Is NPR Liberal? Duh, Winning!

Vivian Schiller

James O’Keefe has done it this time. Dude, the hornets are out of the nest! Today’s news that NPR has canned CEO Vivian Schiller comes less than 24 hours after the conservative activist filmmaker released his scathing undercover report of liberal and racial bias within public radio. But how will Schiller’s departure affect the political leanings of NPR? Not in the slightest.

In the first place, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, who was no doubt behind Schiller’s firing today, has very little to do with the day-to-day programming of PBS or NPR. Oh, theoretically they rule the roost over NPR and PBS, but in actuality they spend most of their time being, well, bureaucratic.

Ask George W. Bush’s former CPB appointee Kenneth Tomlinson, who was ousted from the board in 2005, after he tried to balance NPR/PBS programming. Hey, here’s a cushy little government appointment—don’t rock the boat.

The simple reason why a mere reshuffling of board and staff members in the upper echelons of public broadcasting will not improve it, is because the member stations select the boards of these two networks. That’s right. While the CPB board is a six-year presidential appointment (the current CEO is a Bush appointee), both NPR and PBS appoint their board members internally.

That is not to say that the CPB cannot demand and receive the head of a NPR or PBS executive on a platter, as we have witnessed over the past two days. Obviously they can and will whenever a James O’Keefe jumps out of the bushes. But they normally do not impact network programming to any significant degree.

This is done by the member board, i.e. the stations. Of course they are subject to oversight by the public members of the board, like Schiller and Schiller, but for the most part they manage their own programming.

The truth of the federal government—the government most Americans rarely see—the nuts and bolts, day-to-day players who make up the inner workings of government, are overwhelmingly liberal. These are the middle management of every department and bureau in government today; liberalism is endemic within federal government.

And why wouldn’t it be? What we have seen occurring in Wisconsin and Ohio over the last month should be proof enough that anyone on the government dole is beholden to liberalism. Their entire professional existence is owed to government handouts.

This year, the CPB received $422 million from the government. Don’t trust those numbers, we got them from the government. But whatever the amount, the money allocated by Congress is granted irrespective of the programming we receive week after week, year in and year out.

So it is perfectly understandable that not only the boards of NPR and PBS are liberal, but that every employee working for them and all of their member stations are as well; they feed at the boundless and bottomless Public Through.

None of this is to say that James O’Keefe’s investigation was for naught. But the American people have been slow on the uptake before.

In the 1990s, Hillary Rodham Clinton launched the “Don’t Kill Big Bird” campaign after then speaker Newt Gingrich announced plans to cut funding for PBS and NPR. Virtually every mother with pre-school-age kids in the country was outraged.

And you know the rest.

James O’Keefe has done his part. Now it’s up to you.

Thank You James.

Will the Tea Party Survive 2011?

This year the American people will learn whether or not the Tea Party is a legitimate entity, or if it is the Arsenio Hall of political movements. You remember Arsenio; he was the guy who said he would “kick Leno’s ass” in the ratings. Arsenio is now a regular guest on the Tonight Show.

One reason Sarah Palin is so hated and so loved across the nation is that she is seen to be the face of the Tea Party movement. Which is not strictly true. Well, she may be the face of the movement, but she is certainly not its voice. Palin is more or less what every mainstream GOP politician and pundit fears most: an immensely popular quantity they cannot control. However, she is what all modern Republicans claim to be but in most cases are not: a true Reagan Republican.

This is where Palin differs from the average Tea Party member, I suspect, in spite of many a GOP invective. But if the Tea Party is to succeed in 2011, it must find its moral center. Is it to be merely a mob of dissatisfied antis, or will it bite the bullet and stand for true government reform? Because true government reform is going to hurt.

If government reform is to succeed—and this is purely dependant on slapping an injunction on any Democrat from standing within a thousand yards of the White House for the next 15 years—cuts must be made and they must be severe.

We are all jubilant whenever a politician demands cuts in welfare and inner-city programs designed to keep the poor out of work and dependant on government, and enraptured when one actually does it. But welfare reform is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to spending.

Social Security, with all respect to the late William Safire, is not the so-called “third rail” of American politics; entitlements are. All entitlements. And if we are to bring the country back to solvency we must cut all of them, and that means grandfathering Social Security, paring Medicare to the bare bones, eliminating Medicaid for all but the most needy and cutting out subsidies. Period.

