OK. I’ve seen Breaking Bad and it’s good, but the fact that Hugh Laurie continues to come up empty in the best actor in a drama series category at the Emmy awards is getting to be pretty embarrassing.

I mean, Bryan Cranston has three more Emmys than Hugh Laurie and Jackie Gleason put together.

Laurie’s Gregory House would be a tour de force for an American actor. For a Brit who has to both inhabit another person and another accent and culture, it is phenomenal to watch on Mondays on Fox.  No, he should not have gotten the award because he is a British actor playing an American, it just makes the portrayal that more amazing. He should get it because he’s just that good on Fox’s medical series.

Golden Globes? He’s got two of them; SAG Awards? A couple more. TV Critics Association awards? Two of those as well. People’s Choice Awards? Three, count ‘em, three. He even has a Teen Choice Award, whatever that is. People love him, teens love him, critics, guilds worth of screen actors, accountants (I’m told  — OK, Wikipedia — that Laurie is the highest paid dramatic actor in TV). So, what is it with the academy?

Mad Men took matters into its own hands. With an episode scheduled opposite the awards, the show guaranteed a win for best actor nominee Jon Hamm by writing him a Clio advertising award for a Glo Coast spot. Hamm lost to Cranston, too. AMC was quick to congratulate Matthew Weiner on his writing award with a spot in the show.

Maybe House can get a “most cynical doctor” award from the AMA next season.

The Phoenix Center will need to rise from the ashes of the incendiary criticisms labeled at its latest study by an FCC official.Paul deSa, the chief of the FCC’s Office of Strategic Planning took aim at the center in a claw-baring blog posting Wednesday.The Center had released a study earlier this week, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: Communications Policy and Employment Effects in the Information Sector, arguing that FCC broadband regulation could hurt job creation and the economy.

Phoenix called it a “significant contribution to the existing literature.”

DeSa would have none of it, mocking the study and the group. He called it a “frothy mix of algebra and math jargon,” then quoted from the dense language to support the argument: “a 2 × 1 speed of convergence parameter vector, C is a matrix that defines the contemporaneous structural relationship among employment and investment expenditures, and et = [e1,t e2,t]’ is a vector of mutually orthogonal structural shocks to these variables.” He spoke of the press release as mercifully equation-free.

“While it would no doubt be fun to wander over to the Phoenix Center to sip lattes while using “the estimates from the vector error correction model [to] conduct a variety of simulations to measure the effect on jobs from a change in capital expenditures,” this Commission would rather do the hard work of implementing real-world policies that help incumbents and innovators create real jobs and investments to strengthen our nation’s broadband economy today and for the future,” said deSa.

I am often similarly offput by pages worth of equations and algebraic explanations, but apparently they do often mean something, like how to get rockets to the moon and back. If the Phoenix study equations are off, that is one thing, but just because they are equations doesn’t make them de facto mockable. I must trust DeSa that he has drawn a distinction because I would not be able to distinguish between algebraic doubletalk and Noble prize- winning formulas if the future of mankind hinged on it.

By the “decipherable” measure, the FCC’s Herfindahl-Hirschman Index is in the same category as the Phoenix study to me. And I challenge anyone out there to read the Earthlink addendum to its Comcast/NBCU filing currently on file at the FCC and explain it, which does not mean it isn’t explicable.

Here is a sample of the Earthlink paper: “[G]iven a density function f and its cumulative distribution function F, we use the assumptions that both F(x)=f(x) is monotone increasing and (1F(x))=f(x) is monotone decreasing.”

The latte-sipping remark seemed a bit unnecessary to me, but that is from someone who was once described in an online column as a “champagne-swilling sybarite ramming indecencies down the gaping maws of school children,” or something to that effect. (Don’t ask.)

Bottom line is, I wonder, and have wondered before, at the wisdom of government officials taking aim at critics in blogs unless it is to rebut the arguments in the normal bureaucratic monotone that is less engaging but perhaps more appropriate to the venue (the FCC not a blog, for which almost anything seems to go).

Just a thought.

Phoenix Center President and former FCC official Lawrence Spiwak had his own thoughts.

This is the reply he was planning to post on deSa’s blog:

“While we always welcome the opportunity to sit down with our good friend Dr. de Sa to enjoy a beverage of his choice, we would like to make clear that our analysis was never meant to take away from the good work the FCC has done to develop and implement a truly excellent National Broadband Plan.

“As we and others have pointed out, the FCC risks sabotaging its own efforts by trying to impose common carrier regulation on broadband transport. Our paper simply provides an econometric multiplier to measure the effect of these proposed regulations on jobs, finds this effect to be significant, and will serve to undermine any good that they’ve done.”

The real bill shock for some in the communications industry this week may have been that for once, cable operators were not on the business end of the stun gun.Did anyone take note of the fact that an FCC Chairman was talking about the size of communications bills and the object of disaffection was not the cable industry but wireless carriers.

