Congress May Overturn FCC's Media Consolidation Plan

Spril writes "A congressional committee voted yesterday to prevent the FCC from allowing even more consolidation of the media industry. The original ruling was covered on Slashdot. The committee attached the pro-consumer proposal to a bill funding the Justice and State departments for 2004. But the Bush administration has threatened to veto the funding because they support ever-larger corporations owning ever-bigger chunks of the spectrum that theoretically belongs to the public. Clear Channel may need to cough up some more money for their lobbyists."

Comments

148 dead in Iraq

[Anonymous Coward]

...and counting. Good thing Dubya 'restored dignity to the White House', eh?

Wake up, folks, do we want another 4 years of this (lies and warmongering)?

More information at the FCC website

[Anonymous Coward]

At the official FCC press release site

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Try 300,000 dead in Iraq

[Anonymous Coward]

Iraq civilians, brutally murdered by Saddam Hussein and buried in mass graves. This is the guy you are supporting?

Re:Try 300,000 dead in Iraq

[Anonymous Coward]

I think 300 000 is how many civilians were killed by bombing and sanctions starting from Gulf war 1, up to the present day. And that was done by the USA.

Re:Try 300,000 dead in Iraq

[eln]

Disagreeing with George W. Bush does not automatically suggest you support Saddam Hussein.

Despite what Bush would have you believe, the world is not just black and white, good and evil.

Was Saddam a brutal dictator? Absolutely. That doesn't, however, make the way Bush is handling things a good thing. He lied to the American people to get support for the war, and he went in without sufficient resources to occupy a country the size of Iraq.

Why on Earth would anyone think they could occupy a country the size of Iraq with only 250,000 troops when it took twice that number just to secure a much much smaller country (Kuwait) that was friendly to the United States?

The world is many shades of gray, and nothing is ever purely good or purely evil. The sooner you realize that, the better off you'll be.

Re:Try 300,000 dead in Iraq

[Anonymous Coward]

Jackass. Name one lie Bush told. Just one. That thing about Niger doesn't count. He sais the Brits had intel that said Saddam was trying to acquire uranium from Niger. The Brits did, in fact, have intel that said Saddam was trying to acquire uranium from Niger.

Yes, a forged document that indicated that same thing was found. But, the Brits stand by their statement, and site independant evidence. I could write a document that says "the sky is blue" and sign it "Albert Einstein." I'm not Einstein...does that mean the sky is not blue?

You have no evidence Bush ever told a lie. Even if you did...Bush gave 100 reasons to go to war...if it turns out one was based on misinformation, so what? That doesn't invalidate the other 99.

You're playing politics, in the worst way. The Democrats are so desperate for anything...anything at all they can use against Bush, that they've even latched onto this tiniest of threads. Find another issue...this dog won't hunt.

Yes, the world is shades of gray, and there is no pure good and no pure evil. No pure black and no pure white. Fools like you, though, see only one shade of gray. You assume everything is equal. The truth is that Bush is mostly good, and Saddam was almost all evil, but in your twisted world view, they're the same. That's your mistake, that's the partisan democrats' mistake, and that's why you'll lose in 2004.

MOD PARENT UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

You failed it the first time, but that time it worked! Good job!

envy

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you are a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone speaks out against the war in Iraq, and they're 'supporting Hussein'? That totally fucking ridiculous. Nice fascist attitude. Are you going to help design the new pro-Bush armband? Because we know anyone who dares speak out against the president is a traitor who should be shot.

Bush lied to the world. He said that Hussein was an imminent threat, yet no evidence has been found to support that.

148 Americans are dead in combat, thousands of innocent bystanding Iragis are dead from our bombs, something like $60 billion has been spent, with another ~$4 billion a month going out, with no end in sight, is it worth? Do you feel safer? I don't, I feel exactly the same as I did before the war started in Iraq.

Will the Iraqi people be better off? I though so at first, but now I'm not so sure. That wasn't the reason we went in, though, it was because he was supposedly an imminent threat. Yet the evidence to support this "darn good information" is nowhere to be found.

And are we really going to clean up all the dictators around the world? I hope not, it's not our job, and we can't afford it, either in dollars or in lives.

Yeah, I support Hussein, right. Are you really that stupid?

Re:Wow, you are a tool

[CrowScape]

Um, can you find me the quote where Bush said Saddam was an "imminent threat", or are you just parroting what the media tells you? If I recall, Bush said that we can no longer wait until a state becomes an imminent threat before we act. And I would also like to see the documents you have that show Bush lied. All I've been hearing are quotes that have been horribly paraphrased to make it seem like Bush lied. This is what happens when people don't listen and just hear what they want to hear. If Bush had you thinking Saddam was an imminent threat, it's your own damn fault for not paying attention.

Re:Wow, you are a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

"We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century ... They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."

- President William Jefferson Clinton
- February 1998

Re:Wow, you are a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

"The hard fact is that so long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of the region, the security of the world."

-- President William Jefferson Clinton
-- February 1998

Re:Wow, you are a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

The Bush Administrations might not have said "imminent threat", but I know for a fact they said "this is a pre-emptive war".

Let's look at pre-emption for a second:
In order to pre-empt a threat with war, there must be some credible reason to believe that the threat exists and that no other strategies will address it. A threat involves capability and intent. In this case, the Bush administration was not able to show that Iraq has the capability, and no attempt was made to show that it had the intent to attack.

It's all word games and retracted statements anyways....

