PhotoDude.com

Thu. Oct 18, 2007

What Country Is This?

I woke up this morning, and within ten minutes of looking over the news, I wondered just what country I had woken up in.

First I read that “Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program.”

Bipartisan agreement about domestic spying. That’s what America is about. Right?

Then I read the president is simultaneously joking about staying in power, and talking about World War III.

Meanwhile, “the United Nations took up a resolution calling for the abolition of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for children and young teenagers. The vote was 185 to 1, with the United States the lone dissenter.”

In a world filled with corrupt autocratic governments, the US was the lone dissenter over jailing minors with no chance of parole?

And in US business, “The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.”

Because it’s not like Cox Communications has operated the only newspaper in Atlanta, as well as WSB-TV, and WSB-AM & FM, for 33 years since that ownership rule first went into effect.

Because we just don’t have enough concentration of media ownership. It would be great if we could get it down to just two or three companies owning all of the newspapers, TV stations, and radio stations in this country. Then they could be more easily controlled.

That would be a Good Thing for America. Right? Like domestic surveillance and kids in jail with no possibility of parole?

That’s what America is about. Right?