The last time a Democrat was in the White House we got the Communications Decency Act (since thrown out by the Supreme Court) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (still a weight on the neck of American innovators). This time we’re not only seeing “Net Neutrality” being used as cover for sweeping proposed regulation of the Internet like never before seen in this country, but we’re also due to expand copyright further.
The best thing about the DMCA is that its long arm can’t extend offshore, so Americans have been able to bypass it when needed by working with non-Americans who retain their rights to such technically-critical activities as reverse engineering.
But now the Obama administration is looking to promote an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a trojan horse for a Global DMCA. Or worse actually, because the DMCA only requires ISPs to act on specific copyrightholder requests to shut down accused infringers. Says Cory Doctorow, the ACTA would require ISPs to be active nannies policing copyright, and would outright kill Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, and probably Twitter. Further, your complete access to the Internet could be shut down, without warning, just because you are accused of being a copyright infringer.
Elections have consequences. How’s teaching the Republicans a lesson working out, libertarians?
We won the big statewide races yesterday, and now it’s back to work trying to win some more. The California Senate primary may not be until June, but when we’re faced with an entrenched incumbent like Barbara Boxer, we need all the lead time we can get.
Up until now, the DC types have all been supporting Carly Fiorina in our primary, even though she had not yet declared her candidacy, and had yet shown either an inability or an unwillingness to campaign to the Republican voters of this state. Thus, that early support had failed to move any dials as Assemblyman Chuck DeVore has raised money well, gained loyal grass roots support, and ran ahead of Fiorina against Boxer in polls. But now, with the fallout of Dede Scozzafava’s blowup spreading nationwide, events are moving more quickly.
The NRSC is conceding its positions in primaries, pulling a crutch out from under Fiorina’s already-limping campaign. Conservative DC types are taking advantage of the new neutrality, too, starting with Senator Jim DeMint endorsing DeVore, while Fiorina has the backing of South Carolina’s other Senator, Lindsey Graham.
I know which name and which endorsement have more clout with the grass roots, the Tea Partiers, and other activists who will be essential to any Republican challenge of Boxer. So does Fiorina, who decided to try to drown out this news by announcing her formal candidacy.
Too little, too late. We’ve driven a wedge into the foundation of the anti-conservative establishment, and we’re going to crack it up before we’re done. We will judge each candidate on his or her own merits, and pick the one that’s best able to represent us and win.
Sometimes, in some races, that will mean the most reliably conservative candidate will not win. That’s fine, as long as we’re giving each candidate a fair shake, and not reflexively picking the candidate with the more ‘moderate’ image. In the case of the California Senate we must especially avoid that mistake. Carly Fiorina is a novice candidate whose campaign has gotten off to a poor start. She’s not ready, and she’s no more likely to beat Boxer than DeVore is.
DeVore will put up a good fight, and he’s proven on the issues. This race is not one of Erick Erickson’s hills to die on, but that doesn’t mean we don’t stand ready to send a big message, and benefit big, from a win in this primary. We in California elect a fair number of Republicans to the House, and we could use all the motivation we can get from the top of the ticket if we want to help take the House back in 2010.
What do you get when you combine an ISP active in Internet filtering with a left-wing group that is essentially the online ACLU? You get the broad, bipartisan opposition to the FCC’s plans for Internet regulation that are being sold as Net Neutrality.
It was remarkable enough when Governors left and right all wrote to the FCC against Net Neutrality. But now when Comcast is on the same side of a dispute as the Electronic Froniter Foundation, that’s a sign that nobody who is aware of the technical issues wants any part of what Barack Obama and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski are planning.
Comcast has been a leader in, well, taking things away from its customers. They are routinely booed on the Internet by active users because of the steps they take to cap and restrict the heaviest users of their resources. And it now comes out that as the FCC has challenged Comcast over some of those restrictions, Comcast has fired back by challenging the legitimacy of the FCC’s expansion into regulating the Internet.
By itself that is not surprising, as Comcast has much to lose from large-scale FCC meddling. However what is surprising is to find that the Electronic Frontier Foundation appears to agree. Says Ars Techinca:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the agency’s proposed rulemaking a “Trojan Horse” which is “built on a shoddy and dangerous foundation.” Since Congress didn’t give the FCC specific authority in this area, what’s next, worries EFF—an “Internet Decency Statement” pushed by conservatives, or an “Internet Lawful Use Policy” urged on the agency by the Hollywood studios? That’s why the group calls the move “a power grab that would leave the Internet subject to the regulatory whims of the FCC long after Chairman Genachowski leaves his post.”
The EFF is one of those left-leaning ACLU-type groups, so when they agree with a big telecommunications firm on the impropriety of a regulation action, that’s notable. It’s a sign that Obama’s FCC is far out of bounds in its Net Neutrality plans, and that only the farthest left-wing radicals are in favor of what Genachowski is planning for us.
We have to stop him. We have to stop the Obama drive toward Single Payer Internet. It’s the mainstream, common sense position.
