Tag: Congress

Separated at Birth

 

“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”
― Jesus Christ, quoted in Matthew 22:21 (King James Version).

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . “
― excerpt from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

 

The two quotes above seem straightforward in their meaning, even if some people with self-serving agendas insist there is room for interpretation in both. Some religious groups, but by no means the majority, chafe at the straightforward interpretations and would rather see the federal government allow them to get involved in partisan politics while maintaining their tax exempt status. They applaud any effort to roll back enforcement of the Johnson Amendment to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code, which forbids charitable or non-profit organizations with tax exemptions from directly endorsing political candidates. In May, the current president signed an executive order relaxing those restrictions, essentially directing the IRS to use discretion in enforcing the Johnson Amendment. Since the law would have to be changed by Congress, court challenges to the executive order will probably crop up, though none have as of yet.

 

The simple solution for religious groups who want to submerge themselves in the American political process is to forgo tax exempt status. That appears not to be an option they care to consider. They want their cake, and to eat it, too. The Johnson Amendment, added to the IRS code in 1954 by Lyndon Johnson, at the time a Democratic senator from Texas, has always been laxly enforced by the IRS, revoking the tax exemptions of only the most egregious violators. That’s not good enough for some people. They want the wall separating church and state torn down.
LBJ and Diaz Ordaz
President Lyndon B. Johnson hosts the President of Mexico, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, at his Texas Ranch in 1964; photo by Yoichi Okamoto.

 

But not necessarily torn down completely. Muslims, in the view of the Christian Right, should probably not be included in a law respecting an establishment of religion by allowing them to funnel their congregants’ money to chosen political leaders, just like their Christian counterparts. Not so sure about the Jews, either. Catholics? We’ll have to think about that one. Once we start making exemptions for the exemption, we have to decide who gets it and who doesn’t. What would Jerry Falwell do? His son, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Liberty University President and leader of the evangelical Christian Right, believes the Johnson Amendment has to go because it infringes on the free speech rights of religious leaders.

In this scene from the 1980 film Caddyshack, Bishop Pickerling, played by Henry Wilcoxon, plays golf during a thunderstorm, with groundskeeper Carl Spackler, played by Bill Murray, serving as his caddy. The Bishop exercises his free speech rights at the end, with consequences. Note that the music quotes the score from the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments.

That argument ignores the reality of religious leaders already expressing themselves freely, just not being allowed to funnel money to candidates while maintaining their own tax exempt status. What religious leaders like Jerry Falwell, Jr., really appear to mean is that the Johnson Amendment is an infringement on their free speech rights in the sense that was addressed by the Supreme Court in the 2010 Citizens United decision, which found that the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) was violating the free speech rights of corporations, both for profit and non-profit, when they limited campaign contributions. Money talks. Now some religious groups, such as Mr. Falwell’s, want the same kind of special dispensation, while also maintaining their exemption from paying taxes. That’s called the Sweet Deal!

George Carlin, a man who really did “tell it like it is”, in a bit from his 1988 performance What Am I Doing in New Jersey? Warning: foul language.

For the week beginning August 21, Americans United for Separation of Church and State is organizing what they call Hometown Congressional Visits to express support for the Johnson Amendment. This is a country of many faiths and to allow one vocal minority – regardless of it’s billing of itself as “The Moral Majority” – to usurp the voices of the many would be not only wrong now, but unconstitutional from the founding of the republic.
― Ed.

 

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Bury the Hatchet

 

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer resigned this week, originally stating his intent to stay on until August. Apparently new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci decided August was too long to wait for Spicer to leave and, as Spicer’s immediate boss, took the opportunity to name Spicer’s deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the new press secretary, effective immediately. Mr. Spicer will most likely not be missed by anyone either inside the administration or in the press corps, though the satirists on the Saturday Night Live television show may miss him. They still have plenty of targets for satire in the current administration, starting with the Man with a Daily Message himself, the Tweeter-in-Chief.

