Thursday Reads: Net Neutrality, Sandy Hook Anniversary, and Trump’s Megalomania
Posted: December 14, 2017 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Ajit Pai, Donald Trump, Ed Markey, FCC, net neutrality, Sandy Hook 26 Comments
MA Sen. Ed Markey speaks at net neutrality rally outside FCC headquarters this morning.
Good Morning!!
Today the FCC will vote to kill net neutrality rules. That should set off a number of lawsuits and protests. The Commission meeting is happening right now.
NBC News: Net neutrality: FCC to vote on rules that will shape future of the internet.
Your future internet experience now rests in the hands of the Federal Communications Commission, which is expected to vote on Thursday to end rules requiring internet service providers to treat all traffic as equal.
The five members are expected to vote 3-2 along party lines to scrap Obama-era net neutrality rules, returning to a “light touch”approach and ending what Chairman Ajit Pai has called the federal government’s “micromanaging” of the internet.
“Prior to 2015, before these regulations were imposed, we had a free and open internet,” Pai told NBC News. “That is the future as well under a light touch, market-based approach. Consumers benefit, entrepreneurs benefit. Everybody in the internet economy is better off with a market based approach.”
The end of net neutrality rules will mark a huge victory for the big internet service providers. Depending on how they decide to act, the vote could have massive implications for the way you use the internet.
On Thursday, the Republican-dominated Federal Communications Commission and its chairman, Verizon BFF Ajit Pai, will hold a vote on whether to repeal Barack Obama-era net neutrality rules. If passed, the FCC would allow ISPs to begin setting up a tiered internet designed to suck as much money from customers’ pockets as possible while screwing with their ability to access competitors’ content, or really anything that might suck up amounts of bandwidth inconvenient for their profit margins.
The plan is immensely unpopular, even with Republicans. This type of situation would typically call for a charm offensive, though Pai has apparently decided to resort to his time-honored tactic of being incredibly condescending instead. In a video with the conservative site Daily Caller’s Benny Johnson—the dude who got fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarizing Yahoo Answers—Pai urged the country to understand that even if he succeeds in his plan to let ISPs strangle the rest of the internet to death, they’ll let us continue to take selfies and other stupid bullshit.Gif source: Daily Caller
“There’s been quite a bit of conversation about my plan to restore Internet freedom,” Pai says in the cringe-inducing clip. “Here are just a few of the things you will still be able to do on the Internet after these Obama-era regulations are repealed.”
Pai then pantomimed things users will supposedly still be able to do, like being able to “gram your food,” “post photos of cute animals, like puppies,” “shop for all your Christmas presents online,” “binge watch your favorite shows,” and “stay part of your favorite fan community.”
“You can still drive memes right into the ground,” Pai added before breaking into a literal Harlem Shake segment. Astute viewers may remember that this was an intolerable meme from all the way back in 2013 which has not grown any less intolerable in the intervening four years.
Please click on the link to read the rest and watch the clips.
The LA Times editorializes: The FCC sacrifices the free and open Internet on the altar of deregulation.
In defending his proposed rollback of federal net neutrality rules, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has repeatedly said that he’s merely trying to return to the “light touch” regulation that helped make the internet what it is today.
That’s transparently false, and Pai knows it. The deregulation of AT&T, Comcast and other broadband providers that Pai and the commission’s other Republican appointees are expected to approve Thursday is a dramatic abdication of authority that could usher in an ugly new era for individuals and companies that offer content and services online, and for the people who rely on them.
It’s hard to know at this point how altered the internet will be after the dominant local providers of high-speed internet access services are freed to meddle with the traffic on their networks. But merely giving them that freedom could discourage innovation and investment online by creating potential new obstacles to start-ups and others that would compete with deep-pocketed sites and services….
The obvious problem there is that broadband providers could pick winners and losers online and stay out of trouble for it simply by disclosing that they are, in fact, prioritizing traffic for any online site or service that can afford the fee. No deception and no unfairness, but no neutrality, either. There’s also a realistic fear that broadband providers would favor their own sites and services because some are doing it already — for example, AT&T effectively exempts video streams from its DirecTV subsidiary from its wireless data caps.
