Friday Reads

Good Morning!

I’m still sick so that’s why I’ve not been around much this week..  That flu led to a secondary infection and I’m really sick now.  I’m trying to negotiate the world of Health Care with no Insurance at the moment.  It’s awful.  This put me in the hospital last year when I had insurance.  Now, after a shot and some horse pills, I’m trying to improve on my own.

The Justice Department has moved against a file-sharing site just one day after the SOPA protests. Interesting timing, isn’t it?

The Justice Department seized Megaupload.com, one of the world’s most popular file-sharing sites, and several of its related sites on Thursday.

Prosecutors charged seven employees of Megaupload with criminal copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit racketeering and other charges.

Each faces up to 55 years in prison.

Megaupload, which operates sites such as Megavideo.com and Megapix.com, claimed to receive 50 million daily visitors, accounting for 4 percent of total Internet traffic. According to court documents, Megavideo.com was the world’s 52nd most frequently visited website.

The crackdown comes just one day after a massive Web protest against legislation to expand the power of law enforcement and copyright holders to go after infringing websites.

Prosecutors accuse Megaupload’s owners of generating more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners.

The authorities seized 18 domain names related to Megaupload and $50 million in assets.

New Zealand police arrested four of the alleged Megaupload employees in New Zealand on Thursday at the request of U.S. officials. Three of the alleged employees remain at large.

The NYT has some interesting details about the company.

According to a grand jury indictment, Megaupload — one of the most popular “locker” services on the Internet, which lets users anonymously transfer large files — generated $175 million in income for its operators through subscription fees and advertising, while causing $500 million in damages to copyright holders.

Four of the seven people, including the site’s founder Kim Dotcom, born Kim Schmitz, have been arrested in New Zealand, the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Thursday; the three others remain at large. The seven — who a grand jury indictment calls part of a “Mega Conspiracy” — have been charged with five counts of copyright infringement and conspiracy, the authorities said.

The charges, which the government agencies said represented “among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States,” come at a charged time, a day after online protests against a pair of antipiracy bills being considered by Congress — the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, in the House, and the Protect I.P. Act, or PIPA, in the Senate.

In response to the arrests, the hacker collective known as Anonymous said it had taken down the Web sites of the Justice Department,the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Recording Industry Association of America. All three sites were inaccessible late Thursday afternoon.

I got a really good laugh out of this James Kwak post responding to news of big spending Republicans at the  NYT.  All the spending proposals of the Republican candidates for president will increase the deficit.  Most of them are the usual huge tax cuts for megawealthy “job creators”.  Romney himself would be a big beneficiary of Gingrich’s plan.

The tax cuts proposed by the Republicans would more than wipe out the budget-balancing effects of the cuts that were agreed to as part of the compromise that was ultimately reached last summer to raise the debt ceiling. One part of that compromise called for a series of automatic cuts to begin next year with the goal of reducing the deficit by $1.2 trillion over a decade — cuts that some members of Congress are trying to avert on the grounds that they are too onerous. The Tax Policy Center has calculated that by extending the Bush tax cuts, Mr. Romney’s tax plan would add $1.2 trillion to the deficit in just two years. The tax plans offered by Mr. Gingrich and former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania would add more than that to the deficit in just one year, the center found.

“The amounts of revenue loss we’re talking about in one year is the kind of thing we’re used to seeing over a decade,” said Roberton Williams, an analyst at the Tax Policy Center.

Experts from across the spectrum acknowledge that the Republican tax proposals would benefit the wealthiest the most. Polls have repeatedly shown that a majority of Americans favor raising taxes on households earning more than $1 million a year to reduce the deficit

Kwak-writing at baseline scenario called his response the “Department of Duh” and had these figures. So, who is the fiscal conservative, hmmmm?

