Declaration of (public broadcast) independence

Story by Chris Graham

It’s spring, which means it’s probably time for Congress to threaten to cut funding for public broadcasting.

A move by a congressional subcommittee to slash funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that was reversed last week by the House Appropriations Committee had people again discussing the merits of taxpayer funding for PBS and NPR. The move also ramped up talk concerning a proposal advanced by two progressive citizens groups that would scrap the current system in favor of establishing a public trust with its own dedicated funding sources and an independent oversight panel that would get public television and public radio out from under the foot of Congress and the White House.

“Certainly people should be fighting for funding for public broadcasting - PBS, NPR and all of the other projects that are reliant on public funding. The way we see it, though, is that calling for continued funding without calling for a radical change in how the funding is done, what you’re doing is you’re fighting almost a war of attrition,” said Steve Rendall of the New York City-based Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, which is working with the Pittsburgh-based Center for Independent Public Broadcasting to win support for the idea of creating an independent public-broadcasting trust.

“The goal would be to make U.S. public broadcasting the equal of public broadcasting in almost every modern country - and that is relatively independent from commercial and political pressures,” said Jerry Starr, the executive director of the Center for Independent Public Broadcasting.

“If we had an independent source of funding, you could do away with the congressional appropriation and the various kinds of harassment that go with that - that typically come from conservative organizations speaking through Republican politicians expressing dislike for a program that PBS might have put on that serves a constituency that they don’t value,” Starr told The Augusta Free Press.

Where the CIPB and FAIR see the money coming from - from a levy on television advertising or from commercial broadcast-license sales - is where conservatives raise the red flag.

“This is the same problem that we’ve had with public broadcasting for decades,” said Cliff Kincaid, the editor of the Washington, D.C.,-based Accuracy in Media Report.

“They want to force taxpayers to pay for programming that they may not want, that they don’t watch, that they don’t enjoy. And now they want more money - a billion dollars a year - and they want it to be independent of any federal input. This is a typical left-wing socialist approach - and it’s moving in the wrong direction,” Kincaid told the AFP.

“What’s being proposed by a lot of people is not true independence,” said James Gattuso, a telecommunications-industry analyst with the Washington, D.C.,-based Heritage Foundation.

“If you have a trust fund where the money comes from the taxpayers, you’re still spending resources from one group of people for programming on the system regardless of whether they want to support that or not. That’s different than an independent source of funding where people voluntarily give their money to support that,” Gattuso told the AFP.

Starr said that the characterizations of the funding sources coming from advertising or broadcast-license sales as being taxes are off base.

“We don’t consider it a tax as such - but rather a use fee. That is, if you want to graze cattle on public lands, you pay a use fee to the government for that. If you want to drill for oil on public lands, you pay a use fee for that to the government. If you want to lay cable in a municipality, you pay a use fee to that municipality for that privilege. And yet the broadcasters have a monopoly over the public’s airwaves, and they are owned by the public by statute, and only leased to the broadcasters in public trust, and they pay nothing for it. They make billions of dollars in profits, and they pay absolutely nothing for it,” Starr said.

“A small tax on commercial broadcasters would be sufficient to fund this public trust. And then we would have a chance of being truly alternative at a time when we truly need one,” Starr said.

The idea is gaining steam among public-broadcasting supporters for that very reason, according to Rendall.

“A lot of people mistook us at first - as if we were talking about eliminating public-broadcasting funding, which isn’t at all what we’re calling for,” Rendall told the AFP.

“The more we talk to people about this, the more open they are to it. It is, after all, a way to protect public broadcasting from anybody’s influence. A lot of people who want to see public broadcasting protected from the political winds think this is a good idea,” Rendall said.

Gattuso said it is “encouraging that people are talking about independence - to the extent that people are realizing that independence might be the only way out of the dilemma of how do you fund programming.”

“It’s distressing, though, that the independence so far being proposed is only half of the equation,” Gattuso said.

“It’s more or less cherry-picking the concept of independence. You get the independence in terms of oversight and accountability, but you don’t get the quote ‘independence’ from receiving taxpayer dollars. It’s almost like you’re asking for the benefits, but not the responsibilities of independence,” Gattuso said.

