Yesterday’s FCC decision on Net Neutrality has everyone up in arms on both sides of the battle. Did they split the baby in half or sell out? Republicans are furious over the decision. Kay Bailey Hutchison took to the Senate floor for 30 minutes or so yesterday railing about how the FCC had overstepped their authority and robbed Congress of theirs. On the other side, NN activists are equally angry over what they view as extremely weak regulatory solutions to the much larger problem of keeping the Internet open and accessible to all. Dan Gillmor predicts the end of the Internet as innovation incubator, and sees it becoming much more like cable TV. I fear he’s right. Ars Technica has a great analysis of why everyone hates it . On the Republican side of things, it’s simply that there was any effort at all to regulate the Internet, because we all know backbone providers want nothing more than to provide access to everyone at a low price with no discrimination among users or sites, right? Not so much. This graphic tells the tale . On the other hand, the regulations they passed have different, less restrictive rules for wireless than wired, and are still hardly enforceable. They allow for paid prioritization, so that each ISP can throttle or charge extra for access to sites like YouTube and Netflix. Even the Future of Music Coalition, which represents artists, lamented the fact that net neutrality “seemingly falls short of offering full protections.” They don’t share Baker’s default view of huge ISPs, which dominate the US landscape for wireline broadband, as cuddly companies who would like nothing better than to innovate and invest. And they’re deeply disappointed that wireless companies are largely excluded from discrimination rules. Yeah, that wireless loophole is a pretty big one. And it’s a real thorn in the side of pro-Net Neutrality advocates. Interesting that it was Android’s ubiquity and so-called openness which drove it. Carriers have made a point of taking that “open system” and locking it down tight with their own bloatware and services, so I’m at a loss to understand the logic of loosening wireless regulations as a result. So, by the way, is TechCrunch’s MJ Siegler , who wonders why on earth an operating system would have any impact on a Net Neutrality decision. Except wait. What the hell does an open operating system have anything to do with network access? Nilay Patel wonders this. John Gruber wonders this. Everyone should wonder this. It really does almost read as if they just copied what Google and Verizon laid out and forgot to remove the self-promotion. Meanwhile, we still have Comcast’s acquisition of NBCU to worry about, as Level 3 Communications takes that to the next level by pressuring the FCC to look at the merger in light of their Net Neutrality rules. After the NBC Universal acquisition, Comcast’s incentive to discriminate is increased, as those providers now also compete against Comcast’s affiliated Hulu and NBC content,” the Level 3 submission stated. Furthermore, even if online video is viewed as a separate market from cable TV, the deal would give Comcast more reason to play a gatekeeper role. So I guess we could say that the FCC split the baby and named one half Google and the other half Verizon?
Continue reading …Jon Stewart deserves big props for stepping up and making this a national issue since the media gave it a pass at first. NY Daily News . The deal to pass a 9/11 health bill is done, the Daily News has learned. Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand met with other senators’ staff and staff from Rep. Carolyn maloney’s offce until well after midnight, cutting a new deal and trimming the package to care for 9/11 responders to $4.3 billion, sources close to the deal said. They reached final agreement at about 11:30 this morning after the New York Democrats met for an hour with the prime GOP opponents, Sens. Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Majority Leader Harry Reid is said to have joined the talks at the end, and agreed to try for quick passage. The measure could be passed even before the START treaty is ratified. More to follow…(h/t Greg Sargent t)
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A Democratic president brought the infamous “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy into the U.S. military, and now President Obama has undone that particular piece of work by Bill Clinton. On Wednesday, Obama signed the bill ending DADT, saluting GLBT servicemembers from the past and present and asking those who may consider enlisting to factor this latest development into their choice, as now they, too, can take part in his overseas adventures.
