Goldy

US Airways is joining other major carriers in charging additional fees for checked baggage, turning an already tense boarding process into a Darwinian death match for scarce overhead luggage resources. And…

The Tempe, Ariz.-based carrier also said it would cut domestic flights, shrink the size of its fleet, slash 1,700 jobs and add a $2 fee for nonalcoholic drinks during flights.

So let me get this right… we’re already prohibited from carrying beverages through security due to some bullshit, Bush scare tactic, and now the airlines want to charge us table-service prices for a fucking can of seltzer? As if flying at 30,000 feet isn’t dehydrating enough?

Better carry a shitload of quarters with you the next time you fly folks, just in case the plane loses cabin pressure and you have to feed the goddamn coin slot on the oxygen mask.

For those of you too young to remember, flying wasn’t always such a miserable experience. There was a time when airlines treated passengers as more than just those things they pack into the space above the cargo hold. There was a time when airlines focused on service, and treated even us plebs crammed into coach like paying customers, instead of just an inconvenience.

There was a time when flying from Florida to Seattle, if I missed a connecting flight in Houston due to “thunderstorms in Boston” or some bullshit excuse like that, they’d reticket me on the next available flight, even on a competing airline, instead of just shrugging their shoulders and leaving me and a small child to fend for ourselves in an airport for 24 hours or longer.

That’s because there was a time when airlines were in the business of actually moving passengers and their luggage to their final destination. You know… back before deregulation.

I’m not saying consumers didn’t benefit from deregulation; ticket prices dropped dramatically due to increased competition—hell, at under $300 round trip coast to coast, I don’t think I paid a profitable fare for years—but holy crap, enough is enough already!

Perhaps it’s time to consider a little reregulation, to stabilize the industry and bring a modicum of service and reliability back into the flying experience. Perhaps consumers might benefit if the fare didn’t routinely fluctuate between $749 and $404 and back again, depending on which minute you logged into Expedia? Perhaps something other than “the free market” is necessary to fix an industry that has collectively lost $15 billion since deregulation?

Because if the airlines are so willing to cut corners above deck, where the paying customers can see it, I’m damn frightened to learn what they’re cutting behind the scenes.

It turns out it wasn’t just us amen bloggers who got caught up in TVW’s imaginary copyright infringement dragnet. The Spokesman-Review’s Rich Roesler blogs on his own Keystone Kafkaesque run-in with TVW Security:

On Friday, the network started contacting bloggers, including me, who use excerpts from its recordings. TVW has long allowed TV and radio reporters to edit and use its content and apparently still does.

But the network, which copyrights its work, says it’s worried about its streaming-video clips turning up in campaign attack ads. That could presumably draw official ire that could threaten the goodwill and access the network has worked hard to gain.

It’s not hard to imagine the content being put to attack-ad use. TVW cameras and microphones have inadvertently caught lawmakers falling asleep at their desks, stammering foolishly in floor speeches and ranting at each other.

Which, um, you’d think would be things it might be in the public interest for voters to know. But Roesler continues:

As I mentioned to TVW, it seems like there’s a fair-use argument to be made here. The fair-use doctrine allows reviewers, reporters and so on to quote or broadcast short snippets of a copyrighted work under certain circumstances.

Damn straight. And to illustrate his point, Roesler joins IP pirates like me by embedding my reposting of the video clip that apparently kicked off the whole brouhaha.

(©2006 TVW. View full source here.)

Ahoy, ye matey! Way to hornswaggle those bilge-sucking scallywags at TVW! Aaaarrrrgggghhhh!

Roesler spoke with TVW President Greg Lane, who assures him that the “embed widget” Lane and I discussed earlier this week will be made available shortly, and function along the lines promised, allowing bloggers to set a start and stop time. That’s great, and I expect most bloggers to adopt the TVW widget if only for the sake of convenience, though I’m not exactly sure how that addresses TVW’s concern about political ads. And, there’s still a larger principle at stake here—our well established rights under the fair use exemption—and so I intend to continue to pursue my challenge of the YouTube pull-downs regardless.

