(Part One is over here.)
1) Both Stu Bykofsky and Christine Flowers have been waxing indignant in the Philadelphia Daily News (yesterday and today) on the decision by Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams to downgrade possession of 30 grams or less of marijuana from a misdemeanor to a summary offense…
From Flowers…
How nice. How tolerant. How reassuring to the rest of us who actually respect the federal Controlled Substances Act and its state counterpart.
Williams was quoted in an Inquirer article as saying, "We have to be smart on crime. . . we can't declare a war on drugs by going after the kid who's smoking a joint on 55th Street. We have to go after the large traffickers."
Well, the reason that the large traffickers are in business, counselor, is in part because that kid on 55th Street is part of a willing market.
The fact that you only catch him smoking weed on Monday doesn't mean he doesn't have a stash at home for the six other days of the week.
You get the idea.
Well, I’ll bet you didn’t know about HB 1393, a bill to legalize the medical use of cannabis by authorized patients in PA. This is the very first time our beloved Commonwealth has considered a modern medical cannabis law (more info is here, including information on what we can do to try and enact this into law).
Wikipedia (or something) tells us that 14 states have laws allowing the medical use of marijuana (here).(cannot provide a link at the moment due to my “Big Brother” ISP – I’ll try to do so later). And while someone will have to persuade me that pot should be legalized (at least as tall an order as trying to get HR 1393 passed), speaking only for myself, I am certainly in favor of decriminalization and use for medically-related relief under a doctor’s supervision.
2) And moving from drugs to what others have called the “opiate of the masses” (or, the idiot box, whichever you prefer), former FCC chairman Michael Powell weighs in here on the recent, unfortunate court ruling against Net Neutrality…
Rather than continue to try and force round pegs into square holes, the FCC should seek legal clarity from Congress as to the proper bounds of its authority," Powell wrote in a blog post for Broadband for America, a collection of telecommunication groups.
A federal court ruled Tuesday that the FCC was wrong to order Comcast to stop blocking users' access to BitTorrent, a file-sharing service. Comcast said at the time it needed to limit access to ensure its broadband network was not overburdened by users who consume too much content.
However, the decision is widely regarded as an obstacle that chiefly prevents FCC from implementing rules on net neutrality long advocated by the Obama administration.
Ultimately, Powell's take is not a surprise: It was in part under his direction that the commission began classifying Internet as a Title I service, which a D.C. Court of Appeals ruled unanimously was out of the FCC's legal reach.
As the story tells us, fortunately, current FCC Chair Julius Genachowski disagrees with “Colin Powell, Jr.” (more on Powell in a minute, by the way).
And Mother Jones tells us the following (here)…
For years, giant Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon have wanted to erect "fast lanes" and "slow lanes" on the web. They say this is necessary to prevent file-sharers and heavy bandwidth users from slowing down the Internet for everyone else. But without strict net neutrality rules requiring ISPs to treat all content equally, there's nothing to stop them from radically reordering how the internet works. Comcast and other providers could speed up some sites and services and slow down others—a practice known as "throttling"—unless the hosts or ISP customers cough up more money.
The court fight started last year, when the FCC discovered that one of the biggest Internet providers, Comcast, was slowing down traffic to the file-sharing service BitTorrent. The agency ordered Comcast to stop, ruling that the company couldn't discriminate against specific types of information. Comcast sued, saying that the FCC didn't have the authority to enforce net neutrality. On Tuesday, Comcast won: a federal appeals court threw out the FCC's order. Marvin Ammori, a lawyer and law professor who argued against Comcast, compares the ruling to the massively unpopular Citizens United decision that opened up political campaigns to unlimited corporate spending. The bottom line, he says, is that "the FCC no longer has the power to regulate or protect consumers in the basic medium of our privacy and speech."
The ruling doesn’t just affect the ISPs’ ability to control load times. It could also allow them to restrict what information you get for your monthly broadband payment. In the worst-case scenario, Internet providers could require you to buy access to websites in "packages"—a social networking "package" with Facebook and MySpace, a sports package with ESPN.com and Rivals.com, or a music package with Last.fm and Pandora. Instead of today's "Wild West,” the future Internet might look more like cable television.
