If you've obtained HDTV since the tornado season passed, you haven't yet experienced the absolute moronic stupidity that makes KFOR (channel 4) one of the dumbest television stations in the country, if not the world.

A brief recap of why Football Night in America is not in high-definition:

1. Only KWTV, of all Oklahoma City stations, has yet spent the money to be able to overlay graphics on a high-definition signal. None of the other stations can do this, or even record HD and rebroadcast it later, much less originate HD video. KWTV apparently can only put weather maps on the HD feeds, not a "these things are closed due to ice" crawl. The only HD broadcasts you see are those passed on simultaneously from network feeds.

2. Because of this, when severe weather comes, all stations that want to show school or church or business closings drop the signal out of beautiful 16:9 HD into crappy 4:3 standard definition. Unless they do this, they can't add graphics to the picture.

3. KFOR has two digital channels. 4-1 is the same as you'd see for "channel 4" over the air, except often in high definition. 4-2 is KFOR's branded version of NBC Weather Plus, complete with KFOR local forecasts rebroadcast every five or six seconds.

4. And yet when ice hits, KFOR throws the HD picture away on 4-1 and leaves 4-2 unchanged.

Yes, that's right - even though everyone who can see 4-1 in high definition can also see 4-2 (channel 247 on Cox Cable) and therefore has a 24-hour source for weather from KFOR, the station never, never, never changes the loop on 4-2 to show current weather conditions. Instead, it renders your brilliant new HDTV as useful as the one you discarded to show you weather information that probably does not matter to you, or that often isn't even in KFOR-DT's broadcast area.

Right now, for example, all the football highlights are in really crappy washed out standard definition, while 4-2 is showing a report about how people in Orange County, CA are planning to conserve water.

I shit you not.

Here's how to contact KFOR and tell them, but only tomorrow, when someone might answer the phone. On my Web browser, the page says "Tell us what you think. This feature is not supported for your system configuration." That's a pretty good indicator of the general cluelessness and absolute lack of caring you'll find at KFOR. It's not about informing the public, it's about looking like they're informing the public while actually driving away as many viewers as possible.

Congratulations on your new HDTV.

Update: On the night I posted this, KFOR figured out the dumbness and started showing NBC's HD football programming in high definition after only one hour and 39 minutes. Don't feel bad if you missed it; this will repeat with every HD program KFOR airs until the owners fire the station managers and hire people who actually care about what the viewers think.

…is that they see all your plot twists coming in advance.

We can look forward to more of this in the weeks to come. Each successive move will aim to hit a little harder, each intended to drive a wedge between various groups within the Guild membership as well as between the membership and the negotiating committee. TV writers vs. feature writers. Upper class vs. middle class. David Young vs. freedom, milk, and clean air.

If we stick together and keep picketing -- and maintain our poise and our sense of humor -- these tactics will continue to fail. At some point the large institutional investors who own gobs of stock in the companies are going to say, "Like hell you're going to torpedo two seasons of television. We are not going to stand by and watch you lose a billion dollars so you can save one hundred and fifty million."

At that point, the real bargaining will begin. But the AMPTP Mindf*ck™ will continue. Look forward to the day when they make a proposal that's not very good for most writers but would be good enough for some key members of the negotiating committee. That's when they'll get their new PR firm -- you know, the ones who handled Bill Clinton's "Monica Problem", and helped spin for a company sued for poisoning its workers who were then fired for complaining about it -- to tell the world that certain "crazy idealists" and "bitter militants" (i.e., Patric Verrone and David Young) are destroying this industry.

So be prepared, and recognize it for what it is. They want strike fatigue to set in, so we take a sub-par deal just to feel the relief of being done with the AMPTP Mindf*ck™.

Resist strike fatigue. Resist the AMPTP Mindf*ck™. Because, let's face it, once we go back to work, it's back to the Development Mindf*ck, and the Late Payment Mindf*ck, and the Didn't Your Agent Tell You We Found Another Writer? Mindf*ck.

(Via United Hollywood.)

Glenn Greenwald, this morning:

The Washington Post reports today that the Bush administration, beginning in 2002, repeatedly briefed leading Congressional Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees -- including, at various times, Jay Rockefeller, Nancy Pelosi, and Jane Harman -- regarding the CIA's "enhanced interrogation methods," including details about waterboarding and other torture measures. With one exception (Harman, who vaguely claims to have sent a letter to the CIA), these lawmakers not only failed to object to these policies, but affirmatively supported them.

This information was almost certainly leaked to the Post by intelligence officials who are highly irritated -- understandably so -- from watching the manipulative spectacle whereby these Democrats now prance around as outraged victims of policies to which they deliberately acquiesced, when they weren't fully supporting them. Numerous liberal bloggers are already drawing the only conclusions that can be drawn, and expressing their outrage and horror at the Democratic Party leadership. Those sentiments are indisputably appropriate, and I just want to add a few more points to them.

Disclaimer: Why, yes, I am pulling this completely out of my ass. I have no special knowledge, and I'm not claiming any, on this subject. If you disagree, contact your ISP and ask for a refund on the $0.000000034 of bandwidth you spent reading this.

That said, I keep remembering that when this entire story broke, the first use of the word waterboarding did not immediately trigger the word torture in my mind. We all know that the government and military use "harsh" interrogation techniques by the plain definition of that word, not the new euphemistic one of "torturous." Messing with a suspect's mind and discomfort, even over long periods, are things we all knew were going on.

Somehow, I don't think that these briefings that included ranking member Pelosi included words like waterboarding or torture. With the CIA still just calling these techniques "harsh," I doubt that the briefings included a line like "We ought to tell you that we prosecuted Japanese soldiers after World War II for war crimes for using these same techniques on American soldiers."

Similarly, in 2002, long before everyone knew the intelligence abou Iraq was cooked to fit the war that President Bush had wanted since inauguration day, most people would probably have believed that "cleared by CIA lawyers" meant "adheres to all US statutes and treaty obligations," not "there's a thin argument we can make that we don't have to obey US statutes and treaties if the president says we don't."

In other words, if I had received a CIA briefing on these techniques in 2002, I would likely not have known or even suspected that they were illegal and the plain definition of "torture." I'm not sure that in a pre-Joe Wilson world that the ranking members of the congressional Intelligence committees should have known that, either. It seems clear that Jane Harman did, and that's very good, but I'm not sure that would have been expected, like we expect them to know what is and is not "torture" today. In 2002, I don't think it was even a hint of a question that Congress knew it might have to stop the CIA from overtly torturing people.

If this is the case (and see the disclaimer about where this hunch came from), then Pelosi and the other, even the Republicans, need to say now that they just didn't know, and apologize to the public for not having been on the ball in an area that, for fifty years, had been so beyond the pale that Congress would not have thought the CIA would be entering it. I'm not a congressman, but I did not know that waterboarding was the definition of "torture" until experts started saying so. I can believe that members of congress didn't know it either, especially given the way the CIA probably presented it in those briefings.

Feel free to pull your own hunches out of your own anatomy, but I can at least understand how this might be possible by remembering my own ignorance on the subject. Oh, for the good old days when the voting public didn't have to consider a candidate's position on torture before casting a ballot. That was all of five years ago.