Foundation

I’m a conservative, so I have no problem with anyone using their rights to enter the public discourse, and I’m not allergic to corporations. So I when I call the latest from Google “astroturf”, I’m saying it purely to illustrate the hypocrisy of the left, because by their standard Google is becoming quite an installer of the fake grass roots.

I find it entirely unfair that the left gets to try to shout down our side while theirs goes entirely unnoticed. If we don’t at least speak up, then the left’s arguments might get some traction.

So let’s watch carefully. Google has hired Frannie Wellings, the telecommuniations advisor to Senator Byron Dorgan, North Dakota Democrat. Sounds boring, but dig deeper. Dorgan was the author and sponsor of the Senate’s Net Neutrality bill in 2007. Is Google buying access? That’s what the left would say if the parties were reversed.

They’d especially say that when the job that Wellings is taking was just created. She is to be Google’s “federal policy outreach manager.” In other words, she’s going to run Google’s lobbying operations in Washington. Which means either she or people accountable to her are going to be going right back into Dorgan’s office.

Further, before taking the job with Dorgan, Wellings worked at… yup, Free Press, the special interest group that founded and runs Save the Internet.

What a coincidence it is that Google, Save the Internet, and a Democrat Politican are linked like this! Free Press and Google must justify this if they are to continue their shameless attacks on our side, instead of arguing with facts and logic about the benefits and disadvantages of their goal: aggressive regulation of the Internet, centered on an FCC picking winners and losers in private network policy disputes.

Taking a cue from Twitter:

• Bob Uecker’s Celebrity Tic Tac Toe
• Yoshi Touch and get sued for Sexual Harassment
• Lego Fail Safe
• Rock Band: The Wiggles
• Call of Duty 8: Malibu Coast Guard
• Mavis Beacon Teaches Shaking Your Wii
• Tom Clancy’s Economic Sanctions Task Force Zeta

Following up on my earlier piece on Save The Internet, it’s clear that its founder Free Press has been in bed with Google for a while.

If corporate involvement makes an effort ‘astroturf’, then it’s laughable even to consider the notion that Save The Internet isn’t as turfy as the Metrodome.

So I’m replacing my big, old fashioned home server with a simple little router device, moving all the stuff I’m hosting here offsite to ThePlanet.

Naturally I’m being very, very picky about what router I get. I’m starting with Linksys since that’s what my whole network is right now, Ethernet and 802.11g. But their routers are advertising as features the uses of 3DES and SHA algorithms. This is disturbing because the former is slow and was superseded years ago by the AES version of the Rijndael cipher, while the latter has been compromised.

It will be nice to give up the manually-assigned static IPs I’ve been using forever, in this age where every single video game and gadget wants an IP address these days. I’ll take the DHCP, I’ll take the VPN, but I’d hate to lay down good money on the new hotness for my home network, only to rely on old and busted cryptography!

The left is at it again. They know that in a straight-up battle of ideas, their socialist perversion of Net Neutrality could never win out. Nobody but the most blindly partisan supporters of Barack Obama wants a government takeover of the Internet, because everybody knows that when government takes something over, freedom in it tends to die.

That is why Save The Internet is resorting to dishonest smear campaigns in an attempt to shout down and discredit their opponents. They want to win by driving all opposition off the field, turning this debate into the Internet equivalent of the streets of Berlin in Weimar Germany. They must not get away with it.

Save the Internet is a diverse coalition of mostly radical socialist groups like SEIU, ACLU, PIRG, select AFSCME locals, PETA, Democrat Underground, MoveOn.org, AfterDowningStreet.org, and Common Cause, but also a number of corporations and ISPs both foreign and domestic, and even foreign interest groups. There are some mistaken right-wingers and libertarians in there like Glenn Reynolds, the Christian Coalition, and the Gun Owners of America. I would urge them to leave, because the movement has been hijacked, ladies and gentlemen. You are now being used to promote a radical left wing movement.

Their website is full of blatant lies. They claim that Net Neutrality would not be a new regulation, when in fact the whole point of the push is to get new regulations in place backed by the so-called Internet Freedom Preservation Act currently in the House. Obama’s FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski also made that much plain in a recent speech, that he wants the FCC to be an active, aggressive force on the Internet, picking winners and losers in private network policy disputes.

Further, they blatantly lie about who’s on their side, claiming that big corporations are only on the side against Net Neutrality. And while it’s true that the socialist vandals of Save the Internet want total state control over the multi-billion dollar private investments made on the Internet (including Two billion or more that AT&T, Verizon, and others will spend deploying LTE and WiMax high-speed wireless Internet), the fact is there are dozens of corporations part of their coalition, and by their own admission some titans of the Internet are on their side. “Amazon.com, EBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Skype, and Yahoo” are all on their side. Some of those are small companies, but Intel and Microsoft are members of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Microsoft’s market capitalization stands at over 220 billion dollars today, and Intel’s at half that, $106 billion. The big, bad AT&T itself is only worth $1.2 billion, or about half of one percent of Microsoft. Google, Amazon, and EBay are also featured in the Fortune 500. You cannot tell me only side has the big bucks in this fight for state control over the Internet.

