Pod-SPAN

This is what I need.

A C-SPAN podcast.

You would think that a nice, money-losing public service network like that would invest about $17 more dollars a month into podcasting its shit. Talk about the public good. That would be such a ridiculously useful service, it might actually make our democracy FUNCTION. I just enjoyed a lovely almost-nap, a half of an hour I really should have spent in damn BED at freakin' midnight, listening to the Senate Armed Services Comittee grill Rumsfeld and Myers about...bulletproof shorts. And the Joint something Missile. I stayed up half an hour too late (and another 10 minutes now blogging about it) when, really, I have half an hour a day to kill riding my bike to and from work, just dying to hear some news like that.

There are two C-SPAN channels on the boob tube, covering all kinds of Congressional hearings, book signings, live legislating, and then of course the painfully retarded call-in shows where the inbred and unemployed tell us how to run the country and a dork in a suit reads the paper to us.

But we wouldn't have to listen to all of that on the podcasts! I don't know how Doppler works, but I know the latest version of iPodderX has a preference setting on it that allows me to screen my subscriptions for certain keywords. So, let's say I subscribe to Whole Wheat Radio's Rant-n-Ravin Muffin News, but I'm tired of their random Alaska shit so I only want to actually download the show if they actually mention "tits" in the RSS feed (which Jim usually fills with plenty of descriptive words, phrases, and sentences, something I wish more dumbass podcasters would do). I just put "tits" in the "keyword" filter setting for that feed in iPodderX, and it'll only download the relevant episodes and leave the rest on some server in the middle of nowhere.

So, obviously, C-SPAN could put out everything it recorded in MP3 format, and I could subscribe to the "C-SPAN All Content" RSS but throw "Rumsfeld OR Iran OR Nuclear OR Condoleezza" in the filter and I'd could skip over the author of "Higher than Mine: Lincoln's Testicles and the Civil War" talking to the Society of Unfucked White Men and the Dulles Airport Holiday Inn, for instance.

Dear C-SPAN: please, please, PLEASE put out some podcasts?