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Whopper: John Kerry
Stop lying about your record!
By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, March 15, 2004, at 3:15 PM PT

"I'm pretty tough on Castro, because I think he's running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist secret police government in the world,'' Kerry told WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Michael Putney in an interview to be aired at 11:30 this morning.

Then, reaching back eight years to one of the more significant efforts to toughen sanctions on the communist island, Kerry volunteered: "And I voted for the Helms-Burton legislation to be tough on companies that deal with him."

--Peter Wallsten, "Kerry Stances on Cuba Open to Attack," in the March 14 Miami Herald

It seemed the correct answer in a year in which Democratic strategists think they can make a play for at least a portion of the important Cuban-American vote--as they did in 1996 when more than three in 10 backed President Clinton's reelection after he signed the sanctions measure written by Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Dan Burton.

There is only one problem: Kerry voted against it.

--Ibid.

(Thanks to reader John Giorgis.)

Discussion. Kerry aides told Wallsten that Kerry voted against the final bill because he disagreed with some technicalities added at the last minute, but that he voted for an earlier version of the bill. But every piece of legislation that comes before the Senate is subjected to a succession of votes, many of them tactical in nature. The only vote that counts is final passage. If it were otherwise, any legislator could claim to have voted for or against almost any bill, depending on the audience, and there would be no accountability at all.

There is no dishonor in saying, "I supported that bill initially, but some items were added to it that made it impossible for me to continue that support." Instead, Kerry lied, as is his wont.
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Whopper: George Soros
Oh, that comparison between Bush and the Nazis.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Saturday, Feb. 7, 2004, at 7:12 PM PT

George Soros: I have also been accused of comparing Bush to a Nazi. And I did not do it. I would not do it, exactly because I have lived under a Nazi regime. So I know the difference. But how come that I'm accused of that?

Q: Who accused you of that?

Soros: The Republican National Commission [sic.], or whatever, and a number of newspaper articles. And I--you know, I think I really--I'm upset about being accused of that. And I'm upset that I have to defend myself against this kind of accusation.

--Interview with billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who has spent more than $15 million to oppose President Bush's re-election, on CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports, Jan. 12, 2004.

"Soros believes that a 'supremacist ideology' guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. 'When I hear Bush say, "You're either with us or against us," it reminds me of the Germans.' It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ('The enemy is listening'). 'My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me,' he said in a soft Hungarian accent."

--Laura Blumenfeld,"Soros' Deep Pockets vs. Bush," in the Washington Post, Nov. 11, 2003.

(Thanks to James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" blog at OpinionJournal.com.)

Got a whopper? Send it to chatterbox@slate.com. To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.

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Local Motives
Why the FCC should scrap its absurd rules for satellite radio.
By Thomas Hazlett
Posted Tuesday, March 16, 2004, at 3:01 PM PT


Early this month, in a seemingly innocuous move, XM Radio offered 15 new satellite radio channels featuring local programming--traffic updates and weather reports. But because FCC rules require XM (and its rival, Sirius) to exclusively provide national programming, each of these local channels is available all across the country. An XM subscriber in Oregon, for example, can learn about a foggy night on the coast of Florida or the traffic en route to O'Hare, just by flipping the dial.

The launch of the new channels has kicked off a highly charged debate about whether the local content is legal. Traditional broadcasters claim it's not, because the programming targets particular regions. XM and Sirius (which plans similar channels) claim it is, because the programming airs nationwide. So far, the FCC seems to be siding with XM, but the regulatory scuffle points up the pickle that satellite radio is currently in: In order to get permission to exist, XM and Sirius had to swear off local content. But in order to survive, they need to find a legal way to deliver it to subscribers.

Satellite radio broadcasting was first authorized in 1997, when two licenses were issued to the companies now known as XM and Sirius. Their applications had taken seven years for the Federal Communications Commission to approve, mainly because the National Association of Broadcasters charged that the new service threatened "traditional American values of community cohesion and local identity." (It also threatened revenues. But at the time, the FCC found that traditional radio stations drew 80 percent of their income from local advertising, which suggested that national competition would not be too damaging to existing stations.) The irony, of course, was that just as lobbyists for traditional broadcasters were making arguments about the integrity of regional identity, local stations were airing more and more national programming, and companies like Infinity and Clear Channel were launching their ambitious industry consolidation. But the NAB pressure worked both to delay satellite rivals and to get the FCC to craft license rules that seemed to ensure that satellite service would air only national shows.