First week of the war........ the war is because saddam has WMD (phrase of the month)

Second week of war........ all of a sudden, WMD is forgotten mostly, and it's about "Liberation". Name is officially "Operation Iraqi Freedom".

The media tells horror stories about torture chambers, rape chambers, gassing of the kurds, etc.. etc... what they fail to mention is that back when saddam was gassing the kurds, Bush I and company(cheney, rumsfeld) were buddy buddy with iraq, insofar as selling them unconventional weapons systems, or at least the components to build them(read WMD). Not a PEEP of this from any major US media outlet, even the supposed "leftie" CNN. No, to raise such issues would surely be labeled "unpatriotic".

Re:Wow, you are a tool

[CrowScape]

You are entitled to your opinion, and there's obviously nothing I can do to change it, just as there are people who believe the world is flat, despite the satelite photos.

Why is it only ACs are responding?

Oh, well, Clinton said it

[Anonymous Coward]

...so it must be true. Right? Is that what you're saying?

Yep, that Bill Clinton sure was an excellent president, wasn't he?

Re:I'm waiting for the day...

[gantrep]

If you haven't already read Atlas Shrugged,(and you sound like you have) you should. You'd enjoy it I think. Fountainhead is one of my favorite books.

But that's not why we went in

[Anonymous Coward]

We went in because of WMD, because of attempts at nuclear technology, and to make the US safer.

Do you feel safer? I don't. Is it worth $60 billion plus another $4 billion per month, with no end in sight? Is it worth 148 American lives and thousands of Iraquis killed by our bombs? I say absolutely not.

And no evidence has come up to support the claims of WMD, and the uranium incident is an absolute fucking farce. If Clinton had done the exact same thing, you'd be calling for his head.

Re:But that's not why we went in

[Anonymous Coward]

Do I feel safer? What a ridiculous Argument by Question. I guess, though, there is a snappy answer for that. The answer is, "yeah, a little." I wonder what you'd be saying if we hadn't gone to war, and a year from now terrorists exploded a nuke in NYC, which they obtained from Saddam. In 1937, nobody thought Hitler would start a world war. If only somebody had the GUTS to take him out then. But, if somebody had, whiny bitches like you would have screamed bloody murder.

Is it worth the money? Yes. At least we got some use out of all those years of training and weapons' research.

Is it worth 148 American lives? Yes. Any loss of life is a tragedy. But, we sent over 300,000 troops, and we lost 148. That's a pretty damn good ratio. I wonder how many of those people would have died anyway from random violence, car accidents, etc. At least they died for something.

Is it worth a few thousand Iraqi lives? Yes. A few thousand died, and now 5 million are free. Saddam murdered hundreds of thousands. If a few thousand had to die to prevent hundreds of thousands more from dying, that's worthwhile.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence. It's not like Saddam didn't have plenty of time to hide, destroy, or move his WMD. Remember, you're talking about an area the size of California here. We assumed Saddam had something like 20,000 gallons of chemical weapons. That would fit in a swimming pool. How are you going to find that if he has it buried in the desert, and then kills all the workers? Give it time. And, if Clinton had done it, I would be all for it, just like I was with Bosnia and Kosovo. I'm a Libertarian...I hate the democrats just as much as I hate the Republicans. It's you whose blinded by partisanship. You're so filled with hate of George Bush, that you'll make up any excuse, even to the point of supporting a maniac like Hussein, just so you can be against George Bush. Sad.

Re:But that's not why we went in

[teval]

I'm happy you don't feel safer, because you shouldn't. All the US did with this attacka against Iraq is make a new generation of terrorists. This time much more fanatic then the ones before. They don't even have saddam to take care of them anymore. They're disoriented, and don't know what to do in a new society with new rules. (I come from a former communist country and can tell you people there where mostly nuts, trying to abuse the system as much as they could. Some even went as far as riots). Look at all the suicide attacks and the like against the US troops. It's clear they're not wanted there, and it's also clear that people feel lost and hopeless. Best thing the US could do now.. is try to get a gov't up as fast as possible, and get people jobs/money, even if there is a deficit, or they need a loan from the US. In the future though.. I really hope the US doesn't need to see itself as the 'peacekeepers of the world'. And.. if you'll look at history, most major terrorists in the world today where once funded by the US, or had US involvement in some way or another. (Saddam, Gaddafi, Bin Laden..)

Re:But that's not why we went in

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what you'd be saying if we hadn't gone to war, and a year from now terrorists exploded a nuke in NYC, which they obtained from Saddam.

I'd say "Fuck me, how did a third world tinpot country manage to not only obtain, refine, seperate and enrich enough Uranium for a bomb and build the required weapons facilities to do this without being noticed and assemble the expertise required to build a functioning bomb and then decide that rather than declare their capability to the world, they instead choose to keep quiet and sell it to a terrorist organisation that considers their leader a 'secular devil' and wants him as dead as George W. Bush?"

Not only would the chain of events required be physically impossible and highly improbable, the argument shows how much you bought into the lies about Saddam having ties to Al Quieda. If you'd done a couple of hours homework you would have realised how rediculous that argument is, but they're all Arabs, and all Arabs are Muslims who live in tents in the desert and herd camals, right? Yeah, right.

Re:Oil tool ?

[CrowScape]

Really? I always thought if this was just about oil we'd have just lifted the sanctions. Seems that would have been a lot cheaper, and perfectly doable as France, Russia and China would have supported it. At the very least we would have occupied the Iraqi oil fields after GW-I.