Union protesters call Gov. Scott Walker a "Hitler" for asking them to contribute to their pensions.

Former Gov. Ted Strickland calls the guy who beat him a “tyrant” while whipping union protesters into a frenzy at the Capitol in Columbus.

What a classy guy.

In Wisconsin, Democrats who lost the argument and the election also lost their self respect and went running from the state to delay a vote they are also going to lose. Unbelieveable. We’ve all played with kids like that — the ones who quit and run home with their ball because they’re losing, the crybabies who flip over the gameboard because you’re winning.

And let’s not forget Steve Driehaus, and his cheap-shot quotes about Republican Steve Chabot after he lost the election to Congressman Chabot. Sometimes it’s better to keep your mouth shut and be suspected as a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

The liberals should remember what their beloved leader Barack Obama said to rub it in after he won: ”Elections have consequences.”

True. And now that the Democrats are on the wrong end of the losing stick, they don’t like it. They are throwing tantrums, acting childish, pouting and sticking their fingers in their ears to avoid facing the truth: liberals lost; Democrats were defeated. Voters chose Republicans to stop the binge-spending insanity that has put federal, state and local budgets into bankruptcy.

I always thought Ted Strickland was a better man than that. But now he sounds like the bearded, deranged, sweaty Al Gore invoking curses on the guy who beat him. He sounds like another sore loser.

Meanwhile, the Democrats who ran from Wisconsin are proving the point conservatives have been making about Democrats and the unions who own them. They are not tethered to reality. All the governer is asking is that the public employees contribute to their pensions like everyone else does. He only wants them to pay a token contribution and cover some of the costs of their lavish health-care benefits.

And they are marching with hateful signs like the spoiled proteters who  pitched a fit in France and Greece. They should all be fired. There are plenty of unemployed people who would gladly take thier jobs, with ANY benefits. Fire the lot of them, starting with the teachers who shut down classes and dragged their students to the protests.

It just goes to show that FDR and others were right when they warned that we should never allow public employees to join unions. It’s a huge mistake, guaranteed to wreck government and gouge taxpayers.

– Unions bargain against other public employees who have no incentive to limit concessions because they are playing with other people’s money. And public employees on both sides of the table benefit from whatever benefits are granted — such as superintendents who automatically get the raises they give to teacher unions.

– The unions use their dues for political contributions to elect people who will give them everything they ask. They now own the Democratic Party, which has driven our governments at every level into insolvency by granting unsustainable pensions, salaries and benefits.

– Public employee unions are contrary to the very purpose of unions, which was to prevent abuse and exploitation by private companies. Public employees don’t strike against bad bosses or management, but against their neighbors – the taxpayers who have to provide increasingly lavish salaries and benefits.

– Teacher unions protect incompetence and have paralyzed public education as they cynically sabotage school choice that benefits the children they claim to serve. A bill in Ohio to take away collective bargaining for public employees — including teachers and university professors — could be the biggest education reform in Ohio history.

Obama and the Pelosi Democrats have piled up more debt in two years than all the presidents in history. But voters threw them out and elected Republicans to do something about it. And the unions and their wholly owned subsidiary, the Democratic Party, are squealing like porkers at a pig roast.

If there’s one thing Americans can’t stand it’s whiners, pouters, cheaters and sore losers. 

Liberals like Strickland and the Democrats in Wisconsin are showing their true character — as whiners, pouters, cheaters and sore losers. Voters won’t forget it.

Nancy Pelosi hands the gavel to House Speaker John Boehner -- finally, two months too late

Just in case anyone is still reading this blog, here are some random thoughts on a few topics — sort of in the category of, “You know what really chaps my hide?”

One of the most demeaning social trends is the way people get laid off or fired. These days, when someone loses a job, they also cease to exist overnight. Because of a few jerks who have retaliated and sabotaged their former employers, the current practice is like one of those Soviet May Day parades. They remove any evidence of your existance. One day you are there, the next day you are locked out — gate pass doesn’t work, parking spot taken, and if you manage to sneak in, your password is deleted. It seems like people even see through you — you have become a ghost, and nobody wants you haunting the office anymore.

So why not apply this to politics? It is incredibly aggravating to see lame-duck politicians doing sore-loser sabotage to pay back the voters who canned them. I’m thinking of the Democrats in the lame-duck Congress, and Gov. Ted Strickland, who insisted on keeping the spending hose cranked on at full blast until his last day in office, which could not come soon enough. 

