Foundation

Two quick hits following up with ongoing stories.

First off, Google and/or Andrew McLaughlin (Deputy White House CTO formerly of Google) seem to have responded to the FOIA request for McLaughlin’s email by deleting his Buzz account. It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up, as they say. Big Government is doing such great work on this story.

Next we turn from the behind-the-scenes discussions of Net Neutrality to the front lines. Reuters has a story on the FCC’s Deem and Pass plan to reclassify Internet services into a different category, if and when they lose the Comcast case and the judge tells them they have no authority to regulate the Internet.

The ISPs aren’t ready to lay down and die and according to Susan Crawford, formerly of the Obama White House, they’re ready to fight “World War III” over it. I hope they remember that elections have consequences, and spend accordingly for November.

Here is the amendment that Tom Campbell asked John Campbell to withdraw, an amendment that would have withdrawn funding for a number of NSF grants.

These aren’t earmarks, but is this wise spending?

Michael Powell is a former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission who is not in favor of the whole Net Neutrality takeover of the Internet. So he’s warning us about what I’m calling deem and pass, in which the FCC will respond to a lost lawsuit by deeming ISPs to be something different, and using that to justify passing rules to regulate the Internet like television.

You may remember Michael Powell because right out of the gate during the Bush administration he was an active regulator of content. Imagine a Democrat having that kind of power over the Internet.

Anyway, Powell’s reaction to deem and pass is that “I think that idea is an unadulterated disaster.” Strong words for what is a pretty dry, technical interview. Read the whole thing, please.

This is Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican representing the 46th Congressional District.

This is the title of a press release put out by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, per the LA Times:

Not an April Fools’ Day Joke: Representative Dana Rohrabacher Caught Trying to Take Credit for Jobs She Voted Against

It’s clear that the Democrats have done so little research on their targeted Republicans that they can’t even tell the men from the women. Why such sloppy work? Is the feeling of DOOM hampering their concentration, or something?

Remember Andrew McLaughlin, Deputy CTO of the White House? The one with lots of Google contacts exposed by the Google Buzz security hole?

A group called Consumer Watchdog is filing a FOIA request for his emails, both GMail-based and WhiteHouse.gov-based. This is beautiful. Either we get to watch White House officials backtrack on transparency as fast as their legs will carry them, or we get to see just what Google and Obama Democrats have been discussing.

I’m rooting for the former. It will be delicious to watch Obama and the Democrats adopt Dick Cheney’s position on private meetings with industry.

Updated: I’ve been sent a passage from the Congressional record illustrating that the specific spending Tom Campbell defended was not an earmark, but rather an NSF grant. So, while it makes sense that John Campbell’s amendment would target such a thing as wasteful spending, this specific amendment that Tom Campbell opposed addressed “peer reviewed” grants, not requests by members of Congress. Different process. John Campbell must have mis-remembered, which is of course understandable, but the record must be corrected for my part in repeating it.

Tom Campbell has now pledged to oppose earmarks. That’s a good position to take, and I agree with it. Earmarks are a tiny part of the spending problem, but they’re a gateway drug to outright corruption. There is too little oversight and too much abuse of that system, and it should be abolished.

However this is a recent change for him. Via Flash Report, John Campbell tells us how Tom Campbell once lobbied him in favor of earmarks.

Are campaign-year conversions a useful indicator? That’s for the primary voters to decide.