Tuesday’s column: There oughta be a law . . .
David Iliff | License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 | Wikimedia Commons
Back in September I asked readers to fill in this blank: “There ought to be a law about _____.”
Now that the great big election is behind us, there must be some lawmakers looking for some things to do.
So here we go with some of those suggestions:
Cecilia Barton of Cloverdale wants a law dear to my own heart. The Do Not Call Registry should apply to political robocalls, she says, so that victims of those infernal things can opt out of receiving them.
The campaign robocalls calls to her home started in August, and continued all the way through election day. Often, there were six or seven a day, Barton told me. They came from all over: Boston, Mass., Washington, D.C., Staunton — and many other places.
“You can’t lay down if you want to, you can’t cook dinner without an interruption,” Barton told me.
Almost all of them were from Republican entities. She got so upset the called Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s office, where an aide promised she would pass Barton’s idea on to Goodlatte.
“I’ve been totally bombarded . . . some of which I can’t disconnect from,” she said. “I’m sick and tired of it.”
Mr. Goodlatte, Barton and I are waiting for you to introduce that bill.
That wasn’t the only campaign-related law that ought to be.
READ THE REST OF THIS COLUMN HERE.
November 13, 2012 - 6:00 AM
I’ve got a buddy who listened all the way to the end of one of the political calls. The message said you could opt out by pressing X number. The message also said it would take 6-8 weeks to process the request. Of course, 6-8 weeks means if you requested on Labor Day to not be called any more, you’d only miss a week or two of calls. That is, if they actually processed the claim.
We sort of maneuver around the 3 biggies. We don’t have a landline phone, and the only call either my wife or I got all season was a call from the Obama campaign the weekend before the election, just reminding us to vote. I can handle that. The political mailers went straight from the mailbox to the recycle bin, every bit of it, regardless of who sent it. I didn’t even exert the effort to tear them in half like I do with junk mail, they’re not worthy of that. As far as radio/tv ads, we don’t watch much TV, don’t have cable, and thankfully ESPN radio only ran a few ads. There were 2 times I got annoyed with the ads though…I went ahead and paid $36 to upgrade my Pandora account to side-step one (best $36 I’ve spent), and the other was the ads on Hulu Plus. So until the election was done, we watched shows on Hulu that lacked ads, like old X-Files episodes.
One suggestion though, is there a way you can change how you link to the “READ THE REST OF THE COLUMN HERE.” bit? It never goes to the actual column itself, it goes to your achive page…
Dan, seems like you’ve been talking about these political calls/TV ads for a solid two-three months now. I just don’t understand why everyone gets so upset about it. They’re both easy to avoid: (1) No home phone = no robocalls and (2) DVR the shows and avoid all those commercials. I didn’t even notice all the ads until a week or so before the election and tried to watch a live show on CBS. Within 2-3 minutes I turned it to something I’d recorded and forgot about the ads altogether.
Ms Barton’s suggestion isn’t a new one. Congress always exempts itself (uniquely or all politicians, depending upon the issue) from the laws they write. Since the Capitol building is the world’s biggest symbol of hypocracy, the robo calls will continue. I’m a stronger defender of free speech than Dan, but Barton owns that phone and should be able to use it as she see fit. I gave up the land line 4 years ago and haven’t had a single political call since on my cell. When I had the land line I had an answering machine and let the robo calls be simply background noise. Yeah, an aggravation to delete those calls, but on my time, not theirs.
Dick in Cburg
Wishful thinking concerning robocalls. Congress, reps and dems, exempt themselves from almost everything they pass for us, medical plans, retirement plans, social security, etc.
all elected officials should have their pay and benefits packages approved by the majority vote of their constituents.
I have a landline I don’t use ever, literally…I’ll keep it until #2 son is gone to school and I’m not worried about him needing to call 911 in an emergency. I don’t even have an answering machine on it, but when I’d check my caller Id during the day, I was getting between 10 and 15 calls a day. One of them even called itself “Political Call”…someone had a sense of humor.
I second OJ’s comment regarding the link to the article taking you to the archive rather than the article.
You know, it is possible that the non-stop phone calls for Romney may have actually helped Obama win Virginia. At our house the Romney calls outnumbered Obama by at least 10 to one. Some people could have gotten irritated enough with the calls to vote Obama.
OJ and RightWing, regarding your complaints about the link, I’m kind of caught in the middle here.
I used to republish the whole column on the blog, which is my preference, and it was set up the evening/night before, timed to automatically appear at 6 a.m.
That was undesirable. A portion of the column and a link to version AFTER it had gone through all the editing and the headline had been written was a preferred process, I was informed.
So I do that, and I still set it up the night before. Problem: There is no link to the column when I set the blog post up. Because it hasn’t gone through all the editing, the headline hasn’t been written, and it hasn’t appeared on roanoke.com by that time. That stuff occurs at night, on the copy desk.
So, I link to the archive. One the day that the blog post referencing the column appears, the TOP item in the archive is ALWAYS the column. And I basically trust that readers are clever enough to figure this out on their own. The columns are dated, after all, and the headline that a copy editor wrote for the column usually bares some resemblance to the topic.
Sometimes, if I remember, I go back the next morning and correct the link. Which is corrected now, by the way.
But there are days when I forget to do this.
I can understand that, Dan, and thanks for the explanation. It’s just annoying to click a link to something, then have to click something else to get to what I’m trying to read. It’s why I don’t bother with The Burgs any more. Maybe 10-15% of the time do they post actual content(at least it seems like that). The rest of the time, it’s only a short 2-3 sentence teaser with another link, that you have to click to get the whole story, which is hosted on the main website…not even on The Burgs. So to me, why bother with The Burgs, when almost all of the content isn’t even theirs? The reboot of the NRV Current rendered that utterly pointless, in my opinion.
I was all set to take out my land line. I texted my children and said to use the cells to reach us. They both said they were sad to see their “home” number go…we still have it.
Other John:
“So to me, why bother with The Burgs”
Ditto