How about passing a law that political losers immediately lose the power of their office? There’s no longer any need for transition. The new office-holders don’t need weeks or months to arrive in the capitol or get to work. Give the losers a day to clean out thier desks, and then give them the bum’s rush, I say. What’s the point of sending someone packing in November if they get to hang around like a bad odor for another month or more?

Told you so on the Freedom Center. Before it was opened I did a column to check out several other slavery-themed museums around the country. All of them were failing, and nearly all were begging for big subsidies. Several museum directors I talked to seemed suprised that we would build another one to compete in a saturated market of declining demand. One of them warned that we would know our museum was a flop in Cincinnati when the parking lot was filled mainly with schoolbuses. How true. The reduced-cost tickets “sold” to students amount to a coerced subsidy from taxpayers. Even if the Freedom Center is a valuable educational experience — a dubious claim, given some of their poorly chosen, divisive, guilt-trip exhibits — we were assured it would be self-supporting.

Instead we get more panhandling for public support. Now the Fredom Center is seeking federal support, to avoid having to ask for funding from local taxpayers and City Hall. And believe it or not, one of the justifications for a reserved spot at the federal trough is that they don’t want to let down the 50,000 students who visit annually.

I took a lot of heat for predicting the failure of the Freedom Center. It was dangerously politically incorrect to point out the facts, and with the Enquirer lending its full support, including office space and funding, my bosses were in the tank and I was the turd in the newsroom punchbowl.

It reminds me of a line I read in Memoirs of Hadrian (great book, by the way):   ”Being right too early is the same as being wrong.”

Finally, what’s up with Charles Krauthammer? I think he is suffering from a bad case of Beltway Dementia. The guy has been one of my favorite conservative columnists, since I put him in the pages of the Enquirer long ago. But he is sounding very elitist and downright snobby lately, starting with his mocking dismissal of Tea Party candidates, then his weird interpretation of the Obama tax “victory.” (A few more “victories” like that and Obama will be looking for a new community to organize.) The Kraut-man needs to get the heck out of D.C. more often and get to know some real people.

And while we’re talking about columnists: Were are the some real conservatives? Kathleen Parker is a liberal definition of what a conservative should sound like. She would fit right in taking Juan Williams’ spot on NPR. Ditto for David Brooks, who has been hopelessly brainwashed by the New York Times since he sold his soul for a few inches of newsprint. Where is Cal Thomas? How about Fred Barnes? Or how about throwing politically correct caution to the wind with Ann Coulter, Jonah Goldberg, Mark Steyn, Pat Buchanan or Michele Malkin?

Newspapers have no problem running rancid opinions from the far-far left — Leonard Pitts, Paul Krugman, Maureen Downd, Frank Rich, et al. Where are the similar provocative voices from the right?

P.S. — How can the media be so surprised by what came down with Marvin Lewis and the Bengals? Lewis obviously wanted to leave and hoped to get a better job after his success last year. Then he cratered. Carson Palmer stunk. Ocho was muy stinko, and T.O was only OK. The defense was weaker than Salvation Army coffee. Coaching was horrible. So no wonder Lewis “agreed” to stay. His market value went from hero to zero in a single season. And where’s the media? Still stuck on stupid, blaming Mike Brown. I read one column that said Brown had not given Marvin the tools he needed to win in his division. Oh, really? Then how do you explain last year? The fact is, Brown did everything the fans and sportswriters were asking for — it was the coach and team who dropped the ball. And yet all we get is the pseudo-populist rant against the owner for not hiring more scouts. I’d like to know: Which scouting mistake threw all those interceptions? Which scouting executive was offsides in the red zone throughout the season? Which scout selection mismanaged the clock? Yeah, I thought so.

Which

On Veteran’s Day, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran two excellent features that honored the meaning of the day and the sacrifices of veterans who have served our country. There was a great photo essay by Michael Keating, showing the faces of American patriots and their recollections. And the story by John Erardi, about his uncle who never came home from WWII but lived on in the mythology and history of his family, was vivid and touching.

But I wonder how many may have missed those great stories because they hurled the paper down in disgust the day before and refused to take another look at it. On Page 1, Nov. 10, the Enquirer ran an Associated Press tantrum about John Boehner, calling him the “Weeper of the House” because he choked up on election night while talking about his family and his humble background.

