(NewYorkPost) The Federal Trade Commission says it wants to save journalism. I’m not sure who asked it to.

In a just-released “staff discussion draft” of “potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism,” the agency only circles its wagons around old newspapers and their fading business models.

If the FTC wants to reinvent journalism, perhaps it should align with news’ disruptors. But there’s none of that in this report. The word blog is used but once in 35 pages of text–and then only in a parenthetical mention of soccer blogs. Discussion of investing in technology comes on the last page in a suggestion about tools for “improved electronic note-taking.”

I testified before these untechnocrats and told them about my research at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism into the emerging ecosystem of news. We found profitable hyperlocal bloggers selling $200,000 in ads per year. And we built new, less expensive business models for news (at newsinnovation.com). But that’s not mentioned, either.

Instead, the FTC staff declares defeat in the search for business models so it may explore many government interventions, including:

• Expanding copyright law and restricting the doctrine of fair comment to benefit legacy publishers.
• Granting antitrust exemptions to allow publishers to collude on pricing to consumers and to business partners.
• Giving news organizations tax exemptions.
• Subsidizing news organizations by increasing government funding to public broadcasting; establishing an AmeriCorps to pay reporters; giving news companies tax credits for employing journalists; creating a national fund for local news, and giving the press an increased postal subsidy.

To its credit, the FTC does ask how to pay for all this. So the staffers speculated about what I’ll dub the iPad tax — a 5 percent surcharge on consumer electronics to raise $4 billion for news. They also consider a tax on broadcast spectrum and even on advertising.

Most dangerous of all, the FTC considers a doctrine of “proprietary facts,” as if anyone should gain the right to restrict the flow of information just as the information is opening it up. Copyright law protects the presentation of news but no one owns facts — and if anyone did, you could be forbidden from sharing them. How does that serve free speech?

The FTC’s one suggestion I can salute is more government transparency — making agencies release information in standard formats, enabling us all to become watchdogs. But that’s about responsible government, not saving journalism.

The good news in all this is that the FTC’s bureaucrats try hard to recommend little. They just discuss. And much of what the agency staff ponders are political impossibilities. If there was grumbling about bailing out General Motors, imagine the hailstorm about raising taxes to save newspapers.

The report quotes my testimony to the FTC, where I said I’m “optimistic to a fault about the future of news and journalism.” That’s because the barrier to entry into the media business has never been lower — and that means news can grow.

The government should favor neither incumbents nor newcomers, but rather create a level playing field by helping every American get open, high-speed access to the Internet. That is the gateway to the real future of news and media.

I believe that future is entrepreneurial, not institutional. The industry’s institutions have had 15 years since the start of the commercial Web and we’ve seen how far they can come. What we need now are innovators — like my entrepreneurial journalism students — to invent new forms, structures, efficiencies and business models for news.

But those entrepreneurs don’t need government help. They need to be left alone with the assurance they won’t be interfered with by the FTC — or the FCC, which has its own hearings and reports on the future of journalism.

“Get off our lawn,” I testified to both agencies in Washington. That didn’t make it into the report.

Jeff Jarvis, author of “What Would Google Do?”, teaches at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

How Does The Financial System Work

Clarke and Dawe Explains The Inflation Crisis

Clarke and Dawe on the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Clarke & Dawe’s Guide To Surviving The Economic Crisis

Clarke And Dawe Spins The Credit Crunch

Clarke & Dawe Tiptoe Around The Recession

This week, during his national radio program, Schultz decided it was time for Congress to take over the radio waves. Take it over, cut it up, divvy it out, smear the word “equality” all over it, shove it between two pieces of bread and call it the Fairness Doctrine.

In other words, take time away from the popular conservative movement and jam more liberal marxist propaganda down the ‘collective’ throats of the American People. All under the guise of being ‘fair’.

He wants the Fairness Doctrine to reinflate the defective hot air baloon that he is. Losing altitude rapidly, Shultz only hope is that the government could force people to listen to him, because being unpopular is just “not fair”.

It is a cultural war that’s taking place in America, you’re exactly right. And it’s being played out over the airwaves of America. And I hope the Democrats now turn to the Fairness Doctrine. It’s time now for the Democrats to consider the Fairness Doctrine when you’ve got Rush Limbaugh out there saying, it’s, we’ve got to defeat these bastards.

