Michael Tomasky on the Dems:

… They should begin by realizing that talking about “positioning” isn’t enough. It’s a second-step question, and it skips the first-step question, which is, what do we believe? Then, once they have a handle on what they believe, they can talk about positioning. Admittedly, it’s a harder question to answer, but they’ll have a hard time selling themselves to 51 percent until they’ve answered it.

It’s true that Dems need to give a long and introspective look at what it is that they believe in (and if the answer is that they believe in the GOP’s winning message because it won, then drop me off at the next stop).

But let’s not for a second ignore the importance of positioning and messaging in the age of marketing. The fact is that almost any program can be sold if the marketing and framing is done right (see the re-election of George W Bush for details).

Shares of TiVo we’re up on rumors that Apple might be looking to take them out.

It’s not clear that Apple would make such a move (although the combination would be nothing less than orgasmic and give Apple a higher customer satisfaction rating than Cocaine had in the 80s), but TiVo is in trouble and they’re trading on the cheap.

I’m surprised someone from post IPO lock-up Google who’s really into television hasn’t already bought TiVo for fun. A lifetime subscription for about $300 million seems reasonable to me.

Want to find all the most naughty television clips in one place? Well, the Parents Television Council has been doing some aggregating for you over at their Worst TV Clips of the Week section.

With links that are described by the likes of: Necrophilia scene, gratuitous sex, and teen orgy party, they should see a nice traffic spike at their site.

It turns out that the notion of the Academy Awards being watched live by more than a billion people is more of an advanced urban legend than an actual calculation.

No my friends, those kind of viewership numbers are reserved for Paris Hilton’s cell phone.

Getting sent to your room isn’t what it used to be. A recent survey indicates that 64% of teens have a television in their bedrooms and another 28% have a net connected computer.

It’s interesting that television still maintains so much more coverage than computers with web access. It could be cost. It could be that parents feel a need to monitor the net use of their kids more closely (although this survey is based on teens between the ages of 13 and 17, so it’s hard to imagine any of them surfing with Mommy). It could also be that today’s kids get to enjoy the soft porn of MTV in the glorious privacy of their own rooms while our generation often spent an entire television season hoping (often in vain) that Valerie Bertinelli would lose the turtleneck and at least strip down to a T-shirt on occasion.

On a somewhat related note, Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be DVR users.