It’s the little things that illustrate the big problems with the common evidence that the Earth is heating up rapidly. Take this picture I took yesterday afternoon, as I hiked on out to Wal-Mart to check on after-Halloween cheap candy*:
I always get a kick out of seeing these little guys running around. You see, when I first set foot in Moreno Valley almost a quarter century ago**, I didn’t see this kind of wildlife running around. We’re at the edge of the desert, and as the town was first being developed, the only things I saw were the big old tumbleweeds rolling down the street on every windy day. Brown, dry, and prickly, they weren’t very friendly to little guys like in that picture above.
But now, years later, the town’s different. All the dry, empty spaces full of tumbleweeds are gone, replaced with buildings with lots of grass, trees, and bright green landscaping. The plants are different, the animals underfoot are different, and even the birds are different. Long ago the only birds I’d ever see are big, ugly blackbirds. Now there’s a variety around, and I hear all different kinds of bird songs in the mornings instead of just the honking of those blackbirds.
This is all anecdotal, and proves little, but it illustrates a greater point: it is not in dispute at all that human development changes the local climate. When people move into a desert area, the area gets wetter, greener, and friendlier to life that can move in afterward. Likewise, as a town builds into a bigger, older, more populous city, all of that greenery starts getting replaced with heat-absorbing concrete and asphalt, raising temperatures in the vicinity.
That last part is called the Heat Island effect. It’s real, it’s known, and it’s why the traditional temperature records going back 100 or more years are virtually useless for tracking the greater climate of the world. The only valid records we have for temperatures, therefore, are the satellite records that avoid such local effects. Those only go back 30 years or so.
And that is so little time on a geological scale. Too little to confirm any theory as the truth, inconvenient or otherwise.
* Wal-Mart is too efficient and had none left, sadly.
** Yes, I feel old writing that.
My Club Nintendo Original Calendar 2010 came in today. It’s a spiffy little thing with 13 attractive cards, one for each month plus a cover getting me through to next year:
Now I just need my posters to come in.
…plotting to pass Net Neutrality.
I’ve written in this space for a while about who the real Astroturfers are in the Net Neutrality fight. Google – and its puppets like Free Press – are promoting this idea that it’s a struggle between big telecommunications firms, and the little guys. Except the little guys are actually bigger Internet firms. The corporations pressing for Net Neutrality are Fortune 500 and even Dow Jones Industrial Average firms, with billions in cash ready to be spent on Net Neutrality, trying to defeat Proposition 8, or even promoting Barack Obama.
That last one makes the FCC’s rush to regulate look bad, given all the placements of Google people within the Obama administration as well as the nearly one million dollars that Google employees gave to the Obama-Biden campaign. How do we know that the secretive Obama White House isn’t directing the FCC to pay off Google?
After all, we know he’s giving donors special treatment. In fact, it has come out that FCC Chairman Genachowski himself was a major fundraiser for Obama, pulling in over a half million for the campaign. Why shouldn’t we believe that this is all a big circle of back scratching in the Obama adminstration, when he refuses to release the kinds of information we need to determine otherwise?
The President has played political games with information all along. He dangles his birth certificate on a string in order to distract the right. He’s keeping as little of the Obamacare agenda in writing as possible, because he knows if we read it and expose his plans, we can win the fight, so we end up with ridiculous spectacles like a Senate committee voting on a bill that hasn’t been written yet. And now he’s playing footsie with donors in secret.
We must encourage and join Senator McCain and Representative Blackburn in their fresh legislative efforts to stop the Google/Obama Net Neutrality scheme. We cannot allow this kind of quid pro quo to go unchallenged.
Suddenly Google cares about power grid issues. Or maybe they’re just shilling for Obama as payback for Net Neutrality.
Ralph Nader wasn’t always a creep with a wack-job agenda. He once made a little sense, back before he was scamming all the money he could from college kids through PIRGs. He was exposing just how unsafe cars were. He was right on some key things: Seat belts matter, and not having the whole car covered in blinding chrome matters. That’s true not just for the driver but for the drivers around him. Glare is glare, especially in environments like southern California.
Well, now some idiots here in California want to reverse that with a “Cool Cars” mandate, which would require cars again to be covered in reflective surfaces. Even worse, by coating the windows with a metallic reflectant, cars would be come more effective as Faraday cages, blocking wireless communications. What a luddite-friendly and safety-diminishing step backwards for California (and America, if this takes off)!
We’ve got to expose how terrible this idea is. Fortunately, we have Rush Limbaugh on the case.
Even if we took the left at face value, and from top to bottom we know we can’t ignore the socialist agenda there, would we want to implement their Net Neutrality policies? Richard Epstein says no. Unsurprisingly, investigation shows that research, development, creativity, and innovation depend on the basic freedom that true property rights allow.
We cannot allow Julius Genachowski, Barack Obama, Free Press, and the left to stagnate the Internet in America.
As most of us watch the special election in New York, we still have a Senate primary in California to deal with. It’s the same old story, though. There are two kinds of Republicans.
One kind celebrates big government and progressive control over America. Carly Fiorina, like Dede Scozzafava, is one of those.
While some of us are fighting hard against the Obama push to nationalize the Internet, Fiorina goes behind our backs and joins them, just as Scozzafava will work with ACORN and Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Chuck DeVore knows the score and endorses Doug Hoffman.
There are two kinds of Republicans. Some are on our side. Some are more interested in the left. I know which I prefer to represent our party.