It breaks down into three major categories:

1. The Former Media Monopoly — This includes the New York Times and MSNBC. You’ll find their exemption under U.S.C §431(9)(B)(i). Their howling has included some great moments in hypocrisy.

   The New York Times (whom you’ll recall as the petitioner who claimed the first amendment rights of its corporation had been violated in New York Times v Sullivan) opined: “Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights.” Since this was an unsigned editorial, this is a corporation complaining that corporations shouldn’t have first amendment rights. Of course, they’re exempted.

   Keith “You Sir” Olbermann, in a special comment assailed the decision with the personhood argument. His comment is actually a work for hire, the property of a corporation and disseminated by it; but of course, they’re exempted. If they weren’t exempted, they’d  be first in line with an amicus brief for Citizens United.

2. Those in Under The Wire — In 2005, the chilling effects to first amendment speech was clearly seen by the blogosphere. The Internet isn’t even mentioned in the media exceptions of BCRA, but the blogosphere wound up almost entirely exempted by an administrative decision of the FEC. As such, the FEC under another board, could change its mind. If it had decided otherwise in 2005, bloggers would have fought for first-in-line position to deliver amicus briefs along with legacy media.
3. The Exempted Political Idea Industry — This howling appears the loudest to those of us on a myriad of political action lists. This is another monopoly seeing itself lose power. Their exemption came through their ability to navigate the complicated work-arounds that resulted in the lawyered-up’s ability to express political opinions on behalf of the people paying them to do so. They’re the middlemen now cut out because anybody can go to a media distributor and buy time, or go to a computer store and buy DVD blanks and fill them with political commentary.

Poltitical contribution laws were out of step with the way media is changing. It resulted in Citizens United not being able to spew a load of crap, while Fox News does essentially the same thing every day.

It causes folks like Margaret McIntyre to be fined a hundred dollars for expressing her speech, while the Swiftboaters get awards.

The politically protected pundits can’t seem to agree what the effects of this will be. Perhaps we’ll hear nothing but corporate shills morn ’til night, perhaps we won’t.

But one thing it will do is change the game in a big way, because this decision gave a lot of freedom to a lot of people, and took away a lot of monopolies from a privileged few and its been those privileged few responsible for most of the noise that’s being made.

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One of the most important cases regarding mass political discourse was argued before an unusual early session of the Supreme Court Wednesday last. The case is Citizens United v. The Federal Elections Commission (FEC), and the ultimate decision may rewrite campaign finance law. Common Cause is justifiably concerned, but they’re just not being honest about the fundamental issue that made SCOTUS revisit the whole question of campaign regulation.

This is first and foremost a first amendment question. You see that clearly in the amicus brief from the American Civil Liberties Union:

This case involves core political speech protected by the First Amendment, long recognized as a fundamental foundation of our democracy. Such core political speech enjoys the maximum possible protection under our Constitution. Yet a federal agency claims the legal authority to prohibit the broadcast of such core political speech. We submit that this Court should redouble its vigilance in protecting the fundamental freedom in this case so essential to our very democracy and self-governance, and our very nature as a free people.

It’s very possible, listening to Common Cause, that you wouldn’t even know the First Amendment is involved. If you joined their webchat expecting to hear the facts in the case addressed, you’d discover the words “First Amendment” never appeared in the discussion, though they did receive questions about it.

Here’s the problem:

U. S. C. §431(9)(B)(i)

The term “expenditure” does not include—

(i) any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication, unless such facilities are owned or controlled by any political party, political committee, or candidate;

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When my partner Ray got the pitch from Mitch Stewart of Organizing for America on Monday, he had other things to do with his discretionary money, but the first paragraph got him:

Every single day, special interests spend a staggering $1.4 million lobbying Congress to shut down the President’s agenda for health care reform.

Certainly he could afford the $5 the president was asking for. In fact, he gave $10. But the next morning, he found the account he uses for web purchases overdrawn. The DNC had not only authorized $10 twice, they had authorized $500.00 as well. For three days, despite scores of phone calls, the transaction had neither been reversed nor had anyone at the DNC or Blue State Digital acknowledged the error.

Blue State Digital, founded in 2004 by four former Dean staffers, at first denied any involvement or responsibility. But the emails and the donation page point to them, so they finally resorted to the claim that their involvement was none of our business.

The DNC at first claimed donor error, then flatly denied that no more than one transaction took place. The bank produced documents complete with Terminal IDs, sequence numbers and switch timestamps proving the DNC in fact made four transactions, but refuses to remove the hold unless the DNC advises it in writing to do so.

Its the ultimate Catch-22, with all the trappings of the kind of government bureaucracy the right tries to scare up as a bogeyman to keep health care private.  “Do you trust the government,” they ask, “to provide your medical care?”

