May 2008

Rep Rosa Delauro (D-CT) and 40 other Members of Congress are calling on the Pentagon’s Inspector General to probe whether the Department of Defense went too far in trying to sway the opinions of military analysts on network and cable TV shows in behalf of the Iraq war in ways that may have been illegal. They called the Pentagon effort an “unethical, and potentially illegal, propaganda campaign aimed at deliberately misleading the American public.”
http://www.tvweek.com/news/2008/05/congressmen_urge_probe_of_defe.php
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Pentagon Used Military Analysts to Deliver Message
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90111757

[Commentary] Barack Obama's campaign has spent more than $70 million to air more than 121,000 campaign ads. But the ads starring Obama that his campaign is not paying for are attracting the most attention. Recently, we have seen candidates, interest groups and a state political party all using Obama's quotes, pastor and likeness in an attempt to attack their opponents. This is nothing new. As long as there have been politicians, they've tried to link their opponents, in a game of guilt by association, to identifiable and polarizing political figures. What this trend shows is that the "movement" atmosphere that once surrounded Obama and made him appear untouchable has now seemingly disappeared, at least in some parts of the country. Conservative candidates, the Republican party and right-wing interest groups are not going to hesitate to use Obama's likeness as a way to denounce and triangulate Democratic opponents. This may be something Democratic super delegates consider when deciding which candidate to support. Of course, the bad news for John McCain and the Republicans is that Democrats will still have Bush and Cheney to counter with in ads this Fall.
http://adage.com/campaigntrail/post?article_id=126802

A divided Federal Communications Commission has put a cap on Universal Service Fund (USF) payouts, but even the agency's majority calls it a stop-gap measure for a program in serious trouble. The cap on USF subsidies will exempt telecommunications providers operating on tribal lands in the contiguous United States and in Alaska Native regions. The FCC says that the ceiling will remain in place only until the agency enacts far reaching reforms on the USF program. But it is unclear when that will happen, given the chaotic nature of the Commission's decision making process on this issue. Most analysts agree that the USF has to move from subsidizing conventional telephone service to helping extend broadband use to the nation's low-income and rural consumers. The Benton Foundation, among other groups, has been pushing this issue for some time. The nonprofit argues that a general transition to VoIP telephony would save consumers billions of dollars in the long and even short run. Benton calls for the FCC to establish a five-year timetable from analog to digital telephony—"with a hard analog shut off date." This would be similar to the impending DTV transition deadline of February 17, 2009.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080504-fewer-phones-more-broadban...

[Commentary] What do conservatives have against Network Neutrality? Most congressional Republicans oppose the idea of giving consumers freedom on the Internet. They take shelter in their anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric, preferring to allow Internet freedom to apply to the corporations which own the networks connecting the Internet to consumers, rather than to consumers themselves. There could, of course, be a larger discussion about the meaning of “conservative” and Republican, and whether the two are synonymous. At the heart of the opposition is the “mythology of the market,” that once government “got out of the way,” new technologies emerged. The argument against Net Neutrality really goes off-track when it gets into the nature of private property, the state of competition, and the effect of regulation. That’s more than one track to be thrown off of, so it’s quite the disaster scene. We may need CSI: Telecom to sort it all out.
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1545
http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1544