"Monday, monday....can't trust that day...."

A few things going down today that have me a little bit apprehensive. Apprehensive in the sense that I'm uncertain as to the nature of the issues and, therefore feeling totally unprepared.

One issue has to do with a business decision which I won't get into but the other has to do with our efforts to get Democracy Now! rebroadcast on the local cable access channel.

As some of you may note, we've been trying to get this done since early last summer and we were fortunate enough to get the committee to agree to rebroadcast from a tape kindly provided by my next door neighbor. Although this required the physical effort of taping it every morning at 7AM and then physically delivering it to the cable station, it worked very well. That is, until my neighbor moved and we could not find anybody else willing to do the taping.

While doing that, we began negotiations with the Public asscess channel to put up a satellite dish (one-year for free) and broadcast Democracy Now! either live or tape delayed, directly from the Public Access studios. We ran into a lot of stalling tactics and finally, after four months of delays, we received the new, City Attorney's version of the agreement necessary to do the rebroadcasts.

I spent some time going over the two agreements this morning and find that the major difference between the two is that the local contract has layer upon layer of protections from liability for the local access channel. Beyond that, there are things in there that I don't understand. For instance there is a tremendous amount of verbiage of the start/ending date of the agreement as compared to the original agreement. Reason says that this is just "lawyer talk" but having been involved with lawyers in the past, there is that uneasy feeling that there is a purpose to this verbiage beyond the obvious.

Yeah. I know. I'm cynical. I'm suspicious. Paranoid? Not yet, but I'm working on it.

Anyway. I'll go into the meeting tonight with my naivete' in tact and come out...
..ummmmm...okay...I'll clean it up...let's say LESS naive'.

e