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No More Network TV

No More Network TV

I’m really thinking about getting cable or satellite. I can’t believe I’m still only on network television. It’s getting to be a drag just finding clips on the internet. I feel like I’m missing out on too much.

I’d like the History channel, and Comedy Central, and CSPAN… I want to watch politics and political comedy. Frontline was great last night, and we have two public television stations, but I want more.

Here in Ted Turner media home Atlanta, we don’t get the Cartoon Network or CNN on network television.

Here’s what we’ve got on network TV, the way I break it down:

  • 8 – WGTV – Athens-Atlanta, PBS Public Broadcasting
  • 30 – WPBA – PBA/PBS Atlanta Public Broadcasting
  • 2 – WSB – ABC
  • 46 – WGCL – CBS
  • 11 – WXIA “11 Alive” – NBC, good weather
  • 5 – WAGA “Fox 5” – Um, FOX
  • 36 – WATL “The New WB” – Formerly Fox, now the top Warner Bros. affiliate
  • 17 – WTBS – Atlanta Turner Broadcasting (sitcom reruns, movies, Atlanta Braves games)
  • 69 – WUPA – CW network Atlanta?? Weird history. Owned and operated by CBS, I remembered it as UPN.
  • 4 – WUVM – Low-powered – Azteca America
  • 26 – WANX – Low-powered – Prism Broadcasting Network – ACN Jewelry sales
  • 14 – WPXA – Ion (formerly PAX tv) – also weird history – everything from paid tv to Christian Religious.
  • 57 – WATC – Various Christian networks – Christian Religious
  • 63 – WHSG – TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) / JCTV – Christian Religious

It looks like I could get Comcast cable tv and internet and phone for the same price I’m currently paying for BellSouth “Now the New AT&T” (arrgh) phone and DSL.

Or may DirectTV would be better? Or DISH Network? Please comment if you have recommendations or warnings.

Speak up today for Net Neutrality as Condition of Merger

Speak up today for Net Neutrality as Condition of Merger

Remind the FCC and Congress that they must serve the public interest by making nondiscrimination on the Internet a permanent condition of the AT&T-BellSouth merger. Be heard today!

Take Action

Don’t Let Ma Bell Monopolize the Internet

The AT&T and BellSouth merger would resurrect the Ma Bell monopoly that ruled communications for decades. But this new corporate behemoth would no longer control just phone calls. The new AT&T wants to become gatekeepers to all digital media — television, telephone and Internet — at the expense of the free and open Internet that so many Americans rely upon.

The merger is now in the hands of the FCC. They’ll rubber stamp the deal unless the public speaks up.

We can’t let the new AT&T jeopardize essential Internet freedoms. Tell the FCC to make Net Neutrality a permanent condition of the merger.

By clicking on submit your letter will be sent to all five FCC commissioners and your members of Congress.

Daily Activism

Daily Activism

The House will vote once again this week to hand the Arctic Refuge over to Big Oil.
Tell your Representative to vote NO!
(League of Conservation Voters)

Say NO to Drilling in the Arctic Refuge Before It’s Too Late – The House Votes Tomorrow
(Save Our Environment.org)

Block Bush’s Radical-Right Judges
(Act for Change)

Act now to stop phone companies from abusing your privacy. Join in the nationwide demand that the FCC and state utility commissions investigate reports of unlawful sharing of consumers’ call records with the National Security Agency, and issue cease-and-desist orders to any phone companies that are found to have been engaging in such practices.
(American Civil Liberties Union)

Stop Fueling Exxon Mobil’s Anti-Wildlife Agenda
(Defenders of Wildlife)

Sign the Pro-Choice Pledge, promising to vote pro-choice in November.
(NARAL – Pro-Choice America)

Tell the FCC to stop merger mania
The largest telecommunications and cable companies are fighting to shut down a free and open Internet. They keep raising prices while making empty promises about serving all Americans. They’ve even illegally handed over your personal information to government eavesdroppers. Now they want the government to help them get even bigger. AT&T is trying to buy BellSouth, which would make it the largest telecom company in the world. Comcast and Time Warner — the country’s two largest cable and Internet companies — are trying to wrap up their purchase of Adelphia, the nation’s fifth-largest cable company. If these deals go through, Comcast, Time Warner, and AT&T will control over half of all the high-speed Internet connections in the United States. The Federal Communications Commission is in the final stages of deciding whether these deals should go through. Your voice can make all the difference in stopping them.
(Free Press.net)

Illegal domestic spying is BIG, BIGGER, BIGGEST

Illegal domestic spying is BIG, BIGGER, BIGGEST

George Bush has overturned the United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, which prohibits domestic spying by NSA. He has violated the federal act which created the FISA court to oversee covert domestic investigations. He has disregarded the Fourth Amendment guarantee against warrantless searches.

Now, the story continues… Just yesterday, in a galaxy right here, it was reported in USA Today that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth in the largest database ever created. This includes all calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders – except for the lucky customers of Qwest (Qwest said no to the NSA, fearing legal problems if sanity ever returns to this country). For how long? Since at least 2001, under secrecy and then under the lies Bush and others were telling about the extent of the spying.

The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. “In other words,” Bush explained, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case.

Lies lies and more lies.

Please join me and call on the House and Senate today to issue subpoenas and expose the extent of this intrusion.

