tuesday, Nov. 2nd, and hope our American readers do so as well--for the candidates of their choice...

A Brief History of the Jack O' Lantern...

From History.com:

People have been making jack o'lanterns at Halloween for centuries. The practice originated from an Irish myth about a man nicknamed "Stingy Jack." According to the story, Stingy Jack invited the Devil to have a drink with him. True to his name, Stingy Jack didn't want to pay for his drink, so he convinced the Devil to turn himself into a coin that Jack could use to buy their drinks. Once the Devil did so, Jack decided to keep the money and put it into his pocket next to a silver cross, which prevented the Devil from changing back into his original form. Jack eventually freed the Devil, under the condition that he would not bother Jack for one year and that, should Jack die, he would not claim his soul. The next year, Jack again tricked the Devil into climbing into a tree to pick a piece of fruit. While he was up in the tree, Jack carved a sign of the cross into the tree's bark so that the Devil could not come down until the Devil promised Jack not to bother him for ten more years.

Soon after, Jack died. As the legend goes, God would not allow such an unsavory figure into heaven. The Devil, upset by the trick Jack had played on him and keeping his word not to claim his soul, would not allow Jack into hell. He sent Jack off into the dark night with only a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal into a carved-out turnip and has been roaming the Earth with ever since. The Irish began to refer to this ghostly figure as "Jack of the Lantern," and then, simply "Jack O'Lantern."

In Ireland and Scotland, people began to make their own versions of Jack's lanterns by carving scary faces into turnips or potatoes and placing them into windows or near doors to frighten away Stingy Jack and other wandering evil spirits. In England, large beets are used. Immigrants from these countries brought the jack o'lantern tradition with them when they came to the United States. They soon found that pumpkins, a fruit native to America, make perfect jack o'lanterns.

Help! My Doctor is "Going Boutique"

Not too long ago, my internist "went boutique." What does that mean? A 2002 article in the British Medical Journal described it this way:

Dr Sidney Wolfe, director of consumer organisation Public Citizen's health research group in Washington, DC, said, “Boutique medicine is a predictable consequence of how badly our healthcare system is functioning.”

The American Medical Association has not taken an official position on the issue. But Dr Richard Roberts, chairman of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said, “If you have a substantial portion of America's doctors doing this, who's going to take care of everybody else? We've got over 40 million people in this country without health insurance, and another 20 million who are underinsured. What's wrong with this picture?”"

In my case, I received a letter that informed me unless I paid a thousand dollars a year, on top of what Blue Cross provided for office visits, my doctor would no longer see me.

Instead, I could go see someone from a list of doctors who had agreed to accept his patients for "continuity of care." Well, I thought to myself. If my doctor doesn't want to see me, I don't want to see him. Another doctor told me, "he's good, but he's not that good." So I checked the list. Only one doctor had a medical degree from an American medical school. Some "choice." I called and was accepted as a patient.

Then, a few months later, a new letter arrived, from the new doctor. He was going into a modified boutique system himself, he said, called MDVIP. (The company is owned by Proctor and Gamble, makes of Tide Detergent, by the way.) He would still agree to see me, but only for a short 15-minute appointment. For longer appointments, 30-minutes or more, I would have to pay him an extra fee, as well.

Both of these doctors had invited me to sales seminars at local hotels before they switched to the new system--just the kind of things condo salesmen or hedge fund operators tended to run, before the recent Wall Street collapse.

Well, I talked to yet another doctor, who said that the two-tier practice sounded unethical on its face, that it was wrong to treat patients differently based upon their ability to pay. Apparently, this idea has occured to some lawyers, even Members of Congress, but so far no one has acted upon it. You can find out more about the legal problems with boutique practices, on attorney Steven M. Goldstein's webpage. Apparently, there have been questions from members of Congress:

These practices have not slipped under the radar screen of government officials, as numerous investigations and other efforts to stop this movement have begun. The most visible action was a letter sent in March of this year to the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services by five members of Congress, including Representative Henry Waxman from California and Representative Pete Stark, the author of the Stark self-referral law. In their letter, the Congressmen raise several concerns that the boutique practices are violating federal laws, and they asked the Inspector General to take "rapid action" against these practices. Last year, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida introduced a bill in Congress to prohibit physicians from charging additional fees to Medicare patients. In addition, various state agencies have begun their own investigations. Departments of Insurance in the states of Massachusetts and Florida are reviewing the practice.

