FCC Republicans again attempt to weaken media ownership rule

Blatham,
I have no opinion one way or the other concerning the conversation you reported, it contents or the veracity of the players in it. However the implied criticism of Rupert Murdoch (one of your favorite targets here) coming from the mouth of Ted Turner- and on the subject of media empires - was more amusingly hypocritical than I could quietly endure.

A tad cowardly, that.

Cowardly????!!! In what conceivable way???

Did I fail to engage some fundamental point? Was Ted Turner not the founder of CNN and Turner Broadcasting???? Am I to accept your implied proposition that the liberal media restablishment is, by definition, the norm and that any alternative to it is necessarily revolutionary or conspiratorial??

I'm afraid Bernie that you are so blinded by this cant that you can't see the hilarious hypocrisy involved in it.

You've failed to engage any fundamental point here. What you have done is toss up an ad hominem to avoid address. Ted Turner had a media empire and therefore anything he might say about Rupert Murdoch is unworthy of attention (or even that anything anyone might say about Rupert Murdoch is unworthy of attention). It classically fallacious, george, and it is intellectually undisciplined, and it is cowardly.

Not at all: your prejudice and blindness is showing.

What fundamental point did you raise???? I suppose it is that Rupert Murdoch leads an evil corporatist conspiracy to influuence the Western World. Did it occur to you at all that using the story of Ted Turner's recollection of a supposed conversation with Blair concerning Murdoch would make your point anywhere near as effectively as it very loudly broadcast your own prejudice and hypocrisy on the subject?????

If there is anything cowardly here it is your unwillingness to recognize your gaffe.

I invite you to find any place at any time when I have said something positive about either CNN or Ted Turner.


Go back and re-read perhaps. But let's make it easier. I've made several but let's take two.

First, the tale told by Turner regarding the conversation with Blair. I see no reason why I should discount the story and lots of reasons why I might find it quite truthful. However one might try and sort out the credibility of the story, the magnitude of the claim made is such that attention is clearly due.

Second, I've noted the clearly partisan nature of the FCC chair's prior positions and activities.

I think "cowardly" is a bit unseemly my dears.

Still- trading assertions is the American way it seems, from left to right, from rich to poor, from north to south, from east to west and from the X chromo to the Y one.

Whether that is the source of American greatness rather than grabbing an unspoilt wilderness of gigantic magnitude and applying European science to it is a debatable proposition.

When I was a lad just three-foot-three
Certain questions occurred to me,
So I asked me father quite seriously
To tell me the story 'bout the bird and bee.
He stammered and he stuttered pathetically
And this is what he said to me.

He said, "The woman piaba and the man piaba
and the Ton Ton call baka lemon grass,
The lily root, gully root, belly root uhmm,
And the famous grandy scratch scratch.

It was clear as mud but it covered the ground
And the confusion made the brain go 'round.
I went and ask a good friend of mine,
Known to the world as Albert Einstein.
He said "Son, from the beginning of time and creativity
There existed the force of relativity
Pi r square and minus ten is rooted only when
The solar system in one light year
Make the Hayden planetarium disappear
So if Mt Everest doesn't move
I am positive that it will prove

That the woman piaba and the man piaba
And the Ton Ton call baka lemon grass,
The lily root, gully root, belly root uhmm,
And the famous grandy scratch scratch.

It was clear as mud but it covered the ground
And the confusion made the brain go 'round.
I grabbed a boat and went abroad
In Baden Baden asked Sigmund Freud
He said "Son, from your sad face remove the grouch
Put the body down up on the couch
I can see from your frustration a neurotic sublimation
Hey love and hate is psychosomatic
Your Rorsach shows that you're a peri patatic
It all started with a broken sibling
In the words of the famous Herr Jacoplin

That the woman piaba and the man piaba
And the Ton Ton call baka lemon grass,
The lily root, gully root, belly root uhmm,
And the famous grandy scratch scratch.

Well I traveled far and I traveled wide
And I don't even have me self a bride
All the great men upon this earth
Have confused me since my birth
I've been over land and been over sea
Trying to find answer 'bout the bird and bee
But now that I am ninety three
I don't give a darn you see

If the woman piaba and the man piaba
And the Ton Ton call baka lemon grass,
The lily root, gully root, belly root uhmm,
And the famous grandy scratch scratch.

Excellent.

Wasn't Dylan's first recording accompanying Harry Belafonte on harmonica?

I'm probably wrong but I do believe Dylan's first recording was with Rick Von Schmidt and Dick Farina when Dylan used the name "Blind Boy Grunt"

Yeah- I have some of that somewhere I think. I expect he recorded up in Hibbing. And he did one in a young lady's flat in Minneapolis. When he was but a minstrel.

She said later that he told her to look after the tape because it would be worth a lot of money one day. He knew then.

There's nobody to touch him dys and don't let anybody tell you different.

He was the teacher you never had.

No, no he wasn't. He was an is an artist, composer and musician, I can walk, anytime, around the block. I don't need no teacher, I only need to learn.

Dylan's first paid performance was in Central City Colorado and he was fired the second night so he went down the road to Denver where he spent a few weeks hanging out at the Denver Folklore Center (which still exists but in a different building) A picture of the original Folklore Center;

The Mountie Wrote:






...classic

Yeah--it's not bad. I'll give credit where it's due.

dys wrote-



With a small dog licking your face?

I can't agree with that dys. I can see it as a sort of mystical dream but it is impossible to do.

Surely something hit you from behind. It did me,

Dylan has many teachers.

I have no opinion concerning the veracity of the quote. However I do know that Ted Turner himself has invested heavily in and created media enterprises and used them to advance his own political views. I found it rather odd that anyone would use him to vocalize the same accusation against Murdoch. More than a hint of blatant hypocrisy there - a laughable case of the liberal pot calling the conservative kettle black.

Second, there were many reasons for Blair's ascent to power. I believe his actions in inducing the British Labor Party to abandon its utterly discredited Trades union identity was the chief reason for his victory, and not the machinations of Rupert Murdoch. They may well have helped, but to ignore the other factors is simply to ignore history.


The current dispite within the FCC is quite partison on both sides. No one argues that the current rules aren't anachronistic - they harken back to an era in which there was intense competition in most U.S. cities between multiple newspapers and a wide open field for investment in the then new TV industry. Both sides of this question have changed in profound ways, and the need for reform is now clear. The struggle however to define precisely how the reform will take place is intense and thoroughly partisan on both sides. In generall I prefer less restrictive regulation of private activity to more. Your definition of partisan appears to be limited to things you oppose.

George wrote-



Who says so? Camp beds on the night shift is not discreditable. It's a jolly good idea. You can get another job during the day and thus have more money with which to have one's genes selected in, as the anti-IDers euphemistically call it as befits puritanical gobshites. Nor is "feather bedding".

You're a rate buster George. A closet feminist.

Mrs Thatcher put a stop to all that nonsense eh? Now women are all on medication of one sort or another.

Rate & union buster perhaps. However, I'm no feminist, closet or otherwise.

Mrs. Thatcher did indeed blunt an otherwise runaway trades unions movement in the UK. I believe Mr Blair gave the Labor Party a decade in power by moving beyond the worn out rhetoric of Harold Wilson & Co.