Greetings all,
Last night I attended the first of two training/prep meetings for the FCC hearing scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday, March 7 at the Broad Street Presbyterian Church, just east of the I-70 bridge on the north side (parking in rear; COTA #16). More details can be found at the website of one of the sponsors, the "other" Free Press: freepress.net

We received informative packets about the FCC and the issues involving media consolidation, the primary focus of this hearing. It is "informal" even though 3 of 5 FCC commissioners will be in attendance, the first for Commissioner McDowell, a Republican. The others have included only the Democrat appointees but because Columbus had a grandparented exception put in place (so that the Dispatch, TV, and radio could be owned by same people), we are a unique place to discuss the limited and limiting perspectives of limited, focused ownership. This coupled with issues of competition and advertising as well as pushing out local news, even in emergencies as some communities have reported.

After the recent convictions of two Cuyahoga County Board of Election workers for felony recount tampering, Republican County Prosecutor Robert Batchelor is stonewalling efforts to investigate similar well-documented charges in Coshocton County, Ohio.

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (BOE) third-ranking employee and an assistant manager were each convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct and a misdemeanor count of failing to perform their duties during the 2004 recount. The convictions stemmed from the secret pre-counting of precincts prior to the lawfully required open recount. The convicted election workers only allowed the pre-counted precincts that matched the official results to be used in the recount. This caused the special prosecutor to tell the jury that the election recount was "rigged" in Cuyahoga.

Testimony and eyewitness reports document similar activity in several Ohio counties regarding the illegal rigging of the 2004 recount.

Charlie Crist, Florida's new Republican governor, will win points with voters across the nation for his recent proposal to abandon touch-screen voting machines. Florida's repudiation of the widely mistrusted machines could hasten an across-the-board abandonment — and thereby renew Americans' faith in the integrity of the vote.

Ever since the presidential election of 2000, Florida has been the poster child for controversial ballot counts. After the dispute was resolved, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, providing funds to replace outdated voting equipment.

Florida used its share to mothball the punch-card machines that had caused so many problems. But in many large counties, it replaced them with touch-screen systems that leave no paper trail. The drawbacks of these machines were dramatically illustrated last fall by a close congressional race in Sarasota, where 18,000 votes went unrecorded. The losing candidate, Democrat Christine Jennings, is pressing a challenge in court.

As war wages on in the Middle East, there's a heated battle on Capitol Hill over which political party's proposals to continue the war are more PRO-TROOP.  There's a raging debate over exactly what set of futile recommendations to the dictator living in the Vice President's mansion on Massachusetts Avenue amounts to the greatest PRO or ANTI TROOP agenda.

Leading contestants are:

1.-a Republican proposal to give Cheney and Bush another $93 billion off the books for the war, no questions asked.

2.-a Democratic proposal to give Cheney and Bush another $93 billion off the books for the war but reauthorize the war with new lies in place of the old ones and/or ask the President to issue a public statement whenever he sends troops to Iraq without proper equipment or training, but not actually DO anything if the President chooses not to make such a public statement.

The New York Times and CBS News recently polled the US public:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/03022007_poll.pdf

After a long list of questions that confused any distinction between health care and health coverage, the New York Times/CBS asked:

"Do you think it would be fair or unfair for the government in Washington to require all Americans to participate in a national health care plan, funded by taxpayers?"

By 48 to 43 percent, respondents said: unfair.  But a strong majority had already said they thought it was very important for the government to cover everyone, even if it meant raising taxes.  What was seen as unfair here, for some people, was almost certainly the national health care plan, which sounds like something more than a national health coverage plan.  In fact it sounds like Walter Reed Hospital.

The New York Times article reporting on the poll quoted one respondent who obviously thought national health care, not just coverage, was being discussed: