A Senate debate was scheduled for the next California Republican convention, but Flash Report says it could be cancelled. The Chuck DeVore campaign says that effort is led by Carly Fiorina, a claim supported by her campaign’s announced refusal to participate in a Brandman University debate.
Jon Fleischman, who runs Flash Report and is taking the above linked poll, is a member of the board of the CRP. If his poll gets strong support for keeping the debate going, then he will likely use that as ammunition to argue for the actual vote to go in its favor. The vote is this morning though, so hurry over and vote and express yourself.
Julius Genachowski is Barack Obama’s head of the Federal Communications Commission. He thinks you’re an idiot. After famously calling for broadly expanded FCC powers to mandate “transparency” and “neutrality” on the Internet, and having that plan rejected by a growing, bipartisan coalition, he now denies he wants to regulate the Internet.
Meanwhile he also claims the FCC is trying to “win the case” against Comcast, who has sued to get a federal court to overturn the FCC’s claimed authority to regulate Internet activity. But we’re supposed to believe he doesn’t want to regulate the Internet. Right. The Wall Street Journal says that the FCC “took a beating” during an appeals court hearing on the case. A decision against the FCC could be crippling of Genachowski’s plans, but unfortunately on that front there’s nothing we activists can do but watch, and wait.
Though we can also join in the second comment period that the FCC has opened up on Net Neutrality. Your guess is as good as mine as to where on the FCC’s website we can do that, though. They’re not exactly transparent.
Given all the recent talk about Sarah Palin, and specifically whether she’d be a better President than the incumbent, we give you the Slurm® Keys to the Presidency, brought to you by new Slurm® Energy Drink. Keep the energy to party all night, Slurms MacKenzie™ Style!
Character
Under the stress of the job, the personal failings of “the man behind the desk” will come out. It’s no contest on this one. We’ve got a mother whose worst failings were to use the wrong email account and to stand up to a wife beater, versus the cokehead Community Organizer.
Score: Wholesome Mom 1, Chicago Roughhouser 0
Communication
Particularly for a Republican, you have to be able to engage the people and bypass the press and the Congress. However any President must be able to get his message across to be able to lead. I’ll call this a tie because while Palin can whip up a crowd, Obama’s stiff-necked approach can work in the right settings.
Score: Doncha Know 1.5, TelePrompTer 0.5
Goals
Any President will have signature issues he wants progress on. They have to be good ones he can win on, or he winds up short of political capital and long on enemies. I’ll call this one a tie because Palin hasn’t really expressed anything specific (of course, as she’s not running for anything), and Obama’s a miserable failure at his whole long-term agenda to date.
Score: Blank Slate 2, I 1
Instincts
The unforeseen will happen. The President must have the right way of thinking about the country and the world to react in the right way to crises foreign and domestic. Obama again is a proven failure, from Honduras to the economy, while Palin has proven herself at least an authentic American.
Score: Pitbull 3, Bower in Chief 1
Political winner
Our system is designed to give political obstacles to anyone who wants anything done. You have to be able to win those fights. Let’s face it, between the ex-Governor and Mr. 45%, neither is looking that hot right now despite each winning their last elections after being underdogs in the primary.
Score: Quitter 3.5, Filibuster-Proof Flopper 1.5
Administrator
The executive branch is big. You have to be able to hire good people who will hire good people and run the bureaucracy. Again, I think they’re both probably lousy at it. Palin is a lone wolf but the Smoothest Transition Ever™ wasn’t.
Score: Maverick 4, Tax Cheat City 2
So with the final score 4-2, I still think Palin’s on top though we can do way better than either, in theory. In practice, we have to wait and keep our minds wide open as 2012 approaches.
Now that word has spread that the works and sources of the International Panel on Climate Change are neither “peer reviewed” nor based on “peer reviewed” publications, here come the consequences and loss of credibility. India is quitting the IPCC, and the quote from Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh is just beautiful:
There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science.
