The man whose whole Presidential election campaign was built on change and the future has suddenly decided that the future isn't such a good idea.  Wonderful.  President-elect Barack Obama has asked Congress to delay the DTV transfer only a month before the analog signals throughout the country are set to be mothballed and auctioned off to communications companies and used for emergency services. 

In his address to Congress, John Podesta (one of Obama's transition team) wrote:  "With coupons unavailable, support and education insufficient, and the
most vulnerable Americans exposed, I urge you to consider a change to
the legislatively-mandated analog cutoff date."  There may be about 7.7 million households who may have to go out and pay full price for their DTV boxes come February 17.  Excuse me if I don't cry a river of tears.

Every day for the last six months, I've seen ads discussing the analog to digital changeover.  Every local station in my market has had a periodic crawl across the bottom of the screen announcing that, if you don't have a digital box, the signal will be going dark on February 17, 2009.  They've been practically begging people to log onto DTV2009.com and get their hands on one of these boxes, because they depend on eyes to survive.  The government, for their part, has already sold this air space for a nice $19.6 billion dollars. 

Delaying the changeover is not the answer, mostly because it punishes the TV industry for the greed of Congress.  Nor is halting the changeover because some people haven't used the six months in which the DTV transition has been smashed into their faces to get coupons, get a box, or both.  The answer would be to take a little bit more of that nearly $20 billion in profits and put it into the coupon program to make sure those on the waiting list have been served.  Better yet, give everyone in the country $80 back on their taxes so that way they won't have to depend on coupons to get their converters. 

Another delay on an oft-delayed government plan is not the good kind of change.  They made the TV industry pay for billions of dollars in new hardware (and it's not like PBS was rolling in cash and my local independent TV station wasn't doing much better), so if someone doesn't have their DTV coupon by now, then they'll either have to pay out of pocket, wait in line, do without TV, or hope the government frees up more money. 

Don't punish everyone for the mistakes of a significantly small group of unprepared people.  The government forced this change on everyone, after all.  They have no one to blame but themselves for not making enough money available to cover their coupon program, or having a more efficient way of delivering said coupons.  If you want to delay the changeover, allow stations to continue running analog signals side by side with their digital.  Otherwise, you made this bed, you have to sleep in it.