Surprise, all the Republican candidates’ tax plans increase the national deficit! The numbers(reduction in 2015 tax revenues, from the Tax Policy Center):

• Romney: $600 billion
• Gingrich: $1.3 trillion
• (Late lamented) Perry: $1.0 trillion
• Santorum: $1.3 trillion

I guess that makes Romney the “fiscally responsible” choice, at least among the Republicans. But President Obama’s tax proposals would only reduce 2015 tax revenues by $222 billion. (That’s $385 billion in Table S-4 less $163 billion in Table S-3.)

Second surprise: The big winners in all of these tax plans are the rich! (That’s not just in dollars, but in percentage increase in after-tax income.)

Leave it to Nebraska to try to figure out a way to deny sexual preference status as a protected class.  This would deny legal protection against all kinds of things for members of the GLBT community in that state.  Religionists are interested in being exempted from civil rights legislation and would like to freely discriminate based on sexual orientation.

A new debate is brewing at Omaha City Hall and in the State Capitol over who can qualify as a “protected class” under discrimination laws.

City Councilman Ben Gray says he plans to place a measure to ban discrimination against homosexual and transgender people on the council’s agenda — as early as the end of the month or by late February.

But an Omaha state senator wants to bar cities and local governments from unilaterally creating such protected classes. Instead, the bill would grant such authority solely to the state.

The conflicting proposals are likely to reignite debate about more than a municipality’s rights. The conversation will center on sexual orientation, the rights of private enterprise, religion and civil rights.

Local business groups and religious-based organizations were pitted against a cadre of supporters of the anti-discrimination ordinance during Gray’s first attempt to place a similar measure on city books in 2010.

State and federal governments and the court system continue to wrangle with such issues. The U.S. Supreme Court last week upheld a “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws, a move that would often clear religious institutions to dismiss their leaders with legal impunity.

In the Legislature, State Sen. Beau McCoy’s Legislative Bill 912 would amend state law to prohibit local governments from creating new classes of residents protected from discrimination.

Such changes could only come from the Legislature, the proposed law says.

“It just merely says that if we’re going to change the protected classes … we need to come to the Capitol to do it so that it’s consistent across the state,” McCoy said. “If it’s the right thing to do, it ought to be the right thing to do border-to-border, not just in one city or municipality.”

In Omaha, Gray said he knows of gay or transgender people who have left the city “because they saw it as an unfriendly place towards them.”

“I’ve seen enough smoke that I think there’s a fire,” Gray said. “If we have a segment of our community that is not enjoying those freedoms, or are in fear of not enjoying those freedoms, government has an obligation to act.”

It’s nice to know there are a few reasonable people left in government there.  Nebraska is also in the limelight over the Keystone Pipe line decision made by President Obama. The governor believes the president made a mistake.  Interestingly enough, it was the complaints of Nebraska officials that put the project on hold.  Partisan politics any one?

Nebraska’s Republican Gov. Dave Heineman, whose state is a key part of the Keystone XL oil pipeline debate, expressed his disappointment with the final decision the Obama administration made yesterday to kill the project.

“I want to say I’m very disappointed,” Heineman told POLITICO. “I think the president made a mistake.”

“Really what he was saying in denying the permit was ‘no’ to American jobs and ‘yes’ to a greater dependence on Middle Eastern oil,” he said. “We want to put America back to work.”

The White House has used Heineman as political cover in the fight, pointing to the fact that the original route approved by the State Department was opposed by Heineman for ecological reasons. He said that his Legislature and his administration were working to get the final approvals in place and that the State Department should have approved conditionally while Nebraska worked out the final route. The company seeking to build the pipeline, TransCanada, was perfectly willing to begin construction at either end and finish in Nebraska, according to Heineman.

The administration pushed back yesterday that Heineman’s suggestion was wise but wouldn’t elaborate on whether it was legally possible to grant such a conditional approval.

Somebody must’ve gotten to the governor.  It certainly wasn’t the farming community.

So, that’s it for me today.  What’s on you reading and blogging list?