Updated from the top. Please treat this as a blog-within-a-blog, come back often, and scroll down till you hit something you saw on your last visit.

• Florida legislator calls illegal aliens “illegal aliens"
• The Media Cornucopia
• Remember Free Speech?
• Al not-so-Sharpton, Racist, Anti-Semitic, Riot-Inciting . ...
• Dawn’s Early Light …
• Hillary's Conundrum
• Truth Will Out …
• Case Closed

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Heart-ache: Florida legislator calls illegal aliens “illegal aliens”
Allahpundit

And dares to imply that illegal immigration might impose some sort of a cost on American taxpayers.

He’s a Republican, so this matters.

Rep. Don Brown, R-DeFuniak Springs, recently forwarded a cartoon from his state e-mail account to his colleagues that read: “Don’t forget to pay your taxes … 12 million illegal aliens are depending on you!”

Brown said Friday he meant the message as a joke, but it was met with a fierce reaction from many other lawmakers. He later sent a follow-up e-mail to apologize.

Brown still needs to make a public apology, said Rep. Juan Carlos “J.C.” Planas, a Miami Republican and member of the Hispanic caucus.

“I think he has to specifically state that he understands now that that term, illegal alien, is extremely insulting to many individuals, and I think there has to be something a little bit more public and a little bit more contrite in his apology,” Planas said.

Brown said he’s finished with the issue. ...

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The Media Cornucopia
Adam D. Thierer (H/T: Michelle Malkin)

It’s a Golden Age of media—but not for long, if the Left has its way.

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press’s advent, information spread at a snail’s pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

This media cornucopia is a wonderful development for a free society—or so you’d think. But today’s media universe has fierce detractors, and nowhere more vehemently than on the left. Their criticisms seem contradictory. Some, such as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, contend that real media choices, information sources included, remain scarce, hindering citizens from fully participating in a deliberative democracy. Others argue that we have too many media choices, making it hard to share common thoughts or feelings; democracy, community itself, again loses out. Both liberal views get the story disastrously wrong. If either prevails, what’s shaping up to be America’s Golden Age of media could be over soon. ...

What unifies the two schools of leftist media criticism, beneath their apparent opposition, is pure elitism. Media abundance (which the scarcity critics must implausibly wave away as a mirage) has meant more room for right-of-center viewpoints that, while popular with many Americans, the critics find completely unacceptable. The fact that Bill O’Reilly gets better ratings than Bill Moyers perturbs them to no end. It’s just not fair!

Both liberal groups would love to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the media in their preferred direction. Scarcity-obsessed Dennis Kucinich has recently introduced plans in Congress to revive the Fairness Doctrine, which once let government regulators police the airwaves to ensure a balancing of viewpoints, however that’s defined. A new Fairness Doctrine would affect most directly opinion-based talk radio, a medium that just happens to be dominated by conservatives. If a station wanted to run William Bennett’s show under such a regime, they might now have to broadcast wa left-wing alternative, too, even if it had poor ratings, which generally has been the case with liberal talk. Sunstein also proposes a kind of speech redistributionism. For the Internet, he suggests that regulators could impose “electronic sidewalks” on partisan websites (the National Rifle Association’s, say), forcing them to link to opposing views. The practical problems of implementing this program would be forbidding, even if it somehow proved constitutional. How many links to opposing views would secure the government’s approval? The FCC would need an army of media regulators (much as China has today) to monitor the millions of webpages, blogs, and social-networking sites and keep them in line.

That leftist media critics start sounding so authoritarian is no surprise. In a media cornucopia, freedom of choice inevitably yields media inequality. “In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome,” writes Clay Shirky of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Overcoming that inequality would require a completely regulated media.

When Rush Limbaugh has more listeners than NPR, or Tom Clancy sells more books than Noam Chomsky, or Motor Trend gets more subscribers than Mother Jones, liberals want to convince us (or themselves, perhaps) that it’s all because of some catastrophic market failure or a grand corporate conspiracy to dumb down the masses. In reality, it’s just the result of consumer choice. All the opinions that the Left’s media critics favor are now readily available to us via multiple platforms. But that’s not good enough, it seems: they won’t rest until all of us are watching, reading, and listening to the content that they prefer. ...

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Remember Free Speech?
Don Surber

This was a sad week for Free Speech, as activists on the left and the right ran Don Imus off the radio on a rail. His offense? Saying something he should not have said. He apologized for it. The targets of his verbal blunder accepted his apology.

But that didn’t stop the mob. Never mind that few people heard it originally, the mob wanted him off the air.

I am talking Free Speech, not the First Amendment, which obviously does not apply. The government isn’t censoring people. Yet.

Sadly, the NBC empire which had used Imus to promote books by its various staff members for years, cut him loose from the cable outlet it owns with Microsoft.

CBS Radio tossed him off the air.

I suspect a fear of a slander lawsuit might have something to do with it. See my post, “Imus in tort hell.”

