THE BLOGGING WEB IS SIMPLY THE OLD PAMPHLETEERING OF THE 1700'S IN MODERN DRESS

Tom Paine didn't get paid for writing "Common Sense", Jay, Hamilton, and Madison didn't get paid for writing the Federalist Papers, the Brits who wrote the Rights of Man ditto. Nobody who wrote anything worthwhile ever got paid until lately. Benjamin Franklin ground out a living as a publisher, some playwrights, and some monks got paid, but until Victor Hugo came along there was no money in it. Rich artists didn't happen. Today a stink is being raised because a man who is paid to write by employer A moonlights somewhere else using the name of his employer and himself. In the course of this moonlighting he writes things his employer finds insulting to his readership, specifically Hispanics. So he is put under control.

Oh.
My.
God.

It's called Life 101: You take their money and you do what they want. It's called a job. Plumbers have them, machinists have them, secretaries have them; everybody has them but the unemployed jerkoffs on the web. (Even I have one) Weintraub, the HERO who got blown off his web site by the Sacramento Bee, has no beef at all. If he wants to shoot off his big mouth all he has to do is quit his cushy job and blog away for no pay; like Tom Paine. Naturally the paper doesn't want their Mexican readers pissed off. They are more than fifty percent of the population up there and do most of the buying of products advertised in the paper. None of the people pissing and moaning on the so-called blogoshpere earn their living writing for a daily newspaper. Weintraub, like the millionaire "artists" in Hollywood, wants to say what he wants; in fact he wants to say things his employer will not run in the paper, and then get paid for it. He got canned. Fuck him. That's life 101, something these pampered writers want nothing to do with.

I shoot off my mouth for no pay. I can say what I want. The true price of Totally Free Speech is you ain't getting paid for it. When Reynolds gets a gig it's because he will write what the employer wants written; same for Rush Limbaugh in the WSJ; or Robert Sheer in the LA Times. Does The Nation print Laura Ingraham? Does the National Review have a column by the late Edward Said? Do any paid writers for any publication write material elsewhere that makes their parent publication look bad? Think a screenwriter writes what the producer doesn't want?

So stop the whining about Weintraub. If he wants Freedom he should get a job as a plumber and write for Free.