sfarber

And thus I arrive late in the all-important discussion of “net-neutrality,” or, specifically, legislative resistance to an initiative from telecoms to impose additional tolls on the use of the internet for their own bottom lines at the expense of the rest of us; in this case, a New York Times piece by Adam Cohen lays the issues out succinctly and in easy to comprehend terms. Short answer: AT&T and other telecoms feel that they are not making enough money, even though people like you and me already pay for (1) a web hosting service, (2) an ISP provider, (3) high-speed...

An adage ignored at their extreme peril by Enron poobahs and defendants Kenneth “Kenny Boy” Lay and Jeffrey Skilling at their trial in Houston, where each was convicted on virtually all of the charges associated with their role in the spectacular collapse of Enron. The jurors felt that each did himself a disservice by taking the stand: Kenny Boy’s childish outbursts showed that he was a control freak, not the kind of guy (like, say, someone else we know) who would just sit there obliviously content to just accept whatever he was told, while Skilling’s detailed bean-counting knowledge on some...

Let this be a lesson: when a world miracle like modern-day South Africa wants to host something like the FIFA [soccer] World Cup… let it. At least, that’s what I come away with reading this account of violence by good old neo-Nazis in Germany threatened against swarthy football fans. Didn’t see this coming? Yeah, right. Soccer… the sport where the fans (especially European fans) occasionally kill each other, right? Not much more to be said. Ironic, of course, as Germany has gone through decades of existential angst over its own horrifying past, and seemed to have eviscerated this sort of...

Thus sayeth the President. He forgot to add, “trust me.” Something that less than 30% of those polled now do. And dropping.

The thing with Karl Rove is, the man never hides his big picture. Today’s WaPo treats us to the inside of Bush’s Brain for a brief look at November’s “Operation Hold the House and Senate (TM)”… For one thing, as we expected, the only things Republicans care about is winning elections. In some sense, that’s their job… politicians try to do a good enough job so voters will reward them with reelection. But this crew couldn’t care less about delivering a product or a service– they just want to advertise endlessly with new sizzle and get the stupid rubes to...

This week, we jump the shark on this segment for sure by going all corporate sell-out, with one Goofy, a/k/a George Geef a/k/a Dippy Dawg, the “good-natured” suburbanite “everyman” that Disney added to the canon along with an anthropomorphic effeminate rodent and a lisping bird (I realize that Warner Bros. also featured a lisping bird, but that bird, to his credit, is affirmatively mean-spirited, perennially pithhhhed off, and can’t hide Mel Blanc’s underlying New York accent… and let’s not even go near Warner Bros. house rodent…). Goofy is actually quintessentially “American” (as Karl Rove would define the term): he is...

The senate passed two interesting measures, yesterday, including one making English “the national language” (at least of official business) and a murkier, harder to describe amendment, seemingly at odds with it, proposed by Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO), making English the national unifyinig language and guaranteeing some multilingual services. Funny… we’ve gotten along for over 200 years now, in English, without the need for the “in your face” aspect of “an official language” (the way, perhaps, that German is the official language of an EU member or two… and yes, I mean what you think I mean.) But I guess, a...

I was kind of wondering what the new initiative by Karl Rove the President on “immigration reform” was about… Ginning up a new wedge issue to hold Congress? Something to do with Mexican domestic politics? A sudden bout of concern for a real issue? And why do it at a time when approval ratings appeared to be plummetting, and the little support the President had left, to wit, among his own base, might be eroded by being “soft on Mexicans”? This morning’s New York Times gets right to it, of course: it’s about the contracts. That’s right: billions in contracts...

In the “if we remain a free and open society, the terrorists will have won” department, we give you… Item the first: the release by the Pentagon after 4 1/2 years of surveillance tapes supposedly showing American Airlnes Flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon on September 11th (which, while nominally in response to Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act request, is actually a response to this cult classic Loose Change and other 9-11 conspiracy theories now making their way round the internets.) Amazingly (o.k., not so amazingly… it’s called “high gas prices, Katrina and a 29% approval rating”) we seem...

The President made a relatively rare prime-time speech and told us all about his plans to deploy 6,000 National Guard troops for border patrol duties, along with some other policy proposals associated with immigration, including the vaunted “path to citizenship” (a/k/a amnesty for illegal line jumpers), and a guest worker program. Given the perverse way American electoral politics works, the man with the approval rating at 29% and dropping having selected an issue where his own position (“cheap, easily exploitable labor”) may be at odds with his eponymous “base” (a/k/a “its bash Mexicans season”) may actually help a few of...