Canaries in the Political Mine?

If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, maybe we should be looking at some recent developments. I'm driving along in me vehicle when I hear an ad condemning a proposed radio tax. So I go here. Maybe I don't see things as a free speech sort of thing- it seems to apply to music- but I take note.

Then one day, I open my email and find an empassioned plea from a conservative magazine. I've reproduced the text below:

You may recall that, just over a year ago, the federal government's taxpayer-subsidized mail-delivery monopoly -- aka the United States Postal Service -- hit us with a whopping 20 percent rate increase that drove up our annual delivery costs by more than $120,000.

Well, believe it or not, they've just done it again.

That's right: the USPS is hitting us with yet another postal increase that will jack up our annual delivery costs by an additional $51,568.

Together, this one-two punch of rate hikes amounts to more than $170,000 in increased annual delivery costs -- a staggering sum that we simply can't afford.

Now, it's outrageous enough that the USPS can continually jack up our rates without fearing any loss of our business to more cost-efficient competitors -- something it can do ONLY because federal law effectively protects it from private competition.

But what really burns me up is that these increases are part of a new rate system that was designed in part by lobbyists for liberal media giant Time Warner and other large publishers to benefit themselves at the expense of smaller competitors such as [ ].So instead of Time Warner's mailing costs ratcheting up like ours, the cost of delivering liberal Time magazine and other Big Media publications will increase at about half the rate hike forced on [ ] (and that's after some of those publications actually had a decrease in postage costs last year!).

Talk on radio is mostly conservative; large media publications are almost inveterately liberal. Co-incidence? Who was it that said there are no co-incidences. There is more than one way to shut up the Right. In the meantime, keep an eye on the bouncing ball.