Continue reading …Barbour’s ‘clarification’ of White Citizens’ Council apologia is still more whitewashing
December 22, 2010 No CommentHaley Barbour is obviously eager to walk back his boneheaded apologia for the old White Citizens Councils in Mississippi , so yesterday he issued a “clarification” : “When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns’ integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn’t tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.” Barbour is actually just making matters worse, because this too is false information and incredibly misleading. First of all, Yazoo City certainly did not reject the Klan — it was very much a significant and well-reported presence on the local landscape at the time. Moreover, it didn’t need violence because the White Citizens Council in Yazoo City had so thoroughly intimidated and threatened its local black population into abject fear and silence. Let’s recall Barbour’s original exchange here, especially the question that prompted it: Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so. Well, as Adam Nossiter describes in some detail in his remarkable book, Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers , the real answer is that the White Citizens’ Council’s intimidation campaign was so successful that it took years before blacks had the wherewithal to challenge school segregation in Yazoo City: And fear forced people out of the NAACP. It atomized the community, making any kind of association a frightening undertaking. Whites saw any grouping of blacks as a threat. “The Negroes will not come together, and our former president has not cooperated at all,” Evers wrote despairingly from the Delta town of Yazoo City in 1956. Blacks there had filed a petition to desegregate the schools, as they had in a number of other Mississippi town, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in 1955. The Citizens’ Council responded with a well-honed campaign of intimidation and published in the local newspaper the names of parents who had signed the petition. The people working for whites almost immediately lost their jobs, and soon all but two of the petition signers had backed down. The Citizens’ Council had intimidated the local NAACP president to such a degree that the group could no longer hold meetings in Yazoo City. “It appears that they have gotten next to him and we just can’t get any results, not even a call meeting. One thing, the people are afraid. I would say is is worse than being behind the Iron Curtain,” reported Evers. Indeed, the assassination of Evers in the nearby city of Jackson, was committed by a charter member of the White Citizens’ Council, a Greenwood man named Byron de la Beckwith — who also happened to be a leading member of the Ku Klux Klan. Leonard Zeskind has a good deal more on this : Actually, the line between the Klan and the Citizens Councils in Mississippi was often a distinction without a difference. Consider Byron de la Beckwith, a member of the Greenwood Mississippi Citizens Council. He was also associated with Sam Bowers’ White Knights Klan. In 1963, Beckwith used a sniper rifle to gun down the president of the Mississippi State NAACP, Medgar Evers, while he was virtually on the doorstep of his home in Jackson. And when Beckwith went to trial the first time for this brutal slaying, the Citizens Councils provided essential aid and succor. Haley Barbour would have been a sophomore in high school the year of the murder. In 1994, when Beckwith was finally convicted of first degree murder in that crime, Barbour would have been head of the Republican National Committee. Certainly he read the newspapers then. He has no excuse for even a momentary lapse with a Weekly Standard reporter. Further, when Barbour claims that the Citizens Councils kept the Klan out of Yazoo City through the threat of economic boycott, that was actually the tool the Councils tried to use to keep the NAACP out. Across the South, Citizens Councils would gather the names of NAACP supporters and threaten them with economic sanctions if they continued to support desegregation. Compare that historical reality to Haley Barbour’s original description of this history: “Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.” This is such a gross distortion that it really amounts to a baldfaced lie. Especially when you consider, as Ta-Nehisi Coates observes, the kind of history he is attempting to blot out here. On Fox, the criticism is described as raising questions of racism on Barbour’s part. But that’s really not the immediate issue — though it may be lurking at a deeper level down the road. The real issue here is that Haley Barbour is covering up for and whitewashing one of the most vicious white-supremacist organizations ever to have formed on American soil — winking and nudging at them, and thereby enabling both them and their legatees. And he wants to run for president?
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Atop Wednesday’s to-do list in the Senate was a vote on the proposed and revised version of the U.S.‘s Strategic Nuclear Arms Reduction treaty with Russia, which was running up against resistance from some Republicans in the chamber but still seemed likely to pass, thus adding another legislative feather to President Obama’s cap before the year’s end.
Continue reading …enlarge In one of the most condescending and paternalistic Supreme Court opinions in recent memory, Justice Anthony Kennedy in April 2007 upheld a federal late term abortion ban on the grounds that “some women come to regret their choice.” 18 months later, an exhaustive study of 20 years of research concluded that there is no evidence to support the mythical “post-abortion syndrome” hyped by anti-abortion forces – and regurgitated by Justice Kennedy in Gonzales v. Carhart . And now, a new analysis has demolished 2009 “research” which posited a link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems for women. Julia Steinberg of the University of California at San Francisco and Lawrence Finer of the Guttmacher Institute found that: The findings of a 2009 study by Priscilla Coleman et al–which claimed that women who had reported an abortion were at an increased risk of several anxiety, mood and substance use disorders, compared with women who had never had an abortion–are not replicable. Steinberg and Finer’s analysis, just published online in Social Science & Medicine, examined the same dataset as Coleman et al. (the National Comorbidity Survey) and found that in every case, the proportions of women experiencing mental health problems reported by Coleman were much larger, sometimes more than five times as large, as Steinberg and Finer’s results. The Coleman findings were also inconsistent with several other published studies using the same dataset and sample. “We were unable to reproduce the most basic tabulations of Coleman and colleagues,” Steinberg noted, concluding, “This suggests that their results are substantially inflated.” And the Coleman findings, Steinberg pointed out, “were logically inconsistent with other published research.” Like