Late this afternoon, the DNC did apologize, and tried a new story. It was an address mismatch that caused the transactions to fail. That never stopped Blue State during the campaign, and there were lots of donations with the same exact data.

Nor could they explain how an address issue turned $10 into five hundred but they attempted, without success, to reverse the charges; the charges that yesterday didn’t exist.  Because of their previous denial, Ray’s now canceled the card and faxed a flurry of dispute documents back and forth to the bank.  The DNC is still trying to decide whether or not it requested and received an auth code. Their spokespeople don’t seem to know.

Ray thinks the government needs to guarantee every American health care, and there should at least be a public option. He’s spent a lot of time in verbal gunplay on Facebook with our insurance industry friends, but his powder is no longer dry.

In frustration he finally wrote the White House (the BlueState-served webpages hide out behind a link to www.whitehouse.gov). Its not easy to argue that a group of people can tackle something as difficult as multi-billion dollar health care when they can’t figure out why a $500 charge attempt got made for a $10 donation, and claim its none of your damn business when you inquire about it.

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When cable and high power satellite suddenly gave the media and the media consumer as many pathways as they could use to stream content and the 2000-channel universe began, something very important died. The ability to create and broadcast more worthy programming than there was room for in the pipe had an upside.

Before the FCC threw open the floodgates and granted new station licenses with abandon in the 1980s, there were relatively few outlets. Radio stations could employ whole staffs to produce shows that aired once. Sometimes they weren’t aired at all, and their production costs written off.

In the golden days of radio, KFI employed an orchestra whose job was to sit in the studio and be ready to play on a moment’s notice if called upon by the local announcer who was himself standing by in case the network feed failed. News departments at the early television and major full-service radio stations, even into the 80s, were large enough they could take over and feed content 24/7 if a new story caught the public’s attention.

Nothing saves energy like shutting down 2 days/week.

In mid 20th century Los Angeles, brush fires, floods, even a little girl down a well, commanded 24/7 coverage. The stations realized that was a part of their service commitment, and the licenses were so valuable and the renewal process so onerous, that overtime got authorized and journalists went without sleep.

Somehow, we’ve lost that. As Iran explodes in anger, MSNBC cries poor and runs Lockup:Indiana and Sex Slaves-The Teen Trade. Ten years ago that might have flown, but in the face of Twitter and Facebook’s minute by minute coverage, MSNBC looks out of touch. CNN cycles old programming, even though CNN International could be switched live to US Domestic viewers, but that brings up commercial concerns.

But last night, an isolated live CNN origination of Larry King Live with Christiane Amanpour crackles across twitter, and numbers soar. Today, CNN is in high gear doing live focused coverage. Perhaps this will convince MSNBC that news is important, even if its not something you can easily cover at a time when you don’t want to spend money. Or perhaps, like radio, NBC/Universal realizes the golden days of cable are numbered and you’re best to take every last dime out before the roof falls in.

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The near 60-year history of counterintelligence has been one of having no one in charge of the enterprise. The CI community is not organized or integrated to accomplish a national mission.

Rather, the various CI elements are part of a loose confederation of independent organizations with narrower and varying responsibilities, jurisdictions and capabilities.”

—Michelle Van Cleave

The Twitter social networking site became an international political football this week when the State Department deemed it so valuable in keeping the world abreast of conditions in Iran, that it asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled update and remain online.

The Islamic Republic first tried to control public dissent over suspicious election results by the old-school method of stifling journalists, but they were choking an already dying media and making their own situation worse by helping the decentralized alternative to mushroom.

This has led to a new kind of intelligence and counterintelligence activity, where the role of the “mule” is played by the Internet-astute in their offices, studies and bedrooms; an elaborate cat and mouse game, where Iranian Twitter users tweet information, that information is then repeated by others outside the reach of Iranian control, and the original tweets are deleted by the Iranians who originally posted them.

It’s accelerated the evoution of the citizen journalist, because when you remove the real source because you fear for their safety, you take the burden of the credibility of the content on your own shoulders. A lot of people are coming of age in this sudden change: the Iranian students whose bravery is an inspiration to the world, and the responsible users of the social media networks that are trying to help them by reading the shadows half a world away.

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Like so many others twits tethered to computers and net-aware devices by business or obsession, I dabbled with Spymaster from its “beta” days through roll out. It was easy to keep it running on a browser deep in a window stack on a powerful computer. I could click away at it until my virtual energy was depleted, building up cash and virtual weaponry not quite knowing what the right or wrong answers were, figuring things out as I went along.

There wasn’t much there there, but that didn’t matter; I didn’t have much “here” to give it. But then the unfolding events in Iran made the whole thing silly. It just seemed far more productive to spend my free ponder time trying to figure out what to retweet as truth and what to publicly question as disinformation, than figuring out which safehouse to buy and which weapon to sell to buy something more powerful.