Read the rest at the LA Times.
Today is also the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre.
David Frum at The Atlantic on Oct. 3, 2017: Mass Shootings Don’t Lead to Inaction—They Lead to Loosening Gun Restrictions.
“After Newtown, nothing changed, so don’t expect anything to change after Las Vegas.”
How often have you heard that said? Yet it’s not true. The five years since a gunman killed 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, have seen one of the most intense bursts of gun legislation in U.S. history—almost all of it intended to ensure that more guns can be carried into more places.
In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, gun-rights activists assertively carried openly displayed weapons into more and more places. Many national chain stores banned weapons, but at least one—Starbucks—did not. In August 2013, gun-rights activists declared a “Starbucks Appreciation Day.” They made a special point that day of carrying weapons in Starbucks outlets nationwide, including the Starbucks in Newtown itself. (The store closed for the day to avert the demonstration.)
Since Newtown, more than two dozen states have expanded the right to carry into previously unknown places: bars, churches, schools, college campuses, and so on. The most ambitious of these laws was adopted in Georgia in April 2014. Among other provisions, it allowed guns to be carried into airports right up to the federal TSA checkpoint.
Read more at the link.
The Washington Post has an important investigative article today on the consequences of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and continues to interfere in our politics: Doubting the intelligence, Trump pursues Putin and leaves a Russian threat unchecked.
In the final days before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, members of his inner circle pleaded with him to acknowledge publicly what U.S. intelligence agencies had already concluded — that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election was real.
Holding impromptu interventions in Trump’s 26th-floor corner office at Trump Tower, advisers — including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and designated chief of staff, Reince Priebus — prodded the president-elect to accept the findings that the nation’s spy chiefs had personally presented to him on Jan. 6.
They sought to convince Trump that he could affirm the validity of the intelligence without diminishing his electoral win, according to three officials involved in the sessions. More important, they said that doing so was the only way to put the matter behind him politically and free him to pursue his goal of closer ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“This was part of the normalization process,” one participant said. “There was a big effort to get him to be a standard president.”
It didn’t work. To this day, Trump stubbornly refuses to accept reality.
The result is without obvious parallel in U.S. history, a situation in which the personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat. The repercussions radiate across the government.
Rather than search for ways to deter Kremlin attacks or safeguard U.S. elections, Trump has waged his own campaign to discredit the case that Russia poses any threat and he has resisted or attempted to roll back efforts to hold Moscow to account….
U.S. officials said that a stream of intelligence from sources inside the Russian government indicates that Putin and his lieutenants regard the 2016 “active measures” campaign — as the Russians describe such covert propaganda operations — as a resounding, if incomplete, success….
…overall, U.S. officials said, the Kremlin believes it got a staggering return on an operation that by some estimates cost less than $500,000 to execute and was organized around two main objectives — destabilizing U.S. democracy and preventing Hillary Clinton, who is despised by Putin, from reaching the White House.
This is horrifying:
U.S. officials declined to discuss whether the stream of recent intelligence on Russia has been shared with Trump. Current and former officials said that his daily intelligence update — known as the president’s daily brief, or PDB — is often structured to avoid upsetting him.
Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter. In other cases, Trump’s main briefer — a veteran CIA analyst — adjusts the order of his presentation and text, aiming to soften the impact.
“If you talk about Russia, meddling, interference — that takes the PDB off the rails,” said a second former senior U.S. intelligence official.
I’ve quoted quite a bit, but it’s long piece. Please go read the whole thing at the WaPo.
Finally, a reaction from Greg Sargent: This new report confirms that Trump’s megalomania threatens our democracy.
We already know that President Trump’s narcissism and megalomania threaten our democracy in multiple ways. His intolerance of critical media scrutiny fuels his systematic campaign to delegitimize the free press. His inability to acknowledge that his own conduct led directly to the special counsel’s Russia probe fuels a deep grievance and rage over it, making it more likely that he can be goaded into trying to close the investigation down.
