Foundation

Ray Haynes at Flash Report has a subtle hit up on somebody running for office this year:

The key years for the current budget are the 06-07 and the 07-08 budgets[….] As critical to the current crisis, however, is the 07-08 budget. A legislator, or former legislator that voted for 07-08 budget, and who is now running for office, who claims to be a fiscal conservative, is deceiving Republican voters.

I confess, I’m only watching two statewide races right now: Governor and Senator. So my first concern was whether this was an attack on Chuck DeVore, the only man in either race with experience in the California Legislature. So I checked up on the matter.

As it turns out no, this can’t be referencing Chuck. He voted No on three of the last four budgets, including the budgets Haynes calls critical to our state budget crisis. The one yes vote was for the 08-09 budget after Republicans held out for 88 days against Democrat demands that we sign off on higher taxes. We won that holdout, and so this vote was not scored by the California Republican Assembly.

So rest easy, conservatives. Chuck DeVore is not a closet big spender.

Here’s yet more proof that the FCC is determined to make its power grab: it won’t even pretend to be fair in information gathering. Take a look at this workshop scheduled for Wednesday. Officially the plan is to come up with ways to “preserve the Open Internet”, but in actuality it’s pretty much a propaganda seminar for Google-Obama Net Neutrality.

The list of panelists is just so biased. There’s even a representative from Clearwire, the Google-invested firm Andrew McLaughlin has been unethically lobbying for from his job in the White House.

But this is exactly what we expect from the Obama administration, isn’t it? From day one the message has been “I won.” And so, it continues.

P.S. the Net Neutrality comment period ends today. To speak up to the FCC visit their website and use proceeding number 09-191.

Google wants Net Neutrality so badly to increase lobbying spending by 50%. And that’s just the above board lobbying. No publicly held corporation could get away with spending an extra half million on anything unless profit were expected on the long run.

So ask yourself, the next time somebody starts telling you how we desperately need Net Neutrality, just how Google is going to make money off of it, and where that money is going to come from.

I normally review a game here when I get through with it. Well I beat Mega Man today, finally. Guess if I liked it.

I’d been motivated to make a fresh stab at the original after watching the perfect runs of Roahm Muthril on You Tube.

Sure enough I finally got past the Yellow Devil for the first time a couple of days ago, and made the final push tonight. What is it with the first Wily stage bosses and me? For a long time the dragon in MM 2 Wily Stage 1 blocked me in that game, and for even longer thefirst boss of MM Wily Stage 1 did the same.

Next I want to do it without continues. I think I’ve managed that once in 2.

Recap of the previous episode: BigGovernment.com found through a Google Buzz security hole that White House Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin was using a GMail account to keep in touch with a bunch of people at Google, his former employer, including a number of key lobbyists for the firm

As a result, a FOIA request was filed for McLaughlin’s email correspondence. In response, McLaughlin’s Google profile was made to vanish.

The investigation continues, though. Blackfive is on the case and despite being known primarily for expertise on military matters, has broken a big story. McLaughlin himself has been lobbying for Google in the course of his White House duties, attempting to benefit the company’s investment in Clearwire in the course of Haiti reconstruction.

Ethics? Clearing out lobbyists? Obamises, Obamises.

Since my last look at the polling in the California Senate Primary we’ve had no new primary polls, though in the general Rasmussen now shows Babs Boxer running poorly against all three Republicans. +2 over Tom Campbell, +3 over Chuck DeVore, and +4 over Carly Fiorina are not the numbers three term incumbent Democrats should be pulling in a state where Democrats capable of beating Republicans by 19 statewide, as Dianne Feinstein did to Campbell in 2000. This is a race we essentially seem to be able to win with Generic Republican.

That means we’d better make sure that Republican we choose actually is capable of motivating Republicans and keeping us in the race. And if Tom Campbell can’t convince groups like GOProud of his conservatism, how is he going to build momentum into November?

As one might guess, GOProud is a group focusing on speaking out for homosexuals. Only unlike the Log Cabin Republicans who veer far to the left, GOProud is by and for homosexual conservatives. If Tom Campbell were the Reaganite Libertarian that people claim he is, who would back him more than a group like GOProud? But the problem is that GOProud isn’t convinced, and made this little video suggesting Campbell is even worse than Dede Scozzafava.

