Our rights to cable and internet

We Americans enjoy many rights. Our right arm. The right of way if your turning right and the opposition is turning left....etc etc

Apparently, we also have rights to cable TV and wireless internet!
Our friends in the House of Represntatives figured out an ingenious way to make about 5 or 10 billion more per year. Currently TV is beamed out magically to the populace via analog signals. These analog signals, air waves, are owned by the public (fed govmt). So they auction out bandwidth to for profit stations, non profit stations, emergency services, the liberal media, etc etc

But if all of those airwaves were instantly freed up, thats like 10 billion more dollars the feds can spend on wasteful projects! Of course, Congress claims the proceeds will go towards deficit reduction, which i think is highly unlikely no matter if the "tax and spend" democrats or the "don't tax and spend more" republicans take control after the 2006 elections.

So the House passed a bill mandating all TV stations to beam out their signals digitally by the end of 2008. But what will Grandma do with her 13 inch black and white set? No problem. Our always looking out for the little guy representatives thought of that. They set aside about a billion dollars of coupons for families that cant afford to buy digital to analog converter box from an electronics store. Like Mike Reagan (whom I first heard about this amazing story from) says: "are there really people who can't afford to set aside about $7 a year for the next three years so they'll have the money to pay their share of the subsidized price of a $60 converter box by December 2008?"
Those people certainly have worse problems than missing Survivor Season 26!

In similar Marxian logic, my colleague Travis notes the wonderful news from San Francisco where wireless internet seems to be a right to Americans! (See Jan 5th post)