Virginia beefs up sex-offender registry: Are enhancements enough to make registry an effective tool?

Visitors to the Virginia Sex Offender and Crimes Against Minors Registry Web site can now click on an interactive map that pinpoints where offenders live in proximity to where they live - and get instant information on the nature of their offenses and even where they are employed.

Those changes, part of an overhaul to the registry unveiled last week, are what you can see. The ones that you can’t see - namely, the commitment of $9 million to add 50 new state troopers to the Virginia State Police to beef up enforcement of compliance of offenders with the registry’s reporting requirements - are possibly the key to the registry’s long-term success.

“The unfortunate thing that we discovered with the old system was that so much of the information on the registry was based on an honor system by the criminal - and not surprisingly, some of the information wasn’t accurate,” said Attorney General Bob McDonnell, who spearheaded the changes to the system as part of his package of legislative proposals aimed at getting tough on sexual predators that was passed in the Virginia General Assembly earlier this year.

“We’re spending, with the new budget, about $10.5 million to improve the registry - including about $500,000 for computer software upgrades, about $500,000 for data entry and administrative personnel to maintain it, and $9 million in actual state police, 50 new troopers, whose job it will be to go out and physically verify all the information provided by the criminal. And then if they don’t register or reregister, the state police have the resources to go out and look for them promptly and charge them with a violation,” McDonnell told The Augusta Free Press.

Where sex-offender registries like the one launched in Virginia in 1994 often fall short is in the area of enforcement, according to Wayne Logan, a professor at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., who has studied sex-offender registries nationwide.

“The Achilles heel to registration is that it depends on lawbreakers to comply with the law. It’s an honor-based system - and we know throughout the country that registration rolls are rife with errors, and they are also to a very significant extent incomplete in terms of not having information for all people who should be lawfully registered,” Logan said.

“From the perspective of the registrant, they are able to weigh the burden of registration versus the chances of getting caught. It’s the classic difficulty for the criminal-justice system - where theoretically rational criminal actors are weighing the costs and benefits. But it seems that many registrants are saying that it’s not worth the burden, so I’ll roll the dice with respect to maybe being caught and maybe prosecuted at the felony level,” Logan told the AFP.

The assignment of 50 state troopers to the enforcement of registry requirements will allow the state police to build an “ongoing rapport” with the offenders that they are responsible for, said Thomas Turner, a Virginia State Police lieutenant who oversees the state sex-offender registry.

“Before this, an individual could register, and he would not be heard from again for 90 days. That process is going to change in the fact that we’re going to physically verify where he’s living within the first 30 days,” Turner said.

“The troopers then will have an ongoing rapport with those offenders that they are responsible for - they’ll have a better idea of if they’re there or not there. They’re going to have an on-line contact with us and letting us electronically that they’ve been there and the time, date and location they’ve verified he was there, and the times they went by and he wasn’t there. Those are things that are going to be available to us - so we can look at an offender and say, well, it’s been 30 days since anybody had contact with this guy, and now he’s failed to reregister. We can respond pretty quickly,” Turner told the AFP.

The enhanced verification that the commitment of troopers to the process will provide will mean that the information on the registry should be more reliable. Adding to the reliability is the increase in information that will be required of offenders.

“The work addresses, the updated photographs, the mapping - that’s going to be a positive plus,” Turner said. “Because you can now look at street addresses in relation to where you’re at - schools, the availability of the system to allow you to register to receive community notification. It’s going to be helpful to persons who have a need to know who’s coming in and out of their zip code and contiguous zip code at schools and so forth. The more schools that register, the better decisions they’ll be able to make about bus stops and locations where they leave children in the evenings.”

“It appears to me that this is where states are moving - many states are ramping up the amount of information that is available,” said Bill Chamberlin, a communications-law expert and director of the University of Florida’s Marion Brechner Center Citizen Access Project, which is in the process of updating its 2002 rankings of states’ access to sex-offender information nationwide.

“Indiana, for example, which is ranked currently ranked as being more open than Virginia, provides a recent autograph, home address, full name and alias, date of birth, sex, height, weight, Social Security number, drivers license, description of the offense, name and address of any employers. There’s a fair amount on there,” Chamberlin told the AFP.

