Today's Must-Read #2: Sociopath du Jour

Mark Zuckerberg, a/k/a Facebook:

Concern about Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) respect for data privacy is widening to include the information it collects about non-users, after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the world’s largest social network tracks people whether they have accounts or not.

Privacy concerns have swamped Facebook since it acknowledged last month that information about millions of users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, a firm that has counted U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign among its clients.

Zuckerberg said on Wednesday under questioning by U.S. Representative Ben Luján that, for security reasons, Facebook also collects “data of people who have not signed up for Facebook.”

I had been patting myself on the back for never having signed up for Facebook -- looks like my congratulations were premature. If they're collecting data on me just for visiting a site that is in some way associated with FB -- like those blogs on which you can only comment using your Facebook ID -- well, words fail me.

And thinking about it, I'd be willing to bet that this is standard practice among these tech/internet giants (can you say "Google"? I'd say "Time to change search engines," but then it occurs to me that Google owns YouTube and Blogger.)

Remember privacy? We used to be able to have some. And just think: this is the conservatives'/libertarians' ideal world -- just let the ruling class decide what's appropriate.

Ah, Yes, The Memo

I'm sure you've been hearing about the "top secret" memo cobbled together by Devin Nunes' (R, Mar-a-Lago) staff from bits and pieces of other information as part of Trump's ongoing assault on the FBI -- which the House Intelligence Committee (and there's an oxymoron if I ever saw one) has decided to release.

Well, it seems the FBI isn't real happy about it:

Talking Points Memo reports:

In a rare public statement, the FBI on Wednesday expressed “grave concerns” about the accuracy of a congressional Republican memo that purports to show anti-Trump prejudice among senior FBI and Justice Department officials.

It’s extremely unlikely that the highly critical comment would be sent out without the approval of top Trump appointees at the FBI and DOJ. And it comes as the White House appears poised to defy the intelligence community’s wishes and approve the memo’s release. As the FBI put it, the four-page document compiled by staffers for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) contains “material omissions of fact.”

“With regard to the House Intelligence Committee’s memorandum, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it,” a statement from the bureau read. “As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

(Via Joe.My.God.)

Well, it seems Trump's water boy isn't about take that lying down:

Republican House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes is hitting back at the FBI, calling its rare public statement objecting to the release of a memo he authored "spurious." The FBI earlier Wednesday essentially accused him of spreading false information.

It is a strange, unprecedented, and very public battle between two branches of government. Worse, the president is backing Congressman Nunes instead of his own FBI, because the Nunes memo purportedly is constructed to paint Trump as a victim of intelligence surveillance.

In his public statement just released, Nunes accused the FBI of having "stonewalled Congress' demands for almost a year," adding, "it's no surprise to see the FBI and DOJ issue spurious objections to allowing the American people to see information related to surveillance abuses at these agencies."

From all reports, the memo was cherry-picked from various memos and e-mails and does, in fact, omit critically important information.

But then, no one's ever accused Nunes of being fair and balanced. As a matter of fact, he's not particularly honest, either:

Amid news breaking tonight that the White House would release the memo sent to them by Nunes in spite of serious warnings from the FBI and other agencies who believe it is riddled with inaccuracies and exaggerations, we have Rep. Schiff noting this: THE MEMO SENT TO THE WHITE HOUSE IS NOT THE MEMO THE INTEL COMMITTEE APPROVED.

According to Schiff, there are "material differences" in the two memos.

"Upon our discovery that the document sent for public review had been secretly altered, the majority belatedly offered the minority the opportunity this evening to compare the document transmitted on Monday night by the Majority to the White House with the document made available to all members on January 18th," Schiff wrote.

He concluded, "The White House, therefore, has been reviewing a document since Monday night that the Committee never approved for public release."

Offhand, Nunes may have just laid himself open to a charge of obstructing justice.

Footnote: Peter Stzrok was one of the two FBI agents involved in the "secret society" text messages, and was being used as evidence that Mueller's investigation into Russiagate was biased. Guess what:

News today suggests Peter Strzok, the FBI agent whose texts sparked the "secret society" conspiracy theory from Sean Hannity and Fox News, was the guy who instigated the reopening of the Clinton email probe just before the election in 2016.

CNN:

Strzok, who co-wrote what appears to be the first draft that formed the basis of the letter Comey sent to Congress, also supported reopening the Clinton investigation once the emails were discovered on disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner's laptop, according to a source familiar with Strzok's thinking. The day after Strzok sent his draft to his colleagues, Comey released the letter to Congress, reigniting the email controversy in the final days of the campaign.