the massive study from Johns Hopkins two years ago. That research reviewed 21 studies involving 150,000 women . The team’s systematic analysis of the highest quality studies in terms of methodology showed “few, if any, differences between women who had abortions and their respective comparison groups in terms of mental health.” In contrast, only the studies with “studies with the most flawed methodology” found any negative long-term, mental health impact. In its report , the researchers pointed out that, “the U.S. Supreme Court, while noting that ‘we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon,’ cited adverse mental health outcomes for women as part of the rationale for limiting late term abortions.” It is Justice Kennedy’s dependence on his unproven claim of post-abortion syndrome that the Johns Hopkins team concluded today was wholly without foundation: “The best research does not support the existence of a ‘post-abortion syndrome’ similar to post-traumatic stress disorder,” Dr. Robert Blum, who led the study published in the journal Contraception, said in a statement. Sadly, distorting science to advance a political agenda perfectly describes Justice Kennedy’s jaw-dropping Carhart opinion . Reversing the Court’s position on so-called partial birth abortion just seven years after it struck down a similar Nebraska law, Kennedy swept away Justice Breyer’s previous exception for “for the preservation of the…health of the mother.” Derisively referring to physicians as “abortion doctors” and with callous disregard for the health of American women, Kennedy in the 5-4 majority opinion decreed that father knows best. (His 2000 dissent in Stenberg v. Carhart used the incendiary term “abortionist” no fewer than 13 times.) As the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus recalled : “Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child,” Kennedy intoned. This is one of those sentences about women’s essential natures that are invariably followed by an explanation of why the right at stake needs to be limited. For the woman’s own good, of course. Kennedy continues: “While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.” No reliable data? No problem! The State has “ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition,” Kennedy argued, because “it is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns” the details of the abortion procedure. As Marcus suggests, Kennedy’s mantra of “no data, no problem” was never justifiable as a matter of either law or science, and to be sure, is no longer operative. Unfortunately, that comes too late for the reproductive rights of American women. In the wake of their victories with so-called partial birth abortion laws and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, abortion foes continue to push legislation advancing pseudo-scientific (and unsubstantiated) claims about ” fetal pain ” and as well as so-called ” post-abortion syndrome .” As the AP reported two weeks ago , abortion opponents are pushing lawmakers in Kansas, Maryland and Oklahoma to emulate a Nebraska law which “outlaws abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on the disputed claim that fetuses can feel pain after that point.” Other states look to enact fraudulent health warnings and burdensome new regulations on the operation of family planning centers, laws which have left the entire state of Mississippi with a single abortion clinic. And four states – Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma – now needlessly require mandatory ultrasound procedures for all women seeking an abortion. Only the 2008 Election Day defeats of the McCain/Palin ticket and draconian abortion restrictions on the ballot in South Dakota, Colorado and California prevented a further abrogation of women’s reproductive rights that might have taken a generation to undo. As the New York Times detailed, those setbacks will be no barrier to a renewed anti-abortion crusade by the new Republican majority in the House. The latest research shows that once again the enemies of reproductive freedom for American women do not have science on their side. Sadly, Justice Anthony Kennedy is another matter. (This piece also appears at Perrspectives .)
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enlarge Before he was rounded up and sent to jail for allegedly bilking people out of billions , Allen Stanford was quite the jetsetter. A 2006 cable relating table conversation at a highbrow event in Barbados gives a little insight into Stanford’s narcissism, and the Ambassador’s ambivalence about their chat. There’s something almost Alice-in-Wonderland-like about the whole thing. Grandiose schemes: In response to the Ambassador’s question about his business ventures, he discussed his plans to develop a number of homes in the US$10-20 million range and a world class golf course on a small island off the coast of Antigua. Stanford’s second big venture in the Caribbean is investment in new airplanes for his Caribbean Star airline. (Note: The recent Federal Aviation Administration Category One rating for the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States means Antigua-based Caribbean Star can begin flights to the U.S. See Ref A for more details. End Note). He expects to be running about 400 flights a week throughout the Caribbean, including to San Juan and Caracas, but it is unclear when this expansion will occur. Keeping a distance: Embassy officers do not reach out to Stanford because of the allegations of bribery and money laundering. The Ambassador managed to stay out of any one-on-one photos with Stanford during the breakfast. For his part, Stanford said he preferred to conduct his business without contacting the Embassy, resolving any investment disputes directly with local governments. It is whispered in the region that Stanford facilitates resolution with significant cash contributions. Of course, as we now know, Stanford did far more than bribe foreign officials. Bloomberg reported on his illicit activities in 2009, including this interesting little nugget: In 1999, Stanford Financial tried to take over Antiguan International Business Corp., which regulated offshore companies on the island, said Jonathan Winer, then a deputy U.S. assistant secretary of state. State Department cables sent from the U.S. Embassy and provided to Bloomberg described a “power grab” and criticized the Stanford’s company’s hiring of U.S. consultants to revise Antigua’s offshore-banking rules. I’ll bet you $100 those “U.S. consultants” were on the US Chamber of Commerce referral lists. As is often the case with the high-fliers after they’re shot down, Mr. Stanford’s attorney claims he is suffering from an unspecified psychiatric disorder , is medicated , and unfit to stand trial. A government psychiatrist will be examining him before the judge makes a ruling. His trial is scheduled to begin in January, 2011. Even if he is a psychopath, they should simply reduce the meds and make him stand trial. My guess is that he can rattle too many skeletons in others’ closets for them to allow such a thing.
