I’ve been held underwater by work lately and am just now catching up with this thing called “posting,” so forgive me if this post is light on links and details, but I want to give you all a heads up on what’s coming down the pipe in the Obama/Google administration. The big project after Net Neutrality is supposed to be a National Broadband Plan.
In theory, the idea of a National Broadband Plan is to give faster Internet access to more people. You see, people frequently think America “lags behind” the rest of the world because certain statistics show America to have worse Internet access than other countries. The problem with those statistics is that they don’t account for population density. A country like Japan, South Korea, or the Netherlands has a much denser, more urbanized population, and so it’s easier to run the wires you need to give them all Internet access.
But all a progressive needs is a good crisis, and they’re calling this a crisis. However, one of the proposed fixes is to give third party ISPs access to wires already laid by ISPs to provide service. Do we see how increased access to wires that already exist with service provided, doesn’t give access to people who don’t have access already?
The real motive of Julius Genachowski, Barack Obama, Google, and the rest of the adminstration’s Internet crusaders is to help freeloaders, which is why the Songwriters Guild of America is against Net Neutrality. Anyone who creates things of value on the Internet has something to lose from the Obama plans. Everyone can see this. The terrible problems with the Genachowski/Obama/Google plans are not theoretical.
Chuck DeVore has hit a major milestone in his campaign fundraising. In the year since he announced his bid for Senate, he has raised (dramatic music) one million dollars. Do we think he’s a viable candidate yet?
Meanwhile Carly Fiorina, who’s only recently announced her candidacy, announced early that she would not fund her campaign out of her own deep pockets. However she’s already gone back on that and is loaning her campaign some money. She has to do this because her NRSC-backed announcement, rushed out the door as a reaction to the Jim DeMint endorsement of DeVore, has clearly gone far below her budgetary expectations. Do we finally see that she’s not the candidate we’ve been promised?
California statewide races are tough for Republicans. We need somebody who can fight hard, raise money, and keep the Democrats honest. Carly Fiorina can’t do it. Chuck DeVore is already proving that he can. Chuck DeVore is not just the better candidate on the issues. He’s also the better candidate on practical and technical grounds.
Experience counts, and experience running a corporation’s share price into the ground isn’t what we need for the Republican party in a state where we already have problems. Experience winning elections is what we need, and Chuck DeVore is the candidate in this race who has the best chance to win this one. And I have one million reasons to back that up.
Coshocton County, Ohio accomplished one of the dreams of every socialist in America: its government set up free Internet access for everyone on a free, unrestricted wireless Internet access point. It was a great thing for everyone, for about five minutes. Then the freeloaders came in, with their Bittorrent clients and Pirate Bay searches, and were mass downloading movies, television, music, software, and games.
It got so bad after five years of abuse that the government has cancelled the service due to MPAA complaints.
Sure, a decent sized ISP has much better ways of dealing with abusers, but that’s just it: We need ISPs to be able to tier their service, so that people pay for what they use. That is just one reason Net Neutrality, as envisoned by Barack Obama and Google, must be defeated.
The last time we checked in on Nate Silver, the top-flight baseball analyst turned bottom-feeding partisan shill (appropriate for a guy who started out in politics as a Daily Kos diarist) was launching a crusade against Strategic Vision so lacking in integrity or even basic mathematical sense that it left many of us wondering whose payroll he’s on.
The sad part is, though, that his analysis is so bad, it would honestly surprise me if anyone were actually paying for this. Take this attempted broadside from Sunday. It’s full of so much bad math and so little critical thinking that I lack the time tonight to address it all. Here are the highlights, though.
The first objective claim he makes about the Strategic Vision poll in question, after his rambling anecdotal sideshow, is that the results are underdispersed. This claim is entirely unsupported in the most literal sense, in that he neither demonstrates what kind of distribution the data should have followed, nor does he show that the actual variance of the data contradicts that predicted distribution. The technical term for this is ‘hand waving,’ however when our professor waves his hands we at least can check the textbook for confirmation. Silver’s just making this up as he goes along, though.
From there we get some more anecdotal rambling, in which a Democrat politican’s words are recorded with the same kind of blind, unquestioning support that a Hitler Youth would have recorded Der Führer’s own speeches. After all that, we get what is supposed to be a smoking gun: A different poll with different results.
However it’s not surprising that Cannaday’s poll has different results. It is conducted with a different pool of students (high school seniors in his district, not students from all high school grades all across the state). The samples were not random (special education students were picked out, according to Silver). The survey environment was different (students were questioned in a school environment with authority figures present, rather than asked at home by strangers over a telephone).
