By Denis Campbell

Timing is everything. Cardiff Airport’s tone deaf and out of touch marketing reached yet another low yesterday with the arrival of the “Seats go on sale for faster routes to the States” e-mail. I read it and clicked the links as I had an upcoming US trip to plan.

Now, as background, some may recall a heated exchange back in January I had with the airport’s MD, Patrick Duffy. I eased back a bit on the throttle as it looked as though these articles were unsettling. Well, I’m ba-aack.

After booking passage to Atlanta in April (after shopping several websites), no surprise, I will again travel via Bristol as opposed to the 22-minute door-to-door ride to Cardiff Airport. Why? To fly from Cardiff would cost me £165 more and require one extra flight leg. Most would agree that amount is clearly better in my pocket. As you can see from the photo below the cheapest option from Cardiff on the dates I want to travel is £559. I paid £394.

My routing: Bristol-Paris-Atlanta/Atlanta-Amsterdam-Bristol vs. the “faster route to the States” Cardiff-Dublin-JFK-ATL/ATL-JFK-Dublin-Cardiff. That routing adds another flight leg (so that’s my driving time) and required the purchase of a second ticket on another airline to reach my final destination.

And yet every time I sit on an aircraft taxiing out to that ridiculous Bristol hillside uphill runway, after walking through their terminal building’s permanent construction zone having driven over a single carriage roadway through tiny villages to avoid city traffic, I think of the excellent runways at Cardiff and wonder how Bristol’s airfield ever became better positioned than Cardiff’s?

Bristol Airport is as difficult to reach as Cardiff but yet they doubled in size in a depressed airline market and serve a growing volume of passengers. How can this be? How do they market themselves so well while Cardiff seemingly does so poorly?

Bristol Airport will serve 8+ million passengers in 2010. Cardiff? 1.8 million if they are lucky enough to bring lots of travellers in for the Ryder Cup. Yes, Bristol is a slightly bigger city but why do they double in size with plans to serve 10 million+ passengers while Cardiff lost -5.5% passengers?

How can Bristol serve most major EU city hubs and attract daily service to New York yet In Cardiff, there is no real competition forcing KLM, the only real European airliner operating from the facility, to offer competitive prices and varied flight times (I also booked another flight with a routing Cardiff-AMS-LHR which cost £161 vs £101 roundtrip to and from Bristol). So the exodus of business travellers continues, estimated at 600,000 lost bookings annually and growing.

Where is the private sector outrage? Why must we all just settle and bleat along together riding up and down the M4? Wales has a 70% public sector economic base. The 2.5 million+ people who could fly from Wales need a break.

As I said two weeks ago on the BBC Wales political programme Dragon’s Eye: “Cardiff Airport is badly broken” and seems to be getting worse. While I don’t expect real answers from Mr. Duffy, how is this good news for the local business or leisure traveller if one is continually raped on price?

Try as I might to get excited about the new Aer Lingus Regional connection service, a 3-hour round-trip drive, £25 worth of petrol, £20 to park for a week off-airport and $5.50 toll cannot justify spending £165 extra pounds.

Mr. Duffy said in January he cannot force carriers to operate out of Cardiff so none of this is his fault. Well then whose fault is the loss of traffic under his watch? Our last exchanges brought several interesting comment responses from all but those actually responsible for fixing the airport.

And Steve Hodgetts, Director of Business Development and Commercial, Cardiff Airport wrote a comment reply to a letter on the Media Wales’ website this year:

It is also unfortunate that when we persuade airlines to offer routes such as Brussels and Aberdeen the Welsh public who clamour for them don’t use them – use them or lose them, has to be a warning… the support of the Assembly on inbound tourism and other areas needs to match the best we see in other regions in the UK and Europe if we are going to tip the scales back in Cardiff’s favour and deliver the scale of services we and others want.”

We “clamoured” for Aberdeen? What’s next daily service to John O’Groats? (Warning: here’s where I get David Cameron snarky…) How about Mr. Duffy and Mr. Hodgetts you market Wales to Paris and Frankfurt? Rome and Athens? Madrid and Vienna? Yes, I can fly daily to Anglesey. And why, in God’s name, would I want to? Use it or lose it? That’s the airport’s measured response? Wow.