Of course, I’ll keep you posted.

Republican GOP apologist Kate Riley has her undies in a knot over Democrats’ efforts to taunt Dino Rossi for refusing to embrace the “Republican” label.

The real horror here is the state Democratic party’s attempt, in a press release today, to invent a scandal out of nothing — and, worse, the premise for their argument is founded on an apparent belief that voters are too ignorant to know that “GOP” and “Republican” are the same thing — or that they will live in a cave between now and the general election, missing what will likely be another tortuous high-profile campaign where each candidate is thoroughly dissected.

Uh-huh. I’ve read a lot of horribly written press releases in my day, but I can’t think of any that I’d call a “horror.” (I mean, it’s just a press release for chrissakes, Kate. Get a grip.) But then that’s the sort of “I’m rubber, you’re glue” partisanship we’ve come to expect from an amen editorialist who applauded Dave Reichert’s sexist dismissal of Harvard grad Darcy Burner as a ditzy blond, while condemning Burner as the reincarnation of Karl Rove.

As for her “voters are smart” defense of Rossi’s petty gamesmanship, her and her paper’s professed faith in our electorate is not only conveniently selective, it entirely misses the point. This isn’t about the top-two primary or the tone of a state Dem press release, it’s about Dino Rossi cynically seeking to avoid his party’s damaged brand—unlike every other Republican running for statewide office—because he believes the “GOP” designation gives him a slight advantage over, well… being plain-spoken honest.

That said, Riley’s apparent assertion that actual words have little meaning is, I suppose, understandable, given the quality of the prose we’ve come to expect from her editorial board.

With unemployment jumping at the fastest rate in 22 years, the US House just passed a 13 week extension of unemployment benefits. Kudos to Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Seattle) for sponsoring the bill and shepherding it through the House.

Curiously, while news of the bill’s passage currently graces the electronic front pages of both the New York Times and the Washington Post, at the time of this posting neither the Seattle Times nor the Seattle P-I have bothered to update their web sites to report on the legislative accomplishment of the congressman who represents their district.

Hmm. I wonder if slights like this have anything to do with McDermott’s undeserved reputation in some circles as a less than accomplished legislator?

David Sirota’s new book The Uprising, has hit the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list just in time for tonight’s discussion and book signing at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Books, 7:30PM, 101 S. Main Street.

Sirota, whose nationally syndicated column appears weekly in the Seattle Times, chronicles the rise of a new populist movement that is changing the face of American politics, and is just, well, fascinating to talk to. I wish I could be there tonight, but I’ve got my own speaking engagement at the same time, in which I get to play second-fiddle to Dan Savage. Ah well.

In a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay have the constitutional right to challenge their detentions in US courts.

“The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

So… we are one vote on the SCOTUS away from allowing unlimited detention, without charge, and without the possibility of appeal, in contravention of the Constitution and hundreds of years of common law.  Remember what’s at stake in this election.

Learn more at The Real McCain.

(©2006 TVW. View full source here.)

About an hour ago I received an email from YouTube informing me that at TVW’s request, they had pulled my clip of Dave Reichert talking about his intent to cut Medicare. I am in the process of filing a counter notice, and fully intend to defend my rights under the law.

But as you can see, it didn’t take me very long to upload the clip to another service. TVW is free to request LiveLeak pull this clip too, but there are plenty more video serving services where they came from—not to mention the technical ability to serve the clip myself—and I’m happy to play this game at least as long as TVW. Nothing will stop me from presenting Reichert’s own damning words to the public, short of a court order. (And perhaps, not even that.)

As I told TVW President and CEO Greg Lane yesterday, I will be happy to use TVW’s own embedded player with a time sequence parameter, once they make it available… but I’m not willing to wait. There are several fundamental issues at stake here, not the least of which being my Constitutional right to political speech, and a defense of the fair use exemption, one of the principle tools that make news reporting and commentary possible.