 

The current administration has made no secret of its disdain for most of the press corps, certain favorites excluded, and may try to end daily briefings of White House reporters. It seems the briefings have been a White House ritual for so long that there was never a time they were not part of the scene. That is not the case. They are a fairly recent phenomenon in American history, and were not recognizable in their present form until the Eisenhower Administration. Even then the briefings were not conducted daily. It wasn’t until Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, was elected president at the end of the 1960s that press briefings became a daily occurrence. Nixon also had the Press Briefing Room moved to its current location in the West Wing when he ordered the indoor swimming pool covered over and converted to that purpose.
Spiro Agnew by Edmund S. Valtman ppmsc.07953
A 1970 caricature by Edmund S. Valtman of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who was widely recognized as President Nixon’s “hatchet man” in dealing with the press.
Strange that President Nixon should have been the one to increase the frequency of press briefings, considering his often contentious relationship with the Fourth Estate. Nixon was not alone among presidents in feeling vilified by the press, and vilifying the press in turn. Most presidents have kept the press at arm’s length at best, viewing them as a necessary evil and trying when they could to control the tone and substance of their reporting about the administration. “Spin control” has always been a concern of presidents and their aides, though that particular phrase for it didn’t catch on until the Reagan Administration.

A scene from the 1983 film The Right Stuff, directed by Philip Kaufman, in which the 7 Mercury astronauts assert their priorities over those of NASA scientists by pointing out their leverage with the press.

Theodore Roosevelt was a rarity in that he cultivated a cordial relationship with the press, all the more to get them on his side when he used the Bully Pulpit to push his favored policies through Congress. His distant cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, went even further in developing good relations with the press, personally conducting twice weekly off the record briefings in the Oval Office. As briefings and presidential press conferences became more common through the twentieth century, people came to accept them as an indication of openness and a window into the executive branch, however distorted and murky the view might be. At least there was communication, and official positions could be known by the press and public.

Now this administration wants to pull down the shades on its workings. It makes no difference that Mr. Spicer is being replaced by Ms. Sanders. It hardly makes any difference that briefings are fewer and characterized by disrespect for the press, since this administration has demonstrated openly its contempt for norms of civil political discourse. When you know you will be lied to and treated shabbily, why stand there and continue to take it? Sooner or later, even the most profit hungry of the media outlets may abandon the White House press briefing as a source of anything other than insubstantial blathering worthwhile only as a target for satire. This administration may then find out, if the people in it are capable of learning anything at all, that if no one is taking seriously their side of any story or even listening, then there is no more spin control. With a little self control, the press may even stop giving undue attention to the daily distraction of outrageous tweets issuing from the Oval Office, and start paying attention to the important issues affecting this country.
― Vita

 

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The Case of the Odious Man

 

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
― attributed to Voltaire by the historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her 1906 book The Friends of Voltaire.

 

Imagine you’re in a public place such as a commercial establishment, a place where others can identify you because you are notorious in the community for your distasteful social and political views. At that particular time, you are going about your business, not annoying anybody as you are known to do elsewhere. Eventually a group of your critics show up and create a loud disturbance to call you out for the odious man you are, annoying bystanders in the process. The situation deteriorates from there, with you reverting to form because you cannot pass on this delicious opportunity to provoke and taunt, portraying yourself as a martyr. The demonstrators have given you a great gift, though they believe they are just and righteous in their public condemnation of you.

Now imagine you are still the odious man, but this time the tables are turned and it is the warriors for social justice who are going about their business in public, and it is you and your accomplices who show up and loudly vilify them, disturbing the peace of innocent bystanders in the process. Who is in the right here, and who in the wrong? Surely the first instance, where the social justice warriors loudly condemn you though you have done nothing at that moment to provoke them, surely that is alright in the eyes of the law because the community at large can see you are odious, knows you are odious, and naturally therefore approves the warriors calling you out so that all shall understand it is prohibited to listen to your odious views, should you open your mouth.