But despite such blatant falsehood, Save the Internet presses on to accuse its opposition of being ‘astroturf,’ that is, fake grassroots involvement. Now I would love for someone to accuse me of that, because I and anyone familiar with my financial situation would never stop laughing. Of course, they don’t mention the Open Internet Coalition backed by the above Internet titans, oh no. Only opponents like Broadband for America, a group promoting greater Internet access across America, gets that tag. I mean sure, when I think ‘corporate astroturf’, I think of BfA members like the National Black Chamber of Commerce, Child Safety Task Force, Hispanic Leadership Fund, the Livestock Marketing association, and the Jewish Energy Project. That’s just the corporate Axis of Evil right there, Save the Internet wants you to think.

I do disagree with some of its members, notably AT&T which wants to exclude its wireless Internet from the same rules that wired Internet providers would have to play by. This even though the FCC severely limits competition with its wireless services, and grants legal protection to its broadcasts from interference.

LTE and WiMax are most likely a glimpse of the future of last mile Internet into American homes. And while I don’t think its government-backed (by FCC or by franchise monopoly) providers should be able to set network policies to harm competitors such as Skype or YouTube, I think competition in that field is vital to our well being. The last thing we need is competition-killing regulation of every router and wire in America, increasing the costs of business high enough that only the richest companies can compete, and paving the way to the Socialist dream of Single Payer Internet in America.

So we all need to look hard at just who is pushing this agenda, and note that every time they point a finger, three fingers are pointing back at themselves.

Does Carly Fiorina care what Republicans think at all? The very day after rejecting the option of taking day trips or making video addresses to Republicans gathered for the state party convention in Indian Wells, Carly Fiorina has begun making day trips to raise money. While this is a natural step for somebody who refuses to reach into her own deep pockets to fund her campaign, this does represent yet another stumble for a campaign that can’t seem to go a day without making a mistake.

It’s no wonder that polls show her running against Barbara Boxer no better than Chuck DeVore, despite Fiorina’s wide reputation of being a pro-abortion “social moderate.” One would think that a candidate who, in the public eye, neutralizes Boxer’s key issue of abortion would do better in the polling, but Fiorina’s failure to achieve anything in the polls is a testament to her failure to campaign effectively and to reach out to the Republican base. Republicans would be critical to her fight against the united front of the Democrat party, the unions, and the press. If she can’t get us on her side, she can’t win.

So why, then, does she snub us and instead turn to the deep pockets? Does she intend to run as a Schwarzenegger-ite “post-partisan?” Does she even have a plan for victory? Even Meg Whitman showed up to Indian Wells, made good speeches, and earned respect even from supporters of other candidates. She put pressure on her opponents, and Steve Poizner did not impress when he replied.

Senator Boxer will have to make a mistake if a Republican is going to beat her in 2010. I doubt Carly Fiorina is capable of applying the pressure to Boxer it will take to make that happen.

Nate Silver once was a respected mathematical analyst. His baseball-related work, such as that at Baseball Prospectus and on PECOTA, showed that he has the ability to make solid, reasoned arguments using mathematical tools.

But now, he’s flushed his own reputation into the toilet with his campaign against Strategic Vision. The pretend math, and lack of serious analysis and justification, in his series of posts against the company is so bad, I expect him any day now to start ranting about how he hasn’t seen a given poll, but he still thinks that Obama has the consistency to pull it out just like the Reds used to. Nate Silver has become the Joe Morgan of politics.

The plain truth is, much like a Joe Morgan broadcast, the Nate Silver articles leave one knowing nothing he didn’t know to begin with. Take the original piece. Here, Silver’s analysis boils down to this:

1. Manufacture two sets of data using a methodology with no justification given. Why strip out everything but Democrats and Republicans? Either the polls are doctored or they aren’t.
2. Make pretty pictures.
3. Eyeball the pictures.
4. Scream that they aren’t consistent enough, not like his old Reds teams, so they must be FRAUDS!

He attempts to provide a thin veneer of justification for his work by citing Benford’s Law. However that’s completely ridiculous, as Benford’s Law applies to a) early digits of numbers in data sets spanning b) many orders of magnitude c) smoothly. Silver’s work covers a) last digits of numbers in data sets spanning b) a range of about 30-60 c) bunched together around 50 because polls are more likely to be taken in close races. Even mentioning Benford’s Law in this context by most people would show a fundamental lack of understanding, much like Joe Morgan and other analysts when they use Wins to praise pitchers and RBIs to praise batters.