He is now openly admitting that he is going to work against and campaign against the Republican, against the Democratic Party and campaign against Obama, and he is motivating people with the microphone and he’s electioneering.

Schultz may not like electioneering, but only when it’s coming from the other side. What does he think it is that he is doing?

While he’s accusing Rush of using the microphone to sway the American people, he had no problem doing his own electioneering on the air, while campaigning for the democrat party in January during the Scott Brown election. This is what Schultz said on-air:

I tell you what, if I lived in Massachusetts I’d try to vote 10 times. I don’t care if they’d let me or not, but I’d try to. Yeah, that’s right. I’d cheat to keep those bastards out. I would. ’Cause that’s exactly what they are.

He tells the democrat base to break the law to ensure victory for their party. Because in the Liberal Marxist base the Leninist views of “The ends justify the means” are dominant.

Schultz wasn’t finished this week.

Keep on talking, Rushsky! Hell, maybe I’ll get on 600 stations too, or how many you own or whatever. The fact is, look, it’s not a level playing field when it comes to the audio culture of the country. Ownership has its privileges. When you own, I will be honest, if I owned 500 stations, the Drugster wouldn’t be on any of ‘em. And that’s just where it’s at right now. But maybe we have reached the point where the Congress needs to equal it out. Equal out the audience.

To contact The Ed Schultz Show:

or email Ed Live at the show: ed@edschultzshow.com

A Chilean woman Cecelia Lagos reported seeing “the sky changing colors” moments before the massive earthquake struck Chile. A phenomenon which has recently been termed “earthquake lights”

One possible explanation for the lights is a local disruption of the Earth’s magnetic field or ionosphere in the region, resulting in the observed glow effects either from ionospheric radiative recombination at lower altitudes or as aurora.

However other theories state that these conditions are caused by electromagnetic waves directed into selected regions of the ionosphere via a project known as the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP)

Salfate claims that the Russian military has given him the information that the United States has used the HAARP weapon to provoke a certain population of people into war.

Watch the Chilean ‘Glenn Beck’ assemble his HAARP “conspiracion” theory complete with Beck style dry erase board and a stylish Darth Vader t-shirt.

The federal income tax credit for homebuyers has been extended and expanded to now include homeowners who wish to “move on” after 5 years of living in their current property, as well as first-time homebuyers.

According to The National Association of Realtors News Release, dated 11/5/09, an estimated $22 billion has already been added to the general economy resulting from the bill and approximately 2 million people will utilize the tax credit in 2009.

• First-time homebuyers, or those who have not owned in the last three years, can receive up to an $8,000 tax credit
• Homeowners who have lived in a current home consecutively for 5 of the past 8 years can receive up to a $6,500 tax credit
• There may be no future extensions, so all qualified homebuyers are urged to act and have a written, binding contract by April 30, 2010
• Income limits are now $125,000 for singles, $225,000 for married couples with a $20,000 phase-out of the credit for both.

Visit Coldwel Banker to find out more about your Real Estate Tax Benefit.

Hello jobless Americans! The latest job figures have been released, so lets see if you are officially unemployed!

Contestant #1 have you recently found a job?

No, no one is hiring right now. I havent even bothered to look.

Sorry you are not in the labor market and therefore you are NOT UNEMPLOYED.

Contestant #2 have you recently found a job?

No not yet the industry isn’t doing so well. I need job but i stopped looking because all the plants closed down.

Sorry you’re not working but you’re not officially in the job market so you are NOT UNEMPLOYED

Contestant #3 you were recently an airline pilot, after your recent downsizing; have you found work?

I’m still looking for a real job, all I could get was 4 hours a week part time.

Sorry 4 hours counts as employed, so you are NOT UNEMPLOYED.

Contestant #4 you recently lost your job as a stock broker, have you recently found a job

No, I haven’t yet but I did look in the classified last week….

CONGRATULATIONS you get to be counted in the official unemployment rate!

In 2008, the presidential election became blockbuster entertainment. Everyone was watching as the race for the White House unfolded like something from the realm of fiction. But despite the wall-to-wall media coverage of this spellbinding drama, remarkably little of the real story behind the headlines has yet been told.

In Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the country’s leading political reporters, use their unrivaled access to pull back the curtain on the Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Palin campaigns.

