SHANNON LOVE: Let the FTC Regulate Where It Would Do Some Good:

If we’re going to regulate speech based on inducements to bias why stop with mere financial relationships? I think we should require all media sources to reveal all possible sources of bias starting with the political affiliations of the publishers and reporters. After all, the media sells stories they advertise as accurate and objective. Shouldn’t consumers have ready access to the information they need to decide if those claims are true?

Politics is more important than money. If you buy a toaster based on a biased recommendation, you’re only out the cost of a toaster. If you vote based on a biased political recommendation, you could lose your freedom. If the government has both the duty and the ability to protect you against bias in product recommendations on blogs, why doesn’t it have the same duty and ability to protect you against biased reporting on political matters?

Political beliefs matter. Soldiers fight and die for their political beliefs, not their paltry pay. Our political beliefs are closely tied to our moral sense of right and wrong and our sense of the just order of society. Political beliefs influence us on an unconscious level. Political beliefs do, without doubt, bias people even more strongly than money does.

This Wednesday, ABC is turning an entire day of news programing over to the Democrats’ health care plan. Wouldn’t viewers alter their judgment of the accuracy and objectivity of ABC’s reporting on the subject if they knew that the ABC employees donated to Democrats 80 times as much as they did to Republicans? Certainly, I can’t help but note that if the circumstances were reversed, most people who see nothing wrong in ABC’s actions now would suddenly see ABC’s donations as profoundly undermining the integrity of ABC’s reporting.

(For that matter, shouldn’t Deborah Yao have to reveal that she has an economic stake in suppressing blogs as competitors with traditional media?)

Revealing bias in matters of politics is even more important than revealing bias in commercial matters. If you buy a bad toaster on biased advice, you can easily tell because the toaster is crap and you can easily get another toaster. In politics, the media is often our only source of political information and we can’t easily tell which particular political policies are working and which are not. Worse, when we vote, we’re stuck with whomever we elect until the next election. For most political reporting, knowledge of the reporter’s bias is the only means of judging the accuracy and objectivity of a news story.

I’d like to put Jeffrey Immelt under oath on the relationship between NBC’s coverage and bailouts to G.E. . . . .

ERIC S. RAYMOND: Dispatches from the Iranian cyberfront. “I’ve spent the last seventeen hours living inside a cyberpunk novel. A libertarian cyberpunk novel. It’s been a weird and awesome experience. Within an hour after I received a plea for help from Iran, a regular commenter on this blog recruited me into a hacker network that has been forming to support the democratic Iranian revolutionaries by providing them with proxy servers, Tor anonymizers, and any other technologies needed for them to communicate over channels the Iranian regime cannot censor or control.” He’s looking for volunteers, if you’d like to help.

L.A. TIMES: Why Obama’s sudden news conference today? And what he’ll say. “Here’s the scary thing for the new White House: the terrifying words ‘Jimmy Carter’ have started appearing in print and on the air . . . . Sen. John McCain’s angry Senate Neda speech Monday, also reported and analyzed here with a video, dramatically changed that equation, forcing Obama to talk today more powerfully about the power of talk. . . .Obama needs to re-seize the initiative; hence, Monday’s decision to schedule a Tuesday presidential news conference. Such staged affairs are not only irresistible to the media (CBS will break into normal programming to carry it live), but they suck the oxygen out of any other competing story for the cycle.”

YOUR RIGHTS: An “odd divergence” from federal law.

IS OBAMA STILL SMOKING? “There are fewer touchier questions inside the White House than this.”

A PAINFUL TRUTH: Even Illegal Immigrants Don’t Want to Live In California Anymore.

LARRY KUDLOW: “According to a recent ABC News/USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care. That could mean up to 250 million people are happy. So why is it that we need Obama’s big-bang health-care overhaul in the first place?”

IRAN: Web Pries Lid Of Censorship. “At one time, authoritarian regimes could draw a shroud around the events in their countries by simply snipping the long-distance phone lines and restricting a few foreigners. But this is the new arena of censorship in the 21st century, a world where cellphone cameras, Twitter accounts and all the trappings of the World Wide Web have changed the ancient calculus of how much power governments actually have to sequester their nations from the eyes of the world and make it difficult for their own people to gather, dissent and rebel.” Somebody should write a book about this phenomenon and what it means.

THE KINDLE: A serious downside. I didn’t know about this, and apparently not many people did.

MARKDOWNS ON gourmet foods.

MICHAEL PETRELIS: Gay Reps Hosting DC Democratic Fundraiser on Wednesday With Pelosi. “If I still lived in Washington, I’d be organizing a picket to take place outside the home where this fundraiser will happen on Wednesday. It is time to close the LGBT checkbook and ATM for the Democratic Party, until such time as the party actually delivers some real legislative and presidential-driven changes and advancement for LGBT people.” It seems to me that the votes ought to be there for DOMA repeal.

GEORGE WASHINGTON TWITTERS. Well, sorta.

AN ANTI-CARBON-TAX TV AD from American Solutions.

HOPE AND CHANGE: Stocks tumble on bleak outlook for world economy.

MICHAEL SILENCE: “Angel of Iran.”

INDEED: Pension Costs Can Ruin Cities And States.

SUPPORT THE TROOPS, at the Troopathon.

CHARLES RANGEL: “I don’t know the woman.”

KEITH HENNESSEY: Kudos to the President for proposing to scale back terrorism reinsurance.

ROBERT SAMUELSON:

In theory, expanding public welfare could offset eroding private welfare. President Obama’s health-care proposal reflects that logic. The trouble is that the public sector also faces enormous cost pressures, driven by an aging population and rising health costs. The Congressional Budget Office projects the federal debt will double as a share of the economy (gross domestic product) to 82 percent of GDP by 2019.

Any sober examination of figures like these suggests that the system has promised more than it can realistically deliver. We are borrowing not to finance investment in the future but to pay for today’s welfare — present consumption. Sooner or later, the huge debt will weaken the economy. Nor would paying for all promised benefits with higher taxes be desirable. Big increases in either debt or taxes risk depressing economic growth, making it harder yet to pay promised benefits.

The U.S. welfare state is weakening; insecurity is rising. The sensible thing would be to decide which forms of public welfare are needed to protect the vulnerable and to begin paring others. Our inaction poses another dreary parallel with GM. It was obvious a quarter-century ago that GM the auto company could not support GM the welfare state. But the union wouldn’t surrender benefits, and the company acquiesced. Inertia prevailed, and the reckoning came.

The same cycle, repeated on a national scale with sums many multiples higher, would be correspondingly more fearsome.

Hope and Change! Same!

COFFEE: Arabica vs. Robusta: No Contest.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Why ObamaCare may be flatlining. Well, we can hope.

FASTER, PLEASE: 3D Printing For New Tissues and Organs.

WASHINGTON POST/ABC NEWS POLL: Americans Less Upbeat About Stimulus Bill’s Impact. “Expectations for President Obama’s stimulus package have diminished, with barely half of Americans now confident the $787 billion measure will boost the economy, and the rapid rise in optimism that followed the 2008 election has abated, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.”

DAVID CORN: White House Won’t Say If It’s Satisfied with Iran Intelligence.