Don’t mess with this Ramesh, either.
The fraud at the IPCC is particularly relevant to India because the Himalayan glaciers are a local matter, so India is now to found its own National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to study the matter. It will begin producing its own reports in November. Of course, those will probably be blacked out in the press because they’re not blessed by international bureaucrats and WWF reports.
What does Google-Free Press Net Neutrality plan mean for the American economy? We’ve already seen that American innovation would be harmed, but what about the politically all-important question of employment and the economy now?
Entropy Economics tackled that question and and the results aren’t pretty.
Net neutrality, down to the brass tacks, is an exercise in industrial policy. So for the sake of argument, would this policy help our economy? The FCC wants to pick winners and losers on the Internet. So with unemployment still hovering around 10% (even by the modern, downward-fudged figure), would Net Neutrality risk creation or destruction of jobs by favoring Internet firms over telecommunications firms?
Entropy Economics divides the relevant firms into two categories: “NN Supporters” such as Google, and “NN Skeptics” such as AT&T. It turns out that the Skeptics employ an order of magnitude more Americans than the Supporters: 1.440 million to 0.148. Going further, Entropy even excludes the large last-mile telecom firms from the figure, and the opponents of Net Neutrality still employ almost four times as many Americans, 570k to 148k. If we’re going to favor the 148k job firms, we’re going to shed even more jobs in the Obama economy.
Net neutrality opponents also invest more in America. Entropy found that the opposing firms spent $189 billion in aggregate capital expenditures over the last three years, while the supporters again were an order of magnitude below, at $18 billion. The opponents not only hire more people but they build more of the resources that keep America competitive.
And of course, that capital investment has a ripple effect, creating jobs in construction, software, and other industries that also hire Americans. So Entropy concludes that “Washington’s current preoccupation with short-term job creation is just one more reason to oppose Net Neutrality,” and I conclude that as long as Barack Obama and the Democrats do not come out against the FCC’s Net Neutrality proposal, they’re not as focused on jobs as they claim.
I ‘d just like to pass along a story I’ve been told about Free Press, one of the neo-Marxist groups spearheading the Net Neutrality drive. These guys so often will condescend to you and assume you know nothing of technology or the issues if you dare to disagree with them.
And yet…
So Free Press is supposed to be this expert on Telecoms and what not, but I just tried to sit on a press conference call with them and it was a cluster[****]. First, they sent out a number and password that didn’t work, so their phone lines were busy with reporters calling in to say they couldn’t get in on a call. Then, once the call started, they apparently didn’t know how to put all the reporters on mute. The end result was that some AP reporter absentmindly put the call on hold and then started watching some AP report on her computer or television. So halfway through the call all of a sudden the entire thing is drowned out by this news caster’s voice, and the Free Press people start panicking and screaming at the people to turn the newscast off. By the time they got everything situated, 15 reporters had left the call and they weren’t even able to finish the QandA session.
It makes me laugh just imagining this, as even a non-reporter like me has been on calls run with varying levels of expertise. I wish it had been recorded.
The FCC has opened a second comments period regarding the Free Press-Google Net Neutrality plan (the White House having publicly tucked tail on the matter), so here’s another reminder of why we need to oppose the whole ball of wax: It serves to benefit freeloaders at the expense or producers in a manner so pure it might fit in an Ayn Rand novel.
In short, groups like the EFF are saying the current draft doesn’t go far enough to protect copyright infringers and their downloaders from ‘abuses’ by copyright holders, their agents, and ISPs. Seriously. Says Spencer Dalziel at theinquirer.net:
Channeling well known Scottish actor, Mel Gibson’s bravado call to action in Braveheart, EFF’s Richard Esguerra said, “Carving a copyright loophole in net neutrality would leave your lawful activities at the mercy of overbroad copyright filtering schemes, and we already have plenty of experience with copyright enforcers targeting legitimate users by mistake, carelessness, or design.”