Of course, these organizations are not required to put him on the air. But to fire a shock jock for saying something shocking is inane. Not since Capt. Renault “discovered” gambling at Rick’s has there been so much feigned shock. ...

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Al not-so-Sharpton, Racist, Anti-Semitic, Riot-Inciting Fuckhead 

[Too short to excerpt; just read the whole thing. Nobody does it like The Rottie.]

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Jules Crittenden: Dawn’s Early Light …

[Just read the whole thing and follow the links.]

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Hillary's Conundrum
Ed Morrissey

Hillary Clinton has had a difficult conundrum facing her ever since the beginning of her presidential campaign. Her vote to authorize the use of force against Iraq and Saddam Hussein in October 2002 has the anti-war base revved up to defeat her in favor of a more capitulationist candidate like Barack Obama or John Edwards. She has tried to alternately defend the vote and claim that she was misled as a defense against the activists within her own party. Last night. however, she ran into someone who refused to buy what she's been selling (via Instapundit):

After fielding many questions ranging from mental health care to veteran affairs at a Town Hall Meeting in Hampton, NH, Senator Hillary Clinton received a heated question about Iraq. A woman who had traveled from New York asked Sen. Clinton if she had read the report given to her in 2002 on intelligence and the Iraq war.

Clinton said she had been briefed on the report, and the woman screamed back, "Did you read it?!" Notably uncomfortable, the Senator repeated that she had been briefed. This exchange went back and forth about three times.

The woman sat down and Clinton explained, "If I had known then what I know now, I never would have voted to give this President the authority." Clinton also said she believed she was giving the President the authority to send U.N. inspectors to Iraq.

In most cases, legislators do not read through the text of bills on which they vote. They hire staffers to research the bills and to give them advice on the meaning of the material. Many of the lazier ones simply defer their judgment to the leadership of their party. For the most part, this makes a great deal of sense, as it would be difficult to keep up with all of the paperwork that Capitol Hill creates, in legislative sessions, committees, subcommittees, and so on.

However, on a straight up-or-down vote on whether to go to war, one would hope that Senators and Representatives would find it interesting enough to get personally involved. And Hillary's explanation here doesn't even pass the laugh test. She claims that she believed the bill to authorize only the return of inspectors to Iraq. Well, perhaps the title of the bill could have given her a clue: "A joint resolution to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq." The text seems equally clear: ...

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Truth Will Out … 
Jules Crittenden

All I have to say is, thank God for Pravda:

In a clear sign of its intent to reign in dissident American media personalities, and their growing influence in American culture, US War Leaders this past week launched an unprecedented attack upon one of their most politically ‘connected’, and legendary, radio hosts named Don Imus after his threats to release information relating to the September 11, 2001 attacks upon that country.

According to European reports of the events surrounding Don Imus that have gripped the United States this past week, it was during an interview with another American media personality, Tim Russert, who is the host of a television programme frequently used by US War Leaders, wherein while decrying the state of care being given to American War wounded stated, “So those bastards want to keep these boys [in reference to US Soldiers] secret? Let’s see how they like it if I start talking about their [in reference to US War Leaders] secrets, starting with 9/11.” ...

That’s telling it like it is. Thorough, well-sourced analysis. How come we don’t have newspapers like that in the United States.  I mean, aside from the Boston Globe.  And the New York Times.  And …

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Case Closed
Tax cuts mean growth. 
By Fred Thompson

It's that time again, and I was thinking of the old joke about paying your taxes with a smile. The punch line is that the IRS doesn't accept smiles. They want your money.

So it's not that funny, but there is reason to smile this tax season. The results of the experiment that began when Congress passed a series of tax-rate cuts in 2001 and 2003 are in. Supporters of those cuts said they would stimulate the economy. Opponents predicted ever-increasing budget deficits and national bankruptcy unless tax rates were increased, especially on the wealthy.

In fact, Treasury statistics show that tax revenues have soared and the budget deficit has been shrinking faster than even the optimists projected. Since the first tax cuts were passed, when I was in the Senate, the budget deficit has been cut in half. 

Remarkably, this has happened despite the financial trauma of 9/11 and the cost of the War on Terror. The deficit, compared to the entire economy, is well below the average for the last 35 years and, at this rate, the budget will be in surplus by 2010.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this success story is where the increased revenues are coming from. Critics claimed that across-the-board tax cuts were some sort of gift to the rich but, on the contrary, the wealthy are paying a greater percentage of the national bill than ever before.

The richest 1% of Americans now pays 35% of all income taxes. The top 10% pay more taxes than the bottom 60%. ...

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Ed Morrissey comments on the Thompson column here.

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Yesterday's roundup:

• 2007.04.14 Politics/1st Amendment Roundup
  • Fred Thompson, Man Alone
  • For What It's Worth (Moran on Moran)
  • Factor highlights--and the real Al Sharpton
  • Video: Jason Whitlock calls Jackson and Sharpton “terrorists”
  • Is Fred 'Someone Else'?
  • From the Courthouse to the White House