I'm doing everything I can to fight off a summer cold. If I've got to have a cold, I'd almost prefer it at a time when the temperature wasn't hovering around "blast furnace" and the humidity wasn't "sub-tropical rain forest".
Of course, there's me with mildly tender sinuses. Duncan has been hacking up half a lung for a week, now battling something that looks not unlike bronchitis. If you haven't figured it out, she's about ten times tougher than I am.
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A must-see picture: Susan Rice, Britain's Cameron, France's Sarkozy, and President Obama are thanked by the Libyan people.
Somewhere in an undisclosed location, in a deep, dark, underground bunker, sulking in a high, wing-backed chair, stroking a white cat is a furious Dick Cheney, enraged to see what it means to actually be greeted as liberators.
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Senator Nelson puts Syria in the crosshairs.
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Back in November 2008, I debated a good guy named Jim Barrens at the Suncoast Tiger Bay on the Fairness Doctrine and equal time. I figured it was a good combination of Jim's considerable talent (advocating for the Doctrine), and my very good luck that it ended up pretty much being a draw -- no one asked too touch a question of us, which is kind of how they measure the outcome of those things at Tiger Bay.
As I said at Tiger Bay back in '08, it's not so much that I don't believe in the Fairness Doctrine -- it's just that you don't really need it anymore. Apparently, the FCC and the Obama Administration agreed with me.
The FCC gave the coup de grace to the fairness doctrine Monday as the commission axed more than 80 media industry rules.
Earlier this summer FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski agreed to erase the post WWII-era rule, but the action Monday puts the last nail into the coffin for the regulation that sought to ensure discussion over the airwaves of controversial issues did not exclude any particular point of view. A broadcaster that violated the rule risked losing its license.
While the commission voted in 1987 to do away with the rule — a legacy to a time when broadcasting was a much more dominant voice than it is today — the language implementing it was never removed. The move Monday, once published in the federal register, effectively erases the rule.
Monday’s move is part of the commission’s response to a White House executive order directing a “government-wide review of regulations already on the books” designed to eliminate unnecessary regulations.
Hm, "designed to eliminate unnecessary regulations..." Who do I know that'll appreciate that one?
Hey, I know! Quick! Someone call Jordan Raynor!
Hey, Jordan! Tell you what: I'll blog about how the Obama Administration is actually cutting regulations, you and your group conjure up some silly nonsense about how Obama's Liberal Jack-Booted Thugs are coming to tax and regulate your business to death, and then you pay me nothing to do it.
Sounds fair and balanced to me.
Oh, the reason I said you don't need the Fairness Doctrine is because it's a rule for an outmoded form of communication. Think about it:
It was 1927, and a guy named Philo T. Farnsworth transmitted the first successful electronic TV images. The National Broadcasting Corporation started up in New York City. It was 1931, just four years later. Ten years after that, the FCC issued its first ten commercial TV licenses, and eight years after that, in 1949 -- the same year the FCC introduced the Fairness Doctrine -- there were nearly 3,000 radio stations and nearly 100 TV stations.
Fast-forward to 1989, and there are 10,000 radio stations and 1,400 TV stations in America.
Today there are more than 1,479 employees of Sirius XM Satellite Radio — more employees at one radio station than there were TV stations in 1989, the year I graduated high school. They broadcast to more than 18 million subscribers.
Now about how we communicate, how we get our news and information.
Today, there are more than 255 million websites and 1.97 billion Internet users worldwide. More than 2 billion videos are played on YouTube every day. The photosharing site Flickr hosts more than five billion pictures. There are more than 750 million active Facebook users. Twitter has 175 million active accounts.
No longer do you rely on a simple choice between NBC, CBS, or ABC for your TV news (as I did growing up).
And you know what's funny? There's probably no one who knows this stuff better than Jordan Raynor.
(FYI, if some of this looks familiar, I posted a version of it at a blog for work, here).
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BREAKING NEWS!!!
ALERT! ALERT! FRIGGIN' ALERT, GODDAMIT!
Crazy siren! Flashing light! Red, blue, red, blue, red, blue!
Okay. Everyone, try to stay cool. Stay. Cool. This is a big goddam deal.
Huge news. Huge. This will be the biggest thing, ever.
Ever.
Ev. Er.
Okay. Whoo, boy. Here we go.
Paul Ryan is still not running for president. Still.
My, God. This totally changes the game.
And now you've forced me to do this:
May easy listening sensation Lionel Ritchie have mercy on your poor, pathetic soul.
I hate being sick.
-- More later --
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