XM and Sirius launched service in late 2001 and early 2002, respectively, and they now serve approximately 1.8 million subscribers. Each system features about 60 channels of music and another 40 of national news, sports, public affairs, and comedy for about $10 to $13 per month. Equipment and installation cost an additional $120-$300. Analysts tout projections of 15 million customers by 2006. But success is by no means certain. Bankruptcy rumors plagued XM in 2002, and Sirius' bondholders were awarded a huge chunk of equity to stave off bankruptcy in 2003.

And so long as satellite radio omits community news, weather, traffic, and sports, its march to financial success will be uphill. Currently, XM and Sirius subscribers can easily flip back and forth between satellite programming and AM and FM bands. Airing local content would help bring listeners directly to satellite audio when they turn the ignition--no need to scan the AM dial for traffic updates--which would make subscribers feel they were getting more for their money and heighten their loyalty to the service. It would also--as the FCC foresaw--allow satellite radio to tap into local advertising, a potentially fat new revenue stream.

Airing local programs nationwide is a good start, but it's a remarkably inefficient solution because it soaks up precious channels--and satellite operators are allotted only so much bandwidth (12.5 MHz per operator). There are, after all, about 269 local radio markets. Squeezing an extra 15 or 20 channels onto the available bandwidth is one thing, but providing more slots for local news becomes very expensive very fast.

What makes these inefficiencies particularly grating, though, is that existing technology and infrastructure would allow scores of cities to enjoy multiple full-time local news channels via satellite. This smarter way to distribute local content on satellite radio would employ the repeater stations already in use. Repeaters are land-based relays that, as the name implies, pull in satellite feeds and (using the identical frequency) retransmit them. This boosts reception for area subscribers who would otherwise hit "dead zones"--tunnels, valleys, office building canyons--where signals fade. But they could also allow programs to be customized, market to market. When boosting a satellite signal, a repeater station could insert, say, a 10-minute local news bulletin into a broadcast airing on one of XM's national news channels. And it could easily supplement the range of national channels already on offer with several local ones.

The NAB attacks repeaters--even when they're used just to boost signal strength--as "a crutch for a technology that is not up to the task of providing the seamless, mobile coverage promised by proponents." And the trade press has been littered with such ominous headlines as: "NAB Accuses XM of Local Programming Plot." Capitol Hill has been happy to play enforcer. Former House Commerce Committee chairman Billy Tauzin, R-La., admonished the FCC that regulators must be vigilant in policing rules "intended to prevent companies like XM from offering localized programming like news, weather and traffic in direct competition with small radio broadcasters."

But in this era of industry consolidation, relatively speaking, there are fewer small, independent broadcasters left to protect. And the FCC's regulations, no matter what their original intent, now serve mainly to spare incumbent broadcasters--tiny or huge--the effort and expense of competing with their satellite rivals.

The notion that traditional broadcasters deliver idiosyncratic menus closely tailored to local audiences is a quaint one. Nationally syndicated content has become the order of the radio day, and satellite programming is, if anything, less cookie-cutter than its earth-bound analogs. That this debate has been framed along such outmoded lines illustrates how increasingly strained the concept of "local" has become. Regulators lacking spatial skills are charting geographic divides when they should be mapping communities of interest. Satellite radio caters to niche preferences in music or politics by connecting dispersed audiences. The opera buff in Tuscaloosa, left for deaf by "local" radio, connects with her community when tuning to satellite radio's 100 channels. To characterize satellite programs as uniform because they are nationally distributed is absurd. To then mandate that uniformity is worse.

It's only natural that sky-bound radio competitors want to offer that additional dimension--local news, weather, traffic, and sports--and they should be allowed to use repeaters to do it. Their financial success may depend on it. The earth-bound stations certainly hope that it does. That's why they are pressing so hard to see that they can't.