Among the registry Web site’s regular visitors is House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, who was instrumental in the passage of the package of bills aimed at sexually violent predators this year.

“When I was buying a new house a year ago, I got into the registry and looked up the addresses of everybody that was nearby. They were far enough away that I felt comfortable and bought the house. If there had been one next door, I might not have bought the house,” Griffith told the AFP.

The bottom line to Griffith is that while no system of this nature is going to be 100 percent effective in preventing offenders from committing additional crimes upon their release, “this is clearly money well spent.”

“If a predator is determined to do something bad, he’s going to do it. But we can protect our families and not put them in situations where they’re more likely to be targets,” Griffith said.

“I think it might take 50 years to see, but I think statistically we can reduce the number of kids who are molested. You will never eliminate it completely from society - I’m not that naive. But we can probably reduce by 25, 50, maybe even 75 percent - and that’s saying something,” Griffith said.

(Published 06-19-06)

Summer in the Shenandoah Valley

Golf Things Considered column by John Rogers
JSpencerRogers@msn.com  

The Valley has been changing, and the daylight stretching out, as the solstice draws near. There’s a fullness along the country roads where trees recently bare take on a middle-aged kind of thickness, swaying contentedly with the last of spring breezes. The cacophony of cicadas, tree frogs, crickets and a million other mate-seeking critters makes such a steady droning that you actually have to think about it to hear their song. And along the Shenandoah, tawny bales of fresh-hewn hay spot the fields like Civil War infantry frozen in time. Read more

Nash knows his limits

Story by Chris Graham

Kevin Nash isn’t bashful about being a big man.

The 6-foot-11 grappler knows he’s not asked to do huracanranas and five-star frog splashes and dives from the top of cages.

“I’m kind of limited in what I can do now - I’ve always been limited, because size does limit you to some degree what you can do in there,” said Nash, a former WWE and WCW world champ who is currently involved in a storyline war against the lineup of cruiserweight wrestlers in TNA’s X Division.

He was speaking about his physical abilities - not his penchant for bringing off match psychology that he dates back to a program that he worked with former WWE titleholder Shawn Michaels a decade ago.

“I know the formula to having a good match with smaller guys. I’ve had great matches with small guy. I can dance, but I need a good dance partner. These guys are probably the best dance partners in the business right now - so if I’m going to go out there and do it, I might as well do it with the best,” Nash said, touting the TNA X Division and its stars, mentioning Chris Sabin, Sonjay Dutt, Jay Lethal and Alex Shelley by name as being among those who have impressed him with their ring work.

Big men often are looked at through a very much different lens - in part because it is hard for fans across the sports spectrum to identify with people who are in the area of seven feet tall, to hear Nash tell it.

“I think that it’s hard for a normal person to identify with somebody that is genetically bigger and imposing. I don’t think that most kids really identify with Shaq when they watch basketball. It’s easier for a kid to look at Steve Nash, a white suburban kid, and say, If I’m going to emulate somebody, I probably would be able to emulate Steve Nash,” said Nash, who played basketball at the University of Tennessee and then professionally in Europe before breaking into professional wrestling.

There are advantages to being a big man in wrestling, of course.

“If a big man can go out and do two or three things and have some charisma and be able to get over, then you don’t need to set yourself on fire or do anything else,” Nash said.

“There’s a lot of guys in major-league baseball that have one pitch. It just happens to be a 100-mile-per-hour fastball. I don’t think it takes away from your athleticism. To move a seven-foot body as well as I move it, it takes a lot more skill than it takes to move a five-foot-eight body around,” Nash said.

Where will J.J. go?

Story by Chris Graham

The jury was still out on where J.J. Redick would fit in next week’s NBA draft before the news about his ailing back hit the newswire.

And now you have to factor in his arrest for drunken-driving charges from last week. Read more

Cynthia McKinney - one busy woman

Column by Max Friedman

In between hitting cops and and playing the race card, wacko Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., keeps busy with the left on a number of subjects. Just pulling her file is a full day’s work, but it is worthwhile keeping track of her activities if only to prove that she is not only a racist leftist, but also one who support all types of radical causes, especially if they are anti-American, pro-Communist, anti-Israel and anti-death penalty. Read more