The fatblogging train rolls on…

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A conversation with the owner of a prominent Richmond restaurant persuaded Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to seek a legislative ban on smoking in all eateries.”‘I’d like to go no smoking for my employees, but I worry if I do, I’ll lose business’” Kaine quoted the owner, whom he did not name. The restaurateur urged Kaine to apply a ban to all eating establishments.

“I thought that was a fairly compelling insight,” the governor said.

So why did the governor propose the law? A variation of the protect-the-children rationale used to support all nanny state laws, of course.

He proposed the sweeping prohibition to the General Assembly primarily to protect restaurant workers, not customers.

Despite the documented dangers of second-hand smoke to customers, Kaine emphasized, they can choose a nonsmoking restaurant or stay at home and eat.

But it’s not as easy for workers to find other jobs, he explained.

This argument is a big, fat, stinking, moldy-under-the-gills red herring. Here’s a thought experiment - if a restaurant agreed to hire only smokers, would smoking then be OK? After all, surely first-hand smoke is more dangerous than second-hand smoke is. These workers don’t need protection, so smoking should be OK, right? Of course not, since these laws are all about the government telling you what is good for you and restricting what private property owners allow on their property.

This non-smoker hates cigarette smoke as much as anybody. I’d love it if I woke up tomorrow and all restaurants were smoke free. I’d also love it if people didn’t yak on their cell phones while driving, didn’t wear those stupid Bluetooth headsets at the grocery store, didn’t stink up elevators with bad cologne and didn’t wear stupid-looking topical print shirts. But I don’t ask the government to ban any of those things on my behalf. Non-smokers don’t have a right to a smoke-free restaurant any more than smokers have a right to smoke. Private property owners, however, do have a right to control what legal activity is allowed on their property, free from government interference.

So what’s the solution? As with all things, the market. Don’t want cigarette smoke with your smoked turkey? Patronize the many, many restaurants that are already smoke-free. Business owners will get the message. Don’t want to work somewhere where smoking is permitted? Get a different job (and despite what the governor says, there are other jobs). When workers for non-smoke-free restaurants become more scarce, business owners will have to pay more, increasing the economic pressure to go smoke-free. Customers don’t have the right to use the power of the state to remake businesses into what they want them to be. They do have the power to take their money elsewhere.

Hopefully the General Assembly will vote down the governor’s nanny state amendment.

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Another weekend approaches quickly. No Busch Gardens this time, but we do plan a visit to a friend for dinner, so Sunday may be a day of fasting to recover from fasting.

Today’s favorite food product:

Made a taco salad last night using the El Pinto sauce, which added some nice green chile kick without being overwhelming. The medium heat was perfect - the hot would have been too much.

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Back in 2000, for a City Hall roast, Mr. Giuliani got himself dolled up in drag and made a video in which Donald Trump flirts with him and kisses his breasts. It’s included in a new movie, “Giuliani Time,” and you can see it on YouTube just by typing “Giuliani in drag” into the search box.

Say what you will about the Current Occupant, there is no video out there of him waltzing around in a long lavender gown and a brassiere, and blond wig, while an aging tycoon nuzzles his chest. He may have sunk low back in his drinking days, but he managed to keep his adventures private. I doubt that Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ever donned women’s apparel for the cameras….

There are plenty of bigger issues. But the video has a creepy fascination to it. The man in the lavender dress and the blond wig surely never contemplated running for president. It was the two planes hitting the towers a year later that made him a celebrity and then a candidate, nothing he had accomplished himself in public office.

Mr. Giuliani should put the issue behind him by answering a few questions: (1) How much did he have to drink that night, and what was he drinking? (2) Whose idea was it–his own or an aide’s? If the latter, was there wagering involved and how much was bet? (3) Were the garments new or used, and who picked them out? And was he wearing male or female underthings? (4) On a scale of 1 to 10, how good did he feel in that dress?

Now he’s taking on gay marriage and gay parents:

I grew up the child of a mixed-gender marriage that lasted until death parted them…. Back in the day, that was the standard arrangement. Everyone had a yard, a garage, a female mom, a male dad, and a refrigerator with leftover boiled potatoes in plastic dishes with snap-on lids….

