Okay, for the record and lest there be any doubts as to my motivations, affiliations, alienations, sublimations, etc., I hereby issue a disclaimer:  I am not now nor have I ever been a journalist nor am I a buddy of Rupert Murdoch nor do I own stock in any Murdoch enterprises, as far as I know.

That said, let’s get real about the constant bashing of FNC, the Fox News Channel, which is (not arguably) the only politically-objective network available on television.  As opposed to the former Clinton News Network, CNN, effectively now the Obama News Network and Ted Turner’s fellow travelers, FNC actually does report and lets its viewers decide.

Sure, FNC has right-of-center leanings but nowhere approaching the left-of-center commitments of CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC and, as opposed to those “news” networks, FNC features a slew of leftist thinkers and commentators.  Try searching for conservatives on the other networks and you would be pushing daisies before you discover more than a handful.

Sure, Fox has the “notorious” Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glen Beck, and Neil Cavuto but it also features lefty notables Geraldo, Juan Williams, Ellis Hennican, Eleanor Clift, Bob Beckel, Susan Estrich, Neil Gabler, Susan Estrich, Alan Colmes, until his departure, and a load of others as balancing guests and commentators.

Fox is as fair and balanced as feasible in a news world significantly, liberally, unfair and imbalanced.

Personally, as a news junkie, I try to catch the interpreted news on as many lib channels as possible, given time and interest restraints and as an effort to keep political enemies even closer than friends.  Such enemies are capable of doing much more damage to my country and should be watched very, very closely.

What brought all this to mind was the recent flap over those tea parties held on April 15th, the day governments annually and gleefully confiscate Americans’ hard earned money as Americans scramble to either scrape up the funds to pay their taxes or revel in their tax refunds. 

The bigger those refunds are, the happier the recipients are.  Those generous taxpayers give nary a thought to the fact that they are being refunded monies they had loaned to various levels of government for up to a year, interest free. 

The collective public wisdom of those generous citizens is that their returns represent forced savings.  The conventional governmental wisdom of those various governments is, “Ya gotta love those suckers!”

None of the above is a divergence from the topics at hand, Fox News Channel, those tea parties, and what Ralph Waldo Emerson called taxes, “the price we pay for civilization.”

Emerson wrote a century and a half ago.  If he were alive today, that eminent American philosopher most likely would have attached an addendum to his opinion to the effect, ”Wait, hold on now!  I didn’t mean to flush our taxes down sewers!” 

Granted he would have phrased that change more delicately.  No doubt Ralph Waldo would also have admonished his good buddy, Henry David Thoreau, to stop the chit, forget trying to communicate with ants, and go home to a warm bed. 

Ralph didn’t re-phrase and we now have exorbitant, repressive taxation–and good bud Thoreau died of pneumonia after his 2-year sojourn as a camper on Walden Pond, (which is now polluted beyond redemption.) 

But FNC is once again getting a bad rap, a reflection of the ascendancy of the Fox network which now is trashing all the others with more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined in the April ratings: http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/ratings/april_ratings_fnc_beats_cnn_and_msnbc_combined_115179.asp.

So, it’s not unexpected for the libs to be ripping Fox, sort of like the, “Let’s get the big guy!” mentality and that ripping has been in progress for almost as long as FNC has been around.  Monopolies simply despise upstarts.  However, the attacks have evolved into much more than that, as evidenced by the Tea Parties coverage. 

The reactions of the monopolists have become positively visceral as CNN, especially, resorts to outrageous distortions and blatant lies to blast the opposition seemingly in hopes of bringing down the news leader. 

Actually it demonstrates a palpable fear that not only will the CNNers be hitting the unemployment office eventually but that so many Americans are now getting unadulterated news that the lib stranglehold on TV has been ended permanently. One of many reasons is repressive taxation and we all know how Democrats/liberals love taxes. 

Let’s fess up.  No one, not even Ralph Waldo, ever likes paying taxes but what conservatives tend to like is that those taxes be used constitutionally, such as paying for the national defense, roads, etc.  We also would like the feds to read and adhere to the Tenth Amendment, that last of the Bill of Rights demanded by former colonials which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” 

Farcically and pathetically ignored for nearly eighty years,