Speedkill

Ok then.

This is absolutely hilarious. It’s amazing how certain ideas start to look good after getting your ass handed to you in an election, isn’t it? A couple years ago the Republicans blew off the idea. Now some of them think it’s a great idea.

Even worse, the Democrats aren’t even in power yet. It took a few years for the Democrats to become fed up enough (and assertive enough) to propose something like that. The Republicans? Negative two days. That’s gotta be some kind of record.

The House GOP leadership seems to have been caught covering up a sex scandal involving kids. Sick.

Shane over at LitW notes Rehberg voting for an absolutely awful bill. How ridiculous this bill is is hard to overstate. The bill forbids the collection of attorney’s fees upon a successful suit involving the establishment clause of the First Amendment. That, of course, will have the effect of discouraging some people from bringing lawsuits against the government. That’s right, the “conservatives” are making it harder for citizens to provide a check on government power. In this case, it makes the religious majorities stronger and weakens the ability of religious minorities (or secularists) to keep the government neutral.

Unchecked government power. Partisan advantages over children. Selling votes. Majority religious rule. That’s today’s GOP. Congratulations to everyone who’s voted Republican in the last few years.

The Secular Coalition has released their ratings of members of Congress, as interest groups are wont to do. Out of 100, Baucus gets a 90, Burns gets a 0, and Rehberg gets a 0.

It’s not the greatest rating, though the House scorecard has a much wider variety of issues than the Senate version, which consists mostly of votes against certain judges nominated by Bush. Not too bad, but I hope they find better issues to rank them on.

Now, if anyone actually knew about the Secular Coalition, I’d be waiting for certain anti-secularism elements on the other side of the aisle (maybe even our own MT GOP E-brief writers) to blast people with high ratings for being anti-god or some such tripe. Then again, maybe it’ll happen. We’ll just have to see.

(via Pharyngula)

From the MT GOP E-brief:

In Their Latest Ad, The Montana Democrat Party Attacks Senator Burns For Accepting Money >From The Oil And Gas Industry. “Burns took $490,000 from the big oil and gas industry, then gave them billions in tax breaks.”(Montana Democratic Party, “Not Alone” Ad Backup, montanademocrats.org/news/…, Accessed July 14, 2006)

But fail to mention that since 1979, Max Baucus Has Received $588,287 From Energy And Natural Resources Special Interests. (Political Money Line Website, www.tray.com, Accessed July 14, 2006)

First off, I can’t find either of those figures on Open Secrets. It’s close, though. I get (using their career profiles, which start in 1989):

Baucus: $694,161 from “Energy/Nat Resource” interests.
Burns: $517,361 from “Oil & Gas” industry.

You might be able to see the deception here. “Oil & Gas” and “Energy/Nat Resource” are not the same thing. Here’s Baucus’s total for the Oil & Gas industry: $190,498. Here’s Burns’s total for Energy/Nat Resource interests: $1,059,039. Burns has substantially outraised Baucus in both categories (Baucus has outraised Burns overall by $1 million).

The difference between the two categories is pretty simple. Oil & Gas is a subset of Energy/Nat Resource on the site. Energy/Nat Resource also includes these industries:

Electric Utilities
Environmental Svcs/Equipment
Fisheries & Wildlife
Mining
Misc Energy
Waste Management

Oil & Gas is second in spending among those industries, with Electric Utilities being the first.

There are explanations of this other than deliberate deception. Laziness is a good one. I just wonder about people who didn’t notice that what they were comparing were not the same thing.

Also, does anyone else find it amusing that Burns’s number one contributing industry is “TV/Movies/Music?” Oil & Gas is number three.

I’ve haven’t had much to say about this. And I haven’t been paying much attention to the issue. After arguing with Budge over a fairly insignificant side argument about government impact on the Internet, I became a little more interested.

There are a couple issues here, for me. One is the effect on the sort of tiered pricing schemes people have been talking about will be. The other is that if necessary, can we regulate this effectively.

There’s possibly an issue 0 here, too. It’s hardly in the spirit of the Internet for telcos or ISPs to decide that Google should pay more than Yahoo! for faster service. The free exchange of information is one of the things that makes the Internet so great. And makes it not cable, too (among other things). It’s also not like there’s any basis for such a pricing scheme either. Companies like Amazon pay according to bandwidth. There’s no reason for one company to pay more than the other for the same services.

