Holy (Fleeting Expletive)!
Alright, I've got a lot to talk about and I'm gonna whip through it all as quickly as I can (which if you know me means you'll be reading for a while)...
The Supreme Court of the United States (I'm in total Comm Law finals mode so I have to make sure I write that correctly) ruled yesterday on the "fleeting expletives" case between Fox and the FCC. Just to recap, the FCC cited Fox (but didn't fine them) for a couple of Billboard Music Awards broadcasts where Cher and Nicole Richie dropped F-bombs. Fox appealed, saying that FCC enforcement of its indecency rules is arbitrary and capricious; in other words, they enforce when they feel like it. Which is completely true. When handing down its rulings for these and the Bono "f---ing brilliant" line at the Golden Globes, the FCC said that any future incidents like this "may well lead to the commencement of license revocation proceedings." This, of course, came right after the Janet Jackson incident at the Super Bowl, when the FCC responded to such an outrageous (and completely unavoidable) situation... by fining radio stations like crazy. No, that's not "arbitrary and capricious"...
The FCC says showing "Saving Private Ryan" unedited is fine due to historical and artistic merit, but somebody randomly slipping up and forgetting decorum is enough to cause possible license revocation? And yes, I know that stations and networks can just fix this with a delay system... but dump buttons malfunction, as I can tell you from experience. No system is fool-proof. Anyway, the FCC had to put its enforcement of other such cases on hold while waiting for the SCOTUS to rule on this.
And the end result... the Supreme Court punted. Oh, they did issue a ruling, that the FCC policy was okay under the Administrative Procedure Act, but the larger First Amendment issue here was sent back to the appeals court for clarification. Which of course means that when the appeals court does that, it'll get appealed right BACK to the Supreme Court. So nothing really was accomplished here. Meanwhile, every TV station in Philadelphia continues to stress out over the possibility that the FCC ultimately wins and these stations get fined out the ying-yang for letting Chase Utley's "World F---ing Champions" line get out on live TV last fall.
And speaking of Pennsylvania... the other huge story of the day yesterday was Sen. Arlen Specter's decision to switch parties and bolt the GOP. He'd finally had enough of the constant attacks from right-wingers any time he strayed from conservative dogma. When he and Maine Sens. Collins and Snowe voted for the Obama stimulus plan, talk radio when crazy. Right-wing action groups promptly promised to run right-wingers against all three in primaries. Apparently, Sen. Specter decided that this was the last straw, and that if he was going to go down, it wasn't going to be because of his failure to be a full-time ideologue. While I think he should have taken the Jim Jeffords route and gone Independent instead, I don't blame him for doing what he did. He was my senator for 3 years when I lived in PA, and I always liked him better than that self-righteous Rick Santorum.
See, the reason is because I LIKE independent thinkers. I'm a proud moderate and I am really getting SICK of this ideological purge of the Republican Party that has been going on for years but has really ramped up since the last elections. The party leaders (no, not Michael Steele... Rush Limbaugh and his ilk) seem to think that because we ran a moderate (McCain) and lost, we need to get rid of anyone who disagrees at all with conservatives. I will say it once again... if we had run a right-winger against Obama, Obama would have won by a Reagan-like, 49-state landslide. These people really think that kicking all moderates out will somehow help them in the end, when all it is doing is putting the Republican Party on the verge of insignificance. For all the talk about liberal attempts to silence dissent in this country, the fact that GOP bigwigs won't allow dissent in THEIR OWN PARTY is hypocrisy of the highest order.
This is NOT what people went out and had tea parties over a couple weeks ago. They were protesting Democrats AND Republicans, they were saying nobody represents us because everyone is so concerned with scoring political points. Right-wingers care as much about politics and power as left-wingers do, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Of course, the participants in these protests were lampooned as tools of rich Republicans or worse, but that's another issue for another time. The point is a lot of us in this country think that most elected officials think that politics is more important than finding solutions, and this is just one more example. Many are angling for a third-party that actually cares about what the people want, and if that party could come about before 2012, I think what we might end up with is the REPUBLICANS as the 3rd-place party. I am a dues-paying member of the RNC, and I really think that the only thing that keeps me in the party is the closed primary system that wouldn't allow me to have a say in the presidential nomination process if I bolted. That's kinda sad, actually...
Oh, and speaking of sad... this whole swine flu panic is RIDICULOUS. A local school district has shut down until Monday because a student has swine flu. All high school sports in Texas are canceled. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that tonight kids all over Central New York are thinking up credible "I may have swine flu" stories so they can shut their schools down for several days. Hell, maybe I can get out of having to finish my thesis if I tell someone at SU that I have a third cousin I've never met who had a bad coughing fit last night. Folks, SETTLE DOWN! It's getting to the point where people are going to freak if someone next to them starts coughing. Until I see true evidence to the contrary, this is just SARS and bird flu all over again. It'll all be over in a couple weeks and won't end up being a big deal. 36,000 people die each year from regular flu in the U.S. and nobody bats an eyelash. Do you really think that closing whole school districts is going to do anything? Not unless you confine every kid in the district to their home for the weekend. Seriously people, CHILL OUT!