I’ve already questioned Campbell’s ability to draw on the groups any Republican will need to win in this state, including the Proposition 8 coalition, Tea Party goers, Pro-Lifers, and libertarians. GOProud just helps confirm my theory that Campbell really doesn’t reach out to anyone very well, and that’s why we can’t nominate him in June. We have to make the most of this chance we have to win our first Senate election in California since Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

Of course, that’s if we can even tell which Tom Campbell we’re talking about. Is it the Tom Campbell who said today that he supports the tax cuts signed by President Bush, or the Tom Campbell now who won’t pledge not to raise taxes, or the Tom Campbell in 2000 who ran for Senate against then-Governor Bush’s proposed tax cuts and for a 20% national sales tax?

I can see taking risks in a bad year for Republicans. But not now, not against this weak of a Democrat, not in the best climate Republicans have had in California since 1994. We can’t nominate Tom Campbell. He’s too out of step with the state and too much of a risk on taxes at a time when fiscal matters are driving protests nationwide.

A letter opposing Net Neutrality went out today to members of Congress from a number of groups on the right. The spectrum of our movement is represented: libertarian groups, religious and values-oriented groups, economic and fiscal policy advocates, large organizations, and grass roots are all there. The entire list of signers, available below the fold, is as diverse as it is long.

They all recognize that we’ve all benefited from how the Internet has grown and innovated under years of regulation with a “light touch,” because contrary to myth the Internet has never been a Title II Common Carrier under the Communications Act*, and that we must continue to allow the free flow of information without heavy-handed government interference. Competition protects us better than empowering an activist FCC ever could.

I’m glad to see that more of us are coming around on this critical issue. We’re a long way from the days when Free Press front group Save the Internet could rattle off technobabble and convince conservatives that their neo-Marxist regulatory plans were harmless.

I bought an iPhone today. This to some is a seemingly sudden decision. But it’s a decision that built over time, and was going to come as soon as the scales tilted the right way.

It’s hard for me to remember offhand when I first bought an iPod. It was a G1 iPod Nano, though, white with 4GB of storage, so it had to have been between September of 2005 and September of 2006. This itself was a decision reached after a long and difficult decision making process, as I gave up on desktop music player development after years of doing it and went iPod/iTunes.

That iPod lasted about two years before the battery life got bad. I was looking to abandon the platform entirely when I was given an iPod Touch 32GB for work done at RedState. This was a first generation model, I figure I got it in early 2008 but I’m not 100% sure offhand. Avoiding the $500 sticker price, the huge storage size, as well as seeing the then-unprecented high-resolution screen of beauty, won me over despite my reservations over the lockdown. I also found that proper use of playlists made the lack of tactile controls unimportant.

As for portable phones, I resisted them a long time. I only got one because of a contractual obligation, so in the fall of 2008 I picked up a Blackberry Curve. Eventually though I got tired of that inferior hardware, and Verizon’s higher prices, but I was still happy with the Blackberry platform. So in May of 2009 (the day Star Trek came out I believe, or shortly after, because I saw it that same day) I picked up a Blackberry Bold.

I liked the Blackberry platform for a number of reasons. The hardware keyboards were good, and in fact great in the Bold and later Tour lines; the software platform was open, allowing the use of ordinary Java tools and installation of any software from anywhere; the email support was great; and the app selection was large thanks in part to the support for ordinary Java Mobile Edition apps in addition to Blackberry-specific apps.

However in time a number of problems became apparent to me. RIM was doing a poor job of keeping up with Apple, as witnessed by the horrible lag in browser quality and the disaster of the Blackberry Storm. The build quality also seemed poor to me, as I, my brother, and several people I know all have found out. The thriving market for Blackberry replacement parts is no accident.

Even as my confidence in RIM waned though, I still wasn’t ready to get an iPhone. I wanted a hardware keyboard, and the ability to use the phone one handed for typing, because I need the thing when I’m out, and when I’m out I’m often either eating, drinking, or carrying things to or from home. I also disliked the closed platform of the iPhone, and the lack of interface improvements like cut and paste.