If they weren't so dangerous, they'd be laughable.

Today's Must-Read: The Right's War on America

Specifically, the free press. This piece by Brian Beutler is a pretty damning analysis:

Republican Greg Gianforte defeated Democrat Rob Quist in a special election Thursday for Montana’s lone congressional seat, a six-point victory that should horrify you because he won with the full support of the GOP after body-slamming and punching an American reporter—and many of our political institutions, especially the media, are too paralyzed to impose a meaningful consequence on him or his enablers.

Gianforte, a true coward, didn’t admit any wrongdoing until his victory speech, at which point the risks of playacting decency pertained to his criminal case—the police have charged him with assault—rather than the election. “When you make a mistake, you have to own up to it,” Gianforte said. “That’s the Montana way.” I suspect some Montanans would object to the notion that you only apologize once it’s politically safe to do so.

For it was already beyond dispute on Wednesday night, thanks to audio of the attack and a witness account from a Fox News reporter, that Gianforte had attacked the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs. That’s when the process of public accountability began. In a healthier political culture, the condemnation would have been nearly unanimous, and the context of the incident would not have been a matter of controversy. What we witnessed instead was a political media — confronted with a one-sided assault on its most basic freedom — rendered by its own constructs largely incapable of identifying the threat with any precision.

That last sentence is particularly telling: the "free press" has been more than complicit in its own destruction. There are a number of contributing factors -- the corporate takeover of media outlets, leading to an emphasis on ratings rather than journalism (because in the corporate world, it's all about profits), the rise of Fox News (the propaganda arm of the Republican party), the transformation of the Republican party itself into the party of neo-fascist authoritarianism, the reluctance of reporters (or their editors) to offend those in power for fear of losing "access", the emphasis on "balance" and the resulting validation of bullshit by presenting advocates of positions that are, on analysis, grossly un-American as though they had legitimate arguments -- leading to the end result that we're seeing now: through its unwillingness to call out those such as Donald Trump (who called the press "an enemy of the American people" and got away with it), the press has rendered itself impotent, completely incapable (with a very few exceptions) of performing its essential and most basic function.

And so we wind up with something like Donald Trump in the White House, and candidates for public office winning elections after committing very public crimes.

Via Digby.

Addendum: From Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo, a take on why goons like Gianforte get away with it:

As this morning's headlines attest, Republican Greg Gianforte won yesterday's special congressional election in Montana. One of the noteworthy and little-noticed effects of his assault on Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs was, according to NBC, Gianforte raised $100,000 overnight online. One supporter told CNN the assault charge against Gianforte left her only "more ready to support Greg."

That's your modern "conservative". Read the rest, and then pour yourself a good stiff drink.

Today's Must-Read: The Trump White House

From Digby

It ain't pretty, but it's pretty much in character:

We have never seen anything like this. And the wingnuts and ring kissers can pretend this is part of some master plan or present it as a genius form of organization but it is not. It is incompetence and paranoia, which is probably even more dangerous. Politico reports:

A feeling of distrust has taken hold in the West Wing of Donald Trump's White House and beyond, as his aides view each other and officials across the federal government and on Capitol Hill with suspicion.

The result has been a stream of leaks flowing from the White House and federal agencies, and an attempt to lock down information and communication channels that could have serious consequences across the government and at the Capitol, where Trump tries to implement and advance his agenda.

In the White House itself, one top aide tried to take the office slated for another aide, Steve Bannon is looking to hire his own PR guru, and the details of Trump’s calls with foreign leaders, typically closely held, are suddenly out in the open.

Read the whole thing. If you've ever studied the Renaissance in Italy, I have a name for you: Borgia.

So, Is This a Surprise? (Update)

You want the White House's real attitude toward a free and independent press? New York Times, via Joe.My.God.:

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s chief White House strategist, laced into the American press during an interview on Wednesday evening, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by an election outcome few anticipated, and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Mr. Bannon said during a telephone call. “I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

Let me start off by noting that the press is supposed to be the opposition. If anyone doesn't understand this country, it's Trump and his advisors. Or, let me say it this way: it doesn't matter whether they understand it or not, because they have no respect and no sympathy for our basic principles and values.