The second tier of a truly born-again government is to eliminate not only waste, but to eliminate government itself, by dismantling needless bureaucracies like the departments of Education and Energy and literally thousands of nameless departments, bureaus and agencies. A good start would be dissolving the Bush-created Department of Homeland Security and placing that purview where it belongs, under the Department of Defense. We are at war.

The alternative is that we all lie down and surrender to those who are determined to never lie down until they have made the United States a social democracy where regulatory nihilism and government control are the order of the day.

The Tea Parties are a bright light on a bleak landscape of government incompetency, corruption and complacency, a government that should have long ago been reined in and made to balance its budgets. The average senator or congressman spends like a credit card junkie without any regard to the consequences, because he or she will never have to face them. Just yesterday, each new House member received a $1,000 laptop for his or her orientation on the Hill. That is not only wasteful but it is built-in corruption that no one gives a second thought to.

But the Tea Parties must broaden their scope to be a formidable force against big government.

The Tea Parties will have competition this summer, the labor unions, La Raza, Code Pink and other subversive left-wing organization have been organizing all year for it, and the media will be ramped up to support them. Many of these rallies will be billed as spontaneous event by citizens angry over immigration and health care, but they will be as choreographed as the Metropolitan Opera.

The Tea Party as an organization must not be a one-trick pony in their protests by limiting themselves to health care and government spending; they must take on the Obama Administration over increased regulations, energy costs, jobs and other hot button issues. The American public will distinguish the genuine from the spurious by the very tenor of these events.

Oinkford II: Why Conservative Media Must Not Let It Die

In this era of trillion-dollar stimuli, nonexistent budgets and deficit packages unending it is easy to see how Pigford II could get lost. In fact, in light of the aforementioned it seems almost small potatoes. To paraphrase Willie Nelson: Five billion ain’t much, if you say it real fast.

One can readily understand Andrew Breitbart’s zeal in pursuing Pigford II; within hours of releasing former regional USDA official, Shirley Sherrod’s, scandalous NAACP tape last summer, the website purveyor found himself surrounded like covered wagons in a John Wayne movie.

Of course Big Government and Breitbart survived but, as we all now know, it was far from the end of the story. Big Drama. Breitbart went on to uncover the machinations of a plot that declasses Barack Obama from the ranks of the merely incompetent to those of the most corrupt presidents in our history.

By way of background, Oinkford II was a clever scheme hatched by Obama with the pro-Pigford, Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association (BFAA), to deprive Hillary Clinton of the Democratic Party nomination for president and secure it for Obama; a scam to buy the black Southern vote.

But, with Obama’s ascension to the presidency, it has become far more. Pigford embodies the essence of Obama’s plan to “fundamentally transform” the United States from a democratic republic into a socialist democracy; it is emblematic of everything dangerous about this President and his ideals.

Even so, in this breakneck news environment, and with an administration that treats multibillion-dollar legislation like chump change, Pigford II could become lost.

Let’s face it, Pigford isn’t sexy; it doesn’t quite match up against a former president standing behind the White House rostrum with a Viagra flush, touting the benefits of a new $1 trillion stimulus. But then again what does?

But it must not be allowed die.

With the massive defeat in November of the Pelosi Congress, the Obama Administration must now shift, much like al Qaeda, to a “death by a thousand cuts” strategy. Heretofore Obama has moved swiftly to pass mammoth legislation in his quest for the widespread transfer of wealth, now he must chip away at the American economic infrastructure bit by bit.

Pigford is a thumb in the eye of every hard-working American. It is an Alinsky-esque maneuver to implement the Left’s long-sought-after desire to subsidize the poor on the backs of the middle class; and, as all such schemes, it is rife with graft and corruption.

It begins here, but it will never end if it is not stopped now, and the Left has no intention of letting that happen.

Short of killing this story, the Left will maneuver to defame the messengers with a series of smokescreens, the first of which (and it has already begun) will be the race card. We all remember last summer when Democrats and a frontloaded media charged that Tea Party members’ hurled racist slurs and spat at black congressmen.

Any congressional investigation of Pigford II must go beyond the repeal of this corrupt legislation, it must root out all of those who have profited illegally from it and see them prosecuted.

The conservative blogosphere and media must see that it happens.