No? Well in that case, the second instance must be correct according to the law, if not the community. But how can that be? The actions are the same, though the actors have switched places. Is the law a dark cloud that follows you around, darkening your every action, while your opponents have sole possession of the silver lining always? No. In both instances the person or persons doing the hounding have crossed over the line into harassment, a crime whether the perpetrator or perpetrators feel righteously justified or not. Harassing someone in public does little for your cause other than enable your target to put on the mantle of martyr and portray you and your group as intolerant hypocrites who are for free speech for themselves but not for some others. Yes, we did just switch places there.


Free speech is not for some and not for others. The First Amendment to the Constitution does not say “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech [except speech we disagree with and find offensive]”. In that exception, who are “we”. You? There is all manner of injustice in the world, such as how justice has always bent to accommodate the rich and powerful. Why give injustice more sway by determining that the repugnant speech of an odious man should be shouted down and he personally should be hounded? Why give him the gift of that kind of power? In a more perfect world, justice would not be administered entirely on a case by case basis, wherein self-appointed guardians trample legal protections meant for everyone, even them, in a misguided belief that such capricious administration of justice would not someday be turned against them, the righteous.
― Vita

Blind Justice (9146668714)
Blind Justice, a statue in the Salt Memorial, Lister Park, Bradford, England; photo by Tim Green. Note that Justice carries a double-edged sword in addition to scales.

 

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Resistance Is Useful

 

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
― Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

 

Since Hillary Clinton’s election loss in 2016, establishment Democrats, including Clinton, have scrambled to put forward excuses for her loss, excluding the shortcomings of the candidate herself, and again Clinton has been at the forefront in that endeavor, casting blame on everyone but herself except in a half-hearted manner which she immediately qualifies and takes back. Now Hillary Clinton says she is “part of the resistance”. By that of course she means the popular resistance to the administration of the person who would not be there had she not been the only candidate the Democratic establishment wanted to run against him.

Hearing Hillary Clinton say she is “part of the resistance” is like hearing the coach whose wooden ineptitude sunk your team into a deep hole in the first half, all while throwing everyone but herself under the bus for the colossal failures of the team, come out with a strident speech at halftime saying she has returned to form now and is ready to resume leadership of the players who had taken it upon themselves to set things right in the second half. No, thanks. Please go away.

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin is a classic BBC comedy series from the late 1970s, starring Leonard Rossiter as the title character, and John Barron as his boss, C.J., at Sunshine Desserts. With a certain kind of boss, a sense of infallibility and the false support of sycophants becomes the major dynamic.

Hillary Clinton has her adherents even today. They are the same people who insisted during the primaries in early 2016 that they didn’t want  Bernie Sanders because they wanted someone “who could get things done” and they didn’t want someone like Elizabeth Warren, who wasn’t running but might have been induced to run, because they wanted someone “with Washington experience”. These people, many of them professional, academic, and media elites who presumed to know best, turned a blind eye to the Democratic National Committee’s undermining of Sanders during the primaries. They got the candidate they wanted, and would not listen to the people telling them she was the wrong candidate at the wrong time. Some people saw the defeat coming, even against the weak candidate the Republicans put up, but not these Democratic establishment know-it-alls. A week before the election, they were talking “landslide” for Clinton. Fools.

Then when the election results rolled in these know-it-alls were quick to side with the Clinton camp and blame the rednecks, and not long afterward the Russians, without solid evidence based in demographics of the election results or, in the case of the Russians, anything more than rumors at the time. At any rate, they couldn’t blame themselves! They quickly not only jumped on the resistance bandwagon, but shouted the loudest in order to lead it, unmindful of the hypocrisy of their position, because it was they with their pigheaded insistence on touting the flawed candidate, Hillary Clinton, who did the most to put everyone in the dreadful position the country has found itself in since January 20, 2017. Not the “deplorables”, but them, with their arrogant, dismissive attitude toward the working and middle classes. Now they chant about leading a resistance against a situation they helped create.