And frankly, if the press were to really examine the way Trump became president, they'd have to admit their own complicity. Here's just one example:

I don't think we get to pretend anymore that there is a functioning media in this country. The nation's 'paper of record' is showing that they are fearful (not timid, damn it, but out-and-out cowardly) of publishing stories about our newly sworn-in president who entered office with a plethora of conflicts of interest and scandals, none of which the Times took all that seriously in their reporting prior to the election. But they will rationalize their inadequate reporting away as 'doing their job correctly' while democracy is being stolen from us by Putin.

Digby has a more detailed discussion.

This is interesting. It posits that in order to achieve Trump's foreign policy aims, the media and the intelligence community both have to be thoroughly discredited.  I'm guess that would be Bannon.

Her "this" is a very interesting article from The Atlantic on why Trump is taking on the press and the intelligence community. Worth a read.

Update: It's already started: journalists arrested for "felony rioting." And note the mainstream press' reaction:

While foreign and new media outlets such as The Guardian, Buzzfeed, City Lab, Daily Beast, and Huffington Post have reported specifically on the arrests of journalists (as has traditional outlet US News) most major media outlets in the United States have remained surprisingly silent. The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and MSNBC have not reported on the arrests at all. Washington Post’s report on the episode was framed in a decidedly pro-police terms–complete with an apocalyptic burning limo (that, it should be noted, was set on fire after the arrests in question) and the ominous, conspiratorial headline: “Protesters who destroyed property on Inauguration Day were part of well-organized group”

It was a nice country while it lasted.

Rewriting History: Coda

Towleroad has a good summary of the Trump administration's "alternative facts" strategy, as I sketched out yesterday, with this analysis, which is right on the mark:

Everyone should read this post written by an alleged member of a former administration that was posted on a DC message board and has gone viral, because, despite the anonymity of its author, it is an important explanation of what’s going on here:

If you are puzzled by the bizarre “press conference” put on by the White House press secretary this evening (angrily claiming that Trump’s inauguration had the largest audience in history, accusing them of faking photos and lying about attendance), let me help explain it. This spectacle served three purposes:

1. Establishing a norm with the press: they will be told things that are obviously wrong and they will have no opportunity to ask questions. That way, they will be grateful if they get anything more at any press conference. This is the PR equivalent of “negging,” the odious pick-up practice of a particular kind of horrible person (e.g., Donald Trump).

2. Increasing the separation between Trump’s base (1/3 of the population) from everybody else (the remaining 2/3). By being told something that is obviously wrong—that there is no evidence for and all evidence against, that anybody with eyes can see is wrong—they are forced to pick whether they are going to believe Trump or their lying eyes. The gamble here—likely to pay off—is that they will believe Trump. This means that they will regard media outlets that report the truth as “fake news” (because otherwise they’d be forced to confront their cognitive dissonance.)

3. Creating a sense of uncertainty about whether facts are knowable, among a certain chunk of the population (which is a taking a page from the Kremlin, for whom this is their preferred disinformation tactic). A third of the population will say “clearly the White House is lying,” a third will say “if Trump says it, it must be true,” and the remaining third will say “gosh, I guess this is unknowable.” The idea isn’t to convince these people of untrue things, it’s to fatigue them, so that they will stay out of the political process entirely, regarding the truth as just too difficult to determine.

This is laying important groundwork for the months ahead. If Trump’s White House is willing to lie about something as obviously, unquestionably fake as this, just imagine what else they’ll lie about. In particular, things that the public cannot possibly verify the truth of. It’s gonna get real bad.

Welcome to Kremlin Lite.

Footnote: The next step is to control access to data:

During a discussion about the future of the Affordable Care Act, MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid pointed out that Trump's White House was already lying about how the GOP's plan to "replace" Obamacare would leave millions without insurance.

"People are being hurt by their coverage being diminished, by their opportunities to get insurance being diminished," Reid explained. "And [White House Press Secretary] Sean Spicer comes out and says, 'No, they're not. Nobody is suffering.' And then you try to find the data on people's insurance and HHS just doesn't give it to you."

"That's where we are," MSNBC analyst Joan Walsh agreed. "I think we're really in a place where they're going to scrub the data. They're scrubbing websites now.

And this:

The mind boggles.