Nevertheless, little has been done to stop a questionable practice that results in fewer doctors being available to see patients--at a time of crisis in national health care.

Laura Newman cited the "boutique" phenomenon as a horrifying symptom of a developing American class system in health care, one that harms public health directly by rationing care on the basis of ability to pay in the British Medical Journal:

Charatan points out that the rise of boutique medicine means that more doctors can cream from the top, picking those who pay the most. Unsettling questions remain: are American doctors and insurers in their silence building a system that is eroding the public's health? In the past, doctors' leaders and researchers have waged a successful battle in the United States to allow specialty referrals, taking their battle to the press, Capitol Hill, and state legislatures. But they have become eerily quiet on this issue. It is high time for those claiming interest in the public's health to publicise the situation and document the harm.

I haven't seen too many articles about the phenomenon in the media. My guess is that all too many writers, editors, producers, and the like are happy to pay the extra fees for VIP treatment, and haven't spent much time thinking about the ethical or public health considerations. There's a term for this mentality: "Public be damned."

The thought occurs: Perhaps this discouraging phenomenon might be added to the anti-elitist agenda of the Tea Party Republicans when they enter Congress as part of the effort to "repeal and replace Obamacare?"

WSJ: US Intelligence Budget Over $80 Billion

And what do we get for our money, exactly? Someone please tell me. Oh, you can't because it is a secret? Well, I can tell you that we didn't get Osama bin Laden, dead or alive...So, can we please have our money back? Full AP story here.

WSJ: Bloomberg's FOIA Problem

In today's Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg's Matthew Winkler complains that FOIA isn't helping Bloomberg find out what the US Treasury did with taxpayer money in the 2008 bank bailout--and that government secrecy is bad for business, bad for the economy, and bad for America...

Americans remain bitter about federal bailouts, even after every penny of the $309 billion rescue of banks and insurers was returned at a profit. Why? Because our government refuses to disclose all of the facts and, until it does, every poll will continue to show a lack of confidence in the government and in the companies that finance America.

More than a dozen books have been written about the collapse of the world's biggest credit market and the government's unprecedented steps to protect hundreds of banks from certain ruin. Yet we still don't know: Who made the decisions?

Treasury FOIA Officials Mission: "...withhold information from release to public"

From the Washington Examiner:

Officials at the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Stability contracted with a small consulting firm that has given nearly $25,000 to Democratic candidates since 2005 (and no money to Republicans) to hire “Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Analysts to support the Disclosure Services, Privacy and Treasury Records.” The firm is currently advertising a job opening for a FOIA analyst with experience in the “Use of FOIA/PA exemptions to withhold information from release to the public” (emphasis mine, and if that link goes down, The Examiner has kept a copy for its records).

UPDATE: Phacil has changed their job description on their website (without making a note), however here is a link to another job description for the same job that still uses the above as a qualification. They also have not yet returned calls to The Examiner. The side by side comparison of the old and modified versions are at the bottom of this post.

This means that the entire OFS, which is tasked with overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, is trying to hire people who will withhold information from release to the public.

Jerry Brown's Endorsement, from Meg Whitman, on YouTube...

James Taranto on Katie Couric

From the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal:

They Have Indoor Plumbing Too
Howard Kurtz, who recently moved from the Washington Post to The Daily Beast, has a report on "CBS Evening News" anchorman Katie Couric, which includes this howler:

That's why Couric has spent recent weeks in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is touring what she calls "this great unwashed middle of the country" in an effort to divine the mood of the midterms.

