"Mark Cuban Posterizes Al Franken"

At Red State, Neil Stevens writes that he’s using the basketball portmanteau, “Posterize”, which he defines as meaning, in this context, “to defeat brilliantly with a photogenic finish that humiliates the victim:”

Mark Cuban is known these days for being the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, a team he took from years of malaise to the NBA Finals. He didn’t get his start in sports though, no. He made his money in a pair of business ventures. First he sold a company called MicroSolutions – a hardware and software integrator – to CompuServe. From there he joined what became broadcast.com – an online multimedia streaming service – which netted him the billions in a sale to Yahoo. He’s since stayed in the broadcast field, now heading a venture called HDNet – a high definition video broadcasting service.Suffice it to say Mark Cuban knows audio and video broadcasting.

So when Mark Cuban writes a lengthy article explaining in great detail how Senator Al “Stuart Smalley” Franken is completely, totally, and utterly wrong in his pronouncements on the future of online video, I listen.

Cuban conclusively shows how Franken’s proposed government mandates would make the Internet more expensive for everyone, would cripple a media giant, and make online television worse for the people who do use it today. Nobody wins under the Franken plan.

This idea is so bad, it’s a good thing the Democrats aren’t also proposing to regulate the entire Internet, in some sort of “Net Neutrality” scheme. Then they might really goof up.

But why would Cuban want to “humiliate” Franken? Cuban backed the production of the communist apologia Good Night, and Good Luck, and resuscitated Dan Rather’s career after Document Dan imploded in the fall of 2004 with CBS. I’d say that Sen. Al Franken is exactly the sort of thoughtful soft-spoken articulate “progressive” politician that Cuban would want to see in The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.™