I don’t think I’ve ever seen a major newspaper with so few ads.

The facts are grisly:

A Pembroke Pines teenager told an Internet audience he wanted to kill himself by drug overdose — and then he followed through on his macabre threat while a live webcam captured it, according to the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Abraham Biggs Jr., 19, ingested a lethal mixture of three different drugs early Wednesday, then continued to blog about it while others watched online and egged him on.

The end of the video — which shows Pembroke Pines police busting into his bedroom and discovering his body — remained up on LiveVideo.com as of Friday morning.

Yes, I blame the people involved, not “the Internet”.

Florida has displaced the common-law rule against suicide with some statutory provisions. The most relevant one is aimed at assisted suicide (there’s also § 782.081, banning premeditated commercial exploitation of a suicide, but that seems to me not to apply to these facts). Here’s the relevant law:

782.08 Assisting self-murder.—Every person deliberately assisting another in the commission of self-murder shall be guilty of manslaughter, a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084.

1. Does ‘egging on’ amount to ‘deliberately assisting’?
2. If the statute does make ‘egging on’ manslaughter, does the First Amendment prevent its operation because it protects this sort of speech?

My gut instinct — and I’ll quickly admit this is not my field at all — is that ‘egging on’ does not amount to ‘deliberately assisting’ under this statute, which was pretty clearly aimed at physician assisted suicide, and cases where someone gives a depressed person guns or pills. I see the law as criminalizing the provision of tools in the main. Perhaps this could be extended to specialized knowledge, such as telling a depressed person how to make or find a gap in a protective fence at ‘Suicide Gulch’. But I don’t see it as extending to encouragement — even if a psychiatrist might testify (let us imagine) that the encouragement was a necessary element of the victim’s decision.

Good thing, too, because the second question is much harder…

If you’re having trouble remembering what the recent election was all about, rest easy: You’re likely experiencing the momentary effects of brainwashing.

For weeks, your television, newspaper and radio have been telling you America is a “center-right nation” that elected Barack Obama to crush his fellow “socialist” hippies, discard the agenda he campaigned on, and meet the policy demands of electorally humiliated Republicans.

This is the usual post-election nonsense from the Braindead Megaphone, as author George Saunders famously calls our political and media noise machine. When George W. Bush wins by 3 million votes, the megaphone blares announcements about a conservative mandate that Democrats must respect. When Obama wins by twice as much, the same megaphone roars about Democrats having no mandate to do anything other than appease conservatives.

I do own a TV now, but I don’t ever watch the TV news; and since the election haven’t watched the commentators. Sounds like I’m not missing much?

This is why it might actually be a good idea to revive the Fairness Doctrine.

The right-wing is hyperventillating about the prospect of the Fairness Doctrine’s revival because (1) it would be very effective at curbing the main source of right-wing ability to whip up troops into (often misinformed) frenzy; (2) it’s what they would do if the positions were reversed.

But there’s no chance the Obama administration will do it. None. I wish I thought that their decision was due to the Constitutional dubiousness of the FD. But in fact, it’s due to a vision of how to govern that amounts to a high-stakes gamble: love your enemies and you will tame them. I don’t see that working on Rush Limbaugh, but then I didn’t just get elected President either…

I don’t mind so much the Miami Herald being a coward and making the fundamentally silly choice of substituting a re-run or an old strip instead — it’s failing to acknowledge what they were doing by, say, tacking on a little note that I think is pretty bad…

Then again, this sort of gutlessness (managed to make it to the end of a Myriam Marquez column yet? Don’t you miss Jim DeFede and Ana Menendez?) is one more reason why the Herald seems less and less necessary.

I especially like this one:

The interviewer will be Rhod Sharp, and the program will be broadcast in the UK and live online too.

Although we talked a lot about the impact of the internet on the election, the excerpt they used, which appears near the end of the segment, is about the role of racism in the election, a subject on which I likely know no more than next guy. RTL.fr - “L’autre Amérique” (3) : les USA, pays raciste?

Judging from the interview requests I’m getting from foreign media, a lot of reporters based in Europe think that nice warm Miami — near the epicenter of the last two elections — is the perfect place from which to do their election-week coverage. And they seem to have persuaded their editors to authorize the trips…

The topic is this case. Before you jump to too many conclusions, you might want to read this letter from the prosecutor.

Ok, now jump.

Update: Was on for all of several seconds, and in due course they promise to send a URL.

Look at the “News Analysis” article entitled In Bailout Vote, a Leadership Breakdown . No pussyfooting here from Jackie Calmes (with assists from several others):

The leaders of both parties failed, many analysts agreed, in bringing the measure to the House floor without knowing whether it had the votes to pass — a bad move at any time, but especially so in this case given the risk of the markets and the badly weakened financial system reacting badly.

…

As a study in his prospective leadership, the role of Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, has done him no political good. After suspending his campaign last week and vowing to work with Republicans until a resolution was in hand, Mr. McCain was campaigning in Ohio on Monday with his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, as the House vote commenced. There he implicitly took credit for the compromise bailout that Congressional leaders had negotiated over the weekend, even as it was going down to defeat.

On his plane before takeoff to Iowa, Mr. McCain spoke by phone with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. With no credit to claim in the bill’s defeat, he flew to Iowa without making a statement to reporters on board. In Iowa, he criticized Mr. Obama, his Democratic rival, before adding, “Now is not the time to fix blame.”

Even before the vote, House Republicans had trouble pointing to any contributions from Mr. McCain to their deliberations since late last week, when he and they forced the administration officials and Congressional leaders to reopen negotiations and alter the package to impose some safeguards for taxpayers’ billions.