Had Mr. Lane contacted me before contacting YouTube, this confrontation might have been avoided. With a mutually acceptable technical compromise in the offing, it would be a shame to escalate this dispute any further… but that decision is now solely in the hands of TVW.

Gov. Chris Gregoire has another post up on Daily Kos:  “Republicans refuse to take on climate change.”

Another Republican failure of leadership on renewable energy and climate change happened yesterday in the U.S. Senate. The “drill first and ask questions later” policy of Big Oil and Republicans has not served citizens paying at the pump and won’t in the future. We need to think bigger. What’s wrong with investing some of those wind-fall profits into renewable energy? Energy independence and a cleaner environment sound like things we should be trying to achieve.

[…]

My Republican opponent’s environmental record shows his commitment to fighting climate change is simply political lip service. John McCain came to our state touting the need to fight global warming, but George Bush Republicans like my opponent and those in the U.S. Senate killed the climate change bill and killed a bill today to make Big Oil invest in renewable energy.

While fighting climate change should be a nonpartisan issue, Republicans in Washington have shown us that if we really want to fight climate change, we need to elect Democrats in November.

We are a nation of innovators, and we are in a crisis. I am confident that with a Democratic partner in the other Washington, we can work together to develop the next generation of clean technology and put policies in place that will move us to a greener tomorrow.

Gov. Gregoire makes a blunt point that too many in our media refuse to acknowledge:  in the current political climate, if you care about climate change, if you care about the environment, then you can’t trust the Republicans to get the job done.  On this, as on many other progressive issues, and with few exceptions, the most important thing you need to know about a candidate is the little “D” or “R” next to their name on the ballot.  (You know, except here in WA where our bullshit top-two primary doesn’t even give voters that important piece of information.)

Help Gov. Gregoire get her message out to a wider audience, and recommend her post on Daily Kos.

I had a very friendly conversation with TVW President and CEO Greg Lane this afternoon, and I think we came away with a mutual understanding about our little dispute.

TVW would like its coverage to be distributed as widely as possible, but they don’t want it to appear like they are responsible for editing or excerpting their raw footage. We bloggers, on the other hand, can’t very well illustrate our commentary by inserting a link with an instruction to, say, scroll to the 52 minute mark.

To accommodate both our needs, TVW is working on a technical solution: a flash player that we can embed into our posts—like YouTube—but with a contiguous time sequence as an optional parameter. We get an easier way to select and present pertinent excerpts, and TVW assures the integrity of their coverage by serving it themselves.

I think that’s a win-win. Of course, it doesn’t prevent anybody from downloading events and editing together clip reels, but my guess is the vast majority of bloggers will simply opt for the embedded player out of convenience alone. I figure that’s what I’ll do.

As for the contested clip, Lane informs me that they did request it be pulled back on Friday, and that YouTube has confirmed receipt of their request… but so far it’s still available for your viewing pleasure.

(©2006 TVW. View full source here.)

UPDATE:
YouTube has finally pulled the clip, so I’ve uploaded it to LiveLeak:

According McCain campaign internal polling, the Iraq war remains the number one issue for northwest voters:

Davis says that campaign polling shows that nationwide, the economy is the top issue voters are concerned about, with the Iraq war No. 2, and energy and gas costs in third place. But in the northwest, the war is the top issue. That’s true in only a few regions in the country, according to the McCain campaign. Here, the economy is second and gas prices are third.

One of the taunts routinely launched at Darcy Burner and her Responsible Plan to end the war in Iraq, is that she’s still running the last campaign, foolishly focusing on a war that most voters really don’t care all that much about anymore.  But Darcy has never stopped talking with voters since narrowly losing in 2006, and she’ll be the first to tell you that this is the issue voters most often bring up when talking with her.

Huh.  Turns out, they’re telling the same thing to McCain’s pollsters.  Who’d a thunk?