A Quick Thought

An odd and always changing sleep schedule is just about the only consistent thing in my life right now. But it's not necessarily a bad thing. I do my best to take advantage of different waking hours and enjoy them for what they offer. One of my favorite things about being awake this early in the morning is watching the news networks start their political coverage at 5 am. Yes 5 am!!! I'm a diehard political junkie and even I don't want to know what's going on in politics at 5 am. Give me game scores, jokes, and water skiing squirrels!

Sigh.

Sadly, I crave the silly, non-essential stories because the media have long since abandoned covering pertinent issues in a responsible and rational manner. After all, they have 24 hours of television to fill every day. For the past three days I've watched MSNBC's Morning Joe (Fox News isn't an option and the CNN people don't randomly joke about being drunk) and they've been obsessing about President Obama's weekend media blitz on five Sunday morning talk shows and the Letterman program on Monday night. The consensus on Morning Joe: President Obama is wasting his political capital by overexposing himself.

Jokes about exposure aside, I really just want to observe aloud that there is no winning with the media these days. (President Bush rarely spoke to the people and that too was criticized) It's been true for a long time that the weekly stories in politics are set and controlled by what is said on Sunday mornings. That means a strong communications strategy will effectively use Sunday newspaper stories and popular surrogates on the morning talk shows. So when lies and distortions (death panels anyone?) have made it impossible for a fair and honest debate about health care reform to take place, it makes sense for the president to put himself out there in order to re-establish the facts by presenting his argument directly to the voters.

Unfortunately, rather than focus on the President's message, the pundits have decided it is necessary to obsess about the number of interviews the President gave one weekend in mid-September. When the President speaks to the people it is far more important to analyze his words than to debate the process story. There is a time and place to discuss new political strategies in this constantly changing media environment, but it should be kept separate from policy.

"Hey man, could you grab that end?"

The Official White House Photo Stream is quite fascinating.

I'm working on some more in depth articles for you. Hopefully I'll start turning out some content next week. Until then, enjoy the photos!

El Paso

Melissa del Bosque writes a fantastic article in The Texas Observer about the real situation at the El Paso/Juarez border. I won't inject my own opinion on this item except to say that it's a great moment to be considering this issue, given President Obama's visit with Mexican President Calderon.

FCC finally decides to do its job

It looks like the FCC has finally taken it upon themselves to start a National Broadband Plan. For years we've been lacking in basic broadband coverage and broadband quality (speed speed speed). [Wired Article]

Australia already has a huge plan to spend almost double we will. It's about time we kick some aussie ass. Obama has earmarked up to $7.2 billion after it was found that we were ranked 17 in broadband penetration out of the entire world!

Hopefully this will somehow simultaneously kill Time Warner's monopolistic practice of tiered pricing. I would LOVE to see 100mbps connections straight into residential houses which would give us streaming HD media on demand. We'd no longer need 5 different connections to our house (phone, cable, internet, satellite, plumbing [okay we may need this one still but I'm hoping the internet solves that]).