It was a lazy, poorly reported, uninformed story, relying on hearsay and secondhand sources. It included the mandatory quotes from a bobblehead “expert” who knows nothing about the subject, which is so typical and useless in today’s journalism. I saw no mention of the personal attacks and slander that Boehner had endured during the election as Obama and his Chicago Way hit squad tried to destroy him. I saw no mention of his struggle with chronic back pain, and the emotional vindication of his life story on Nov. 2. 

But beyond that, it was a juvenile name-calling attack by liberals who were unhappy because “their team” and their messiah Obama were defeated and repudiated by the voters. It was the kind of story that is never published about one of big media’s liberal heroes.

The liberal reporter who wrote it disguised opinion as objective reporting. And the liberal editors who chose to run it in newspapers, including the Enquirer, apparently no longer see anything wrong with debasing the professional standards of journalism. What possible good purpose is served by a story like that? At best, it belonged on the op-ed page, although it was weak even for that.

On Wednesday night, I was the speaker for the monthly meeting of the Blue Ash Republicans, and that”Weeper” story came up. Blue Ash Councilman Rick Bryan asked why the paper would run such a story. The crowd nodded and murmured its agreement with the question. They wondered: What they heck are the editors doing to our local paper? Why do they insist on pushing their Republican-bashing agenda in the news? How can we trust anything in the Enquirer when they inflict opinion and pretend it’s news?

As someone else pointed out, stories like that are one of the major reasons newspapers are becoming extinct and irrelevant. Conservatives, who make up the majority in Cincinnati, don’t trust them anymore. Are you listening Enquirer? Apparently not.

It happened again this morning. The Enquirer now contains hot-dog ingredients you really don’t want to read, such as byproducts and filler from USA Today. The Saturday USA TODAY/AP story was: ”Obama touts g-20 progress: Though some major goals weren’t met, president emphasizes successes.”

Only confirmed Kool-Aid drinkers could see his trip as anything but a disaster. So I turned to this morning’s Wall Street Journal for a second opinion. Their news story was ”Obama tries to repair damage.” Their editorial, ”Embarrassment in Seoul,” asked, “Has there ever been a major economic summit where a U.S. President and his Treasury Secretary were as thoroughly rebuffed as they were at this week’s G-20 meeting in Seoul? President Obama failed to achieve any of his main goals while getting pounded by other world leaders for failing U.S. policies and lagging growth.”

Obama took a beatingon Nov. 2, so he put his fingers in his ears and ran off to India and Indonesia on another trash America tour. His highest priase of veterans was reserved for veterans of Indonesia’s anti-colonial war for independence. He has poor-mouthed our country and belittled our international leadership so many times, it’s no wonder that the rest of the world now believes it, and ignores us with impugnity.

His trip was an extravagant failure. But you would never guess that from the AP story that could have been written by Robert Gibbs. 

There are many things newspapers do well. The Veterans Day stories in the Enquirer were proof of that. But readers are turning the page to other media because newspapers have devalued their own precious currency — credibility — with counterfeit news and rubber-check bias.

So today I found this essay in the American Thinker blog that does a much better job of developing the theme. Reading it was one of those serendipities that happen when you stumble on an idea or theme, and suddenly see it repeated, reinforced or developed elsewhere.

In this case, the writer does a good job of adding new long-view dimensions of history that complement Goldberg’s provocative autopsy of liberal fascists such as Hitler and Woodrow Wilson. (Goldberg’s book opens the door on a fresh view of American history that contradicts and exposes the liberal revisionism taught in schools and universities. Good stuff.)

In J.R. Dunn’s essay, the key word is not fascism but rationalism, defined this way:

For our purposes, rationalism can be defined as a reductionist doctrine holding that the universe and everything within it is a mechanism, governed by simple laws easily discovered, understood, and manipulated. A rationalist is a very smart individual who, if he doesn’t know all the answers, can tell you where to get them. A political rationalist is all this and more, since political rationalism is the arena in which the limitations of the ideology first became apparent. Namely, rationalism, taken to its logical extreme (and how could it be otherwise?), leads inevitably to chaos, misery, and death on continental scales.

Most leaders of the modern era were political rationalists: Lenin, Mussolini, Woodrow Wilson, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Clement Atlee, FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson, all the way down to Mr. Barack Obama, who lives in Washington in a building called the “White House.” Whether communist, fascist, progressive, socialist, or liberal, all believed in the tenets of rationalism. Since the universe is a mechanism, and everything within it shares that quality, then society, in all its varied manifestations, was a mechanism to these rationalists as well. The social and political machinery was open to manipulation, along with all the little machines within — humans, they were called. All were perfectible, and all could be made right with the proper formulae.

