A classmate of mine, an Israeli Arab, taught me a phrase I will paraphrase here, as it was indelicate in the original: There is nothing wrong with carving a little something for yourself out of the hind end of a pig. Translated: If you hold the person you’re scheming on robbing in contempt — by all means, rob him blind. (My friend was the recipient of a scholarship courtesy of the Israeli taxpayer whom he despised — you can see where our disagreement lay.)

For today’s purposes, the justified robber is the Public Broadcaster in all its offshoots — NPR (National Public Radio), PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), and, in my case, “KCTS 9 Connects,” of Washington State. The hind end belongs to the American taxpayer. The propagandists hate their meal ticket, but feed off its flesh all the same.

To his credit, the recently fired Ron Schiller, President of the NPR Foundation and Senior VP for Development at NPR, has agreed with fiscal conservatives on the need to eliminate federal funding for his organization, which gets $90 million annually off the backs of some “seriously racist, racist” taxpayers.” (Schiller’s words.) Scrap that: doing away with taxpayer subsidies for public broadcasting was a point of agreement between this NPR functionary and a few fictitious Muslim philanthropists.

Members of the so-called Muslim Education Action Center Trust had lured Schiller to lunch. Amir Malik and Ibrahim Kasaam were really associates of gonzo journalist James O’Keefe, who played the pimp in the ACORN undercover operation. The luncheon was a trap. The bait: breaking bread with two blokes who boasted about their ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. We aim to “spread the acceptance of Shari’a across the world,” stated the MEAC’s website. Boy, does O’Keefe know how to whet appetites at NPR! At the Café Milano, at ease among philosophical friends, an animated Schiller carried forth as follows:

The current Republican Party … has been ‘hijacked’ by the Tea Party. … Tea Party supporters are seriously racist, racist people. … not just Islamophobic, but xenophobic. Basically, they believe in white, middle-America, gun-totting, I mean it’s pretty scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people. It feels to me as though there is a real anti-intellectual move on the part of a significant part of the Republican Party. In my personal opinion, liberals might be more educated, fair and balanced than conservatives.

The American malaise, carped this philosopher king, was “much more about anti-intellectualism than it is about politics.” Schiller lamented at length the fact that the “educated elites” formed only a tiny portion of the American population. Consequently, “a very large uneducated part of the population carried these ideas.”

Betsy Liley, Schiller’s “repulsive side kick,” who holds the comical title of Senior Director of Institutional Giving at NPR, was delighted to hear the men from MEAC refer to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio,” for its championing of that cause. Every bit as sanctimonious about her mission as her NPR companion, Liley added that the American Jewish World Service may not agree with what “we put on air, but they find us important to them.”

Still, brooded Schiller, “If we lost federal funding altogether, a lot of stations would go dark.”

At last, some good news.

Look, I respect Jim Lehrer of PBS’s “NewsHour.” He is the consummate newsman. Moreover, I relish reading the “NewsHour” online. The reports there are top notch. News bulletins on other sites, including at FoxNews.com, have become script-averse, and consist mainly of moving pictures — you don’t read words; you watch YouTube. The “NewsHour” has retained a fidelity to the written word. This particular PBS program will not struggle for private funding.

How I hope, however, that the lights go out on “KCTS 9 Connects,” in my neck of the woods. My brief encounter with the producers of this PBS show began when I was given a cameo on KCTS to debate the media’s dereliction of duty during the invasion of Iraq. I had come out in opposition to the invasion, on September 19, 2002. “KCTS 9 Connects” liked WND columns such as “In Bed With The Military,” and “On Pimps And ‘Presstitutes,'” which exposed the journalistic jingoism that was the coverage of the high-tech media extravaganza known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Back then, almost all my neoconservative and Republican “friends” had vanished. My column’s syndication fell through: Creators could not get any newspaper or website editor to carry the thing. Naturally, I was thrilled when the Left showed an interest in the anti-war perspective of a libertarian of the Old Right.

KCTS’s intellectual curiosity was short-lived. I continued to send them my column, but must have gone terribly wrong with “Obama’s Racial Ramrodding.” The column followed on the revelation that Barack Obama had told a radio show host that the woman who raised him with a great deal of love was apparently “a typical white woman.” “Richly revealing was the way Obama tarred his maternal (white) grandma with the taint of racism,” I wrote, “because she ‘once confessed her fear of black men who passed [her by] on the street.’ … Grandma … has still not acquitted herself for expressing a visceral fear borne of the brutal reality of crime in this country.”

“TAKE ME OFF YOUR LIST IMMEDIATELY – i COMPLETELY DISAGREE WITH EVERYTHING YOU HAVE WRITTEN!”, KCTS’s Lesley McClurg screamed back at me in caps, on March 24, 2008.

Calmly, I quizzed Ms. McClurg about the facts with which she “disagreed.” After all, the question of factual correctness had not cropped up when KCTS invited me on to illuminate truths toward which they were well-disposed. I urged McClurg to open up the debate over controversial issues. Or else, she and the public broadcaster she represented risked cementing their role as “custodians of consensus” — acting to confine and shape debate, just as other (privately sponsored) rival networks did at the height of the unjust war.

Lesley McClurg shot back: “you don’t present facts.”

