Shots Across the Bow

So let me get this straight. Our wonderful Congresscritters are attempting to pass a law that requires equal media time for conservative and liberal programming. Leaving aside the insurmountable obstacle of determining what content is liberal and what is conservative (According to the Kos kiddies, the New York Times is a conservative rag.) and the equally insurmountable obstacle of weighting that content (Is a show that promotes awareness of global warming the equivalent of a show profiling successes in Iraq? Or should one be weighted as stronger than the other?) and the equally insurmountable obstacle of determining how to calculate equal time over multiple broadcast formats (TV has pictures as well as sound so 1 minute of TV should equal at least 5 minutes of radio) isn't it a fundamentally unamerican approach to issue sweeping regulations on who gets to say what and when?

Isn't it odd that the same folks who scream about government censorship when a preacher suggests that maybe bloody mutilations and graphic sexual encounters shouldn't be on TV when kids are watching are silent or solidly behind this significantly larger curtailment of our Constitutional freedoms?

Not to keep beating a dead donkey, but don't Democrats ever get tired of their own hypocrisy?

I'm just wondering if they will extend the "Fairness Doctrine" to all media, or just the ones where conservatives dominate? Will we see a Blogging Fairness Doctrine? Will Randy Neal be forced to open his doors to, gasp, the dreaded conservatives? Oh the horror!

Out of curiosity, how will this new doctrine be enforced? Will we be paying people to listen to the radio with stop watches, timing conservative and liberal content? What about libertarian content? Will that be null space? It might as well be since nobody listens to us anyway. What about Green Party ideology? Who will that count against?

Just a side thought, but even though the short term effect will be to limit the ability of conservatives to speak, won't the long term effect be to completely crush the ability of a third party to develop? If all the air time is split between the big two, there won't be anything left for anybody else, will there?

More protection for the incumbents...

So, Republicans don't want us to talk about sex and Democrats don't want us to talk about politics; I guess all we can talk about is the weather.

Hot out there today, isn't it?

I have to claim some amount of ignorance, but the fairness doctrine was in place for a long time and was only relatively recently abolished. I assume that it worked fine.

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