Anyway, onward. Effects? It seems like if we’re forcing smaller startups who can’t afford to pay for top tier service to the bottom of the barrel, we’re stifling innovation. This Reason article cites the possibility of stifling innovation we can’t forsee, but I’m going to weigh the paths I can see being stifled over the ones I can’t. Combined with the fact that very few smart people who know a lot about the Internet seem to be worried about that, I see effects as more negative than possibly positive. That said, I’m not entirely sure the effects are going to be that big of a deal. The Reason article makes this point:

Let’s assume that The New Republic’s worst fear of a fast-loading foxnews.com page comes true, even for those of us who prefer other, even more fair-and-balanced, less-comical news sources such as, say, The Onion. What are you likely to do in such a situation? Lump it or leave the company that delivers your broadband (as The Washington Post has reported, more than 60 percent of U.S. ZIP codes are served by four or more high-speed providers, a figure that will only continue to increase)? At the very least, you’ll bitch and moan to your provider, which is known to have some beneficial effects, even with near-monopolists. Remember what happened to the biggest ISP of them all, AOL, during its rise to dominance a decade or more ago? Originally a closed system, it had to allow its users to email with non-AOL customers, then it had to allow its customers full access to the Internet, then it had to go to flat-rate pricing, then it had to woo subscribers with ever-increasing free hours, giveaways, and the like. AOL still regularly upgrades its system and its services not because it wants to, but because it has to.

I’m not sure that’s a great argument, however. I think, though I could be wrong, many ISPs use other telcos’ pipes, leaving the choices available more restricted than they appear. Something about that sounds sketchy, but I’m sure someone can correct me if I’m wrong. The state of competition for companies involved in different phases of the Internet is not all that great, as far as I know, so it seems to me that we’re going to see more of an effect than what Gillespie thinks.

That said, is the effect all that bad? Companies probably won’t be denying you access to part of the Internet, nor will they probably charge you an arm and a leg to get to some obscure site. Then again, maybe they will.

The second issue is can we regulate this effectively. Given that 3/4 of Congress are certifiable morons, I don’t have a lot of hope for them to understand the distinction between prioritizing content type and discriminating against content source/ownership. This is the issue I need to think more about (and read the legislation in question, too).

That’s my two cents, anyway.

I can actually say something nice today. We finally got al-Zarqawi. And only two years later than we should have. Better late than never, I guess. Of course, it cost us who knows how many lives, but still.

Ok, that wasn’t very nice. Moving on, the estate tax repeal failed in the Senate. It and the other two issues I mentioned in my last post constitute the holy trinity of republican idiocy at the moment. We must make something that affects no one but the very rich a key issue! Like I said, vacuous.

…with Pat Roberts. Remember when Harry Reid closed down the Senate to pressure him regarding the investigation into the use of pre-war intelligence by the Bush administration? He chastised Reid for doing so:

It seems to me it was rather convenient, because it was just yesterday that our staff was working with the staff of the minority indicating that not this week, but next week we would spend as much time as possible, five or six days to complete our work in regards to phase two.

It isn’t like it has been delayed. As a matter of fact, it’s been on going. As a matter of fact, we have been doing our work on phase two. It is difficult, as I will indicate in just a minute I’ll go through these provisions on what we agreed to do. So it seemed to be a little convenient for all of a sudden go into a closed session of the Senate and call for a full Senate investigation of phase two when the committee is already doing its work. And I think that that basically is an unfortunate stunt. I would call it something else, but I think probably I would just simply leave it at that.

I mean, come on, we’ll basically be done next week! 5 months later, here we are. Now Roberts is pushing for another division and delay (via Drum):

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said he wants to divide his panel’s inquiry into the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq-related intelligence into two parts, a move that would push off its most politically controversial elements to a later time.

It makes sense to me. There’s an election coming up. We can’t have the truth about the Bush administration’s handling of intelligence coming out.

Sheesh. Does Roberts have any shame? He keeps dragging his feet, avoiding actually investigating whether the Bush administration deserves some blame in the intelligence catastrophe that was WMDs in Iraq. Roberts whines about it at the end of the article:

Roberts is less than completely pleased about his committee’s focus on wrapping up phase two.