• How did Obama convince himself that, despite the thinness of his résumé, he could somehow beat the odds to become the nation’s first African American president?
• How did the tumultuous relationship between the Clintons shape—and warp—Hillary’s supposedly unstoppable bid?
• What was behind her husband’s furious outbursts and devastating political miscalculations?
• Why did McCain make the novice governor of Alaska his running mate?
• Was Palin merely painfully out of her depth—or troubled in more serious ways?

Game Change answers those questions and more, laying bare the secret history of the 2008 campaign. Game Change take’s us inside the Obama machine, where staffers referred to him as “Black Jesus.”

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

They unearth the quiet conspiracy in the U.S. Senate to prod Obama into the race. They expose the twisted tale of John Edwards’s affair with Rielle Hunter, the truth behind the downfall of Rudy Giuliani, and the doubts of those responsible for vetting Palin about her readiness for the Republican ticket. And they reveal how, in an emotional late-night phone call, Obama succeeded in wooing Clinton, despite her staunch resistance, to become his secretary of state.

The war room within a war room dismissed or discredited much of the gossip floating around, but not all of it. The stories about one woman were more concrete, and after some discreet fact-finding, the group concluded that they were true: that BIll was indeed having an affair — and not a frivolous one-night stand but a sustained romantic relationship. …. For months, thereafter, the war room within a war room braced for the explosion, which her aides knew could come at any moment.

“This shit would be really interesting if we weren’t in the middle of it.”
—Barack Obama, September 2008

What if the U.S. government released an “educational video” to teach today’s Americans how to be good citizens?

It links to this article on Yahoo!

The article says the oil wells are in disputed territory, and they’ve been exchanging hands between Iran and Iraq for several months:

“What happens is, periodically, about every three or four months, the oil ministry guys from Iraq will go … to fix something or do some maintenance. They’ll paint it in Iraqi colours and throw an Iraqi flag up.

“They’ll hang out there for a while, until they get tired, and as soon as they go away, the Iranians come down the hill and paint it Iranian colours and raise an Iranian flag. It happened about three months ago and it will probably happen again.”

Suddenly it gets a BIG RED headline on Drudge.

He added that the Iraqis are “very concerned about the Iranians pulling oil out of fields underneath Iraq.”

From:The Daily Paul

Last week here is a sound clip from the Rush Limbaugh Show

Let’s be blunt here: the only way to stop them is to destroy the Iranian regime, the mullahs, and that can only be accomplished through war. And by war I don’t mean ground troops; I mean massive bombing raids intended to destroy every one of the key targets.

There is no question about it, the propaganda machines are gearing up for war in Iran. Mostly likely to hide the collapse of the dollar that is taking place. Be ready, because one more war in the middle east will make this world a much more dangerous place to live in.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Time’s Magazine 2009 Man of the Year

“Ben Bernanke probably deserves the Man of the Year, because he’s the most powerful person in the world.”

“He controls the supply of money, the dollar, which is the reserve currency of the world. He can create a trillion dollars in secret without any monetoring of the congress. I think he’s more powerful than the President.”

The question is “Has he used that power for good, or has he used it for Evil?”

Joe’s Book and September 10, 2003

Joe is talking about his new book, “The Last Best Hope”. And how Joe is “STUNNED” about a warning Ron Paul had made in Banking committee so he reprinted it in its entirety.

“The special privileges granted to Fannie and Freddie has distorted the housing market by allowing them to attract capital they would not be able to attract under pure market conditions. Like all artificially created bubbles the boom in housing cannot last forever. When Housing prices fall the home owners will experience difficulty as their equity is wipe out furthermore the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss, these losses will be greater than they would have been had government policy not actively encouraged over investment in housing.”

-Ron Paul address to the house Sept 10, 2003

Afghanistan

Joe: Myself and other conservatives are very concerned about the surge. We’re concerned that we’re going to be in afghanistan for another decade. What do you think?

Ron Paul: We’ll be there for another decade. If the money holds out, but what we’re doing is exactly what Osama Bin Laden wanted us to do.

Get ourselves bogged down, spend alot of money, and get people discouraged. At the same time to give the people an incentive to build up al qaieda.

Joe: What would President Ron Paul do?

Ron Paul: The troops would be home by now. I’d bring them home. II would declare victory and just come home. There’s not much victory to declare, but I would just come home.

In 2003 Donald Rumsfeld estimated a war with Iraq would cost $60 billion. Five years later, the cost of Iraq war operations is over 10 times that figure. So what’s behind the ballooning dollar signs? Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilme’s exhaustedly researched book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict,” breaks down the price tag, from current debts to the unseen costs we’ll pay for years to come.