No amount of special pleading can make the two surveys comparable, especially given the menacing glares of teachers ensuring the students try on the tests, and the teachers themselves under political pressure from a state officeholder.
And again, Nate Silver knows this. Different methodologies testing different pools, with samples drawn using different methods, will produce different results. He chooses to disregard this in order to shill for his Democrat superiors.
I sure hope he’s getting paid, because his integrity was surely worth at least a combo meal at Carl’s Jr, with large fries.
The Democrat coalition may be fracturing more visibly along abortion lines in the Obamacare debate, but that’s not the only popcorn-friendly battle going on right now. ‘Minority’ groups are going after Net Neutrality now, and nobody is sparing the ‘race card.’
The leaders of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, National Organization of Black Elected Legislative Women, The National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials, and the National Association of Black County Officials wrote a letter to David Honig of the Broadband Opportunity Coalition praising the group for its position against Net Neutrality. The BOC is a group focused on getting high-quality Internet access available to more Americans, and the BOC has not lined up in favor of the Google-Obama Net Neutrality scam. That is why the above groups support of the BOC, because the plan will harm the very expansion of Internet capacity and deployment that the group was formed to promote.
So naturally, pro-Net Neutrality groups came out and gave reasoned responses… no sorry, I don’t know what came over me. That’s not what happened at all. These Democrat-dominated groups were accused of being bought shills for telecommuncations firms!
Ready the popcorn. These ‘black’ groups have called that a racist accusation. Apparently it is racist and ‘paternalistic’ to say that they are incapable of having opinions of their own, but are merely puppets of some corporate masters. I suppose the telecommuncations firms are ‘white’ in Democrat-speak. But regardless, Multichannel News describes some good fun for us on the right to watch:
Some fans of network neutrality countered that the groups were under the influence of cable and telco operators, leading to some heated exchanges, calls for apologies, and charges of racism and paternalism.
“In publicly attacking several of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations, one organization recently published a statement that minorities – blacks, Hispanics and even Asians’ are supporting points of view that hurt the people they claim to represent. Other organizations have regularly peddled these and other offensive claims to the news media and public via Web posting,” wrote the officials.
They branded the attackers digital elites who wanted high-speed broadband for their personal enjoyment. “Many feel that these organizations are pushing a regulatory perspective that would regressively shift the costs of bandwidth onto middle- and low-income consumers,” they said. “We urge you to ignore the destructive racial rhetoric peddled by elite digital organizations…”
The ‘black’ groups got two things right, though: First, it is the Internet firms that are rich and powerful here, not the telecommuncations firms. Second, the technologists pushing the Obama-Google Single Payer Internet plans really do want their intensive, high-bandwidth, low-latency Internet use subsidized by everyone else, including the urban poor.
Opposing Net Neutrality is the bipartisan, mainstream position. The only people who support it are big Internet firms, freeloaders downloading movies and video games from the Pirate Bay, and socialists who want to nationalize the Internet.
Listen to Carly Fiorina yourself, if you don’t believe my repeated posts describing how wrong a candidate she is for this party at this moment of conservative mobilization. Is this the time to nominate a candidate who wants to sign a globowarmo treaty with China? Who wants to withhold water from California farmers? Who can say, without gagging, the words “Regulation can play a very important role in bringing about change?” Who blames under regulation for the financial crisis?
Don’t take me at my word. Listen to her. Does she sound like someone who will take this country somewhere different from where Barbara Boxer wants to take us?
They haven’t passed the Net Neutrality regulations, phase one of the push for Single Payer Internet, but the FCC is already plotting phase two: a National Broadband Plan. Call it what you will: a socialist Five Year Plan, fascist-inspired industrial policy, what have you. It’s a frightening step by this administration.
It’s so frightening, in fact, that Senate Democrats think the FCC needs to be more plain spoken about their plans, currently being hidden in overly-fancy language. It’s not impossible to speak about Internet policy in plain language. It’s just not possible to plan fascist takeovers of industries in plain language without scaring voters, is all. Which is why they don’t do it.
Meanwhile, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel refutes Net Neutrality proponents who claim that the practices NN is meant to oppose, are not theoretical:
Net-neutrality advocates raise the specter of providers censoring websites by slowing or cutting off access to them in the absence of new rules. Yet they cite only three isolated instances of this in the past five years. Each was quickly resolved.