Under the old monogamous system, we didn’t have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents—Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck—and need a program to keep track of the actors…

And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it.

The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men—sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That’s for the kids. It’s their show.

Of course, Keillor’s act has always been based on his fuddy-duddiness, but he does seem to be going off the deep end a bit, seeing a chartreuse-panted cross dresser around every corner. Now that both the conservatives and the liberals recognize that he’s an ass when he’s not rolling out the well-worn Guy Noir schtick, can we just kill his syndicated column already?

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Like the graph to the right? It’s entirely done within Wordpress, using Pasi Matilainen’s Simple Graph plugin. The text block under the graph is automagically generated using the plugin’s database entries and PHP. I used to do something similar using EditGrid, but this solution works better and doesn’t rely on the availability of a third party site.

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Back on the horse for this week. I still hop to see 19x real soon.

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• Fully functional breadcrumb navigation (no plugin required).
• Famfamfam’s Silk icon set, with changing icons in breadcrumb.
• Built-in support for Christine’s Ultimate Tag Warrior, Alex’s Share This and Binary Bonsai’s version of Dunstan’s Time Since plugins. These are not required, but the theme looks to see if they are installed. If UTW is found, it hides categories and the category archive tab.

A little more bug testing and I’ll do a public release. It will come in a variety of color schemes.

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An Internet petition called savethewrencross.org garnered more than 17,000 signatures calling for Nichol to restore the original policy.

Benjamin Locher, a W&M senior from Pittsburgh and co-founder of the site, said he is satisfied with the compromise.

“Hopefully, this gives us enough common ground that we can all rally behind it,” he said.

Joe Luppino-Esposito, another co-founder of the site who is also chairman of the student Senate, said he has some reservations and would prefer the original policy. “Putting [the cross] in a glass case makes it museumlike,” he said.

Locher and Luppino-Esposito said they spoke only for themselves and would need to consult with others before reaching any decision on the future of their Web site and petition.

It’s just delicious that Luppino-Esposito is now arguing that the compromise is unacceptable because it makes the cross “museumlike,” given that his website exists to “Defend and Honor William & Mary’s History.” If the cross should stay to honor the College’s Anglican history, then making the cross “museumlike” is entirely appropriate.

The T-D’s comments section contains lots of commentary objecting to the compromise as well. Like this one:

I doubt that ACLU, Brown-Shirt Nichol would have been offended by a swastika or hammer and sickle in the Wren Chapel upon his initial arrival to the W&M campus.

Or this one:

Get real President Nichol! Placing the cross in a glass display case does not in any way, shape or form return it to it’s place of honor in the chapel. It must be returned and displayed in the manner which was in effect before the ACLU entered the case. Maybe in years to come it will be seen proper to inter the remains of Gene Nichol in a glass display case somewhere on campus as a memorial to political correctness gone awry. What the heck! It worked for Lenin!

These people want the College to say that Christianity is superior to all other beliefs. It simply shouldn’t do so. The compromise adequately addresses the history of the building without endorsing religion.

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Following its meeting yesterday, the William and Mary Committee on Religion in a Public University unanimously recommended a compromise practice on the display of the table cross in the Wren Chapel. We accept and will immediately begin to implement the Committee’s recommendations, which we quote in full:

THE WREN CHAPEL CROSS SHALL BE RETURNED FOR PERMANENT DISPLAY IN THE CHAPEL IN A GLASS CASE. THE CASE SHALL BE LOCATED IN A PROMINENT, READILY VISIBLE PLACE, ACCOMPANIED BY A PLAQUE EXPLAINING THE COLLEGE’S ANGLICAN ROOTS AND ITS HISTORIC CONNECTION TO BRUTON PARISH CHURCH. THE WREN SACRISTY SHALL BE AVAILABLE TO HOUSE SACRED OBJECTS OF ANY RELIGIOUS TRADITION FOR USE IN WORSHIP AND DEVOTION BY MEMBERS OF THE COLLEGE COMMUNITY.