During an interview with Opie and Anthony, Jesse Ventura walks off the set after the host goes way out into left field on a tirade attacking the military, and the constitution.

by Ariana Huffington

I. Desperate Times Lead to… Desperate Metaphors

Ever since we decided to launch the Huffington Post, I’ve talked about how the future of journalism will be a hybrid future where traditional media players embrace the ways of new media (including transparency, interactivity, and immediacy) and new media companies adopt the best practices of old media (including fairness, accuracy, and high-impact investigative journalism).

And with so many traditional media companies adapting to the new realities, it was ridiculous to engage in an us vs. them, old media vs. new media argument. Either/or was the wrong way to look at things.

But playing nice has increasingly become a one-way street — suddenly the air is filled with shrill, nonsensical, and misplaced verbal assaults on those in the new media.

Apparently, some in the old media have decided that it is, in fact, an either/or game and that the best way to save, if not journalism, at least themselves, is by pointing fingers and calling names. It’s a tactic familiar to schoolyard inhabitants everywhere: when all else fails, reach for the nearest insult and throw it around indiscriminately.

So now sites that aggregate the news have become, in the words of Rupert Murdoch and his team, “parasites,” “content kleptomaniacs,” “vampires,” “tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internets,” and, of course, thieves who “steal all our copyright.”

It’s the news industry equivalent of “your mama wears army boots!” Although, not quite as persuasive.

In most industries, if your customers were leaving in droves, you would try to figure out what to do to get them back. Not in the media. They’d rather accuse aggregators of stealing their content.

Of course, any site can shut down the indexing of its content by Google any time it wants with a simple “disallow” in its robots.txt file. But be careful what you wish for because as soon as you do that, and start denying your content to other sites that aggregate and link back to the original source, you stand to lose a large part of your traffic overnight. But as they say in Australia: “Good on ya.” Of course as someone who cares deeply about the future of this country, I’d say that having Glenn Beck not searchable by Google is an entirely good thing. But a good business move? Not so much.

Thinking that removing your content from Google will somehow keep it “exclusive” shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the web and how it works. As an experiment, Google the key terms from any interesting story currently kept behind a paywall, on the Wall Street Journal, for instance. And imagine no News Corp. source being included in the search results. You’d still get dozens and dozens of links to other sources — including many of the biggest news sites — writing about the story, riffing on it, quoting from it, and commenting on the key facts in it. So what are you going to do, try to make the case that no one should be able to talk about or write about or comment on or report on the stories you make them pay for? It’s a ridiculous notion.

I was recently on a panel in Monaco with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of the German publisher Axel Springer. He decided to play a confusing metaphor game by comparing news content to beer. “If it’s your business decision to offer beer cans for free, fine,” he said. “But don’t take our beer and offer it for free.”

This struck me as a really bizarre metaphor. Information is hardly the same thing as a product that can only be consumed once by a single person. If you consume a news story, you might be one of millions. If you consume a beer, no one else can consume it.

So it’s a false metaphor. And if you start from a false premise, you will inevitably be led to a false conclusion. Or, to put it another way, if you chug-a-lug too many of old media’s metaphoric beers, you will end up staggering down the street of illogical thinking and banging into the lamp post of wrong revenue models.

In his speech this morning, Rupert Murdoch confused aggregation with wholesale misappropriation. Wholesale misappropriation is against the law — and he has legal redress against that already. Aggregation, on the other hand, within the fair use exceptions to copyright law is part of the web’s DNA. Period.

At HuffPost, aggregation goes along with a tremendous amount of original content including original reporting and over 250 original blog posts a day. And we love it when someone links to one of our posts, or excerpts a small amount and links back to us.

Most sites understand the value of this and the way the link economy operates. It’s why HuffPost gets hundreds of requests from news outlets asking us to feature their material and link back to their site. They understand that the web is not a zero-sum game and that consumers love the freedom to be able to follow where their interests — and the offshoots of a story — take them.

Plus, let’s be honest, many of those complaining the loudest are working both sides of the street. Take, for example, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Just look at the sites News Corp. owns, as TechDirt.com recently did, and you will see example after example after example of the pot calling the kettle black. And aggregating its content.

The Wall Street Journal has a tech section that’s nothing more than a parasite — uh, I mean, aggregator — of outside content.

