PETER SUDERMAN ON NET NEUTRALITY: How the tech industry learned to stop worrying and love the FCC.
My thoughts, as presented in testimony to the FCC, are here.
Archive for 2010
January 7, 2010
DON SURBER: The next Democratic senator to retire is… “Isn’t it odd that Obamacare became poison so quick?”
HOW MARKETS make us more rational.
CHANGE: Gallup: Conservatives Finish 2009 as No. 1 Ideological Group. Uptick owing largely to more independents calling themselves conservative.” Somehow, I’m imagining Seinfeld, with W as George Costanza and Obama as Kramer: “Amazing! I drive them to lesbianism, and he brings ’em back!” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
GENERATING POWER WITH solar updraft towers.
HEY AL, HOW’S THAT GLOBAL WARMING WORKING OUT FOR YOU? It’s not working for me. It’s 23 degrees, with snow forecast. Faster, please?
MICHAEL WALSH: We Are All Spartacus Now.
FAITH IN GOVERNMENT: Just 32% Confident Congress Represents Their Best Interests. Actually, these days it shouldn’t be “just 32%.” It should be “Really? That many?”
RULE OF LAW: Obama Lawyers Fined by Federal Court. “It is noteworthy that these two lawyers — the ones who directly superimposed their own legal judgment in the New Black Panther Party case — are now the subject of the court’s order, which as the report notes is unusual, in that it is ‘directed at individual lawyers that specifically says their employer is not responsible for paying the costs.’ To boot, King is a multiple-sanctions recipient. During the Clinton administration, she was one of the Justice Department attorneys who was responsible for a fine of more than half a million dollars.”
UPDATE: A reader says there’s less to this story than this makes it appear. Stay tuned.
HOW TO MAKE KIDS “HUSKY.” Once, that was a common ambition.
SEN. BEN NELSON: We Should Have Waited On Health Care. Ya think?
THE ASCENDANCY OF THE NON-PRIVATE PERSON.
THE EXAMINER: Time for sit-down protests by Hill reporters.
President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — all of whom have in recent years promised unprecedented levels of transparency in government — are flouting their own words by meeting in secret to write the final version of Obamacare. They are doing this to avoid the public meetings of a bipartisan conference committee representing the Senate and House and the multiple, on-the-record roll call votes required in both chambers on a conference committee report.
The most radical expansion of central government power in American history is happening right under these journalists’ noses, and yet they raise not a peep of protest when the doors close, effectively barring them from doing their jobs at a critical juncture. Where are the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and the Radio and Television News Directors Association? These august organizations vigorously and rightfully protested former Vice President Richard Cheney’s secret meetings with oil company executives in the early days of the Bush administration. They also wailed loud and long about the Bush administration’s abuses, many real and some imagined, of the Freedom of Information Act.
Systemic failure.
MAKE “VERBAL VIOLENCE” A CRIME, and many more women will go to jail. The Insta-Wife was on the BBC talking about this yesterday.
NICK SCHULZ: America as Texas v. California, Part II.
SMELLING WEAKNESS: Arnold blasts health care bill: ‘Trough of bribes, deals and loopholes’.
Plus, this’ll sell: Married Couples Pay More Than Unmarried Under Health Bill. “The built-in ‘marriage penalty’ in both House and Senate healthcare bills has received scant attention. But for scores of low-income and middle-income couples, it could mean a hike of $2,000 or more in annual insurance premiums the moment they say ‘I do.'”
HOW TO SPICE UP A MARRIAGE.
Mr. Yamaguchi, as a 29-year-old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, was on a business trip in Hiroshima when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. He was getting off a streetcar when the “Little Boy” device detonated above Hiroshima.
Mr. Yamaguchi said he was less than 2 miles away from ground zero. His eardrums were ruptured and his upper torso was burned by the blast, which destroyed most of the city’s buildings and killed 80,000 people.
Mr. Yamaguchi spent the night in a Hiroshima bomb shelter and returned to his hometown of Nagasaki the following day, according to interviews he gave over the years. The second bomb, known as “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, killing 70,000 people there.
Mr. Yamaguchi was in his Nagasaki office, telling his boss about the Hiroshima blast, when “suddenly the same white light filled the room,” he said in an interview last March with The Independent newspaper.
“I thought the mushroom cloud had followed me from Hiroshima,” he said.
“I could have died on either of those days,” Mr. Yamaguchi said in an August interview with the Mainichi Daily News. “Everything that follows is a bonus.”
Every day is always a bonus, with or without the dramatic accompaniment.
January 6, 2010
“CLICK HERE TO VISIT CRAZY TOWN!” And that’s just the beginning. . . . . It used to make me sad, but now I’m just resigned.
UPDATE: Smitty offers forgiveness.
AMERICA RISING. “This video doesn’t exactly represent our point of view–we never fell for Obama’s “hope and change” scam–but it does speak for many millions of Americans. It’s nicely done. We’ll see a lot more of this kind of populist calling of Democrats to account between now and November.”
The country’s in the very best of hands.
NEW YEAR’S MARKDOWNS on tools and home improvement.
STEVE BENEN: Democrats Aren’t Really Dropping Like Flies. It just looks that way.