So Howard and others are responding the the FCC’s new activism by heading over to satellite radio. But what makes everyone so sure that the FCC will not simply follow them there?

The medium and the venue are irrelevent. This is a question of values. And sooner or later, free expression supporters will have to turn and fight.

There might have been a time in my life when I would’ve been ashamed to admit that my mom made a serious effort to get Barry Manilow to perform at my bar mitzvah. I was (and given the absence of any formal notice otherwise, probably still am) a card carrying member of the B.M.I.F.C. (known to the layperson as: the Barry Manilow International Fan Club).

This is a secret that I’ve managed to keep under wraps since my sisters spilled the beans during their bar mitzvah toast. And nothing, I should tell you, quite says “becoming a man” like the combination of wearing a suit with tennis shoes and having your Manilow fetish outed.

And yet, here I sit, decades later, willing to share this dark secret from my past. Why? Well it turns out that loving Barry is an incredibly popular habit these days. While doing some holiday weekend channel flipping, I came across an episode of Oprah in which the oracle of Chicago described Barry Manilow this way:

“He is one of our most requested guests of all time. And he’s here. So you can all stop calling and writing letters now.”

That seems like an impossible statement, but what possible motivation could Oprah have for lying or even exaggerating?

Remember, Oprah didn’t say that people were happy to see Barry or that the segment seemed to go well. She called him her most requested guest ever. And she interviews everyone from stars to politicians to fake psychologists. A week ago I would’ve found it impossible to imagine that Oprah had received even one letter or phone call complaining that Manilow hadn’t been on for awhile. For a second, I even thought that I was being punk’d by someone. But then I saw them: The screaming fans in Oprah’s studio audience.

Now, to be fair, that same audience members also screamed, cheered, chanted and jumped up and down when Oprah announced that her next book club selection would be The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.

But still, there is really no denying the obvious.

Barry is large. I am music. And I am out of the B.M.I.F.C. closet for good.

I was clearly ahead of my time. Expect wearing suits with tennis shoes to take the country by storm sometime very soon.

Over at PressThink, Jay Rosen samples 21 different writers who all indicate that the real big loser in the recent election was mainstream media.

Some people think that the media is hopelessly liberal, wanted Kerry to win, and couldn’t pull it off. This perception, more widely held than ever, is largely the result of an effective multi-decade smear campaign orchestrated by conservatives in an effort to debase any institutions (universities, news organizations) that could dig beneath their talking points. The mainstream media abandoned their liberalism (and their intellectual elitism) in the face of the constant criticisms.

If anything, the media failed in its reponsibility to act as a check on power, offering less cynicism about the march to an optional war than they did to an Oval Office blowjob. The media allowed being skeptical to be viewed as something other than doing a good job.

The Bush administration has pushed through a funding increase for abstinence education. The idea is to focus on abstinence and to skip other topics related to sex education and safe-sex.

Wade Horn, the administration’s front man on abstinence programs, explains that it really doesn’t matter if these programs work:

“We don’t need a study, if I remember my biology correctly, to show us that those people who are sexually abstinent have a zero chance of becoming pregnant or getting someone pregnant or contracting a sexually transmitted disease.”

Of course we also don’t need a study to tell us that young people really, really want to get it on.

Pay attention here. The “moral” position is that we should teach abstitence and not the sex ed courses that supposedly promote promiscuity. Right? Wrong.

The moral position is to realize that a whole lot of young people have always had sex and we should take steps that make it more likely that an increaed number of them will be protected from disease and/or unwanted pregnancies.

This should be especially obvious to those who consider themselves to be pro-life. Here are three things that cannot logically co-exist: A pro-life ideology, an opposition to safe sex education, and the ability to reason.

When the president of South Africa refuses to acknowledge AIDS and the need to educate his citizens about condoms, we call him crazy and cruel. When we look in the mirror, we call that kind of anti-common sense hogwash morality.

Step one on the road to recovery: Reclaim the meaning of moral leadership.

Be the frame.

The Supreme Court’s latest look at the use of medical marijuana is positioned as a battle between state’s right and the federal ban on pot.

It should be positioned as a moral issue. But not in the way most people think.

There is some irony that those who see themselves as the moral police, protecting us from ourselves, are also among those who seek this illogical, absurd, cruel, and yes, immoral effort to keep relief from those who seek it.

Want the moral position on medical marijuana? Here it is. If you are sick and in pain and you can ease your pain without hurting others, then do it. Period.

Putting petty politics in the form of insane arguments ahead of symptom relief for those in pain is immoral. Those who preach morality have so deluded themselves that they think allowing people to smoke a plant is worse that barring patients from relief.

No one is stupid enough to argue that marijuana is nearly as powerful or potentially dangerous as prescription drugs (if Pfizer invented pot, we’d never have this debate). There simply is no downside here.

So why are so many groups lining up to stop people on their deathbeds from smoking a joint?

Well, some of them buy into the arbitrary world of morals where certain drugs are bad (generally those that are not controlled or have apeared alonside Tommy Chong in a major motion picture) and other drugs are good.

Some conservatives in Congress have argued that thousands of people die each year from drug abuse and that medical marijuana sends a message that drugs are good. Using that logic, we should ban chemotherapy because it causes hairloss and because it’s sending a message that people can be healed.

Anti-drug groups worry that giving an inch when it comes to any illegal drug is a step in the wrong direction.

Again, what is the moral message that is being sent with these arguments? That ideology (no matter how illogical) should trump humanity?

Forget drug use. How do we explain this version of morality to our kids?

If you’re one of those who hates reality television, then it will come as good news that viewership of reality TV is way down while viewership of scripted dramas is up.

The networks are still buying new reality shows at a record pace, in part because it’s cheap and in part because the anti-reality trend is fairly recent.

It will be interesting to see how the networks hold-up in a the post reality landscape. There have been a few new scripted network hits this season, but reality television seemed to bring the networks back from the brink. If the bubble completely busts, where does that leave them?