And that’s not to mention all the advertising spliced into the programming itself. The Province of Quebec set a standard twenty years ago by passing a law banning advertising aimed specifically at children under the age of 13; it was promptly taken to court by — who else? — a toy company claiming it was a constitutional violation of freedom of expression. The law still stands; you’d put broadcasts of kids’ shows from Quebec and the US side by side, and it would seem like day and night. It might be the same dreck, but at least the direct link between show and product is broken.

The actual message of a show is a touchier issue altogether.

Look at kids programming and movies, if they’re not trying to sell toys, they’re trying to indoctrinate them. What happened to the basic ethics that kids need to learn? Share, be nice, don’t make fun of others? Those are far more important lessons that are still necessary for children to grow up into good adults. And far more important than whether a 5 year old believes in recycling or not. Since you teach a kid those lessons, and when they are old enough to make a difference they’ll make the right choices. If all you do is indoctrinate them, they’ll have no basis for why they do anything, it would be rote, and all the little decisions we make every day would suffer from the lack of a base.

Obviously that’s the parent’s job. But it would be nice if children’s programming served the same function now as it used to 30 years ago.

I, for one, am bothered by this.

In 2003, the Republicans had the majority with 51 seats, compared to 49 for the Democrats.
They would need 60 votes to invoke cloture (ending a filibuster) (3/5ths of the Senate). 51 isn’t enough strictly along party lines.

For a rules change, they’d need 67 votes (2/3rds of the Senate), and if they can’t get 60, how are they supposed to get 67?

Now, if you’ll listen to me I’ll explain what happened with housing and Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc.

None of it started out as any form of great evil plan by either side. Understand that the Republicans want to go too far with deregulation, and the Dems want to go to far the other way with regulation.

It started out with the Republicans doing just what they wanted, and they went too far with deregulation. This allowed the lending institutions to do things without enough oversight.

Because of this, they did things they shouldn’t be doing, making allot of bad loans. This was because the Democrats pushed for a noble cause, housing the poor. But there’s a problem when the costs can’t be paid, and the Republicans recognized this, what they themselves had done.

17 times since 2003 President Bush sent things to Congress to address this problem. But every time, the Democrats and a small number of Republicans, in their efforts to protect the lower classes, blocked his efforts. (Bush could have written a bill himself, but after Iraq the Dems would have eaten him alive as the “big brother” trying to kill the little guy. That would have caused the whole Iraq war to fall apart, and Iran and Al Qaeda would now be all over Iraq.)

Once the Republicans deregulated it too much, the Democrats found out how they could use that to promote their own thing, and it just went way to far, and by the time the Democrats realized how bad it really was (because they didn’t believe the Republicans and Bush), they started covering their arses because it was they who had carried it even farther, and because suddenly, everyone realized too how certain people had abused their position in Enron like fashion to rake in huge amounts of money, and because these same people were making very large donations to those same Democrats.

And now, the shit has hit the fan for us all.

Sorry to have confused you…

http://www.toplessrobot.com/2008/10/the_10_people_you_meet_on_xbox_live.php

The potential here is only beginning to emerge.