Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is one stubborn guy. He has practically no support for a new set of punitive regulations he has proposed for the cable industry but that hasn't stopped him from trying to force a vote on the matter at the commission's meeting tomorrow. One of his fellow Republican commissioners has publicly dissed Martin's plans and Congressional Republican leaders are aligned against him.
Now even Martin's Democratic colleagues are stepping away from him. Democratic commissioner Jonathan Adelstein has been trying to get Martin to postpone tomorrow's vote on this item because Martin is trying to "unfairly" rush other commissioners to rubber stamp a finding that cable controls more than 70% of the multichannel video marketplace, which is the underlying "finding" Martin relies upon to justify the new regulations.
Like most observers, Adelstein is unsure "there was an adequate basis" for reaching this conclusion. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page goes even farther than that this morning by saying that Martin reached his conclusion "essentially by cooking the books."
Martin, however, doesn't seem to grasp that he's been nailed by the facts, irrefutable, non-debatable facts. I suspect that he thinks the cable industry has kicked up this dust as part of a clever lobbying campaign to kill the new regulations and that his sheer willpower will prevail. Cable is up in arms over the new regulations, which would force operators to lease more of their plant capacity to third parties, among other things.
But Martin's plan is doomed precisely because he did concoct the numbers that justify his proposal. Martin is wrong and can be proven wrong by cold hard facts. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of any issue in Washington.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:47 AM|Comments(0)
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