Radio Radio

It is an article of faith among those who live in the vicinity of Our Nation's Capital that the going will get a little weird from time to time. Like daily. Cessnas fly too close to the Beltway, provoking mass evacuations of government buildings that aren't populated by too many liberals. Militant ducks take up residence on government property and demand Secret Service protection. Local citizens willingly take in and adopt baseball teams from foreign countries, which leap to first place in the National League East (this should surprise no one). Motorcades containing either Dick Cheney or the "Defense" Minister of Belgium (hint: always count the black Suburbans, but Renault limos are a dead giveaway) keep you from getting through that damned intersection at 17th and G when you have a meeting at the freakin' World Bank in 4 minutes, for which you are running late because a pothole on the Roosevelt Bridge launched your passenger seat into the river and your passenger into the path of the GWU captained eights sculling practice and the Harbor Patrol gave you a boatload (heh) of crap about having to troll the Potomac on your behalf again (and you'd think "at least it wasn't a crack whore this time" would carry some weight with those guys). Don't even think about trying to clue those Bank morons to the existence of something like "business casual" in 95-degree heat, and dream not of getting a candy bar at the CVS on G Street to tide you over because you missed lunch, because the 63 Office of Thrift Supervision deadbeats in front of you in line are gonna be too busy counting out pennies and fishing for their CVS cards (like being asked for payment and your bonus card is a big surprise) to get the hell out of your way.

Oops. Sorry. I'll return from my rant now. For the record, only the part about the passenger seat and the Harbor Patrol was fiction.

One of the weird goings is local radio. It and the local population are so awful that the number one radio station in the region is the all-news station, this despite the fact that the station's programming cycles around completely about every half-hour. We must be immediately informed, you see. And where else are you going to get the same weather report every ten minutes on the eights? Or traffic information that's outdated by a crucial 30 minutes despite everyone in every traffic jam from Baltimore to Richmond picking up their cell phone and calling the station about it?

The region's demographics lead to some real strange advertising on this station. Lobbyists, it seems, function under some kind of rules that limit their access to congresscritters. This sort of stuns me, because I can think of no better punishment for the twit who is your congresscritter (mine's only a little better) than to have to listen to some shitheel blather about why repealing the Mann Act will improve the lives of his constituents, including those the Mann Act was designed to protect (hot underage white girls, for the record).

But it appears that lobbyists have limited opportunities to directly extol for congresscritters the virtue of interstate transportation of stolen teenagers and other burning topics. So they advertise on the local all-news station, and we get 30-second radio spots telling us to vote against H.2107 as amended but to support it if the amendments further limiting rat hairs in hot dogs are withdrawn.

Think about this. This radio station plays to a media market of something like 4 or 5 million people. We have crafted a civilization where it makes sense for some interests to pay the advertising costs to run spots on the highest-rated station in the market targeted at 435 people who don't have to listen to the radio for traffic reports, because they're getting a BJ from Jessica Cutler in the back seat while some guy in a black suit drives the Town Car.

This rant was triggered by a spot I heard on the comprehensive energy bill, which as I understand ensures that we will comprehensively pay too much money for energy and that the ensuing windfall will comprehensively line the pockets of friends of the President who conveniently sent him somewhere where he could be more useful, like not in the freaking energy industry. An organization called the Coalition for Reliable and Affordable Energy (CARE) paid for the spot.

CARE is an organization with the Edison Electric Institute at its core, along with a smattering of other organizations that EEI duped into joining it under the CARE banner. EEI is funded by something we like to call oil companies and utilities. Do I need to show any more math here?

I have noticed that many of these caring organizations who sponsor lobbying adverts go by names acronymed as CARE, and I have decided to form my own lobbying organization and advertise on my highly-rated local news station to convince my congresscritter and yours and everyone else's that the Mann Act is dangerously repressing my constitutional right to dupe young women into committing vile sex acts. With me, of course. My organization will be called CARE--the Community to Ass Ream Everyone.

Our spot will appear on the fours, so bend over and listen.