Expect to have hope rekindled.
Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways.
The dry seasons in life do not last.
The spring rains will come again.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
Earlier One-Off Post: A Response To a Canadian's Pro-Obama Viral Letter
Chart of the Day
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| Via FEE on FB |
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| Via Lew Rockwell |
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| Via National Review |
Election 2014 Update
A Cassidy-financed poll shows his campaign with a 16-poinr lead over Landrieu 3 weeks this Friday. Landrieu is still trying to drum up Dem votes to get past a filibuster on a Keystone Pipeline vote, as a last resort to demonstrate her Senate pull, but the President's press secretary has already promised a veto. In fact, Cassidy has already been guaranteed a Majority spot on the energy committee.
Surprise! Surprise! All three close GOP-led Congressional districts on election night, flipping Dem incumbents, seemed to flip, two of them in the Valley and still uncalled.
As expected, the top 4 GOP House leaders, in particular, Speaker Boehner, were elected to lead next session; Mitch McConnell will become Majority Leader. Apparently a handful of Dem senators wanted to topple Harry Reid, but he will come back as Minority Leader.
On Obama's "Amnesty" Plan
I don't necessarily disagree with elements of the plan (but giving immigration employees a morale-boosting pay raise is a quick HELL NO). I think existing immigration is overly restrictive, I do oppose deporting families with American-born children, and I do want to deal with resident undocumented workers in a legal, transparent way. The problem is that Obama has NO CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY to do almost anything in what I've seen to date (which does not including granting permanent legal status or path to citizenship). "Presidential discretion" does not mean rewriting existing law; you have a constitutional responsibility to execute laws faithfully, as Judge Napolitano points out elsewhere, not simply disregard enforcement of laws you personally disagree with.
I would urge Obama not to act uniformly. If he does, there will be likely two responses: (1) Obama will kill a chance to pass real immigration reform, and (2) he would open a door to impeachment. I would likely lean against impeaching a lame duck President; I think he's the gift that keeps on giving and would be useful during the 2016 campaign as unpopular and radioactive. I don't think it would be prudent to let Obama distract from your hard-earned majority; there's no ways the 46 Senate Dems vote to convict, and there would be political blowback against the GOP for putting the nation through a second impeachment trial--with nothing to show for it. Obama wants to provoke a GOP overreaction which may help him rehabilitate his public approval number, and the GOP will suffer a high-profile loss.
Facebook Corner
(Bastiat Institute). "The concept of the “tiered” Internet is not something to be feared. On the contrary, it could be a means of enhancing services to broadband customers, providing revenue for ISPs to invest in accommodating increasing demand for bandwidth-intensive and delay-sensitive applications and making further improvements to data delivery, and of increasing fairness by ensuring that content providers responsible for the most Internet congestion pay the higher costs of assuring a high quality of service for Internet users. Choking off this potential revenue stream through net-neutrality mandates will only ensure that instead of an Internet with regular lanes and “fast lanes,” all consumers will be stuck in the slow lane."
In our current system, a tiered service means elite/everyone else.
Since when do we find premium service for data handling a threat? If anything, the standard service customers benefit from investments made to support premium service. Express Mail costs more than first class, but not at the expense of other customers.
I am a third-year law student at one of the top law schools in the country, where I have been fortunate enough to take a class taught by a very seasoned oil and gas attorney. This attorney also happens to be a big free-market advocate, and he has assigned to us readings by Hayek and similar authors for our oil and gas regulation seminar.
However, one of the main themes for our course is that the whole "no regulation!!!" argument, of which he and I are both normally big proponents, doesn't quite work in circumstances where you have natural monopolies. These emerge for several different reasons in systems like energy pipelines, telecommunications infrastructure, etc. In order to prevent rent-seeking costs, inefficiencies, and under-investment (all of which will eventually burden consumers, taxpayers, or both), you need common carrier regulations to prevent companies with natural monopolies from discriminating amongst the sources or content of the substance which they transit.
This well-understood and widely-accepted principle applies perfectly to the Internet, and it how the Internet has functioned until the FCC lost a court case earlier this year on a technicality. This can be corrected by reclassifying what category of common carriers Internet providers are regulated as by the FCC as per its statutory authority from a 1990s act regulating telecommunications common carriers. As I understand it, the purpose of net neutrality is to ensure this objective so that Internet data can continued to enjoy common carrier protections (which also has privacy implications).
No. The biggest monopoly is by force, not a current infrastructure that can be obsoleted by technological advances, the market force of creative destruction. This is pushing-on-a-string, counterproductive elitist bullshit; you have several alternatives, including but not restricted to wire, cable, wireless, satellite. An ISP cannot force you to buy its service. What we do know is that government regulation restricts innovation, has the potential to abuse that authority to compromise individual liberty, and you will have regulatory capture by special interests. The Internet has flourished without regulatory constraints.
Can't say I agree with the libertarian position on net neutrality, a rare break for me. I've just worked in the technology industry too long to see it any other way.
It was difficult for me to justify my thoughts at first, based on the telecommunications industry (obviously) owning the networks which deliver service. However, those networks depend entirely on rights of way granted to them to allow them to run wires on legitimately public land. No rights of way, no networks. This gives the public the right to a say on how these networks are governed. This is not some nebulous theoretical ownership issue, its infrastructure whose maintenance materially affects the public. For example, the fact that road construction on the Middlesex tpke in Massachusetts has been held up for at least 3 years by utility companies that won't complete their transfers. Or, the poor road quality in Massachusetts because utilities refuse to invest in upgrading their infrastructure so they don't have to dig up the street every few years.
There is a price to be paid in terms of the availability of a free market regardless of whether net neutrality is adopted or not. The number of networks available to people is limited by physical constraints, monetary constraints, anticompetitive subsidies from the government, and many other factors which make transferring to a different network if one is not happy with the tiered service difficult or impossible for most consumers. As the internet becomes a more and more critical venue for social change as well as commerce and employment, the free market that needs to be protected is clearly the internet, rather than the telecom industry.
This is to say nothing of the telecom industry collusion with the government in what is clearly an unconstitutional surveillance program. Allowing these carriers the latitude to censor, or effectively censor, free speech when they have shown an enthusiastic willingness to engage in obviously illegal behavior like that is unacceptable on any level.
ISPs are common carriers. The consequences of not making this distinction will be disastrous.
Bullshit! You don't understand fundamentally the concept of the Internet; you are confusing a physical implementation.
(FEE). Same topic.
One important thing to do: remove local provider monopolies. Most (if not all) municipalities and areas have monopoly agreements with providers. This prevents Comcast from competing with Verizon for the same customers. There is no competition in the provider market. The laws that allow municipalities to have monopoly agreements must go and allow for (and encourage) provider competition at the local level.
This one change will have more of an impact on prices and quality of service than anything else. It's also the one thing that nobody talks about and the provider companies lobby against (that is ending local monopoly agreements).
No. This is leftist crackpot pushing-on-a-string nonsense. No one forces you to buy cable.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of the original artist via IPI |
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| Courtesy of Steve Kelley via Townhall |
Glen Campbell, "By the Time I Get To Phoenix"
