Want to destroy conservative talk radio? We got a czar for that

By Paul A. Ibbetson

The Obama administration is truly the place where Czars are made daily. Name your problem, concern, wish, or desire, and somewhere, for better or worse, there is an Obama Czar with power, authority, and funds to address the problem. The question that seems to come up repeatedly is: why do we need Czars that mirror other department agency heads? For example, why do we need a terrorism Czar when we have a head of the department of Homeland Security? In fact, currently the Obama administration has agency heads in place that do the work of the current drug Czar, health Czar, intelligence Czar, urban affairs Czar, blah, blah, blah; in short, all of these Czars are unnecessary expenditures of taxpayer funds. If your head begins to spin whenever the current list of Obama's Czars is read, it is because at no time in history has there ever been a creation of so many overlapping bureaucratic power wielders within the U.S. government. The fundamental separation, which has been observed by those such as Glenn Beck, is that the Czars do not report directly to the people, as do the government agency heads, but directly to President Obama. That's right; you won't find any Senate deliberation behind the employment of the President's special little helpers, now known as Czars. In fact, even the more politically informed individual would find it nearly impossible to keep up with the growing Czar list, let alone why we have them.

The existence and furtive work of these stealthy little Obama specialists should be grounds for analysis and discussion on conservative talk radio shows and I promise to make it a regular part of the Conscience of Kansas radio program; however, that may be a limited time offer. If discussions between the public and political talkers on these important issues, and others, are to cease from the conservative radio dial, it may come from the congressionally un-restrained and free-wheeling hands of the Czars. How so? Let me share it with you — while the sharing is still legal.

For talk radio, this would come from the newly conceived position of the FCC diversity Czar, now filled by Mark Lloyd. Lloyd, a past member of the far-left 'Center for American Progress' (CAP), which in its 2007 report, titled "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio," was openly hostile to conservative talk radio and saw the Reagan repeal of the Fairness Doctrine as a fundamental component of the current disparity between liberal, (conveniently called "progressive"), and conservative talk radio. After lengthy calculations of the "fairness" gap (in reality, the reflection of the free-market superiority of conservative talk radio), Lloyd and his cohorts disclosed a plan to destroy talk radio through a series of restrictions, observations, and penalties.

With the growing opposition by the public to a re-emergence of radio free-market killers, such as the "Fairness Doctrine," it seems only too convenient that Obama's employment of Mark Lloyd, in the hired gun position of FCC diversity Czar, would take place now. This maneuver, while being liberal to the core, also has a familiar Chicago mafia style aroma — where dirty work is not handed down to the visible public figures, but quietly hired out on the side. No matter how one looks at the situation, in reality, we are observing another end-run maneuver to try the take away the people's choice of what political voices are available when they turn their radio dial.

© Paul A. Ibbetson