The First Amendment Is Too Important

To be left in the hands of just anyone and everyone. It must be tightly regulated and controlled by those who know best. For our own good, of course.

According to the Institute for Justice

California’s Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) is considering “how to regulate new forms of political activity such as appeals on a voter’s Facebook page or in a text message.”

Not whether to regulate these new forms of political speech, but how.

Clicking through to the article IJ links to we discover that it is even worse than described.

The recommendations include requiring tweets and texts to link to a website that includes the full disclosures, although some people feel the disclosure should be in the text itself no matter how brief, O'Connor said.

And,

Any changes the commission makes to state law should give regulators the flexibility to respond to swiftly evolving technologies, the report says.

When regulators respond swiftly, they invariably respond arbitrarily and harshly as well. Likely their first reaction to new technologies will be to err on the side of censorship, until forced to stand down - usually well after the damage has already been done.

How To Solve a Problem: Define It Away!

As Nancy Pelosi promised, Congressional Democrats have drained the swamp of corruption in Washington. One may ask: How can that be, with ethics charges recently filed against two prominent Democrats?

Easy - simply define corruption as only involving Republicans. Voilà! No more corruption!

Republicans love to throw back at Pelosi her "drain the swamp" promise of four years ago, when Democrats used the issue to help capture the House.

"The swamp was described in the press as a 'criminal syndicate' operating out of the Republican leader's office," she said last week in defining the phrase.

This is so easy you, too, can do it at home. Want to become debt-free? Simple. Merely define your debts as those you've already paid. Debt-free, instantly!

Using the Pelosi Method, any problem can simply be defined away. Of course, your results (and hers) may vary.

The Rich Get Richer

At least when it comes to public employees. As employment and pay in the private sector plummeted in the last few years, even the highest-paid public employees in Southern Nevada received nearly double-digit (and higher) pay increases.

City of Las Vegas employees in a random sample of the highest-compensated workers received increases in total pay (excluding benefits) averaging 22.8% from 2007-2009. Total pay for workers in a similar survey for Clark County increased 9.8% over the same period of time. (Data was taken from Transparent Nevada's database of public employee salaries.)

The highest-compensated employees were defined as those whose total compensation (including benefits) totaled $100,000 or more in 2009. There were 1,827 such employees in the City of Las Vegas (or 16.6% of the total number of people appearing in the Transparent Nevada database for the City in 2009). Clark County had 2,482 such employees (or 21.4% of those in the 2009 database for the County).

Total pay for workers in the City of Las Vegas sample increased from an average of $89,436.33 in 2007 to 109,806.96 in 2009, while County workers in the sample received an average of $105,737.39 in 2007 increasing to $116,083.32 in 2009. Neither the City nor the County supplied benefit data for 2007 for the database.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average pay declined 0.86% for workers in the private sector in Clark County during this same period. In addition, BLS reports that total employment in the state of Nevada dropped from a seasonally-adjusted high of 1,297,100 in February 2007 to 1,123,400 in December 2009.

While those in the private sector lucky enough to keep their jobs were suffering pay cuts, even the most highly-paid workers in the public sector were getting raises.

Notes: Seventeen employees who held the same full-time position for the 2007-2009 period were used for the City of Las Vegas sample, while 15 workers who held the same full-time position for the period were used in the Clark County sample. Total pay was used for comparison purposes because, as noted above, neither the County nor the City supplied benefit data for the first year. Raw data used in the surveys and the BLS pay data are available upon request. Technical issues prevented them from being posted with original publication.

An Honor Bestowed

The AP was awarded Helen Thomas's old seat in the front row of the White House press briefing. While not given the prized seat, Fox news, much to the consternation of the left, was awarded a seat in the front row, beating out NPR and Bloomberg.

Frankly, I think it's kind of fitting that a company other than Fox was awarded the Thomas seat. By all means, award the seat to a member of the administration-sycophantic, JournoList echo chamber. After all, it is a seat of undeserved honor. For Thomas's fatal transgression was not to misspeak but to - finally, after all these years - spout her vile bigotry at a time and place where her colleagues were not able to cover for her.

Best of all, the seat could have been given to NPR, but only if they appointed Sarah Spitz as the correspondent. Then she could regale her colleagues with her fantasies of laughing while watching the spectacle of another human being suffering a fatal heart attack. Oh, the good times they could have had.