FoxNews.com has a Politics Buzztracker that bloodsucks — uh, I mean aggregates and links to — stories from a variety of different sources, including the NY Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and others.

AllThingsD has a section called Voices that not only aggregates headlines, but also takes a nice chunk of text — and puts the links out at the bottom of the story.

And Murdoch’s News Corp. also owns IGN, which has a variety of web properties, including the Rotten Tomatoes movie review aggregation site — which is entirely made up of movie reviews pulled together from other places. Did someone say “stealing”?

Talk about having your aggregation cake and bitching about others eating a slice too.

That’s why I could only roll my eyes when the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Thomson wagged his finger at Google, and complained that it “encourages promiscuity” among news consumers.

Heaven forbid! Let’s be honest, while promiscuity is not good in relationships, it’s great for those looking for news and information. Trying to deny news consumers as wide a range of options and viewpoints as possible seems shortsighted — and ultimately self-defeating. This is a Golden Age for news consumers who can surf the net, use search engines, access the best stories from around the world, and be able to comment, interact, and form communities. The value of having the world of information at your fingertips is beyond dispute.

So it’s time for traditional media companies to stop whining and face the fact that far too many of them, lulled by a lack of competition and years of pretax profits of 20 percent or more, put cash flow above journalism and badly misread the web when it arrived on the scene. The focus was on consolidation, cost-cutting, and pleasing Wall Street — not modernization and pleasing their readers.

They were asleep at the wheel, missed the writing on the wall, let the train leave the station, let the ship sail — pick your metaphor — and quickly found themselves on the wrong side of the disruptive innovation the Internet and new media represent. And now they want to call timeout, ask for a do-over, start changing the rules, lobby the government to bail them out, and attack the new media for being… well, new. And different. And transformational. Suddenly it’s all about thievery and parasites and intestines.

Get real, you guys. The world has changed. Here are some facts culled from one of the most popular anthems to the impact of technology on our world, a video originally put together by a math teacher, Karl Frisch:

Did you know that newspaper circulation is down 7 million over the last 25 years while unique readership of online news is up 34 million in the last 5 years?

Did you know newspaper advertising fell nearly 19 percent this year while web advertising is up 9 percent and mobile advertising is up 18 percent?

Did you know that more video was uploaded to YouTube in the last 2 months than if ABC, CBS, and NBC had been airing all-new content every minute of every day since 1948?

And did you know that we have access to more than 1 trillion web pages, 100,000 iPhone apps, and send more text messages a day than there are people on the planet? And Rupert Murdoch still thinks aggregators are the problem?

We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. And some things are better while some things, for the moment, are worse in terms of upheaval and especially the painful loss of jobs. But this is unarguably a Brave New Media World. And there is no use living in digital denial.

The information superhighway is a busy thoroughfare and there’s going to be some road kill along the way. But only among those who insist on merging into traffic riding a horse and buggy.

Read the rest of this story: Huffington Post

Congressman Paul appeared on CNBC to debate former ITC chief economist Peter Morici over the Federal Reserve’s role in the economy and the need for greater transparency at the Fed.

The HBO miniseries “John Adams” shows the Declaration of Independence signing and the public reading. Oh, how far we have come.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

The Dollar Bubble starring Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, Marc Faber, Gerald Celente, Jim Rogers, and others. Prepare now for the U.S. dollar collapse. Presented by the National Inflation Association

For More about the NIA visit: Inflation.US

“Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth” – George Washington

Watch the rest of the inverview:
Part 2 of 6

Part 3 of 6

Part 4 of 6

Part 5 of 6

Part 6 of 6

The advanced security detail for Vice President Joe Biden was involved in a car crash in New York today.

According to NBC New York, three advance NYPD vehicles “were moving down 49th Street near 10th Avenue when they slammed into the back of a livery cab.”

An NYPD detective said that three people were injured in the collision.

This is the third car accident involving Biden’s motorcade or security detail in less than a week. On November 11th, a pedestrian was struck and killed by two Secret Service employees in Temple Hills, MD. In another incident yesterday, a sheriff’s deputy was hit by a car while escorting Biden’s motorcade in New Mexico.

In 1972 Biden’s wife Neilia and 13-month-old daughter Naomi were killed in a tragic car accident

Watch as a patient police officer in Texas puts up with a friendly black cat clinging to him during a recent traffic stop. The ways of the affectionate feline were captured by the patrol car’s dashcam.