Not a penny from this little piggy’s piggy bank should be taken by force to support Lesley McClurg and her colleagues at “KCTS 9 Connects.”

The Closing of the American Mind is not to be carried out on my dime.

Private property rights in waterways, or riparian rights in water that abuts private property—these are the best protectors of the ocean and of other state-controlled expanses of water ~ilana

Republican reaction to the president’s reaction to the crude gushing in the Gulf of Mexico is a measure of how serious the GOP is about checking the spread of big government. Every time I turn around, there’s a Republican insisting that  the Big “O” take over where Big Oil has (allegedly) left off.

This Sarah Palin has been demanding as loudly as James Carville; Congresswoman Michele Bachmann as urgently as clown Keith Olbermann. The consensus on both sides of the political aisle seems to be that where British Petroleum has failed to stop the spread of the oil slick, the president will prevail. If I didn’t know Republicans better, I’d think they were making political hay out of the Deepwater Horizon leak, now in its fifty second day.

Fault the president for failing to speak directly to BP CEO Tony Hayward. Or, for heading to the golf course instead of the Gulf Coast. In certain respects, however, Obama’s “lackadaisical” approach is not all bad. Think of how quick the POTUS would be to hammer the final nail in the coffin of American capitalism if he and the FLOTUS didn’t like to live it up a little.

Baiting Barack with a takeover is cruel—to all of us. The meddlers got what they cried for, and then some. Obama will maintain the moratorium on drilling permits for six months. He has also suspended planned exploration drilling off the coasts of Alaska and Virginia as well as on 33 wells under way in the Gulf of Mexico.

The hyperventilating over presidential optics ─ for that is all Obama can be expected to achieve ─ is that BHO has gone “coastal,” says the Washington Examiner’s Julie Mason: “instead of Australia, Guam and Indonesia, Obama heads back to the oil-slopped Gulf Coast next week for two days of squinting at the horizon and getting briefed by local officials. It’s a no-win for Obama: If he goes, we wonder why. If he stays away, we go on cable to say he doesn’t care.”

So what does the idolatrous Idiocracy want from its Golden Calf?

The Oprah faction confuses righteous indignation with righteousness; it wants Obama to come unhinged. The Disneyland division is hoping that off-shore oil explorer, acclaimed scientist and inventor James Cameron, who “has worked extensively with robot submarines,” will help the film directors of BP to plug the oil plume. Cameron’s plan includes that liquid metal robot from “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” Obama must realize that there is no way such a plan could fail.

Oddly enough, Obama had initially resisted ascribing evil to Big Oil, but was pushed by bigger idiots to so do. The president’s previous stance on the spill made more sense to me:”While the government overseeing the operation, BP has the expertise and equipment to make the decisions on how to stop the flow. … BP is responsible for the cleanup and the government is accountable to make sure the company does it.”

British Petroleum’s incentives to minimize the mounting costs it is incurring are manifestly obvious ─ all the more so since the company has forfeited the privileges conferred on it by regulators.

Yes, regulation encourages recklessness. The oil conglomerate was operating under a Federal law that limits liability to a meager $75 million in lieu of economic damages. While the “1990 Oil Pollution Act” does not cap cleanup costs, litigation in excess of the $75 million is predicated on demonstrating gross negligence and willful misconduct in court. Even with the best of intentions, a company is inadvertently lulled into complacency by such state statutes.

Regulation is always the culmination of agreements between the regulated and the regulators, to the detriment of those left out of the political loop. The state and its corporate donors will invariably come to a consensus as to what constitutes reasonable damages to them, not to the aggrieved. Thus regulation always works to the advantage of the offenders.

The haggling has just begun. It’ll be years before harmed parties are made whole again. The Exxon Valdez litigation has only just wound up. Noah Hall of Wayne State University Law School told PBS’s Jim Lehrer: “There’s going to be a lot of disputes, a lot of litigation, and for many of these claims, the victims really won’t see justice for many years to come.”

The root of environmental despoliation is the tragedy of the commons, i.e., the absence of property rights in the resource. One of my favorite running routes wends along miles of lakeside property, all privately owned, and ever so pristine. Where visitors dirty the trail that cleaves to the majestic homes; fastidious owners are quick to pick up after them.

In the absence of private ownership in the means of production, government-controlled resources go to seed. There is simply no one with strong enough a stake in the landmass or waterway to police it before disaster strikes.

Entrusted with the management and regulation of assets you don’t own, have no stake in; on behalf of millions of people you don’t know , only pretend to care about, are unaccountable to, and who have no real recourse against your mismanagement—how long before your performance plummets?

A just tort system, moreover, would work best where title over the areas in question is deeded to private citizens. Otherwise litigation becomes “a question of proximity,” and not ownership. As Tracy Hester of the University Of Houston Law Center explained: “It’s going to be fairly straightforward and easy to process the claims of people who’re geographically close to the spill; who can show a direct nexus to how the spill has affected” the way they live their lives and make a living. Ditto any personal injuries. “But, as you spread out further in time and location, that ripple is going to get harder and harder to prove.”

Private property rights in waterways, or riparian rights in water that abuts private property—these are the best protectors of the ocean and of other state-controlled expanses of water.

I don’t expect Republicans to champion radical propertarian ideas. I do expect the party of smaller government to not plump for an increase in executive powers, even if politically expedient.