In other words, rationalists are the kind of people whose gods wear lab coats. The kind of people who believe in “political science,” another oxymoron. They are progressives, aka liberals.

I’m not sure I agree with Dunn that American voters get all this and were voting against it. But instinctively, on a common-sense level,voters know it when they see it in Obama, and they are having none of it. Because at its heart, rationalism, progressivism, socialism — all those liberal isms — are fundamentally anti-American and poison to our individual liberty that comes from God, not political science.

The entire essay is here. It’s worth a read.

If you want to know what the election was all about last night, it looks like this:

That’s Rep. John Dingell, who has served in the U.S. House for 28 terms. When he was elected, automatic transmissions were a big deal. A cell phone was something you used to call your lawyer from the hoosegow. Dingell is one of those career politicians who have made public service thier own lifetime entitlement. He has burrowed into Congress like a bedbug for 56 years. When I grew up in Michigan he was as much a part of the landscape as Detroit, and just as charming.

He represents the Socialist Republic of Ann Arbor, which decided to send him back for yet another term — barely — to make it 29 terms. Go figure.

He’s a hard-core liberal, a hero of the UAW, and has often been one of the most mean-spirited partisans in D.C. — and that is saying a lot. To win re-election he ran ads stamped from the Union sheet-metal shop accusing his opponent of being a Wall Street insider.

Considering how the UAW grabbed Obama bailouts with both hands, it’s amazing they have the gall to criticize Wall Street. But here’s the punchline. Dingell’s opponent was no Wall Streeter. He’s a doctor, and he seemed genuinely flummoxed that Dingell would run such a dishonest, ignorant ad.

But the lesson is: For Democrats, it worked. So Dingell is one of their stars today, one of the few bright spots in a gloomy forecast, along with Harry Reid, Barney Frank and the flashback to Gov. Moonbeam in California. He’s their “winner.” And with winners like that, who needs losers?

Most of the rest of the country has a different opinion. Elsewhere, voters were sending newcomers like Rand Paul and Marco Rubio to the Senate to send a message that the John Dingells of Washington are washed up. As Paul said in a genuine goosebump moment, “We’re here to take back our government.”

Obama doesn’t get it, or if he does, he is lacking the humility gene in his DNA. He thinks it’s all about the economy. But this time it really is all about him.

If Nov. 2 was a performance evaluation, he would be fired. But we can’t do that yet, so he is on probation, with one last chance to shape up. And his team is still loaded with John Dingells and Harry Reids and Barney Franks, who are still trying to push the car back into the ditch, or blaming Bush for putting the gas station too far away, to borrow Obama’s favorite analogy.

Good luck with that. Meanwhile, the rest of us are high-fiving, fist-bumping and sighing with relief that the Obama-Pelosi socialist, big-government train has been derailed before it can do more damage.

God bless America. God bless the Team Party. And God bless the Founders who gave us a chance to correct our mistakes every two years.

“What started the fire?” he would demand. “You don’t say.”

“What happened to the dog that got loose on the highway and caused the accident? You don’t say.”

And so on.

I thought again of those memos when I read the story in the Enquirer this morning about election fraud at Cincinnati Public Schools. CPS is now admitting something went wrong when bus-loads of Hughes High School students were hauled to the Board of Elections to vote, handed partial ballots listing only Democrats, then rewarded with ice cream.

But CPS insists it was not an attempt to influence an election. Of course not. The mistakes that are being investigated by CPS have nothing to do with partisan tricks. They’re only concerned that the church vans that were used had too many seats. No kidding. And the volunteer drivers may not have been authorized to haul the kids.

But while the Enquirer story does a good job of quoting the official CPS spin, it has a few gaps.

Were parents told their kids’ first lesson in voting would be a Democratic Party dirty trick? Were they even told about the excursion? What do they say? How about the students? As the memo says, You don’t say.

Was it a criminal violation of election laws? You don’t say. Who were the volunteers? CPS says they have lawyered up and aren’t cooperating. But were any of them connected to any campaigns or groups like ACORN? Does CPS have their names? You don’t say.

Why was a former principal handing out ballots listing Democrats names only? You don’t say. Was there a link to the campaign of Democrat Steve Driehaus, who is desperate for votes in his losing campaign for re-election for Congress? You don’t say. All we get is a standard Sgt. Schultz denial from the Driehaus campaign: “I know nothing.”

