We all have our own ideas about what constitutes obscenity.
Congress, FCC Focus on Pay Television Indecency
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain urged cable and satellite companies to offer parents the ability to pick and choose what channels they get so they can protect their children from violence, sex and profanity, an idea that resonated with other lawmakers and regulators.
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But lawmakers also heard that federal power to enforce decency standards on subscription cable and satellite service was limited compared to material on the public broadcast airwaves.
“It seems interesting that we say … if it’s on just a higher channel number, which you can get just by clicking your channel changer, we’re going to ignore it and not pay attention to it,” Sen. John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat, said.
“We ought to look at the whole spectrum of what we get over our televisions,” he said.
Suicide Car Bomb Kills 47 at Iraqi Army Center [Rumsfeld says it’s just human nature.]
A suicide car bomb killed 47 people at an army recruitment center in Baghdad Wednesday, taking the death toll to about 100 in two attacks on Iraqis working with the U.S. occupation forces within 24 hours.
9/11 Panel to Access to Edited Memos [emphasis mine]
The federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks will get greater access to classified intelligence briefings prepared for President Bush under an agreement announced Tuesday with the White House.
The 10-member, bipartisan panel had been barred from reviewing notes taken by three commissioners and the commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, who reviewed the data in December but couldn’t take the summaries with them. Under the agreement, the entire commission were allowed to read versions of the summaries that were edited by the White House.
White House lied about Al Quaeda Nuclear Plant Threat
The White House stepped back from a high-profile assertion by President Bush, in his January 2002 State of the Union Address, that U.S. forces had uncovered evidence of a potential attack against an American nuclear facility.
In the speech, Mr. Bush warned of a terrorist threat to the nation, saying that the U.S. had found “diagrams of American nuclear power plants” in Afghanistan.
Coming just months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — and as U.S. forces were on the hunt for al Qaeda in Afghanistan — the statement was offered as evidence of the depth of antipathy among Islamic extremists, and of “the madness of the destruction they design.”
“Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears,” Mr. Bush told Congress and the nation in the televised speech. He said “we have found” diagrams of public water facilities, instructions on how to make chemical arms, maps of U.S. cities and descriptions of U.S. landmarks, in addition to the nuclear-plant plans.
Monday night, the White House defended the warnings about Islamic extremist intentions, but said the concerns highlighted by Mr. Bush were based on intelligence developed before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, and that no plant diagrams were actually found in Afghanistan. “There’s no additional basis for the language in the speech that we have found,” a senior administration official said.