Once again, we get more evidence that Net Neutrality is really just the crisis that progressives are using to grow government. We have to stop them.
You may remember when Carly Fiorina insinuated that anyone who opposes extensive government regulation of the Internet, is covering for child rapists. I was confident that DeVore would get back to me with a record contradicting that slimy attack, but also offered the Fiorina people an opportunity to get an airing of their candidate’s record on pro-life issues.
I received nothing from Fiorina. However DeVore’s campaign sent me DeVore’s 2006 fight for “Jessica’s Law”, a large expansion of legal protections of society against the sexual predators and killers of children. DeVore stood up against Democrats looking to be lenient, or to use a phrase Democrats use against us all the time, “putting dollars ahead of childrens’ lives.”
DeVore also fought to expand California’s predation laws, making it a crime for an adult to lure a 13 or 14 year old youth away from home, and expanding forfeiture of the tools (presumably computers and other telecommunications devices) used by criminals to accomplish that. This provides protection when a minor is lured away but not (yet) attacked.
Carly Fiorina truly is panicked. The NRSC has been spooked by the Scozzafava/Hoffman/Owens race, and is more or less going to leave Fiorina out to dry. And while she got the support of conservative favorite Tom Coburn to match Chuck DeVore’s Jim DeMint, the rest of her supporters paint a different picture. Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Lisa Murkowski: to many of us, these are what is wrong with the Republican Senate caucus.
So now she’s launched prematurely, shot the wad of endorsements she has in the middle of a week, rushed to pander to the right by appearing in the OC Register, but even that’s not enough. Now she’s making outrageous attacks on Chuck DeVore and the rest of us who favor an Internet free of burdensome government regulation.
I’ve been given a transcript of part of her appearance with Ed Morrissey, in relation to the video out where she endorses big government on the Internet, as follows:
Well, thanks for giving me the opportunity. First, one of the unfortunate habits of my primary opponent is he tends to cut and splice things I say and mischaracterize my positions and my record. I am against further regulation or taxation of the internet. And if you listen to the entire conversation, what you would find is what I was talking about very explicitly, was the reality that the Internet is used today for the exploitation of women and children. It is used as a tool to facilitate human trafficking in sex slaves, and it is used as a tool to facilitate child pornography. And we must land hard on those criminal activities that are going on on the Internet, particularly when they impact children. So for anyone to try and defend criminal activities, particularly those kind of criminal activities, on the Internet, I just find, frankly, unconscionable.
This attack is, first of all, ironic: I doubt she could demonstrate a voting record of DeVore’s that actually favors child rapists. Did she even try? But at the same time, her supporters have attacked DeVore as “lacking integrity” because he questions her own pro-life credentials. But DeVore’s voting record is much more clear than Fiorina’s own record on life.
Does she really want to get into this battle? The DeVore camp tells me they’re already compiling the information on the Assemblyman’s record against child rapists, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing about it soon enough. He’s going to refute this desperate, flailing attack with a conclusive response.
But we will still be left with no definitive answer from Carly Fiorina on basic life questions: Does she favor legalized abortion on demand? Does she favor government-funded embryonic stem-cell research? Does she think Roe v. Wade or Planned Parenthood v. Casey were correctly decided? Does she favor the Hyde amendment? Would she support or reject Obamacare with abortion subsidies? Would she have voted to confirm or reject Justice Sotomayor? Would she vote to confirm any justice not a strict constructionist?
If someone has a definitive transcript, essay, or video with Fiorina answering these basic, vital questions, I would love to see it. I’ve looked and not found anything. I welcome emails from Fiorina supporters or staffers, and I pledge that if I receive such evidence in email, I will post about it fairly at RedState. I earnestly would love to be shown that both our Senate candidates are strong on life, but until now only one candidate’s been willing to show me anything.
I’m waiting.
It’s not just treaties and regulations that the Democrats are using to wage war on the Internet as we know it. They’re not above using laws, too:
Internet service providers may become legally responsible for scam web sites and spam that passes over their lines if a new piece of legislation, the Investor Protection Act, gets turned into law. The act, which passed through the House Financial Services Committee today, requires ISPs to filter fraudulent sites and emails that falsely claim to be from certain brokerage firms affiliated with the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) if the ISP is “aware of facts or circumstances from which it is apparent that the material contains a misrepresentation.” If the communications are not blocked, ISPs could be liable for damages.
This is incredibly stupid. We don’t hold the USPS liable for mail fraud. ISPs should be no different.