However Nate Silver knows better. He’s not the Joe Morgan of politics. He’s more like Joe’s old teammate Pete Rose here. Rose was great as a player, and a fraud as a manager, while Silver was great as a baseball analyst and has now become a fraud as a political analyst.

Compound that Benford’s Law deception with the use of a picture of a correlated data set. He asserts out of thin air that the distribution of last digits should be uniform. How is this the case? We all know that close races are polled more often than blowouts, and Silver in particular should, since he spent the whole last Presidential election watching some states come in more frequently than others. All it would take for Strategic Vision to get a distribution like he shows, is to have a bunch of polls that show something like, oh, R 48 D 49 Other 1 Undecided 2. But we don’t see that because, guess what, Silver stripped out the Others and Undecideds!

He hasn’t backed down since that original article, either. The willful mathematical incompetence continues in a followup article, in which he exhibits the same mathematical ham-handedness:

1. Asserts a distribution of last digits without justification
2. Invokes Benford’s Law in a way only a mathematical illiterate could
3. Heavily relies on charts and not established statistical tests to draw conclusions about data sets.

In another followup, Silver attempts to refute a specific poll by… making up his own simulated poll results. And apparently distance from Atlanta, GA has a proven correlation with fraud, or something. Perhaps Coca Cola makes you better at math?

Nate Silver once had a reputation. Even if his political commentary was left-leaning, his math could be trusted. Not anymore. He has shredded that solid reputation to become a political mercenary, attacking a firm’s integrity for partisan political reasons. I’m sure he won’t even notice that Republicans and independents no longer have any reason to trust him, with all the rabid cheering he’ll get from the radical left. But deep down, I wonder if he felt it when he shed that last bit of integrity to get page views.

Is Strategic Vision making up poll results? I have no idea, but that’s just it: Nate Silver’s rabid crusade won’t tell me that. Actual, mathematically-sound analysis would have to be done to draw any conclusions about that. Silver has done none, because Silver is only interested in scoring political points for the Democrats, rather than using math to ferret out truth.

I am in danger of becoming a broken record on the issue of Net Neutrality in this space, but as aggressively as the Democrats are pushing the issue, it is a danger we all will have to live with. Once again, I will summarize the issue with a minimum of technological impediments to understanding:

Net Neutrality started out as a broad-based movement on the Internet. It wasn’t a left-wing thing at all, but rather was something most of us could support, because it was merely a movement to ensure (usually government franchise-backed) ISP firms could not abuse their monopoly or oligopoly power to coerce their customers to use other services by the firm, such as phone service in the case of AT&T or television service in the case of Comcast. I believe this is a reasonable request. It doesn’t prevent investors in Internet technology from profiting, but rather merely prevents them from abusing government-granted market power to benefit other businesses.

However on Monday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski went beyond that when he outlined his six principles of Net Neutrality in a speech to the Brookings Institution. What he proposes is an intrusive, never-ending government hand in the growth and management of the Internet, one that is clearly aimed at the Socialist goal of “single-payer Internet,” run with the same agile reactiveness as the DMV or the TSA.

He starts off innocently enough when he speaks of “non-discrimination,” and in fact says the right things about an important problem:

The fifth principle is one of non-discrimination — stating that broadband provider cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications. This means they cannot block or degrade lawful traffic over their networks, or pick winners by favoring some content or applications over others in the connection to subscribers’ homes. Nor can they disfavor an Internet service just because it competes with a similar service offered by that broadband provider.

This is all true. If Genachowski stopped here, I would not oppose him. I don’t agree that the FCC must act in this space; rather I believe the answer to this problem lies at the state level. Ending or reworking franchise monopolies and duopolies on phone and cable television would go further in fixing the problem government created, than creating more new government.

The FCC Chairman does not stop there, though. He goes on to speak of how government needs to play an active role in monitoring all network maintenance activities and configurations of ISPs and their infrastructure, in the name of “transparency:”

We cannot afford to rely on happenstance for consumers, businesses, and policymakers to learn about changes to the basic functioning of the Internet. Greater transparency will give consumers the confidence of knowing that they’re getting the service they’ve paid for, enable innovators to make their offerings work effectively over the Internet, and allow policymakers to ensure that broadband providers are preserving the Internet as a level playing field. It will also help facilitate discussion among all the participants in the Internet ecosystem, which can reduce the need for government involvement in network management disagreements.