The cross will still be available, of course, for use on the altar during appropriate religious services. This practice is similar to that used by other universities with historic chapels, including the University of Virginia. Other religious symbols, which may be stored in the sacristy when not in use, will also be welcome during the services for which they are appropriate. Under this policy, the Wren Chapel will continue to play its unique historic and affirming role in the life of the College: a place of worship for our students and a site for our most solemn occasions.

This compromise is eminently reasonable. The response to the new policy will be telling. If those who opposed President Nichols’ decision to remove the cross oppose the compromise as well, then it means they will oppose any policy that does not place Christianity in a superior position to all other beliefs, which is a completely unacceptable position for a public university to take.

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Till recently, the royalty rate was about 7/100th of a penny per performance, allowing many small webcasters to thrive and build sizeable audiences. At 14-15 songs per hour, it worked out to about penny an hour – one of the main reasons why Yahoo could offer music-streaming services at affordable prices.

However, now the equation has changed – the royalty rates will increase every year through 2010 when it is going to cost about $0.0019 per performance. While not much when taken as a single performance, the amount does add up if you are a company that streams millions of performances per day.

It’s actually even worse for most webcasters, as many were operating under a percentage-of-revenue model that will no longer be available. But put them aside for the moment, as such webcasters will almost certainly disappear, as the RIAA thinks that they should:

Dr. Nagle rested his overall analysis on the fundamental assumption that the current webcasting industry consists of a large number of marginal or insignificant entities (see, e.g., Tr. 13393 (Nagle); Nagle W.D.T. 5) and that a dramatic “shake out” must and will occur. See id. This, in his view, is both inevitable and desirable because it will bring about market consolidation, which will result in the emergence of a far smaller number of viable webcaster companies. These, in turn, will be able to prosper and endure (operate at a “sustainable scale at this future point of viability” (Nagle W.D.T. 6)) and, not incidentally, be able to afford significantly higher royalty payments to copyright owners. [emphasis added]

The CRB’s job is to consider only what royalty agreement a hypothetical marketplace would produce, so the fate of small webcasters is not within its purview. But what marketplace would produce contracts that no purchaser could afford to pay?

What about the big players, like AOL Music, last.fm and Pandora? Pandora says that the new royalty rates will kill their service:

The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has recently released a revised fee schedule for internet radio. Left unchanged, these rates will end internet radio, period. The RIAA has effectively convinced this federal committee to establish rates that make online radio a non-viable business.

It’s an utterly ridiculous ruling that renders any form of internet radio non-economic. We are continuing in the belief that sanity will return as everyone involved, including the 50 million avid online radio listeners, realize just how outrageous this is.

Bluster from a webcaster that just doesn’t want to pay? Hardly. As Keith Hanson points out, the 2006 rates alone amount to 100% of the total revenues of a well-run web radio station:

In 2006, a well-run Internet radio station might have been able to sell two radio spots an hour at a $3 net CPM (cost-per-thousand), which would add up to .6 cents per listener-hour.

Even adding in ancillary revenues from occasional video gateway ads, banner ads on the website, and so forth, total revenues per listener-hour would only be in the 1.0 to 1.2 cents per listener-hour range.

That math suggests that the royalty rate decision — for the performance alone, not even including composers’ royalties! — is in the in the ballpark of 100% or more of total revenues.

If that weren’t bad enough, the new rates include a minimum payment of $500/channel/year. In the case of last.fm and Pandora, what constitutes a channel? Is every channel created by each listener a channel for purposes of royalty payments? If so, then the news is even worse. It’s not clear to me how many Pandora stations there are, but six months ago Pandora was reporting 2.5 million users. Each user can create up to 100 stations, but even 1 station per user is a minimum royalty payment of $1.25 billion.

The CRB royalties apply only to non-interactive webcasters operating under the statutory license. It’s always been questionable whether Pandora qualifies for that license - would they be better off under a negotiated rate? All in all, the decision is a bad one. Bad for webcasters, bad for customers, and bad for the music industry (even if they don’t realize it yet). The only winner appears to be terrestrial radio stations, which could pick up a handful of listers if webcasters go away. And what’s good for Clear Channel and the NAB is almost certainly bad for you and me.

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