Meaningful resistance to the policies of the current presidential administration will come about from a recognition of the failures that brought this situation to bear, and then applying remedies. The Democratic Party has lost its way and no longer represents the interests of the working and middle classes. It now represents the interests of Wall Street bankers and large corporations. The people finally glommed onto that fact in 2016 after eight years of disappointment with Obama, and then being presented by professional, academic, and media elites with a uniquely uncharismatic candidate whose sole reason for wanting to be president appeared to be that it was “her turn”.
Gandhi spinning
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869 – 1948) at the spinning wheel, late 1940s. Gandhi famously said “You must be the change you wish to see in the world”.
Since the election loss, the Democratic establishment has shown no signs of learning from their mistakes, nor even recognizing them, much less doing anything about them. They continue shifting blame and making excuses. They continue pushing establishment insiders into Party leadership positions and showing lackluster support for the candidacies of Sanders progressives around the country. There is talk of impeaching the President, the Trainwreck-in-Chief, and of the Democrats picking up many seats in Congress and around the country in the 2018 mid-term elections. The impeachment will not happen without more Democrats in Congressional seats, and that will not happen, at least not to the extent that some imagine, without a change of heart, and therefore a real change of policy, within the Democratic party between now and 2018. The Democrats need to appeal to people as something other than Republicans-lite, the position they adopted in the 1990s under the leadership of Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill. Meanwhile, there will be plenty of opportunists as well as thoughtlessly smug hypocrites and true, useful, believers who will continue to clamor for resistance, without understanding that resistance is futile until they change their own hearts.
― Ed.

 

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How Green Was My Astroturfing

 

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) net neutrality rulings of 2015 are under attack from – surprise, surprise! – Ajit Pai, the former attorney for Verizon and new FCC chairman. Mr. Pai calls the rollback of Title II regulations “Restoring Internet Freedom”. It’s clear Mr. Pai has read and understood his Orwell. Part of the niceties involved in rolling back the Internet Service Provider (ISP) common carrier regulations of Title II that Mr. Pai and his Republican allies in Congress and the White House want to have happen are invitations for public comment on the FCC website. It turns out, however, that when the FCC isn’t complaining about John Oliver inciting his viewers to inundate the FCC website with comments in support of Title II, they are ignoring the questionable origin of comments against Title II from citizens whose identity may have been hijacked by the very companies they pay for monthly internet service, companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.

 

Astroturfing is nothing new in politics, but to ignore the obvious signs of astroturfing in a letter writing or email campaign to government regulators or congresspeople signifies a set agenda that is not to be swayed by emails or letters of varying opinions. The fix is in, in other words. It’s clear from FCC Chairman Pai’s previous public comments what his opinion is on Title II and net neutrality, and now that the FCC board has a Republican majority, his opinion is likely to become policy. It is hypocrisy then for the FCC to invite public comment and ignore for whatever reason the comments it’s board doesn’t want to hear, even though they are genuine, while accepting the clearly astroturfed comments originating from industry insiders.
Ajit V. Pai headshot
Ajit V. Pai, new Chairman of the FCC.

Lewis Black in a concert in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, after the 2008 financial meltdown, comments on capitalism, greed, and how the United States government handled the crisis. In the end, there were no repercussions to the wealthy for the damage they inflicted on the working and middle class people who pay their way year after year. Warning: foul language.

 

Chairman Pai has remarked that in the 90 day public comment process, the FCC will not ” rely on hyberbolic statements about the end of the internet as we know it, and 140-character argle-bargle, but rather on the data.” Presumably the FCC chairman will then be ignoring the considerable amount of 140 character argle-bargle generated by his boss, the Argle-Bargler-in-Chief. Would that it were so. The reality is that the new FCC Chairman and the new President and the new Republican Congress appear to be in perfect agreement on rolling back Title II common carrier regulations for ISPs, and there’s little that ordinary citizens can do to stop them. Try John Oliver’s solution or the one from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and good luck to you, but in the future pay attention at the ballot box once every two to four years, and every day remember not to buy into the “fruit from your tree” delusion.
― Techly

 

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Gee, What a Swell Guy

 

“This is a service. No one here pays me to go.”
― Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) speaking to constituents in 2017.