"This great unwashed middle of the country"? Do you think you could be a little more condescending, Katie?

Moreover, although Chicago at least is in the Midwest, in no other sense are any of these cities in the "middle." Politically? All four cities are in counties that went overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, giving him, respectively, 76.2%, 83%, 76.9% and 60.2% of the vote.

A probably apocryphal quote attributed to Lyndon Johnson has it that if he's lost Walter Cronkite, he's lost Middle America. Barack Obama doesn't need to lose Katie Couric. She's lost Middle America all by herself!

William Easterly on the Ivy League v Middle America

From Aidwatchers.com:

There has been a lot of talk this political season about Ivy League Elitism. My own background—of belonging and yet not quite belonging to the elite— makes me very conflicted.

On Monday, I gave a seminar (not for the first time) at my undergraduate alma mater, Bowling Green State University, which is located in my hometown of Bowling Green, Ohio. It was a very good audience, and I enjoyed as always interacting with my old professors, my first mentors in economics, Charles Chittle, John Hoag, and Leo Navin, as well as with one of BGSU’s new generation of star professors, Timothy Fuerst. I also gave a talk at my old high school (BGHS), and was very impressed with the knowledge and smarts of the students (from the Model UN club) and the Social Studies teacher who hosted me, Theresa Dunn, on development topics.

Earlier this year, I attended an awards ceremony where I was one of 100 alumni that were “among the most prominent” of BGSU’s first 100 years, 1910-2010. Some of my friends teased me that getting an award like this was a bit easier at BGSU than it would have been at, say, Harvard, and I played along with maximum self-deprecation. Yet at the awards ceremony, I felt very humbled by how impressive the rest of the 100 were, with high-achieving entrepreneurs, scientists, actors, artists, and athletes.

My Bowling Green experience always reminds me how American economic development is not just built on a bicoastal elite that went to the elite high schools and universities, but on a very broad and deep Middle America (usually dissed as “flyover America”). The bicoastal elite itself is not a fixed hereditary class, but is constantly renewing itself with new recruits from the same vast Middle, of which I am originally one.

The Massive Middle also provides upward mobility to the poorer regions. My family had lived in one of the poorest regions of the US, the Appalachian Mountains of western Virginia and West Virginia for seven generations. My father grew up in southern West Virginia during the Depression, after having lost his own father at age 2 to tuberculosis. Yet thanks to his hard-working mother and his own hard work, he got a Ph.D. at West Virginia University (WVU) and then got a job as a biology professor at BGSU. Government-funded education like WVU, BGSU, and BGHS is also what helped create the Massive Middle.

So after all this, I am a bit conflicted about the Ivy League Elite. I don’t like the anti-intellectual attacks on this elite (from the Middle); I respect very much all the incredibly smart and creative people I know who belong to this elite. Contrary to the perception of the attackers from the Middle, the elite universities do a great job producing world-class ideas and achievements.

At the same time, I don’t like the pretensions of some in the elite who look down on the Middle and who think they are the only ones qualified to contribute to our development.

Having been on both sides, Middle and Elite, it looks to me like BOTH are success stories in themselves and BOTH have played their own important part in America’s Miracle of Development.

Robert Spencer on Juan Williams

From Human Events:

Juan Williams makes the understandable post-9/11 observation that the sight of Muslims on airplanes makes him nervous, and NPR immediately fires him. Bill O’Reilly states the obvious truth that Muslims attacked the United States on 9/11, and Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar walk off the set. These incidents and others demonstrate that the Leftists in the mainstream media and their Islamic supremacist allies are wholly intellectually bereft—and so they cannot engage their opponents on the level of ideas, but must instead bludgeon them into silence...

