Girls Gone Wild On Good Friday

This is surely an eye-opener at 2 am.

Sweet Jesus!

That just might have been the reaction of a Bucks County woman at about 2 a.m. Friday when her regularly scheduled Comcast program - Good Friday Mass at the Vatican - abruptly changed to a 30-second "Girls Gone Wild" ad.

The seemingly unholy programming snafu was caused by a test for the Emergency Alert System, said Jeff Alexander, a Comcast spokesman.

"We're obliged to do emergency tests that are usually done in the overnight hours," Alexander said last night.

The test automatically tunes viewers to a preselected channel that is supposed to provide emergency information.

Since yesterday's test was just that, the preselected channel also aired its regular programming, which in this case was a paid advertisement for a "Girls" video. The ads are notoriously racy.

Alexander noted that no actual pornography was shown during the glitch.

Oops: Porno Clip Interrupts Super Bowl

No, not the interview with Barack Obama and Matt Lauer. That act of public fellatio was pre-game.

This actually happened during the action.

A Tucson television station's broadcast of the Super Bowl on Sunday was interrupted for some viewers by about 10 seconds of pornographic material, the station said.

KVOA TV in Tucson released a statement saying that the only viewers who were able to see the material were those who receive the channel through Comcast cable.

The station said it will investigate the incident.

"When the NBC feed of the Super Bowl was transmitted from KVOA to local cable providers and through over-the-air antennas, there was no pornographic material," KVOA president and general manager Gary Nielsen said in a statement.

The KVOA statement said the station was dismayed and disappointed that some Comcast customers and their families were subjected to the material.

"KVOA will continue to investigate what happened to our clean signal and make sure our viewers get answers," Nielsen said in the statement.

Comcast spokeswoman Tracy Baumgartner confirmed that the company's standard feed was interrupted during the Super Bowl, although she said its high definition feed was not.

Baumgartner said engineers were investigating Sunday night.

Tucson media outlets reported that they received calls from irate viewers about the pornographic material.

A spokesman for Cox Cable said the company had not been affected.

You figure Cox cable would be the one showing porn.

Good News: New and Improved 'Fairness Doctrine' Could Apply to Web Content

Nothing would ignite a fire under the behinds of a million bloggers more than threatening them with the idea of having to provide "balance" on their sites.

Good luck with that.

Mark my words. Any politician dumb enough to vote for something like this should take the time to enjoy their final term in office. I'm almost curious to see them try, as the backlash would be so swift and enormous the notion of resurrecting this long-outdated scheme would never again see the light of day.

There’s a huge concern among conservative talk radio hosts that reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine would all-but destroy the industry due to equal time constraints. But speech limits might not stop at radio. They could even be extended to include the Internet and “government dictating content policy.”

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell raised that as a possibility after talking with bloggers at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. McDowell spoke about a recent FCC vote to bar Comcast from engaging in certain Internet practices – expanding the federal agency’s oversight of Internet networks.

The commissioner, a 2006 President Bush appointee, told the Business & Media Institute the Fairness Doctrine could be intertwined with the net neutrality battle. The result might end with the government regulating content on the Web, he warned. McDowell, who was against reprimanding Comcast, said the net neutrality effort could win the support of “a few isolated conservatives” who may not fully realize the long-term effects of government regulation.

“I think the fear is that somehow large corporations will censor their content, their points of view, right,” McDowell said. “I think the bigger concern for them should be if you have government dictating content policy, which by the way would have a big First Amendment problem.”

“Then, whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair, under a so-called ‘Fairness Doctrine,’ which won’t be called that – it’ll be called something else,” McDowell said. “So, will Web sites, will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?”

The notion is so insane, so anti-freedom that only some pointy-headed libs could be stupid enough to dream it up.

I can see the left trying to stifle dissent by attempting to silence talk radio. After all, they hate free speech. But the idea that blogs would ever have to provide balance? With the sheer volume on both the left and right it would just not be possible. Considering it's the World Wide Web, how would they possibly control content that extends across the globe?