Today's Must-Read: The "Press Conference"

Also known as "The Daily Hissy Fit" with an invited audience. Charles P. Pierce's take (via Bark Bark Woof Woof):

What was beaming in from New York was nothing less than a genuine aspiring American dictator having what amounted to a very public tantrum. By the way, you knew it was a bag job when you saw that El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago had brought in his own personal claque of hecklers and cheerleaders. (It should be noted for the record that the "fake news" chant is merely lugenpresse for the digital age.) And the first thing he did on Wednesday morning was intimate that it's the American intelligence community that is a bunch of fascists.

It gets better -- or, in this case, worse, I guess. Needless to say, read the whole thing.

And about the "revelations" that prompted the latest series of tantrums, it turns out they're old news. From Digby:

For the record, the intelligence agencies didn't leak this. It's been in the hands of the media for months, apparently. They just decided to eport on it because they found out that the intel bosses had briefed the president and Trump himself on it last Friday.

Now, knowing that, think about the media's treatment of Trump during the campaign knowing that they were aware of these rumors and probably snickering like schoolgirls over it.

And then recall their handwringing over Hillary Clinton failing to properly tell them the full details of her doctor's visits.

And here's an update, from Tom Sullivan.

The Link

Josh Marshall articulates something that's been in the back of my mind for a while but that I couldn't quite pin down:

Which gets me to the larger point about the mainstream media. Let me start by defining terms. We are talking about large news organizations which at least purport to be apolitical in their editorial outlook and are owned and controlled by large corporations. People have lots of different definitions of the "MSM". But I think this is the most valuable one for present purposes.

Two things to keep in mind: all of these organizations have business models which are based on appealing to people across the political spectrum. So for instance, CNN cannot afford in business terms to get too out of sync with Trump and his supporters. (This is one of the big points about the campaign. Trump harped continuously on CNN but it was in fact one of his most accommodating news organizations. It even hired a group of bespoke supporters as pundits for the duration of the campaign. He harped on them because he saw them correctly as the most vulnerable.) Second and just as important, every big media organization and especially every big diversified corporation that owns a media organization have lots and lots of business before the federal government all the time. Even for broadcast TV networks alone there are regulations about how many local stations they can own. Telecoms like Comcast, which owns NBC, have a long, long list of business before the government.

(Emphasis in original.)

The government and the business sector are so intertwined -- and not just in lobbying and the "revolving door" between the two, but also just in the normal course of each taking care of its business -- that it's inevitable that government -- being, in bare bones respects, the more powerful -- is going to influence the workings of the media. There's been a lot of bitching since the Reagan years about news organizations soft-pedaling their criticisms of the government for fear of losing access. And now various news organizations have become more partisan, also affecting their coverage and the impartiality of their reporting.

I suspect we're about to see a lot of more that.

Read Marshall's full piece.

Today's Must-Read

Finally, someone says it -- Michelangelo Signorile, to be exact:

But Trump can count on much of the media falling for stock phrases, engaging in superficial coverage and often running with a false narrative that the Trump campaign hands to journalists on Trump and LGBT issues rather than doing the most basic reporting and presenting an accurate story. Throughout the campaign, Trump has often been treated to a different standard than other political candidates, and that’s been true on some issues more than others as the media prioritizing what to focus on.

Our so-called "independent press" has been suffering from a couple of maladies since news divisions stopped being a public service and started being required to deliver ratings: the stenographer syndrome (typified by the "he said, she said" school of reporting) largely stimulated by the perceived need to maintain access to the movers and shakers, and the search for "hot" headlines -- click bait. This impacts not only how stories are reported, but which stories are reported -- it's a fault even more evident at the editorial level.

Signorile notes something I've also noticed:

So, from the stage last night in Cleveland, Donald Trump said, “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology, believe me,” in the context of his fear-mongering about foreign terrorism and how the country is supposedly in chaos and government is supposedly inadequately responding to the threat. And ABC News, in coverage similar to other news organizations, focused on the “historic” use of the term “LGBTQ” by a GOP presidential candidate without including the context of the “historic,” extreme anti-LGBT GOP platform, and Trump’s own extreme positions, including promising religious conservatives – on the Christian Broadcasting Network, on Fox News, in a town hall with Pat Robertson ― that he would overturn the historic Obergefell ruling, which he’d called “shocking.”

A number of bloggers -- and even more commenters -- have crowed about the fact that Trump actually referred to us in his speech, without noting the context: it was just a convenient way to pivot once again to his perennial anti-Muslim plug: it wasn't about us, it wasn't about LGBTQ rights, it was about Islamist terrorism.