Continue reading …Barney Frank completely pwns hapless CNS reporter attempting ‘gotcha’ DADT question
December 22, 2010 No Comment
Click here to view this media You can tell that all these reporters for right-wing propaganda organs like the Media Research Center spend waaaay too much time watching Fox News and their army of would-be ambush journalists. Because they often try to imitate their betters only to discover that it can seriously backfire on them. Especially when the intended victim is a seriously smart person like Barney Frank. This happened yesterday to a young reporter for CNS (an MRC outlet), as Terry Krepel at Media Matters reports : Apparently feeling confident (and sufficiently homophobic), CNS decided to target Rep. Barney Frank with a question about the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell – specifically, whether he thought gay and straight soldiers should shower together. This was based on a statement calling for a ban on separate showers from the Pentagon’s report on the impact of repealing DADT that CNS had previously singled out. Frank saw this coming from a mile away. As CNS reporter Nicholas Ballasy slowly got out the words “shower with homosexuals,” Frank let out an exaggerated gasp and responded, “What do you think happens in gyms all over America?” After calling it a “silly issue,” Frank added, “What do you think goes wrong with people showering with homosexuals? Do you think it’s the spray makes it catching? … We don’t get ourselves dry-cleaned.” Frank then turned the tables on his interviewer by quizzing Ballasy: “I know you’re looking for some way to kind of discredit the policy. Do you think that gyms should have separate showers for gay and straight people? I’m asking you the question because that’s the logic of what you’re telling me. You seem to think that there’s something extraordinary about gay men showering together. Do you think gyms should have separate showers for gay people and straight people?” Ballasy wouldn’t answer, insisting that he was “just quoting the recommendation.” Frank responded: “Don’t be disingenuous. You’re quoting those you think may cause us some problems. You’re entitled to do that, but you shouldn’t hide behind your views.” Frank again asked the question of Ballasy, who again wouldn’t answer, trying to change the subject: “So that’s the question you would pose to people who have an issue with that part of the report, the recommendation?” Frank made his point one more time, and that’s where the CNS ends the video. As is often the case with Barney Frank, it is a delightfully thorough humiliation.
Continue reading …John Kerry Rips Republicans for Playing Games With START Treaty Passage
December 22, 2010 No Comment
Click here to view this media As Think Progress noted, John Kerry did an excellent job of ripping Mitch McConnell and the Republicans for their continued delay on ratifying the START Treaty. I’m just wondering how hypocritical the Republican Party has to become on issues of national security and supposedly caring about the first responders on 9-11 before the media quits giving them a pass as the party that cares about either. Kerry Rips McConnell On START: ‘Just Because You Say It Doesn’t Make It True’ : Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) confronted Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) immediately after he spoke on ratification of the New START treaty this morning. McConnell’s complaints about the process being rushed were too much for Kerry, who had overseen the treaty’s ratification and has frequently bent over backwards to appease Republican concerns. Kerry ripped McConnell: I would say to my friend from Kentucky: Just because you say it, doesn’t make it true. Our friends on the other side of the aisle have a habit of repeating things that have been completely refuted by every fact there is. … The facts are that this treaty is not being rushed. This treaty has been delayed at the request of Republicans. It was delayed 13 times… to have more time to deal with the modernization issue, which the administration has completely, totally, thoroughly dealt with in good faith. I’d like to know where the good faith comes from on the other side. They [the administration] put extra money in, they sat and negotiated, they sent people to Arizona to brief Senator Kyl personally. For weeks we delayed the process of moving forward on this treaty in order accommodate our friends on the other side of the aisle. And now fully accommodated, with their requests entirely met, they come back and say ‘oh its being rushed.’ Well Mr. President today marks our sixth day of debate on the New START treaty. That’s a fact. … I mean is there no shame. The good news… it looks like they might finally get this treaty passed. Lamar Alexander Will Vote For START, Republican Opposition ‘Collapsing’
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