 

Earlier this week a congressman from Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, told his constituents at a town hall gathering that their notion that they paid his salary was “bullcrap” and that he alone had paid his own way through taxes over the years as a businessman. Hallelujah! Congressman Mullin further elaborated that his tenure should be considered a “service” from him to his constituents, and damn glad of it! This is truly a man who is God’s gift! If he took a side job at a convenience store rather than in Congress, those of us buying lotto tickets and fast food from him would feel blessed to have him deign to notice our proffered treasury bills. Glory!

From the founding of the nation, there have been calls from some to withhold all payment to those who selflessly serve in our nation’s deliberative bodies. Honor itself is its own reward, they argued, and no doubt Markwayne Mullin, selfless civil servant, would have been right there with them, refusing his congressional salary and cushy benefits, along with the extremely lucrative possibility of reaping even greater rewards from private sector lobbying once he left office. Not for Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, who proclaims loudly for all to hear “Bullcrap!”

Markwayne Mullin, whose daddy left him a profitable business at the age of 20, and who lined up for government largesse while decrying the distribution of the same, we thank you for telling it like it is. That’s what’s important these days! BULLCRAP, in belligerent all caps, that’ll set those lib’ruls back on their Birkenstock heels. Markwayne Mullin, according to your bio on Wikipedia you are a Cherokee Indian, and naturally that leads to considerable cognitive dissonance for the lib’ruls when they try to reconcile your heritage with your arrogant, bellicose ignorance in relating to your constituents. All the better for you, because you are in your own dickish way standing up for what you believe in, which apparently is tone-deaf entitlement and your own testosterone-addled studliness, and how many Indians can lay claim to that after 500 years of bloody history of white folks pushing them around?
― Vitawayne – Booyah!

 

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We’ll Take That As a Yes

 

Last week the United States Congress voted to repeal new Federal Communications Commission rules which would have required that internet service providers (ISPs) notify their customers of the data they collect on them for their own commercial purposes unrelated to providing the service, and that customers had to specifically opt-in to the practice. The FCC voted 3 to 2 in favor of the new rules in October 2016, and they would have gone into effect on March 2 of this year had the FCC not stayed it on March 1 under new chairman Ajit Pai. Outgoing FCC chairman Tom Wheeler pushed for the new rules in order to spell out consumer privacy protections in relationship to ISPs, something which he and two of the other commissioners felt was inadequately addressed in Section 222 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

 

The Telecommunications Act goes back to 1934, when the original law went into effect creating the FCC and granting it the authority to regulate telecommunications companies as common carriers, which is to say the same as utilities. Section 222 of that law pertained to how the carriers could use their customers’ personal information, and it required them to keep the information confidential except as required by law or by consent of the customer. Congress has amended the Act periodically to reflect changes in technology, with the last major revision in 1996.

Common carrier or not is the logical puzzle in question. Substitute “Section 222” for Catch-22 to relish the flavor of the ISP regulatory mess.

 

Since the advent of widespread consumer internet service in the 1990s, there has been a regulatory battle over whether ISPs should be considered common carriers, and thus subject to oversight by the FCC under the Telecommunications Act. Since some providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, were also telephone companies, they were already partially subject to FCC oversight. It wasn’t until early 2015 with the FCC’s Open Internet Rules that all ISPs were brought under the same set of regulations as common carriers and bound by the consumer privacy protections of Section 222.

 

Previously the only regulatory oversight of some ISPs on behalf of consumer privacy came from the Federal Trade Commission, and it was limited to holding the companies accountable to the terms of their own privacy policies. The FTC does not regulate consumer privacy regarding the actions of common carriers. It does regulate consumer privacy regarding the actions of so-called edge providers that offer services by voluntary subscription, like Facebook, and of websites in general, but again only by holding them to their own privacy policies, as invasive as they may be. Since the implementation of the FCC’s Open Internet Rules in 2015, all ISPs must adhere to the more restrictive regulations applied to common carriers.