Now a blockbuster new Post report shows how these traits are coming together to expose our democracy to danger on another front. Just before Trump was sworn in as president, the report says, his advisers urged him to publicly acknowledge U.S. intelligence findings that Russia tried to sabotage our democracy. But Trump “became agitated,” the report notes. “He railed that the intelligence couldn’t be trusted and scoffed at the suggestion that his candidacy had been propelled by forces other than his own strategy, message and charisma.” [….]
As I’ve argued, we have done a poor job of accurately capturing the true nature of Trump’s position on Russian interference. It isn’t simply that Trump denies his campaign colluded with that interference. Rather, it’s that this interference never happened at all, irrespective of whether any collusion with it took place. (We now know that collusion did happen; at this point the question is how serious the misconduct was.)
Though Trump has at times acknowledged that such sabotage did take place, he has mostly refused to do so. This has long appeared to reflect an inability to view discussion of Russian interference as about anythThing other than himself. To acknowledge Russian meddling can only be an acknowledgement that his victory may have reflected unsavory external factors along with his blinding greatness, and thus may have been in some sense tainted, and since in Trump’s mind that cannot be true, it also cannot be true that Russia meddled at all.
Those are the top stories today, IMHO; but there’s plenty more happening. What stories are you following?
Monday Reads
Posted: December 17, 2012 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Bobby Jindal, fiscal cliff, Sandy Hook 67 Comments
Good Morning!
The embarrassingly, nakedly ambitious pol that is my governor decided that taking a stab at the birth control issue on the front of the WSJ would bring back national attention to him. The man will do anything for attention. So, I covered his suggestion to make birth control over the counter last week. Here’s some feedback from a blogger at kos.
Ah, yes. Because it’s Democrats who run around like headless chickens, screaming and wailing about “religious liberty” and how making birth control affordable and accessible to women is just like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor day . It’s Democrats who’ve said that only sluts use or want birth control. It’s Democrats who’ve said that even married couples should not use birth control because the whole point of marriage is to pop out babies in the name of Jesus.
Oh, no, wait. That’s actually the Republican Party.
But Jindal, who is also head of the Republican Governors’ Association as well as a possible presidential candidate in 2016, thinks it’s high time Republicans stand up for women and their health care because—Nah. Just kidding. In fact, Jindal manages to completely omit any mention of the benefits of birth control for women and their families. But boy, oh boy, does he see an awful lot of political benefits for Republicans if they’d stop giving Democrats such a good reason to criticize them. And that’s apparently reason enough to support the recommendation of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to make birth control available over the counter.
Oh, and also, Obama sucks. In fact, it’s his fault women don’t have better access to birth control. No, seriously:
Over-the-counter contraception would be easier to obtain if not for some unfortunate aspects of President Obama’s health-care law.
Ah, yes. Who doesn’t remember how Republicans were demanding that the president’s health care law be bigger and better to provide even greater access to, say, reproductive health care?
Oh, and lest you think that “pro-life” Jindal has suddenly turned away from the Every Sperm Is Sacred ideology of his party, don’t worry. He hasn’t:
As an unapologetic pro-life Republican, I also believe that every adult (18 years old and over) who wants contraception should be able to purchase it. But anyone who has a religious objection to contraception should not be forced by government health-care edicts to purchase it for others. And parents who believe, as I do, that their teenage children shouldn’t be involved with sex at all do not deserve ridicule.
This comes on the heels of Jindal’s embarssingly ignorant response to the problem of the fiscal cliff where he demonstrated he has no idea what he’s talking about. Meanwhile, we’re about to suffer yet another blow to higher education and health down here in Louisiana in the name of Peyush’s search for higher office.
Governor Bobby Jindal’s administration announces sweeping state budget cuts totaling $165.5 million.