And what happens in October when the world comes to Wales for the Ryder Cup? Oh, that’s right. They’ll fly into London or Bristol and drive to Newport!

Politico Senior Editor David Mark discusses President Obama’s visit to Ohio as he continues to push for health care reform on CBS News.

The Lunacy of Republican opposition in the Healthcare Debate writ large!

By Denis Campbell

As US healthcare reform passage draws near, my mailbox fills with incoherent Right Wing hate screed and rage. Meanwhile the Obama Administration and Democratic controlled US Congress seem unwilling to buck the echo chamber and do the right thing.

The public located outside the 24 sq. miles of fantasy surrounded by reality known as Washington DC, want fairly priced healthcare coverage for their families. The greatest medical technology in the world can only prevent people from dying of preventable and treatable diseases if they can afford insurance.

When someone has to choose between health coverage and paying their home mortgage, what kind of a moral choice is that? How can any nation that pays nearly 18% of its GDP for healthcare not have the best coverage in the world covering everyone?

Where is the moral outrage? Where is the real courage?
President Obama told a great story yesterday in Ohio. We shed a tear for Natoma Canfield. The problem is his actions and leadership have not matched the rhetoric. He has consistently back-pedalled away from telling Congress what he wants done and supported a bad bill created by and rewarding the corporate thieves who both created and thrive in the current system. How can an Anthem Blue Cross in CA morally justify raising premiums by 40% when they rake in $2.5 billion dollars in profit and pay executives $100s of millions of dollars?

His and Congress’ lack of courage to take on the monied special lobbying interests created 14-months of turmoil and confusion that now rightfully threatens the political future of all Congressional Democrats and Republicans because of inaction, gridlock, greed and a patent inability to set the record straight.

It’s time now to do something.

Equal Time’s Cruel Joke
It’s time for the Main Stream Media (MSM) to stop just accepting bald-faced lies and do some real reporting. I watched in horror Sunday as former national network anchor Tom Brokaw sat in as guest host of NBC’s Meet the Press. While there he allowed former Bush adviser Karl Rove to spend 10-minutes re-writing Bush era history without challenge.

The noble corporate news mien of ‘equal time’ is a cruel joke perpetrated on the viewing public. Equal time never meant “accept whatever bullshit comes out of someone’s mouth” without challenge! It was designed to allow all sides to be aired but the job of reporting requires the “journalist” to challenge them!

Now cable and network news simply adopt talking points. A Georgetown University Law School professor last week “leaked” a test false quote as an example for his media law class to see how far it could travel. He let leak that Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement. It was on The Drudge Report website and then FOX News in less than 1 hour! There was no independent verification. Without verification and discipline, misinformation reaches Orwellian heights!

Where is the real debate and discussion?
I was scheduled to debate Republican wordsmith Frank Luntz (he of “it’s not called off-shore drilling, rather deep sea oil exploration” fame) on the BBC network during the upcoming UK Leadership debates. Now because it was not a cozy 1:1 studio chat and he would actually have to defend himself 12x during the three debates, he suddenly cannot be there? Of course not.

Why risk a real news discussion/debate when you can sit in the SKY or FOX studios and chat up a friendly host? FOX only has 1:1 discussions because one need only watch Larry King or a CNN broadcast to see how much of a food fight multiple live feeds become.

I’ll debate anyone on the right in-studio, anywhere face-to-face. That requires courage so I’m not holding my breath.

But when it comes to courage, this morning’s report on the website Media Matters shows how the Right has deliberately misled people about the very same budget reconciliation measures they used to pass the Bush Tax Cuts for the rich and other measures. It is a must-read to see how carefully crafted and craven the distortions really are.

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It’s time for truth without SPIN. From “death panels” to “Hands-off my Medicare,” the right wing slow-down tactics are, thankfully, finally running out of steam. It is well past time for real reporting, discussion and a real series of bills to fix the broken system.

Social Security and Medicare both started as bad bills but improved over time. Let’s hope this will also be the case here.