 


The 1970 film adaptation of Joseph Heller’s brilliant Catch-22 lays out a problem in logic. It does not attempt to explicate it, because that would be impossible and probably unhealthy.

 

Still, Chairman Wheeler and others felt that the language of Section 222 did not go far enough in spelling out consumer privacy protection in the internet age. Originally written in 1934 when the capacity of a common carrier to sweep up vast amounts of customer data was not even a pipe dream, and inadequately addressed in the major 1996 revision of the law, Section 222 did not explicitly deny ISPs the ability to sell customer data because the ISPs could interpret “with the approval of the customer” in Section (c)(1) to mean they could consider customers opted-in unless they stated otherwise. Being passive and silent rather than active and vocal has always been considered assent or approval, especially by sneaky people with an agenda, and it is a prevalent practice on the internet. That is a trick of the interactive internet age that no one foresaw in 1934, and apparently not even in 1996. In 2002, Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota introduced a bill which would have changed “the approval of the customer” to “the affirmative written consent of the customer.” The bill went nowhere.

 

Without legislation from Congress to clarify things in the new regulatory environment, Chairman Wheeler felt obliged to take up the slack by adopting Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules in October 2106. As already noted, the vote was 3 to 2. The 3 ayes came from Chairman Wheeler and the two other Democrats on the Commission board. The 2 nays came from the Republicans on the board, including Ajit Pai, now the new Chairman. When the new Republican Congress and President came to Washington, Chairman Pai stayed the new Privacy Rules before they could take effect, and Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona introduced a bill to repeal the Rules and also prevent the FCC from making similar rules in the future.

That’s an android in the center, but it could just as well be you, an internet service customer, caught between government regulators and telecommunications providers.

 

The rest is history. We are returning to the regulatory environment of the past year and a half after the FCC ruled all ISPs were common carriers, but before it adopted new Privacy Rules to clarify the difference between “approval” and “consent” of customers. Now ISPs, though they are common carriers, have a gray area to navigate in Section 222 of the Telecommunications Act, and their claim that they will still be regulated by the FTC is disingenuous at best, considering the FTC does not regulate common carriers. It should be understandable now why ISPs lobbied to repeal the new Privacy Rules. Citing their own privacy policies in which they claim they never have and never will sell customer data, and which had been enforced by the FTC (they glide over the part about FTC regulation no longer applying to them as common carriers), they claimed the FCC was unnecessarily complicating the regulatory environment. They say they shouldn’t be held to stricter privacy standards than companies like Google and Facebook, thereby putting them at a competitive disadvantage. Except for the part about competitive disadvantage not being applicable to monopolistic utilities that are regulated in the public interest, that’s a fair point. Instead of raising the privacy bar for everyone, however, they and their mostly Republican allies in Congress and in the new FCC prefer to lower the bar, serving corporate interests instead of consumers. Trust us, they say. Uh-huh.
― Techly

 

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How Many Russians Does it Take to Screw Up an Election?

Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak […]. Like various words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

― George Orwell, from the Appendix to 1984.

 

The answer to the question headlining this post is “It depends.” If you are a staunch Democrat and keep up with the latest articles from your favored media outlets about the 2016 election, then you might see Russians lurking around every corner, pulling strings to upend Hillary Clinton (mission acomplished!) and boost their boy, now known as our Supreme Leader. If, on the other hand, you are a die-hard Republican faithfully following your favored media outlets, you are apt to think “Russians? What Russians? I don’t see any Russians around here!” You might think that the whole stink about Russians hacking the 2016 election is fake news promulgated by liberal media for consumption by whiny Democratic (or Democrat, dropping the “ic” at the end when the word is used an adjective to make it sound flat and harsh, according to the Newspeak of Newt Gingrich and his kind since the 1980s) losers.