Although Bush said today that our government was “not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans,” I’m not sure what else you could possible call a huge secret database of domestic telephone calls, especially when considered along with the “vacuum cleaner surveillance” of e-mail messages and Internet traffic being done by NSA personnel in at least one AT&T building.
(San Francisco – anyone gonna go check? You’d think they’d do it in Texas…)

They’ve also managed to kill the investigation into the illegal spying – smells like coverup to me:

The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005 – yup, he’s the very guy who directed warrantless surveillance of American citizens. Now, he will head the CIA unless some congresspeople actually care about our constitutional rights, not to mention the takeover of a civilian institution by military interests. Block this guy, wouldja? Having himrun the CIA is almost as much of an insult as tolerating “Death-Squad” Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence. I never thought I’d find myself defending the CIA, but they have been trashed by Porter Goss under Bush’s direction. Now we are to approve a military takeover of this civilian institution? When will we stand up for our own freedom, democracy, and civil rights? Who will stand up for the interests of all Americans in these dark days? Here are some of Hayden’s comments on the matter, although he’s dodging the issue as much as he can. (It’ll be a little harder now to dodge, I hope).

It is not a driftnet over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont grabbing conversations that we then sort out by these alleged keyword searches or data-mining tools or other devices that so-called experts keep talking about.

This is targeted and focused. This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al Qaeda. We bring to bear all the technology we can to ensure that this is so. And if there were ever an anomaly, and we discovered that there had been an inadvertent intercept of a domestic-to-domestic call, that intercept would be destroyed and not reported.

Yeah, right.

So, let’s have it:

The BUSH LIE LINEUP in the “Official Response from the White House” today- all in one place!

First, our intelligence activities strictly target al Qaeda and their known affiliates. Al Qaeda is our enemy, and we want to know their plans.

Collecting all possible domestic communications with a dragnet is not “targeted” to al Qaeda, nor to their “known affiliates.”

Second, the government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval.

He has already admitted that if one party is outside the US, there has been no oversight. I would even speculate that with the sound-compression technology available today, all of our conversations could actually be in the process of being stored in their entirety – why else create the largest database in the world? It could be done, and I’ll wager that it is being done. The NSA’s secret domestic eavesdropping program was not reported under the requirements of either Title III or FISA – the agency’s budget is unknown.

Third, the intelligence activities I authorized are lawful and have been briefed to appropriate members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat.

They are not lawful just because he wants to make us think they are lawful, nor have all appropriate members been briefed. Moreover, Congress needs more than selective “briefing” – they need to vote to approve any such actions because NO domestic surveillance is lawful outside of what Congress has specifically approved.

Fourth, the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities. We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans. Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates.

Then why do they need a database of DOMESTIC calls? How does that “fiercely protect” our privacy? Their efforts are clearly directed at us, you and me, Americans.

This is not a kindly Empire, this country that was formerly a beacon of freedom and democracy, and we seem to be missing some essential Jedi knights. You laugh at the metaphor, perhaps, but you know what is meant. The metaphor collapses, of course, since there seem to be quite a few Sith roaming about (not just the master and his apprentice). Go back and look at the arguments for the illegal spying – now try to fit in the idea we are all under surveillance by our own government. This is profoundly anti-American.

It is not targeted only for known al Qaeda terrorists and their associates. It is not limited by location. There is no Congressional or Judicial (or even economic?) oversight. There has been no vote by Congress or by the American people to allow this overturning of our system.

The so-called right is so very wrong.

I have some hope that the upcoming elections may put some into the position of actually having to think about what they can say to their constituents. They seem to think we’re very very stupid.

Personally, I’d like to see most of Congress thrown out on their butts. I have confidence in only a handful of them. Any who have allowed these things without public protest need to go, too.

Put the voting apparatus back into the hands of the people.

“If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [NSA] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
Senator Frank Church, 1975

Congress needs to investigate this government intrusion — immediately. Please demand that the House and Senate issue subpoenas and expose the full extent of this program against the citizens of the United States of America.

Stop AT&T Merger with BellSouth

Stop AT&T Merger with BellSouth

AT&T and BellSouth plan to merge into a single colossus (it also includes Cingular wireless). The merger is the largest yet among U.S. telecom players. AT&T, already the nation’s largest telecommunications company, will become the largest broadband provider with nearly 10 million subscribers. This deal must be protested and stopped.

It would resurrect the Ma Bell monopoly that was busted up in 1984 with even more drastic results. We are still in the days of partially-connected media systems, but are moving into a convergence of all digital media – television, telephone, internet, etc. No one company can be allowed to take control as the gatekeepers, and no one company can be allowed to set the policies and prices. This deal would leave consumers with fewer choices, higher prices and less control over their communications.

AT&T and BellSouth have a poor track record serving Americans. They have stifled competition, eliminating choices in the marketplace. They have not kept up with global competitors. They have not bridged the “digital divide.” They appear to have little if any interest in protecting network freedoms that keep the Internet an open road for all. This is a bigger issue than many realize.

Both AT&T and BellSouth have publicly discussed pricing plans that undermine the freedoms that keep the internet open to all.

Take action! One easy form sends a message to the Department of Justice, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), your Congressperson, and your Senators. It’s still a democracy, speak your piece.