What really worries? Financial institution reform’s got next! Groan.

By Denis Campbell

The UK House of Commons today takes up a measure to stop music and video piracy on the Web. Good luck with that one.

While an admirable pursuit, they are only 15-years too late and now only George Orwell could applaud this Big Brother, bone-headed attempt.

Closing down Internet sites and ISP access will makes the pirates cleverer. That won’t stop Labour from trying to teach this pig to sing (makes horrible noise and irritates the pig). Like turning on the kitchen light, the 2 or 3 cockroaches you see scurrying away, mean hundreds live in the floor boards.

Or, using the ocean off the coast of Somalia analogy, it is too vast to police so everyone but the pirates will suffer. Like attacking prostitution by arresting patrons, one wonders if this matter, just weeks before an election, is the best way to divert attention away from the sick economy?

While most cringe at the thought of popular websites like YouTube being shut down in the UK, £178 billion pounds of debt grows at a rate almost as ridiculous as the industry estimated 240,000 tracks downloaded per hour worldwide. Yet Gordon Brown’s Labour government is as determined as Hans Christian Anderson standing at the bursting dyke. Both are woefully bereft of fingers. In this room full of faeces, Mr. Brown thinks there’s a pony for him in here somewhere.

Are there not other areas like… ooohh say… banking reform more worthy of attack? Or does team Brown look at the 54% of under-20s not even bothering to register to vote and think “there’ll be no consequence here?”

While the recording and video industry may be Labour patrons, their history of exploitation and resistance to any change is what created the mess they now find themselves in. Talk about antitrust monopolies, there is nothing like a record contract. Those golden handcuffs create fortunes for young artists but even bigger ones for those that discover them. It is an industry that creates stars and everyone wants a record deal, but no one as much as the publishers. While the artist gets .10p on the dollar, the bosses split .50-.60p and it is this enormous pile of money that creates those chains that bind. And if you were lucky enough to hit it big with 2 or 3 top artists in your stable, you sit back and watch the money roll in.

There has always been zero incentive to change a thing. No matter what you produced it was a cash generating machine. So since the 1960s advent of audio tape presented the 1st great threat to their dominance one understands how sweet a deal recording companies actually had, how hard they fought to preserve it (and the status quo) and how their mantra, “we do not inn-o-vate!” has been sung like a Druid chant every morning, noon and night for nearly 50-years.

Every recording invention from audio tape to rewritable CDs and DVDs to download sites has been the subject of enormous copyright infringement litigation. Their lawyers were aligned like Roman armies and could beat up your 1-2 lawyers. The industry operated under one rule, sheer, brute force. It had but one objective, to drain you, the innovator, dry.

Their objective was to treat you like Guy Fawkes. You were financially hung, drawn and quartered and then also hung out in the courtyard of public opinion as well. The cases dragged on for years and the result was always the same. Their lawyers rung up huge fees, the early adapter of the technology got hit and put out of business (see Napster 1.0) and the executives patted themselves on the back for a job well done and headed off to the club.

What they did not count on was everyone else watching the case. They knew Napster was taking the hit so they got smarter and either created a solution that paid them (see iTunes) or located their download servers in a friendly country far from the reach of copyright laws.

Now the illegal download business so dwarfs the paid business (some estimates are by as much as 10 or 20:1) that even iTunes’ recent billionth download is a fraction of the total business hit pirates exact. While everyone wants to “monetise their web presence” no price beats free unless you can convince someone you have a better deal costing little or no money.

So Labour will try and fail. Angry British citizens will momentarily bloviate over a non–issue and May 6th approaches quickly. I’m beginning to feel a bit like the Americans watching George W. Bush’s last few weeks during the transition saying, “just… please… don’t break anything.”

We all know how well that worked out.

Man-tan Minority leader John Boehner throws down another gauntlet, not even a speed-bump.

You gotta like this guy! Passionate and he calls them as he sees them.

Sharp pain in chest, this is the big one Weezy! Ken Starr, Clinton special prosecutor obsessed with dress stains  calls out Liz Cheney? Wow!

What he said! Amen to the new young lion.

Can’t make stuff this good up!