There’s a lack of clear goals and strategy in Spymaster that suddenly was supplanted by a real world situation that I could play some small part in from the safety of my real-yet-virtual viewport on it. I could leverage what knowledge I have of the tubes to some real advantage; because out there in the streets of Tehran people are dying for an idea that is only hinted at in Spymaster.

When people are putting their lives on the line for real values and a laudable goal, it just seems silly to play with virtual weaponry when sneaking the right words past Iran’s oppressors could make some small difference.

UPDATE [4:05 AM Tehran Time]: I’ve just been identified on Twitter as an “Iranian Government Account.” This is a tremendous compliment, as it comes from a twitter user (@Persian_Guy) that is almost certainly an Ahmadinejad disinformation entity.

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Back in the day, when the federal government exerted far more control over the far fewer radio and television stations, an outbreak of hate-fueled domestic terrorism would have prompted at the very least a campaign of public service announcements pointing out that killing doctors or shooting up the Holocaust Museum is not the way to change a course of government that you think is wrong.

While I won’t listen to the width and breadth of Fox and Clear Channel, I got a full dose of Rush Limbaugh today who was blaming MSNBC for the media hate mongering and calling out Shepard Smith for his honesty and concern.

Gentlemen of the legacy media both right and left: Deregulation has not removed from you the responsibility to act responsibly, and to address the hate mongering that is leading to domestic death as a problem faced by all of us. It is not an excuse to blame the other guy and suggest your viewers and listeners stop tuning in the other network.

Limbaugh and Fox may choose to believe that its the other guy making the incendiary speeches, but when one network clearly has the eyes and ears of the vast majority of conservatives then they have the bulk of the responsibility to call for restraint when its the right wingers pulling the triggers.

Fox and Clear Channel need to start calling for restraint with the same zeal they’re using terms like “baby killer,” “Socialist” and “closet Muslim.”

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A debate has been raging among Media Matters, Daily Kos, Gawker.com and Tommy Christopher over at Politics Daily over a Jake Tapper piece about President Obama playing the Hussein card as he speaks to the Muslim world. I have to agree with Christopher and come to Tapper’s defense.

For the past 8 years, we’ve done everything we possibly can to inflame American sentiments against Muslims, and to inflame middle-eastern Muslims against the United States.

I knew if we could get through the campaign without the Hussein part of Barack Hussein Obama completely overwhelming the percentage of the electorate with one word attention spans, this would suddenly become a feature as we explain to the peoples of the mideast that we’re not all oil-grabbing Christian Soldiers: we just had the misfortune to elect some of them to lead us.

Every few months the left wing noise machine forgets that it’s politics we’re playing here, and sometimes the shadows turn out larger and more influential than the characters who cast them. When we forget that, unpredictable results can occur. We got our ass handed to us by Lieberman; we made him a bigger monster than he would have been had we left him alone.

This is a damn good thing Obama’s doing, and its good journalism that points it out. We didn’t like the press cowed by the nationalist jingoism of Bush/Cheney, but we seem hell-bent to repeat it by not tearing up the pre-election talking points now that the Hussein card may turn out to be trump.

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When Randi Rhodes returned to the air today, now syndicated by Clear Channel’s Premiere division, she didn’t get her old timeslot back at her old hometown WJNO.  Sean Hannity replaced her when her relationship with now-defunct syndicator Nova-M radio blew up.

Hannity’s numbers in her old timeslot at the station where she actually originated her show are beating her, according to John Hunt, market manager for Clear Channel West Palm Beach.  So Rhodes will return, timeshifted to 6-9 PM, where uber-reactionary Mark Levin was previously heard.

But Rhodes will be live again starting June 1 on another Clear Channel AM station, according to Hunt, who won’t make the formal announcement for a couple of weeks. This new station will have a better signal than WJNO, Hunt added.

South Florida progressive radio took a hit when 940 WINZ, Miami flipped to The Sports Animal 940.  Clear Channel owns one other AM facility in Palm Beach County, 1230 WBZT now programming business and variety talk. WBZT’s signal is superior to WJNO’s.

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Premiere Radio Networks announced today that Randi Rhodes will join the Clear Channel-owned-syndicator’s lineup of radio talk programing which includes Rush Limbaugh, Jim Rome, Casey Kasem, Ryan Seacrest, Glenn Beck, Bob & Tom, Delilah, Steve Harvey, Blair Garner, George Noory, John Boy and Billy, Big Tigger, Dr. Dean Edell, Sean Hannity and others.

Her show, which was previously produced at Clear Channel’s WJNO’s studios in West Palm Beach and syndicated by the now-defunct Nova-M networks, will begin May 11th, 2009. It will originate from Washington D.C. and be carried on most of her long-time affiliaties.

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