Yet Another Czar Post

Adding to the several dozen already running around unchecked and dictating national policy:

What's a poor liberal progressive to do when the radio airwaves are dominated by conservative talk and they can't seem to "get a word in"? Why not diversify it? After Dan Rather got hammered recently for suggesting the news media needs a public handout, now on the horizon is an FCC Diversity Czar calling for private broadcasting companies to fund public broadcasting companies their total operating cost. Matt Cover at CNSNEWS.COM files this report:

(CNSNews.com) - Mark Lloyd, newly appointed Chief Diversity Officer of the Federal Communications Commission, has called for making private broadcasting companies pay licensing fees equal to their total operating costs to allow public broadcasting outlets to spend the same on their operations as the private companies do. LINK

Lloyd not only wants the money to come from private companies, he is planning on regulating the content:

"Local public broadcasters and regional and national communications operations should be required to encourage and broadcast diverse views and programs," wrote Lloyd. "These programs should include coverage of all local, state and federal government meetings, as well as daily news and public issues programming.  (see link above for complete story)

Pravda anyone?

Lloyd wrote a book back in 2006 that must have caught someone in the Obama administration's eye titled Prologue to a Farce: Communications and Democracy in America, published by the University of Illinois Press. Matt Cover explains that "Lloyd wrote Prologue to a Farce while a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. In that capacity, he co-authored the 2007 report The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio"

The report argued that large corporate broadcasting networks had driven liberals off the radio, and that diversity of ownership would increase diversity of broadcasting voices

Did you catch that?  These unfortunate liberals have been "driven" off the radio.  Why wait for the liberals to produce a fairness doctrine when you've got a Diversity Czar under the White House's thumb?

Dissent?  Silence it!  By any means necessary.  It's the Obama way.

But he's not done yet...there's yet one more on the way, and it's a doozy:

If you like what's happened to the auto industry, you'll love this. Bloomberg is reporting today that Ron Bloom — the head of the Obama Administration's automobile task force — will soon get an expanded portfolio, with responsiblity for crafting Administration policies for all manufacturing industries.

Yet another Obama Administration czar? Don't expect the White House to use the dreaded "C" word, but that seems to be the plan. By itself, of course, that's no bad thing — after all even George Bush had a "manufacturing czar" within his Commerce Department. And there are plenty of positive steps that can be taken to ease burdens on manufacturers. In 2005, in fact, OMB published a list of regulatory changes that could help.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration — having just nationalized General Motors — seems to have quite different policies in mind. According to Bloomberg, the new position may be a response by the White House to calls for a full-blown national industrial policy for manufacturing. In recent congressional testimony, Obama advisor and former cable executive Leo Hindery starkly described the elements of such a strategy: government picking winners and losers among products and firms, government spending to support industry, and trade protectionism.

The American people got taken in my Obama's hope-n-change rhetoric during the campaign.  Now that they've seen his strong-arm tactics and outright deceit time after time after time, they're starting to get wise.  Adding in another czar and attempting to take over yet another entire sector of the American economy will hopefully go over like a load of bricks.

There is absolutely no doubt that Obama is trying to wrest control over as much of the nation as possible from the free market private industry, and he's doing it through a stunning combination of deception, brute force, and outright manipulation of Americans' good intentions and tolerance.  It needs to end here and now.

There's my two cents.