He recently complained in a U.S. News & World Report article that his committee has not made progress on overseeing intelligence on Iran, a growing national security concern, because Democrats are “more focused on intelligence failures of the past.”

Actually, some us would like to have a better understanding of why the Bush administration was so wrong. It seems useful to, you know, figure out if our elected leaders are doing their jobs honestly.

Wulfgar had about the same reaction I did when reading Baucus’s opinion piece (or was it a letter? I haven’t seen a paper copy) in the Chronicle today.

One of the things that really struck me was the strange idea that a .xxx domain will hinder online predators. As Wulfgar says, Yahoo chatrooms are not going to be moved to the .xxx domain. Neither are places like MySpace. So what does that leave for cyber crime? Kids stumbling randomly upon a porn site? I’m not sure that’s cyber crime. Still, it’s certainly something to be concerned about, but is it big enough to require a change on the scale Baucus is proposing? I don’t think so. I don’t see why current filters and simple supervision aren’t sufficient. I don’t think creating an .xxx domain for adult sites is a bad idea, but the mandatory part seems like an unwieldy solution to a fairly small problem.

This whole thing strikes me as the same as this corporate takeover of the Internet we’ve been hearing about, too. It’s not as disconcerting, but it’s the same idea. Rather than allowing us to choose the content we want freely, we’re pressured into choosing certain companies or staying away from types of content. Considering the Internet is such a valuable resource because of the open sharing of information, that can only be a bad thing.

Another thing I find interesting is that the porn industry and the religious right are on the same side. Focus on the Family opposes the domain because it’s sort of an approval of porn:

Daniel Weiss, senior analyst for media and sexuality at Focus on the Family Action, added that a top-level domain dedicated to pornography does little more than lend legitimacy and credibility to a vile and largely illegal industry.

Vile I tell you, vile! I’m not sure exactly why the porn industry generally isn’t in favor of it. Maybe just that it’s regulation of their industry. The idea of singling out one type of speech for regulation is probably a sticking point for an industry that relies on a broad right to free speech.

Some of Baucus’s other ideas aren’t bad. Maybe overkill, but not bad. Age-verification software is about as much as I’m willing to tolerate as far as regulating this area. Educational initiatives are probably a good idea.

Finally, I saw something strange in that Focus on the Family article:

While some say a designated dot-xxx domain would enable parents to easily filter out pornographic Web sites, David Burt, public relations manager at Secure Computing Corp., said that while it sounds simple, it would significantly complicate and multiply the job of filtering companies.

He explained that for every Web site address in the familiar, www.WebsiteName.com, format, there is a corresponding numerical address, called the Internet Protocol or IP address—which is what computers actually use to find their way around the Web.

“The bottom line is that .xxx won’t make our jobs any easier,” Burt said. “because, in addition to blocking the www.porn-site.xxx, we will have to block the numeric IP as well.”

I don’t really understand the problem here. As far as I know, the problem filters have to solve is blocking the correct sites. I’m not sure why that necessarily involves the IP address, but if you have to do that already, fine. A .xxx domain will give a clear indication that the site is unsuitable. There would be no need to check the content of the site and there wouldn’t be any false positives (ignoring the definitional issues here). In any case, couldn’t the filter just block the domain name from resolving? Maybe I’m just confused.

As everyone surely knows, Tom DeLay has been indicted.

A conviction on the felony charge against Mr. DeLay, 58, carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison. The lawmaker has consistently maintained his innocence and today asserted that the indictment resulted from a “purely political investigation” by the Travis County district attorney, Ronnie Earle, a Democrat.

“I have done nothing wrong,” Mr. DeLay said, adding that he had violated “no law, no regulation, no rule of the House.” Mr. DeLay, speaking on Capitol Hill, described Mr. Earle, a longtime antagonist, as “a partisan fanatic” and a “rogue district attorney” and said the prosecutor had shamelessly courted journalists on “the only days he actually comes to the office.” Mr. DeLay said the charge lodged against him today was “one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history,” one that is “a sham, and Mr. Earle knows it.”

And of course, the grand jury that indicted him has also been duped by Earle. Pretty smart guy, eh? Getting a grand jury to go along with “one of the…most baseless indictments in American history”? Damn, he’s good! Especially for a guy who apparently isn’t at work that often.