Read Signorile's whole piece -- it's as good a take-down of the press and its failure as an independent watchdog as I've seen.

It's symptomatic of the state of journalism in this country that we have to go to Comedy Central to get any real reporting.

Speechless

We've all heard what a total loss Fox News is as far as actual information is concerned, but the degree of ignorance displayed by their hosts and anchors is genuinely astonishing. We have another Ten Commandments battle, this time in Oklahoma, where the state supreme court ordered the government to remove a monument on the capital grounds.

State Rep. Mike Ritze (R), whose family funded the monument, told Doocy that he was shocked because the judges had never ruled against a Ten Commandments display before.

“Well, you know, it’s curious because in many instances like this, Mike, things in state capitals and on public ground are regarded as historical because that’s where our laws and our heritage comes from, came from in the beginning when this nation was first founded,” [host Steve] Doocy opined.

Hmm -- Enlightenment philosophy, English common law, Roman law, even some Iroquois law, but the Ten Commandments? Sorry, no.

The real problem here is that the Fox audience doesn't seem to value critical thinking skills very much, and they're likely to take this kind of blatant ignorance as gospel. Can I suggest that this has more than a little to do with the state of public discourse in this country these days?

Investigation du Jour

Well, it looks like the House Witch Hunt Committee has a little time on its hands:

Congressional Republicans are accusing the White House of having "an improper influence" over the Federal Communications Commission's decision on net neutrality, and are launching an investigation.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform wrote to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler today demanding documentation of all communication between FCC personnel and the White House, as well as calendar appointments, visitor logs, and meeting minutes related to meetings with the White House, and all internal documents discussing the views and recommendations of the White House.

And just in case you thought Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Comcast) wasn't being aggressive enough:

The committee's document request had several other components, including "all documents in the possession of FCC personnel working in the Office of Chairman Wheeler and the Office of General Counsel."

It seems chairman Wheeler and the FCC had the audacity to recommend classifying the Internet as a "public utility" under Title II of the Federal Communications Act of 1934, when everyone knows that the Internet should be the sole province of major telecoms. Just ask them.

Oh, and not only did President Obama abuse the powers of his office (Tyranny!!1!) by publicly supporting net neutrality, but the public overwhelmingly supports it, so you know it can't be good for the country.

One commentator echoed my thoughts exactly:

xWidgetArs Centurion

I believe communications companies may have been having improper influence on this committee. I'd like to see their communications, meetings with company representatives, and any documents in their possession.

Via Balloon Juice.

#alexfromtarget

If you haven't heard about this one, I'd love to know how you managed it. Here's a story on it from Towleroad.

And I'm including the video of Alex's appearance on Ellen, just because:

You should click through and check out the comments at Towleroad, not because they're particularly insightful, but because they're so typical. My only comment is "You people are really overthinking this." It's an internet craze, it'll be gone in a week to make way for the new meme. Alex seems dazed by the whole think, although from his appearance on Ellen he seems to be a very solid kid. (One thing about the reactions, and it may be purely subjective: several commenters noted how cute he is -- disparagingly, in some cases, but that's only to be expected -- but no one mentioned what beautiful eyes he has. Maybe that's just me.)

And While We're All Outraged About That Russian Dictator (Updated)

Look what's happening at home:

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.

Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents. The credit card data was of no interest or use to Mr. Brown, but it was of great interest to the government. In December 2012 he was charged with 12 counts related to identity theft. Over all he faces 17 charges — including three related to the purported threat of the F.B.I. officer and two obstruction of justice counts — that carry a possible sentence of 105 years, and he awaits trial in a jail in Mansfield, Tex.

According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.”

Because Mr. Brown has been closely aligned with Anonymous and various other online groups, some of whom view sowing mayhem as very much a part of their work, his version of journalism is tougher to pin down and, sometimes, tougher to defend.

But keep in mind that no one has accused Mr. Brown of playing a role in the actual stealing of the data, only of posting a link to the trove of documents.

(Emphasis added.)

Via Digby, who also inks to this article:

A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university's servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him.

Professor Matthew Green wrote on 5 September:

I was totally unprepared for today's bombshell revelations describing the NSA's efforts to defeat encryption. Not only does the worst possible hypothetical I discussed appear to be true, but it's true on a scale I couldn't even imagine.

The post was widely circulated online because it is about the sense of betrayal within a community of technical people who had often collaborated with the government. (I linked to it myself.)