Cable operators got so used to being pilloried over their bills by former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin that a reflexive flinch in anticipation of this week’s “bill shock” announcements by current FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski would have been understandable. There were the same kind of “shocking” examples–300 page bills, $30,000 charges–OK, I don’t think Martin ever found either of those on the cable side.

Genachowski is not Martin, however. It is hard to turn around without finding the chairman praising the promise of  wireless broadband. And he was not complaining about the size of the bills as much as he was the fact that consumers were being surprised by some of the charges.

Actually, Martin is still pounding the a la carte cable beat as witness his comments last week on C-SPAN’s Communicators. Frankly, I found it interesting that when all three former chairmen on the program–Michael Powell and ReedHundt were also in attendance–were asked to weigh in on the Comcast/NBCU deal, Martin did not point out that he has been part of a legal team opposing the deal for clients including Bloomberg. He did say at the end ofthe show that he represented communications clients as a partner in Patton Boggs, but that seemed less than full disclosure.

Of course he was hammering cable on prices and choice long before he was being paid to do so, so there is no inconsistency in his position.

If various reports are correct, the White House could be vetting a strong voice for Title II regulation of Internet access to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the High Court.

The next Supreme Court justice could be a judge who twice has held that cable- modem service is at least partly the kind of telecommunications service that the FCC can regulate under a Title II common carrier regime.

The FCC is currently contemplating that and other moves after the federal appeals court for the D.C. circuit ruled that it had not justified its network management decision against Comcast under its Title I designation for cable-modem service.

According to reports late last week by various news services, the administration has been talking with Judge Sidney Thomas of the Ninth Circuit federal appeals court about the upcoming vacancy on the High Court.

Thomas delivered the opinion in the  AT&T vs. City of Portland case in 2000, which held that open-access mandates could not be applied to AT&T by the city as part of a franchise agreement because Internet (@Home) was not a cable service, but at least partly a telecommunications service.

“Under the Communications Act, [the] principle of telecommunications common carriage governs cable broadband as it does other means of Internet transmission such as telephone service and DSL,” Thomas wrote in the Portland decision.

Ironically, that designation could open the door to federal access regulations if the FCC decides to classify cable broadband as a Title II telecommunications service subject to interconnection and nondiscrimination requirements.

Thomas actually twice came to the conclusion that cable modem service included a transmission component that was subject to Title II regs. The second time was when he concurred in the court’s second call on classification. That came in the Brand X case, which challenged the FCC’s subsequent classification of the service as a more lightly regulated information service.

The Brand X challenge was based on the court’s earlier conclusion in Portland that cable broadband had a telecommunications component tied to the transmission element. Brand X was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court, which deferred to the FCC’s Title I classification. But in the Brand X decision, Thomas, in a concurring opinion, wrote separately “to underscore my conclusion that City of Portland was correctly decided. Considered in its entirety, the 1996 Telecommunications Act compels the conclusion that cable modem contains a telecommunications service component.”

Thomas was tapped for the Ninth Circuit post in 1995 by the President Bill Clinton. His better/other half, former First Lady and currently Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has been another name floated as a possible Supreme Court nominee, though she said Sunday on one of the talk shows that she was not angling to ankle her State Department gig to add judicial variety to her resume.

But if Clinton did, she could be another sympathetic ear to mandatory open access.

She was an early backer of network neutrality legislation as a senator and talked up access and connection as Secretary of State in a speech about global information access earlier this year.

Clinton said it was critical that Internet users were assured basic freedoms, including the freedom to connect “to the Internet, to websites, or to each other,” which she likened to the freedom of assembly. She was speaking globally, but also suggested American companies needed to lead by example. Of course, Thomas and the network neutrality would both have to get to the court before his Title II defense could pack a punch, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Show of hands, here. How many people are still looking for the indignity and outrage from the online privacy and “open and transparent digital business practices” worlds about Google’s data harvesting gaffe/mistake/scandal?

Does anyone here think that if Comcast or Charter or Cox had been discovered collecting and storing private data for years, after having first denied it, that the net would be full of talk of inadvertence and gaffes and “must do better next times.”

Comcast/NBCU are not even partnered and they are being pilloried for a host of imagined and anticipated evils both on and off-line.

I am inclined to believe that Google made a mistake in its mission to collect all the world’s information, just as I am inclined to believe that Comcast made a mistake as well, trying to hit a scary and moving target with a blunderbuss, while proceeding to shoot itself in the foot.

But talk about discriminatory treatment in the digital age.

One online privacy proponent was too busy on other fronts to focus on the issue, I was told, while one of those groups that hammers Comcast at every turn said it was not focused on international issues at the moment — Google’s harvesting “gaffe” was discovered in Germany.

Maybe the executives running networks and content and applications companies are all out to conquer and control the world for their shareholders and incentive bonuses through nefarious means, blocking and degrading our political speech, harvesting our private data at will with a twirl of their mustaches and a swirl of their black capes.

Or maybe they are trying to figure out a business that is morphing at the speed of exponential technological change and sometimes get hoisted on their own petard.coms.

“Sauce for the Google?” a far better media reporter than I once asked.