Election fraud? I know nothing!

What about other Democrats and their campaigns? You don’t say. In fact, the letters to the editor asked more questions and raised more issues about the incident than the story in the Enquirer Local section. But here’s a tidbit from the story: The Hughes High principal who is being held responsible is Virginia Rhodes. Who is she? You don’t say. So I will.

She’s the former wife of former Cincinnati Federation of Teachers President and union militant Tom Mooney. She’s a big-time Democrat and party activist, who served on the CPS board in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In 1988 she ran against current Prosecutor Joe Deters for Hamilton County Clerk of Courts. It was a bitter and nasty campaign. She accused Deters of extortion but never offered any evidence that he was coercing donations from courthouse employees. It was revealed, however, that she had sent a letter soliciting illegal donations for a judge whom she worked for as bailiff.

She was chosen to run against Deters by the Hamilton County Democratic Party, on a wave of enthusiasm for Michael Dukakis. She lost by 14 points. The chairman of the Democratic Party at the time: Don Driehaus, father of Steve Driehaus.

Dukakis doing his Snoopy impression

So the principal of Hughes High, who is involved in a shameful effort to exploit students’ votes for Democrats, is a longtime Democratic Party activist and candidate who  may owe favors to the Driehaus family. The Enquirer story mentioned none of this.

Is that because the editors are less enthusiastic about the story than they would be if Republicans were implicated? Or is it because so many people have been laid off from the newsroom that nobody even remembers or knows local history anymore?

You don’t say.

And yet…

More and more I think he is a blessing in disguise. He and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and the far-left agenda they have perpetrated on our country are a wake-up call. They are the cattle-prod alarm clock. They’re the last call, the final buzzer. If we don’t wake up now and take out the trash on Nov. 2, we will get what we deserve.

They are the face of liberal fascism described by Jonah Goldberg — the smiley-faced totalitarians who will rob us of our liberty one Big Mac and one Marlboro at a time, all in the name of the “public good.” They are the people whose gods wear lab coats. The ones who believe in the perfectibility of mankind by flawed mankind. Like their ancestor Lenin, they believe it’s only a matter of giving government complete and total control over everything.

And we are so lucky they took unchecked power two years ago. Because they have dropped the mask. Now we can see them for what they really are. Without the pretense of compromise and bipartisan cooperation, they have been exposed.

A more pragmatic and political president, such as Bill Clinton, would steer by the polls. His course would still be leftward, toward socialism, but close enough to the prevailing winds to keep the passengers comfortable and unaware, sunning in their deck chairs.

But Obama, by nature and opportunity, has been completely unaccountable. His response to overwhelming public opposition and the minority party? “I won.” As if that settles everything. That’s the attitude of a dictator, not a president. It’s the voice of disturbing arrogance. It’s the personality of the liberal fascist who knows he knows what’s best for us — our health care, our diet, our spending, the money we are allowed to keep, our property, even the planet we live on.

And that’s what’s driving the backlash that can save us. With a leader more subtle, less ideological and rigid, we could easily continue to drift past the tipping point into an irreversible socialist society of entitlement. That leads to the chaos we’re seeing in France and Greece, where the welfare slackers are rioting to protect unsustainable handouts. Ironically, the socialist who set out to perfect society always wind up empowering the most selfish aspects of it.

Here, we can see the same trend exposed this year. Finally, the public is turning against the unions that have done so much damage to our country. And finally, that even includes the teacher unions who have undermined our schools.

They have always hidden their selfish demands behind “the children.” Anyone who dares to criticize them is accused of being “anti-teacher.”  But finally, people are waking up.

In New Jersey, Republican Gov. Chris Christie became a conservative hero when he threw the leader of the state teachers’ union out of his office, after one of the union leaders circulated a memo wishing that Christie would die for daring to suggest cuts and merit pay.

In Ohio, Gov. Ted Strickland, the pet of the teachers’ unions, is in big trouble, trailing Republican John Kasich.

All I ever needed to know about Strickland was revealed to me at his first State of the State message, when I watched him trash school choice and threaten charter schools while a room packed with teachers’ union leaders cheered wildly.

If  Strickland is defeated and we return control of education to the people, not the unions, we can thank Obama and Pelosi for waking up the country.