The mid-year tax cuts will hit the state’s Department of Children and Family Services and those who receive hospice care, the hardest.
Every Saturday, you can listen to Sue May of Cannon Hospice on the radio, trying to counsel families on end of life decisions for their loved ones.
But today, she has bad news for listeners when she hits the radio airwaves.
Governor Jindal’s cuts include hospice care.
“Bobby Jindal and his crew are telling us that if you have a serious illness you can’t receive any further treatment,” says May. “You can get any assistance at end of life care no symptom management, no pain control, no outreach of compassion.”
The cuts to hospice care affect Medicaid patients who are not in nursing homes.
May says thousands of terminally ill patients so often choose to die at home with dignity might no longer have care.
“Medicaid is also for people who struggled through serious illness and who have gone through all of their savings and their funds to get care and are seeking the assistance of the state to help them,” says May. “Last time they made these changes in Medicaid we found out about it on Friday and they came in effect on Monday, we don’t get any huge notification.”
Yes folks! It’s compassionate conservatism with some southern fried curried hospitality thrown in. Jindal is well know for throwing sick people out on the streets. Now, we’re going to be tripping over dying people too.
Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, says he wishes Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of the Sandy Hook Elementary School, was armed with an M-4 assault rifle when she confronted Adam Lanza, the shooter who killed 20 children.
“I wish to God she had an M-4 in her office locked up so when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids,” Gohmert said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
Dawn Hochsprung, Sandy Hook’s principal, was reportedly killed when she confronted Lanza after he forced his way into the school.
The M-4 carbine is a smaller version of the M-16 and AR-15 assault rifles. It was developed for urban combat and its semi-automatic version, which is available to civilians, can fire 45 rounds per minute.
Lanza was armed with a semi-automatic M-4 Bushmaster rifle and two semi-automatic handguns, a Glock and a Sig Sauer.
Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, Connecticut’s chief medical examiner, said all of the victims at the school were killed by a “long gun” rifle, suggesting the Bushmaster was the murder weapon.
Ah yes, the answer to a shoot out at the OK Corral is more guns!!!
Here’s a link to the WAPO coverage of the President’s sermon last night.
President Obama’s speech Sunday night at a memorial service for the victims — mostly children — of a mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut was a forceful assertion that the politics surrounding guns (and gun control) must change.
“We can’t tolerate this anymore,” Obama said. “We are not doing enough and we will have to change.” (Full transcript of speech here.)
Obama noted that this was the fourth time in his presidency that he has had to grieve with a community after an incident of mass murder with a gun. But, his speech in Connecticut Sunday was a significant departure from the other addresses he had given to communities torn apart by shooting sprees.
Speaking in Aurora, Colorado just days after a gunman opened fire in a movie theater this summer, Obama was somber, subdued — and decidedly apolitical. The closest Obama got to making a statement (of any sort) came in the speech’s last line in which he said: “I hope that over the next several days, next several weeks, and next several months, we all reflect on how we can do something about some of the senseless violence that ends up marring this country, but also reflect on all the wonderful people who make this the greatest country on Earth.”
It was a very different Obama who took the stage at the Newtown memorial Sunday, a president not just saddened by the tragedy but fed up with the lack of forward movement in hopes of preventing the next one.
One sentence in Obama’s speech sums up his state of mind. “I’ll use whatever power this office holds…in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this,” he said — a line the incumbent never came close to uttering in Aurora or, before that, in Tucson in 2011.
Speaker Boehner appears to be warming up to the process of negotiating.
House Speaker John A. Boehner has offered to push any fight over the federal debt limit off for a year, a concession that would deprive Republicans of leverage in the budget battle but is breathing new life into stalled talks over the year-end “fiscal cliff.”
The offer came Friday, according to people in both parties familiar with the talks, as part of the latest effort by Boehner (R-Ohio) to strike a deal with President Obama to replace more than $500 billion in painful deficit-reduction measures set to take effect in January.