In this fairly harmless-sounding paragraph lies much danger. For one of the aims of the socialist perversion of Net Neutrality is to prohibit ISPs from offering different “tiers” of service, giving customers who pay more money a higher priority over other customers. Should Genachowski get his way, regulators would be positioned to prohibit that, just as the far left internet users want. You see, people who download lots of things off of YouTube and the Pirate Bay, as well as firms like Google who seek to make money off of services like YouTube, would benefit if ISPs are required to offer all customers an “all you can eat” plan. Such plans effectively force casual, low-intensity users to subsidize the constant downloaders. Great for some, terrible for others, and totally inappropriate for government to mandate.

Further, Genachowski attacks the fundamental right of property owners to control their property when he says this. He openly acknowledges that he wants the FCC to have an active role in resolving “network management disagreements,” in which outsiders can complain to the FCC about a private computer network’s configuration. Presumably the FCC would then grant itself the power to compel holders of networks to change such configurations on demand. Why else demand transparency if not to start making changes?

The Internet is not a single network. It is a network of networks, all of which talk to each other through standardized protocols. When I send this post to RedState, for example, it will travel over five different networks: Mine, Verizon, Alter.net, Level 3, and ThePlanet. This is not an ecosystem. This is a neighborhood, with property lines that are clearly drawn.

Genachowski is showing himself to be a tool of the radical left when he attempts to use the Net Neutrality banner to conquer the whole Internet, or at least the US-based parts of it, and put them under total government control. He must be stopped.

Recently I and others have questioned Carly Fiorina’s commitment to the race to defeat Barbara Boxer in 2010. She won’t fund her own race with her deep pockets, which was supposed to be a key reason to nominate her. She also won’t show up to the California Republican Party meeting in Indian Wells this month (starting today, in fact)*. Her candidacy so far has been characterized as “amateurish”.

Fiorina now says cancer treatment is the reason for her evasiveness so far. And while nobody wishes she would skimp on her cancer treatment, or hope for anything less than a full recovery for her, I join Pejman Yousefzadeh in being skeptical of this explanation.

I am skeptical for two reasons. The first is the reason Pejman gives: if Ms. Fiorina is capable of virtually attending an anti-cancer summit via video feed, surely she could at least do the same for her limping Senate campaign? She has strong leadership support for her campaign, and surely could have gotten this accomodation had she put in the effort.

Secondly, I have been sent a recent itinerary of hers. If she could join former President Clinton in Milan, Italy for a business conference, surely she could make at least one day trip to Indian Wells to address the Republicans who are to give blood, sweat, tears, and money to get her elected over an entrenched incumbent Senator? I hear Southwest Airlines has many flights from the Bay Area down here running all day long.

I hesitate to write this, because I naturally am gunshy over her cancer. Mark Kilmer taught me more about cancer than I ever wanted to know, unfortunately. It is possible to be strong, unflinching, and productive while enduring cancer treatment, and a relapse can be swift and brutal. I wish her a full and complete recovery.

But at the same time, Ms. Fiorina cannot expect to win this race that way. She may get some of us in the primary to pull our punches due to the way we feel for her in this troubling time, but the unions, the press, and the Democrats will not. If she is going to be able to win this election, she must be confident enough in her health to give her all, and she must show us now that she is capable of doing it.

Because if she can’t win the general, I echo Pejman and wish that she would sit this one out, give her cancer treatment her all, and return another year. In the meantime she could take up writing or radio, engaging Republicans and selling herself to the base as well as the party leadership. Perhaps in time she could challenge Senator Feinstein, or maybe even try for a House seat.

But this does not appear to be Carly Fiorina’s year.

* I would attend but I am a) sick, b) usually must get around on foot, and c) am 60 miles of desert terrain away. Trips like that require special reasons and arrangements, and are just out of the question when battling a cold and after the closed primary amendment was withdrawn.

There are two candidates who have a chance to win the Republican nomination for Senate in June 2010. One is Chuck DeVore. One of our Fighting Four candidates this primary season, he announced last November his candidacy to defeat Senator Barbara Boxer. Term-limited from his state Assembly seat, he’s committed to victory.

The other is Carly Fiorina. A political novice, never having run for office before, she doesn’t even know if she’s running for this office yet. In big, black letters her own, brand-new website asks “Coming Soon?” It’s no wonder she won’t even fund her own campaign. Why spend that money when she might not even run?

Chuck DeVore is on Facebook. Chuck DeVore is on Twitter, and he’s active on both. Carly Fiorina’s webpage has placeholder, non-functional links to both services. She may, or may not, show up to engage Republicans, and will do so only when it’s convenient for her.

We have two choices in June, but only one candidate is there for us and committed to fighting Barbara Boxer, the dumbest member of the US Senate. The clear choice is Chuck DeVore. I hope we can give to him and good conservatives like him to help him fight for us and win.