No one really knows how much the Russians may have influenced the election, and may not for a while yet pending sober inquiries from Congress, which seem increasingly unlikely. The majority in this country, who are neither staunch nor die-hard, likely have other things to worry about day by day, and anyway they can see the dispute over the Russians is descending into another ideological fight in a mud pit, and so they would just as soon tune it all out, mostly. Democratic supporters of Clinton will continue to cling to any external source for their candidate’s loss – for it was a loss, not a defeat – rather than face a mirror and admit their party has lost its way, while Republican backers of El Supremo will continue to use the issue as a club – their favorite instrument of debate – to CRUSH (all CAPS, their second favorite instrument!) challenges to his authority and legitimacy. Meanwhile the intelligence agencies, sensing a vacuum and sidling out of their place ever more boldly, have skulked from the shadows in the wings and taken center stage. This is going from bad to worse too quickly. It is doubleplusungood.
― Ed.

 

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A Good Day for Swearing

 

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”  ― Abraham Lincoln*

Today is Inauguration Day in the United States, and a new president will be sworn into office by Chief Justice John Roberts with the following words from Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”



“Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones.
A cry of protest from long ago that is just as relevant today.

It has become a tradition for presidents to use a Judeo-Christian Bible when taking the oath of office. There is no demand in the Constitution or other legislation to swear on the Bible, or on any book. People taking an official oath may legally place their hand on their heart, and many do just that. The third paragraph of Article 6 of the Constitution implies that an oath taker could use any holy book he or she desires:

“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

When Keith Ellison, a Muslim, was elected to Congress from Minnesota’s 5th District in 2006, conservatives raised a fuss about whether the nation’s first Muslim elected to Congress should be allowed to take his oath of office using the Koran. In the end Ellison, a Democrat, used an English translation of the Koran owned by Thomas Jefferson.

What should be self-evident is that the words are what matter most about an oath of office, not the manner of taking it. How then to account for today’s outgoing President, a constitutional law scholar, signing into law the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, one section of which authorizes the president to order the military to arrest and indefinitely imprison people anywhere in the world, including American citizens? Today’s outgoing President now bequeaths that unconstitutional authority to the incoming President, a thin-skinned narcissist with a vengeful streak, the Tweeter-in-Chief. God DAMN it!
― Vita


“Dreams” by The Cranberries.
Like all dreams, this one is open to interpretation.

 

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I Can’t Hear You

Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in 2014
Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke with FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in 2014.

Rural communities and small cities took a blow to their prospects for municipally provided broadband internet service on August 10th when the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled against the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 order to preempt state laws in North Carolina and Tennessee. Wilson, North Carolina, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, had petitioned the FCC to allow them to build municipal broadband networks and the FCC had acted under a provision of the 1996 Telecommunications Act directing it to remove barriers to broadband investment and competition. The Sixth Circuit Court ruled the FCC did not have the power to supersede state law.

19 states have laws hampering the ability of local governments to provide broadband service, with the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) offering sample legislation to more states. As Michael Copps, a former FCC commissioner and now an advisor to Common Cause, put it “Let’s be clear: industry-backed state laws to block municipal broadband only exist because pliant legislators are listening to their Big Cable and Big Telecom paymasters.”

The FCC defines broadband as an upload speed of at least three megabits per second and a download speed of no less than 25 megabits per second, and maintains a map displaying the different types of service available around the country. Even in larger cities where broadband is more commonly available, however, consumers have few choices of internet service provider because for all practical purposes carriers such as Comcast operate as regional monopolies.

The possibility of building municipal broadband networks has been an option in areas of low population density where private internet service providers often display little interest in building out their network for what they see as small return on their investment. People in poorly served areas sometimes turn to satellite service, though it has drawbacks in the form of high latency speeds and throttling of service for users who have reached certain data caps. In the same areas, wireless service can be spotty, with generally low data caps at high cost.


It appears the debate over net neutrality and whether to treat broadband service as a utility may revive, and it will be up to Congress to either strengthen the FCC’s regulatory powers over the states and the industry or to enact legislation defining internet service providers as common carriers, something companies like AT&T and Verizon fought tooth and nail against during the last round of discussions in 2014.
– Techly

Hand with Light and Switch

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