Freeloading, cheapskate downloaders who refuse to spend $10 on a movie or an iTunes album expect you (yes you, dear reader), me, and everyone else to subsidize their use of the network to make those downloads. Seriously. They want to make it illegal for ISPs to clamp down on such activities, and at least thwart efforts to make the users of BitTorrent-based download services pay for their pipe-busting activities.
No, BitTorrent the protocol is not exclusively used for copyright infringing downloads, but the peer-to-peer download setup, combined with the tracker’s ability to go without hosting the source material and instead just host hashes, is great for giving centralized hosts deniability as well as pushing last mile bandwidth use far beyond any normal use pattern. The latter is even a deliberate design feature of the protocol. But the freeloaders want to get to pay the same amount for that use, that you or I may pay for ordinary email and webpage use.
Ayn Rand’s famous novel had America’s best and brightest withdraw from society entirely. Net Neutrality as wished by the far left may not send anyone that far, but subsidzed copyright infringement will sure make some of America’s creative people go Galt instead of just putting their works out to be stolen online. I’m no Atlas, but I shrug at the EFF’s selfish, immature moaning at the plight of the looters, parasites, and moochers of our new economy.
Update: I’m told that today is Ayn Rand’s birthday. What a day for her to have been proven right about government.
Chuck DeVore has a money bomb going today to aid his effort to humble and unseat Babs Boxer. I hope the right can flex some muscle and support him.
This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you he’s another Marco Rubio, Doug Hoffman, or Scott Brown. I won’t. Every candidate has his own strengths and weaknesses, although DeVore has been outspoken in support of each of those three candidates. I will say that DeVore is the only candidate running for statewide office in California with a proven pro-life, pro-marriage, anti-spending, anti-tax voting record. DeVore has had more fundraising success than Republicans in years past did, and it’s only February 1.
Chuck DeVore has also gained the endorsement of Tom McClintock, he says. McClintock also has a proven record in fighting the Democrats in their outrageous free spending ways, and is notable in Washington for his bill to allow early TARP repayment to free businesses from Barney Frank’s and Barack Obama’s grabbing, regulating hands.
Feel free to donate under my tag or sign up to join the money bomb yourself and run up your own score.
Do we actually want to run a candidate like Tom Campbell, who favors massive gas tax hikes and goes to national magazines to write against marriage? Or Carly Fiorina who believes the American tradition equality of opportunity is insufficient, and we need rigged outcomes to get equality? I don’t think so.
I was thinking today while I was out making a quick trip: We on the right have fouled up badly our responses to the visit President Obama made to the GOP retreat.
We’ve spent the whole time bashing Republicans and talking about how great Obama looks on television, when we missed what the true, underlying message was: The President spent his first year in office trying to ignore us, but now has had to come crawling back like the miserable failure that he is.
He’s the President, so he’ll never look like he’s on his hands and knees begging for whatever legislative scraps we’ll deign to give him, but that’s precisely what he’s doing now. He’s accomplished not one major component of his long-run agenda: Card Check, Cap and Tax, Obamacare, repeal NAFTA, close Guantanamo Bay, retreat from Iraq. He’s done nothing without us, and now he needs us.
The magnitude of this failure is magnified by the huge Congressional majorities his party has commanded, including the filibuster-proof Senate majority he had between the seating of Senator Franken and the victory of Senator-elect Brown. The President is on a street corner hoping we’ll buy an apple or a pencil from him. He’s failed that badly as a President so far. Let’s remember that, and remind both ourselves and the President’s supporters of that.
This should make it easier to drag an item behind me while leading a race in Mario Kart.
I enjoy though that the controller has now come full circle. First there was the SNES/SFC Controller by Nintendo, which was copied by Sony for the Playstation and then enhanced by the PS/2/3 Dual Shock, which has now been stolen back by Nintendo for the Classic Controller Pro.
Best controller design ever.