On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. The email also informs him that if he resists he will need a lawyer. The professor runs two versions of the same site: one hosted on the university's servers, one on Google's blogger.com service. He tells the dean that he will take down the site mirrored on the university's system but not the one on blogger.com. He also removes the NSA logo from the post. Then, he takes to Twitter.

Do you see where this is going?

Now add this little tidbit:

The National Security Agency violated privacy protections between 2006 and 2009 when it collected phone records from millions of Americans by failing to meet court-ordered standards, U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal Tuesday[.]

Want to bet all those phone records are classified? Along with any information relating to how they were acquired?

Hah! Just found this article:

Walton’s dissatisfaction with the Obama administration’s handling of the surveillance program are contained in hundreds of pages of previously classified documents federal officials released Tuesday as part of a lawsuit by a civil liberties group.

The Obama administration has been facing mounting pressure to reveal more details about the government’s domestic surveillance program since a former intelligence contractor released documents showing massive National Security Agency trawling of domestic data.

The information included domestic telephone numbers, calling patterns and the agency’s collection of Americans’ Internet user names, IP addresses and other metadata swept up in surveillance of foreign terror suspects.

The documents released Tuesday came in response to a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They relate to a time in 2009 when U.S. spies went too far in collecting domestic phone data and then mislead the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about their activities.

(Emphasis added.)

Can I call 'em?

Update: It gets worse. Read the whole article -- it's fairly short.

It's about time

The F.C.C. is waking up to the possibilities of the Internet, and the telecommunications industry doesn't like it:

The proposal already faces resistance from the TV industry. Stations say they still serve a valuable public service, especially during emergencies, and say the F.C.C. proposals could cause gaps in signal coverage.

"Valuable public service" -- well, TV is the opiate of the masses, I guess, although whether corporate news media can be called a "public service" is up for discussion.

And wait until AT&T unleashes its lobbyists -- we'll see Congress mandating that the F.C.C. go back to policing costume malfunctions as its main order of business. Any number of congresscritters should be up for that one.

You may have guessed how disgusted I am with service providers in this country. (Earthlink sucks, basically, but I can't see that it's worse than any other -- one of its major virtues is that it's not AT&T, which is nothing more than a nest of thieves.) They've bought in to the American business model of crappy products for high prices. Chris Ryan at AmericaBlog has reported on the comparison between Internet service in the U.S. and in Europe. (You'll have to dig for the posts, but it's an ongoing topic for him.) We're looking pretty sad in comparison. (I remember noting in one of his posts that the U.S. ranks something like 19th in Internet access speeds.)

[T]he plan will include an initiative the chairman calls 100 Squared — equipping 100 million households with high-speed Internet gushing through their pipes at 100 megabits a second by the end of this decade. According to comScore, the average subscriber now receives speeds of three to four megabits a second.

The government is “setting a stake in the ground by setting a standard for broadband speeds in order to be a competitive nation,” said Dan Hays, director of PRTM, a global management consulting firm in the telecommunications industry.

He said the plan could place “significant pressure” on incumbent providers to improve their networks.

It seems, now that competition is more buzzword than reality, providers need "significant pressure" to provide the service they're in business to provide. It's getting like the insurance industry -- rake in the money for not doing much, not even what you said you'd do.

Health Care Reform via the MSM

Take a look at this article from NYT and try to find anything about what's actually in the bill other than the abortion restrictions. Also, check the links in the sidebars to "related articles" and the like, and see if you can find anything that summarizes the contents of the bill.

It's all about the kabuki. Two pages of kabuki.

Do I really have to say it?

It's All About the Message

A fascinating article by Robert Darnton on information and the history of the way it's been dealt with.

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.


more cat pictures

I'M BACK!!!

It only took two weeks and two days for a technician at Earthlink to get me online again.

And now I'm almost completely out of the habit.

Big Mess

I am without Internet access for a while, so posting is going to be light to nonexistent until I get everything ironed out.

Hang in there

A New Public Media, A New Media Policy

Ellen P. Goodman has a challenging post at Balkinization (yeah, I know -- it's just a Balkinization kind of morning) on public media policy in the face of the growth of the Internet. I'll let her comments speak for themselves.

The irony here, however, which Goodman doesn't really address in any detail, is that we are faced with a real revolution in information flow, and the control of that revolution and the form that it will take are in the hands of the two most conservative and least flexible components of our society -- business and the government. The Net Neutrality fight is just the beginning.

Think about that.