Golberg’s definition of liberal fascism was written before Obama took office but it fits him and his far-left gang of community organizers, tenured hippies and closet Communists like a cigar fits Castro. As you read it, think of his Obamacare, the stimulus spending, the way they demonize the Tea Party and their conservative enemies, the banking regulations nobody read, the way he says conservatives “cling to their guns and religion.” Then go vote.

“Finally, since we must have a working definition of fascism, here is mine: Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism. “

Juan Williams

In case  you were wondering, the taxpayer subsidy for public broadcasting such as PBS and National Public Radio this year: $420 million.

I want my money back.

I never could understand why we subsidized left-wing radio and the likes of TV hack Bill Moyers, who never passed up an opportunity to exploit his subsidy for personal gain and launch uninformed political attacks on Republicans.

And now we have something new brought to you by NPR:  Censorship.

NPR has fired Juan Williams for saying the simple truth that nearly everyone recognizes.

According to NPR, he was fired for saying on the Bill O’Reilly Show:

“Look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

What NPR did not report was that Williams also warned that political correctness causes paralysis. He should have added that it also it causes stupidity — such as the kind shown by NPR in firing him.

Even with tax subsidies, NPR cannot allow certain non-liberal viewpoints to be spoken. And there’s little doubt they got their wiring in a tangle because Williams said it on Fox News Network.

An interesting item from Powerline blog says that another NPR personality was similarly bullied by NPR.

Mara Liasson is National Public Radio’s top political correspondent. She also helps hold down the left flank on panels where she appears as a FOX News contributor such as Special Report with Bret Baier. Last year Josh Gerstein reported that NPR management has asked Liasson to reconsider her appearances on Fox News because of what they perceive — in accord with the teaching of the Obama administration — as the network’s political bias. NPR executives said they had concerns that Fox’s programming had grown more partisan, and they asked Liasson to spend 30 days watching the network.

At the end of the 30 days, Liasson was undoubtedly expected to engage in rigorous self-criticism, but it didn’t work out that way: “At a follow-up meeting last month, Liasson reported that she’d seen no significant change in Fox’s programming and planned to continue appearing on the network, the source said.” Now NPR has gone a step beyond the summoning of Mara Liasson.

I almost never agree with her, but I have new respect for Liasson.

But no respect for NPR. There is just no reason we should be paying even a dime for PBS and NPR subsidies. Once upon a time, when there were only three networks, PBS made sense as an educational network. They were nonpolitical.

But now they are the unofficial network of the Democratic Party — blatantly, egregiously biased, unprofessionally partisan. They are the plummy, condescending voice of the liberal faculty at any state university.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy NPR sometimes. They have talented people who do interesting and thorough stories, when they stay away from politicas. But those people and that kind of reporting can succeed in the free market, without a subsidy. And it is beyond insulting that conservative taxpayers are forced to fund PBS bias and propaganda, as we listen to Democrats whine and carp about the conservative slant of talk radio.

Last time I checked, the only talk radio that required a taxpayer subsidy was NPR.  And that’s because their brand of politically correct lectures cannot  succeed in the market.

It’s past time to pull the plug. I hope this ridiculous censorship of Juan Williams winds up turning off the taxpayer juice to NPR and PBS.

So allegations of voter fraud in the contest would be pretty big news, right? Not in the Enquirer.

The accusations could not be more serious. Tom Brinkman and Chris Finney of COAST have filed a lawsuit alleging that students at Hughes High School were bused to the polls and given sample ballots listing Democrats only — then, after voting, they were taken out for ice cream.

Cincinnati Public Schools officials denied they were involved — but the kids were allegedly taken to the polls during school hours, so it’s pretty hard to believe CPS was not somehow involved. And this is far worse than the typical ACORN voter fraud of bribing homeless vagrants with cigarettes and Whoppers. In this case, high school students have been exploited to corrupt an election. That means that their first experience with voting was cynically manipulated by Democrats and their supporters to rig an election.

Anyone who would do that deserves to be prosecuted and fired.

Who is involved? The teachers union? CPS? The Driehaus campaign? Why was this story buried on B5, near the back of the Local section, at the bottom of the page?

And why does CPS approve of taking students out of class so they can vote? Since when is it OK to waste public money and classroom time to “get out the vote”? Are we supposed to believe teachers and their union do NOT provide instruction on the way those kids should vote?

After working for 18 years in the newsroom at the Enquirer, I can guarantee this much: If similar voter allegations had been made against the Republican, it would have been on Page One.