OK, I'm done... there, that wasn't so bad, was it?
The Supreme Court of the United States (I'm in total Comm Law finals mode so I have to make sure I write that correctly) ruled yesterday on the "fleeting expletives" case between Fox and the FCC. Just to recap, the FCC cited Fox (but didn't fine them) for a couple of Billboard Music Awards broadcasts where Cher and Nicole Richie dropped F-bombs. Fox appealed, saying that FCC enforcement of its indecency rules is arbitrary and capricious; in other words, they enforce when they feel like it. Which is completely true. When handing down its rulings for these and the Bono "f---ing brilliant" line at the Golden Globes, the FCC said that any future incidents like this "may well lead to the commencement of license revocation proceedings." This, of course, came right after the Janet Jackson incident at the Super Bowl, when the FCC responded to such an outrageous (and completely unavoidable) situation... by fining radio stations like crazy. No, that's not "arbitrary and capricious"...
The FCC says showing "Saving Private Ryan" unedited is fine due to historical and artistic merit, but somebody randomly slipping up and forgetting decorum is enough to cause possible license revocation? And yes, I know that stations and networks can just fix this with a delay system... but dump buttons malfunction, as I can tell you from experience. No system is fool-proof. Anyway, the FCC had to put its enforcement of other such cases on hold while waiting for the SCOTUS to rule on this.
And the end result... the Supreme Court punted. Oh, they did issue a ruling, that the FCC policy was okay under the Administrative Procedure Act, but the larger First Amendment issue here was sent back to the appeals court for clarification. Which of course means that when the appeals court does that, it'll get appealed right BACK to the Supreme Court. So nothing really was accomplished here. Meanwhile, every TV station in Philadelphia continues to stress out over the possibility that the FCC ultimately wins and these stations get fined out the ying-yang for letting Chase Utley's "World F---ing Champions" line get out on live TV last fall.
And speaking of Pennsylvania... the other huge story of the day yesterday was Sen. Arlen Specter's decision to switch parties and bolt the GOP. He'd finally had enough of the constant attacks from right-wingers any time he strayed from conservative dogma. When he and Maine Sens. Collins and Snowe voted for the Obama stimulus plan, talk radio when crazy. Right-wing action groups promptly promised to run right-wingers against all three in primaries. Apparently, Sen. Specter decided that this was the last straw, and that if he was going to go down, it wasn't going to be because of his failure to be a full-time ideologue. While I think he should have taken the Jim Jeffords route and gone Independent instead, I don't blame him for doing what he did. He was my senator for 3 years when I lived in PA, and I always liked him better than that self-righteous Rick Santorum.
See, the reason is because I LIKE independent thinkers. I'm a proud moderate and I am really getting SICK of this ideological purge of the Republican Party that has been going on for years but has really ramped up since the last elections. The party leaders (no, not Michael Steele... Rush Limbaugh and his ilk) seem to think that because we ran a moderate (McCain) and lost, we need to get rid of anyone who disagrees at all with conservatives. I will say it once again... if we had run a right-winger against Obama, Obama would have won by a Reagan-like, 49-state landslide. These people really think that kicking all moderates out will somehow help them in the end, when all it is doing is putting the Republican Party on the verge of insignificance. For all the talk about liberal attempts to silence dissent in this country, the fact that GOP bigwigs won't allow dissent in THEIR OWN PARTY is hypocrisy of the highest order.
This is NOT what people went out and had tea parties over a couple weeks ago. They were protesting Democrats AND Republicans, they were saying nobody represents us because everyone is so concerned with scoring political points. Right-wingers care as much about politics and power as left-wingers do, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Of course, the participants in these protests were lampooned as tools of rich Republicans or worse, but that's another issue for another time. The point is a lot of us in this country think that most elected officials think that politics is more important than finding solutions, and this is just one more example. Many are angling for a third-party that actually cares about what the people want, and if that party could come about before 2012, I think what we might end up with is the REPUBLICANS as the 3rd-place party. I am a dues-paying member of the RNC, and I really think that the only thing that keeps me in the party is the closed primary system that wouldn't allow me to have a say in the presidential nomination process if I bolted. That's kinda sad, actually...
Oh, and speaking of sad... this whole swine flu panic is RIDICULOUS. A local school district has shut down until Monday because a student has swine flu. All high school sports in Texas are canceled. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that tonight kids all over Central New York are thinking up credible "I may have swine flu" stories so they can shut their schools down for several days. Hell, maybe I can get out of having to finish my thesis if I tell someone at SU that I have a third cousin I've never met who had a bad coughing fit last night. Folks, SETTLE DOWN! It's getting to the point where people are going to freak if someone next to them starts coughing. Until I see true evidence to the contrary, this is just SARS and bird flu all over again. It'll all be over in a couple weeks and won't end up being a big deal. 36,000 people die each year from regular flu in the U.S. and nobody bats an eyelash. Do you really think that closing whole school districts is going to do anything? Not unless you confine every kid in the district to their home for the weekend. Seriously people, CHILL OUT!
OK, I'm done... there, that wasn't so bad, was it?
Labels: politics, radio, swine flu, television
posted by Dave | 8:52 PM
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