Really, really, really bad idea!

Two news stories to make you tremble for the future:

1. Today's WashPost reports that the audience of National Public Radio, the tax-funded crapper-on-Christianity-and-all-things-Republican, GREW last year, reaching record ratings.

The audience for NPR's daily news programs, including "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," reached a record last year, driven by widespread interest in the presidential election, and the general decline of radio news elsewhere. Washington-based NPR will release new figures to its stations today showing that the cumulative audience for its daily news programs hit 20.9 million a week, a 9 percent increase over the previous year.

2. Add to that the following proposal from one of our giveaway-hungry Congresscritters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.

"This may not be the optimal choice for some major newspapers or corporate media chains but it should be an option for many newspapers that are struggling to stay afloat," said Senator Benjamin Cardin.

And what perchance does THIS mean?

Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements.

The Honorable Senator Cardin is playing DC's favorite sport, horsehockey. This would do nothing of the sort. It would freeze forever--at public expense --an editorial outlook with a business and production model that was obsolete the day that the PC modem was invented. It is nothing more than a government subsidy for those who would politically prostitute themselves to the Democrats (which is the very definition of 'press neutrality' and 'no political endorsements'). It is a government payoff to Democrat party propagandists.

It is totalitarian in outlook, for it forces ME, a pro life Republican, to underwrite with MY TAX DOLLARS a communications structure inimicable to all I believe in, at gunpoint.

(It works like this: They stop taxing newsbusinesses. Instead they increase MY taxes. I refuse to pay the higher taxes. They send a cop to arrest me for tax evasion. I attempt to avoid arrest. The cop shoots me. I die. So: Pay for tomorrow's Free Press or it's curtains for you, Dad!*)

And no, it is not like the tax break churches get, for churches have ALWAYS been tax exempt. Not so newspapers.

Furthermore, it is anachronistic. It is an attempt to force the continued existence of a buggy industry after the invention of the internal combustion engine. It is an attempt to keep metafauna alive on oxygen and life support after the arrival of the Yucatan asteroid.

Dinosaurs they all are. And we are the small mammals that eat the eggs. Once the decision is made to keep them alive, the next move is to obiterate the most obvious threat to their existence: US, on the Web.

To the first story, I say: let NPR do without my tax money for five minutes and then we'll see how well they do.

To the second story: NOT JUST NO BUT HELL NO!

(*To the immortal P.J. O'Rourke, from whom I stole and adapted this paragraph: "We're not worthy! We're not worthy!")