With the national debt already bumping up against a $16.4 trillion cap set last year, Congress risks a government default unless it acts to raise the debt ceiling in the next few months. Some Republicans had argued that party leaders should use the threat of default to demand additional spending cuts from Obama.
Boehner’s offer signals that he expects a big deal with sufficient savings to meet his demand that any debt limit increase be paired dollar for dollar with spending cuts. That would permit him to keep a key vow to his party — and head off a potentially nasty debt-limit fight — at least until the end of next year.
So, that’s it from me.What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Sandy Hook Up Dates
Posted: December 16, 2012 Filed under: Gun Control | Tags: Assault rifles, gun control, NRA, Sandy Hook 49 Comments
The President will speak tonight in a memorial to the victims of the Sandy Hook Shooting. I thought I’d try to provide you a list of various articles and updates to read as we try to make sense of something senseless.
This moving article by Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books aligns the interests of the gun fetishists with the worship of Moloch a blood thirsty old testament god who was only appeased by the sacrifice of small children.
Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).
The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.
Senator Diane Feinstein announced her intention to introduce gun control legislation on the first day of Senate Business in 2013.
Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein said Sunday that she will introduce a new ban on assault weapons when the new Congress convenes next year, and she expects President Barack Obama to support it.
Appearing on Meet The Press in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that killed 26 on Friday, Feinstein, who sponsored the first federal ban on assault weapons which expired in 2004, said she is ready to push to reinstate it.
“It’s being done with care, it will be ready on the first day, I’ll be announcing House authors, and we’ll be prepared to go — and I hope the nation will be prepared to help,” she said.
State Police in Connecticut announced what we all knew and feared. The slaughter in Sandy Hook was caused by a military style semi-automatic assault rifle capable of showering those little bodies with hundreds of bullets in a matter of minutes. The shooter had hundreds of rounds and magazines.
Adam Lanza had hundreds of rounds and used multiple high capacity magazines when he went on a rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 first graders and six adults, Connecticut State Police said today.
After shooting at victims in two classrooms and a hallway with a high-powered semi-automatic rifle, he put a bullet into his own head with a handgun.
“The weapon that was utilized most of the time during this horrific crime was identified as a Bushmaster AR-15 assault weapon,” Connecticut State Police Lt. Paul Vance said. “The trajectory of the shots and all of the ammunition used in the horrible crime will be examined.”
Vance said three weapons were found at the scene, while a fourth, a shotgun, was recovered from Lanza’s vehicle.
Amid all the discussion, the NRA remains silent. Additionally, no pro gun rights senator would appear on MTP. Many folks believe that “The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre Has Blood on His Hands”.
There should be special place in hell reserved for LaPierre. He likes to fulminate about gun owners’ rights. But so far he’s has been silent on the nation’s most recent gun massacre.
The NRA not only lobbies on behalf of “stand your ground” laws, but also offers insurance to members to pay for the legal costs of shooting people in “self-defense.” The NRA also defends the right of Americans to carry concealed weapons, including handguns.
Adam Lanza—the 20-year old man who walked into the Connecticut school shot his victims with a semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle—is no doubt deranged. He’s not alone. There are lots of crazy people around. But if we make it easy for them to obtain guns, they are more likely to translate their psychological problems into dangerous and deadly anti-social behavior.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2011 there were 15,953 murders in the United States and 11,101 (30 a day) were caused by firearms. Suicides and unintentional shootings account for another 20,000 deaths by guns each year. Of course, many more people are injured—some seriously and permanently—by gun violence.
Will we actually see the NRA’s death grip on Congress come to an end?
According to a 2011 Gallup survey, 47 percent of Americans own some kind of firearm, and the total number of nonmilitary guns in circulation exceeds 300 million. There are nearly 130,000 federally registered gun dealers across the country, three and a half times the number of grocery stores. Although the sales transacted by registered dealers are subject to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which screens out buyers with disqualifying felony convictions or histories of confinement in mental institutions, 40 percent of gun sales are unregulated transactions made by private, unlicensed vendors, many at gun shows and conventions.
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