Thomas Hazlett is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He formerly served as chief economist of the Federal Communications Commission.


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Socialists
The zombies who won the Spanish election.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Thursday, March 18, 2004, at 2:26 PM PT



Despite what you may have heard, socialism isn't dead. It's undead, a zombie that still roams the earth uncertain what to do with itself since its demise. It was sighted again this week, somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula, though some observers dismissed the reports. Sure, a group named the Socialist Workers Party won the elections in Spain, and a Socialist named Jos? Luis Rodr?guez Zapatero is slated to become the country's next prime minister. But it says something about the state of small-"s" socialism--in addition to the state of the world--that conservatives are attacking Zapatero for his response to terrorism, not his attitude toward capitalism.

Granted, the war in Iraq and the war against al-Qaida are the whole reason the world has been watching Spain so closely for the past week. But there's another reason for the conservative silence about Zapatero's economics: The socialist debate over what to do about capitalism--and the proletariat, and the theory of surplus value, and the ownership of the means of production--is largely over in Europe. If the old libel against American liberals is that they're socialists, the new European libel against socialists is that they're liberals--classical ones. Here are some of the economic promises on which Zapatero's Socialist Workers Party campaigned: lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 30 percent, cutting income taxes, and reducing the value-added tax. Oh, and they're going to balance the budget and control inflation. The man expected to be the Socialist finance minister, Miguel Sebastian, is a U.S.-educated economist with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He's promising to put his faith in the Invisible Hand. "There will be a strict separation between politics and business," he told the Financial Times. "We will be a market-friendly government." These are socialists?

They're what's left of them. The 43-year-old Zapatero took the helm of the Socialist Workers Party in 2000, in the wake of a disastrous election for the party. That year, the Socialists allied themselves with the Communists, known as the United Left, but for the first time since Franco's death in 1975, the Socialists and the United Left together did not win a majority of Spanish votes. In the wake of that defeat, Zapatero pledged to follow a "Nueva Via," or New Way, rhetorically aligning himself with the "New Democrats" of Bill Clinton, the "Third Way" of Tony Blair, and the "New Middle" of Gerhard Schr?der. He would navigate between market fundamentalism and state socialism. The clear message: The era of big socialism is over.

To American ears, that sounds ridiculous. Of course it's over. But to the European left it's not so simple. For example, it wasn't until 1995 that Tony Blair convinced the British Labor Party to change Clause Four of its constitution, which had bound the party to pursue "the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange." In other words, to abolish capitalism. To old Labor loyalists, Clause Four was like the Human Life Amendment in the Republican Party platform, which would amend the U.S. Constitution to ban abortion. They knew their party wouldn't do anything about it if it took power, but they liked having it there as a statement of values. In One Hundred Years of Socialism, the historian Donald Sassoon notes that over the course of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, European socialists went from wanting to get rid of capitalism to declaring "that they were the ideal managers of it."

But Zapatero, Blair, and Schr?der are taking this a step further: They're dropping much of the socialist project of economic interventionism. The vestige of socialism they cling to is the commitment to a strong social safety net that can balance the inequities of unbridled capitalism. Schr?der may be going the furthest: He's trying to cut Germany's welfare state in order to save it. (Americans might be amused that some Germans are outraged because they now pay $12.40 each time they visit the doctor.) Zapatero's shift toward market economics is understandable: He has to live up to the stellar performance of his predecessor. As the Wall Street Journal Europe noted this week, during Jos? Maria Aznar's eight years as Spain's prime minister, unemployment dropped from 20 percent to 11 percent, and the country created 40 percent of the European Union's new jobs, 4.2 million of them. During the Socialists' 20-year reign from 1976 to 1996, the country's job growth netted out at zero.

Of course, European socialists have long coexisted with capitalism, as the historian Sassoon has argued. Although they long believed that capitalism would wither away, socialist parties in Western Europe have contented themselves with the short-run goal of making the current economic system a more just one. As Paul Berman once put it the New York Times, socialism "has modestly shriveled into what it always should have been: an ethical orientation, not an economic how-to guide."


Chris Suellentrop is Slate's deputy Washington bureau chief. You can e-mail him at suellentrop@slate.com.