Of course Apple has improved. Things like cut and paste are in, and multitasking is coming. The App Store is huge and mitigates the problems of the closed platform for app selection. Also, if I swapped to an iPhone I could carry just the iPhone and not a phone plus the music player.

But still, my Blackberry worked, that despite RIM’s announced failure to come up with a good client-side browser, essentially conceding the long-run race to iPhone and Android machines, and despite my broken battery cover. And my iPod was fine, despite it being the slowest model of the touch line. I had no reason to switch. Lastly, the iPhone tied me to one service vendor, AT&T, without the ability to move to other vendors.

I researched, though. Eventually I found that if I hold the iPod/iPhone in the right way I can use it one handed. I found I can type OK on the touch screen. T-Mobile turned out to use an oddball 3G band that the iPhone physically didn’t support, so the lock was only theoretically important anyway.

The announcement today expedited the rest of that research. As OS 4 was the final break from the early models, abandoning my G1 iPod Touch as well as the G1 iPhone entirely, and skipping multitasking for the G2 iPod Touch and iPhone 3G. Full support was only to come to the newest models of iPhone and iPod Touch. My iPod was obsolete and replacing it was a reasonable option all of a sudden.

So I checked: the early termination fee for the AT&T contract is reasonably priced, so if I have to get out, I can do so justifiably. All the apps I need are there. I can type on it. It’s a thriving platform with a better web browser and, shockingly enough, better IMAP email support. It will sync perfectly with my iCal and Address Book data, and of course will let me play my entire iTunes library.

I came to the conclusion that the scales have tipped. The Blackberry had fallen far enough, the iPhone had risen high enough, and the economics had become justifiable enough (especially with the discount AT&T had been pushing on me for some time to get an iPhone) that today, I bought my G3 iPod Touch 3GS, white, 32GB.

With Twitterific replacng my old Blackberry Twixtreme, BeejiveIM coming with me to iPhone, and Safari being both better than Opera Mini on the BB as well as in a class above the built-in RIM browser, oh and iSSH doing everything midpssh can do plus VNC support(!), I have all my functionality from before, and more.

I even spent less than I did buying my Blackberry Bold. o I just have to get used to this keyboard…

The Hill yesterday ran two stories that show the Democrats are planning a two-pronged attack on Internet Freedom, to empower the FCC to control the Internet and everything on it, just as they do television and radio. Yes, I’m talking about our good friend, neo-Marxist Net Neutrality.

The first story discusses the honest approach, which is to go to Congress and pass a law expanding the FCC’s powers. After all, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals refused to find Internet regulation in the penumbra of the Communications Act, and changing the law would be an easy way to fix that.

But of course that takes pesky things like votes, so they have a backup plan, Deem and Pass. They call it “reclassifying,” because they want to take the unprecedented step of placing ISPs under Title II of the Communications act, which would give the FCC the same power over ISPs that the Bush-era FCC had when it fined television stations for showing Janet Jackson’s breast, and that FCCs in eras past had when they imposed the Fairness Doctrine on television and radio stations.

The justification for strict regulation on television and radio used to be that there are only so many frequencies useful for broadcast over the air, and that public resource had to be managed to avoid the tragedy of the commons. However the Internet is privately held and expandable, so the argument just doesn’t hold. There is no valid reason to reclassify ISPs under Title II.

But it sounds like the Democrats of the FCC are plotting it anyway, because they just can’t stand the freedom enjoyed on the Internet today. There must be commissars watching every ISP, every router, every packet, to ensure political correctness transparency and neutrality.

So Veronique de Rugy put out a paper entitled Stimulus Facts. In it, she ran a regression of the money spent by Obama’s “stimulus” package recently, to see if it was actually being spent where unemployment is highest. It turns out it’s not, and most important factor she found in determining where money was spent, was whether the area was represented by a Republican or a Democrat. Democrats got more, you see.

Like any good scientist, she published her data, her formulas, all the results she got. This was all put out for the world to see, to criticize, and even to reproduce if desired. She then got some criticism, and re-ran her tests taking into account the suggestions she got, and then published a new version of the report without making the old version go away, even.