If the FCC wants to avoid that, it has three options. It could appeal Tuesday’s ruling to the Supreme Court. But Comcast has already won once, and the litigation could take years. The agency could ask Congress to give it more power to enforce net neutrality. That's what a bill proposed by Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass), Anna Eshoo (D-Calif), and Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) would do. But the telecoms have enormous influence on both parties—since 1989, AT&T has spent more on national politics than any other company, union, or special interest. Even if the legislation cleared the House, it would likely stall in the Senate.
Gosh, you mean “the world’s greatest deliberative body” would fall on its collective face once more due to Repug obstruction and Dem hesitancy?
(Ok, it’s Friday I know – I’ll be nice…)
The third option discussed in the story is “reclassification”; basically, the FCC “has limited power to regulate information services. But it has broad powers to regulate telecommunications networks,” as stated in the story. And if it reclassified the Internet as a telecommunications network, which it most certainly is, then the FCC could implement net neutrality rules.
And oh yeah, this tells us the following about Michael Powell by way of a reminder (file this under “consolidating the corporate voice”)…
In June 2003, Michael Powell and the two other Republicans on the FCC pushed through new media ownership rules that would have allowed the television networks to own a few more stations, tightened national radio ownership rules, and let one company own the biggest newspaper and television station in almost every city. During the run-up to the FCC vote, more than two million letters, emails and faxes were sent to the FCC. Almost all of them opposed the weakening of the nation’s media ownership regulations. The rules were later overturned by a court that said the commission had failed to justify the ruling.
And Powell was responsible for raising the fines for language and content across our airwaves, which remain ridiculously excessive (I’m a lot more concerned about the young one’s exposure to violence on the tube than I ever will be about an accidental naked female body part or a “fleeting expletive”).
3) Finally, I have a bit of a two-fer here; first, we learn from here that, besides the matters of terrorism and health care reform, former Bushco flunky Marc Thiessen doesn’t know anything about the financial management (or lack thereof) of The Sainted Ronnie R when he occupied An Oval Office…
TAX CUTS. Bush enacted the largest tax cuts in history -- and unlike my personal hero, Ronald Reagan, he never signed a major tax increase into law.
Yes, Thiessen actually wrote that – in response, I give you Will Bunch (from here; I suspect Bunch has forgotten more about Reagan than Thiessen will ever know)…
As for the tax cuts, it was clear in a matter of months that the initial Reagan plan (in 1981) went too far. How far? Less than one year later, Congress passed – and Reagan signed – what at the time was the largest peacetime tax increase in American history, a revenue booster with the Orwellian name of the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. That wasn’t all: Reagan signed further tax increases in 1983 and 1984, and in 1986, enacting a broad tax reform plan that is also a major part of his legacy, he ceded a leading role to the Democrats who were reasserting their authority on Capitol Hill. Given the nation’s skyrocketing debt, it’s easy to understand why Reagan lost much of his influence in this area.
Also, former Bushco word guru and Op-Ed columnist Michael Gerson whines here about the general incivility in our political discourse (I’m not going to waste both my time and yours demonstrating yet again how bogus Gerson’s false equivalency is here).
I have only this to say about Gerson; you remember the warnings from Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History about “the smoking gun turning into a mushroom cloud” on Iraq? And do you remember the variations we heard on that from members of our prior ruling cabal?
And as noted here, do you remember how the warnings about Iraq and nukes turned out to be total fiction?
Well, do you want to know who came up with the “mushroom cloud” imagery when trying to sell us the Iraq war?
Michael Gerson, that’s who.
He should be treated as a media pariah for this, but he, along with serial liar Thiessen, are instead both featured prominently on Fred Hiatt’s crayon scribble page (and far be it for the WaPo or any of our other news organizations with initials for names to do this kind of reporting – hat tip to Crooks and Liars…and in other Bushco propaganda news, Saddam Hussein’s statue fell seven years ago today – more here).
Yes, I think it’s a good idea to tone down the “hatefulness” in politics also. But dealing with it is a compromise I will gladly make if that’s the only way for the truth to emerge once and for all.
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