...But by the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet regime had grown sclerotic, and had lost the assurance that its own people were still terrorized enough to keep silent, or that it could still count on a foreign intelligentsia willfully blind enough to defend the regime. And so instead of mounting flashy show trials, it packed off its opponents to mental hospitals under the cover of darkness. They simply didn’t exist any longer. It was an effective tactic in the short run, as it certainly silenced their opponents of the day; in the long run, it was an expression of exhaustion, an admission of defeat.

NPR used essentially the same tactic on Juan Williams: it declared his opinions beyond the pale of decent people and cast him out of polite society, into the outer darkness inhabited by Fox News, far from the politically correct fold. NPR apparently did not anticipate the fury of the American people at the public station’s bullying and refusal to countenance reality. Goldberg and Behar tried the same tactic with Bill O’Reilly: in stalking off the stage, they were actually banishing him, along with his claim—as obvious to most Americans as it was outrageous to them—that Muslims killed Americans on 9/11. This is likewise what Jeffrey Goldberg and others who have tried to do to Pamela Geller: render her so radioactive through misrepresentation of what she has said that decent people will turn away.

As they practice these tactics, the implicit admission rings louder and clearer all the time: they have no arguments. They can’t really explain why Juan Williams should not be nervous at the sight of Muslims on an airplane. They have no idea how to answer O’Reilly’s follow-up question that if it wasn’t Muslims who killed us on 9/11, then who was it? And they have no comeback to the arguments from reason, decency, common sense and history that Pamela Geller has adduced against the Ground Zero mosque, and so instead of acknowledging these arguments they try to destroy her personally.

The Leftists who control the media and the Islamic supremacists of whom they provide fawning and mendacious coverage cannot defeat their opponents. They are exhausted. They are finished. The only weapons they have left are feigned moral outrage, defamation, and smear.

Seth Lipsky: NPR Bad for High Culture

From "The Real Case for Defunding NPR," in the Wall Street Journal:

My quarrel with government subsidies to NPR—via grants from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting—is that they cast a chill over the markets in which private entrepreneurs seek to raise capital for what might be called highbrow journalism. It is hard to quantify this. But it is a conclusion that I have reached after more than two decades spent seeking to raise capital for privately-owned publications competing in this arena.

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.

These are questions for Congress to explore when it looks into whether to continue funding for NPR. It's been nearly two generations now since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. It's not clear to me, incidentally, what constitutionally enumerated power Congress was relying on to pass such an act. But leave that question aside. What has been the impact on the quality of privately funded journalism of the octopus that government funding of broadcasting helped create?

More about NPR from Lipsky in The New York Sun.

Our Readers are Invited to an Exhibition of Paintings By Polly Evans at the Arts Club of Washington on November 5th

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Sarah Palin: End Federal Funding for NPR

Has NPR's firing of Juan Williams given Republicans an issue with "curb appeal" to swing voters? First Mike Huckabee, now Sarah Palin, have called for ending federal funding for NPR. Actually, they would need to do more--to strip NPR and CPB of preferential treatment when it comes to subsidy, advertising, payola and plugola, links to partisan political activity, tax exemptions, reserved frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, etc. Republican George W. Bush had eight years--but didn't do a thing. Let's hope that Huckabee and Palin would actually do what they say they want to do...From Sarah Palin's Facebook page:

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

Here's my idea for Palin's 2012 platform, or Mike Huckabee's: Use NPR's radio frequencies for data transmission channels that expand the speed and availability of the wireless internet instead of broadcasting. This would be truly public radio, where any American citizen is able to Google, Wiki, Blog, Tweet or podcast. The US government has already taken reserved military channels for this purpose, but more are needed--and NPR has abused the channel reservation it enjoys today. With Joan Kroc's 450 million endowment, plus the additional contribution from George Soros, the NPR network could stay in business as an internet broadcaster and via iTunes on a level playing field with everyone else. Existing NPR radio spectrum could be made available for its best and highest use to serve the American public, while NPR listeners could continue to enjoy their channels on their smartphones, netbooks, iPods, and iPads--without federal subsidy.