Court: FCC has No Power to Regulate the Tubes

The giant telecom and cable monopolies that control 99% of U.S. broadband services won a big battle with the FCC earlier today.

A three judge panel in Washington overturned a 2008 FCC ruling that barred cable and phone giants from blocking customers’ access to Internet technologies such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and Peer-to-Peer (p2p) file sharing.  The ruling comes as a blow to proponents of Net Neutrality regulations.

In the past AT&T executives have tried to claim that companies like Google, HULU, and Apple are stealing bandwidth from them by allowing their customers to get email, perform web searches, and and stream audio or video without paying AT&T special access fees. 

Currently the Internet is modeled in a peering system where consumers pay Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for access to the Internet and Internet services companies like Google pay ISPs for access to the Internet enabling companies and consumers to reach each other.  Now that the FCC ruling has been overturned, proponents of Net Neutrality believe telecom giants like AT&T will move to begin double billing companies like Google and Apple by making them pay additional fees for access to their customers.  Some believe things could get even worse and companies services could be blocked entirely from telecom and cable giants’ networks.

“We’ve run into this very problem with cable providers in Kansas City,” said James Nelson, President of KCnet, Inc. a independent Internet Service Provider that’s been providing access since 1995. “In addition to our high-speed Internet services we offer digital phone service or Voice-over-IP.  The cable companies also offer a similar service but at substantially higher cost. As a result we’ve been able to attract many cable Internet customers to our VoIP service.”

“Needless to say, these companies haven’t liked this and have from time-to-time blocked their customers’ ability to access our VoIP services,” continued Mr. Nelson.  “Because of the nature of the blocks these companies employ, it is nearly impossible to prove when they are occurring.”

“A lack of Net Neutrality regulation and enforcement has resulted and will continue to result in increased costs for consumers and decreased competition in the access market space,” he concluded.

The U.S once led the world in broadband adoption, today the country ranks 15th and is sliding rapidly largely due to monopoly control of the Internet infrastructure and the pipes that deliver next generation speeds to consumers.

Proponents of Net Neutrality now believe the only option the FCC has is to force cable and telecom giants to provide wholesale, unrestricted access to their networks in much the same way they currently do with telephone services.  Others believe the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division should embrace a national highway or Interstate type system for delivering the Internet to consumers where the government would step in and break up telecom and cable giants by splitting their infrastructure layer from their services layer in order to create one new regulated company that controls all the pipes in the ground and wireless spectrum in the sky and leaving all other companies to compete in the free market for the services delivered over those lines.

Until the FCC or congress acts, companies like Comcast and AT&T will be able to block and/or restrict the sites and services their customers can access on the Internet.

EXCLUSIVE: President Obama Falls on Camera a Fake

The blogosmere is all abuzz over a video of President doing a face plant on camera.  Unfortunately, the video is a fake!

Take a look at the video in question:

Now, let’s look at some frames from the spill in ultra slow motion.

 Click image to enlarge

Keep in mind, the frames are taken from the ultra slow-motion section of the video.  Look closely at how the president can be seen falling through the window of the white SUV and then in an instant he is standing back up straight.

The evidence becomes very clear when you replay the video and at normal speed. Go ahead and do that now, we’ll wait for you.

…

Done?  Great!

As you can see the video is clearly a fake, all be it a pretty good one.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t make the president any less of a boob because as you undoubtedly already know he once tried to enter the White House through a window mistaking it for a door, bumped his head on the doorway of Marine One, flubbed the oath of office, believes there are 57 states in the union, and once thanked himself in a speech after a teleprompter malfunction.

With as many candid camera moments as this president has given us in just over a year, there really is no need to resort to making fake videos.

Democrat Rep. Phil Hare - The Constitution Doesn't Matter

Democrat Rep. Phil Hare of Illinois put words to the mindset we’ve all suspected of our representatives in Washington, “the Constitution doesn’t matter.”

When Hare’s constituents try to call him out on that inflammatory statement and the oath he swore to protect it he responds by confusing the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution.

When asked where in the Constitution it grants the federal government the right to force people to purchase health insurance Hare replies, “I don’t know.”

Finally, After proclaiming he read all 2700 pages of Obamacare not once, but three times, he flees when the mathematical impossibility of such a feat is pointed out to him.

Gateway Pundit Doesn't Like to Hear the Hard Truths About Lincoln

It always worries me when a so-called “conservative” is quick to attack Ron Paul. Because again and again the only reason they do so is because Ron Paul does not support spreading democracy through war… something conservatives believed up until the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gateway Pundit did just that after reading an interview with Rep. Paul on Right Wing News:

Ron Paul insisted in a recent interview that Abe Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War by buying the southern slaves from the southerners…

Of course, this is ridiculous on many levels. For one, hindsight is 20/20. No one knew going into the war what it would mean to this country– that 600,000 Americans would lose their lives, that the South would be devastated.

And, buying out the slave owners was not an option.

Ron Paul’s statement was not that the North should have purchased slaves from their owners to prevent the Civil War.  It was that if Lincoln truly did not want civil war and if the real reason for the civil war was to end slavery, than Lincoln could have made the offer to buyout slave owners.  And as much as GP would like it to be so, the proposition is not some wild notion that Dr. Paul thought up in his basement.

Not only had other former slave owning countries like Britain freed slaves buy buying out their owners, but Lincoln’s own letters show he considered doing it himself after the costs of the war started to mount.

“As to the expensiveness of the plan of gradual emancipation with compensation, proposed in the late Message, please allow me one or two brief suggestions.

Less than one half—day’s cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware at four hundred dollars per head:

Thus, all the slaves in Delaware, by the Census of 1860, are 1798

…

Cost of the slaves, $ 719,200.

One day’s cost of the war ``2,000,000.

Again, less than eighty seven days cost of this war would, at the same price, pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri.

…

Cost of the slaves $173,048,800
Eightyseven days’ cost of the war ``174,000,000.”[1]

According to US Census data from 1860, there were 3.9 million slaves in the whole of the United States.  Even at $400 per, that’s only $1.5 billion to free the entire nation, not just the South as Lincoln did in his Emancipation Proclamation.  Yet, GP holds on to some analysis that seemingly ignores Lincoln’s own conclusions.

A major problem here was that the costs of such a scheme would have been enormous. Claudia Goldin estimates that the cost of having the government buy all the slaves in the United States in 1860, would be about $2.7 billion (1973: 85, Table 1).

By the time you add the total cost of the Civil War, roughly $7 billion, and the cost of lives lost, 600,000, $1.5 billion appears to be a bargain even Wal-mart couldn’t dream of.

So again we return to Paul’s original statements. 

“I don't think [Lincoln] was one of our greatest presidents. I mean, he was determined to fight a bloody civil war, which many have argued could have been avoided. For 1/100 the cost of the war, plus 600 thousand lives, enough money would have been available to buy up all the slaves and free them. So, I don't see that is a good part of our history. Besides, the Civil War was to prove that we had a very, very strong centralized federal government and that's what it did. It rejected the notion that states were a sovereign nation.”

He’s right.  Lincoln fought the Civil War not to free slaves, but to demonstrate that the United States was not a union of 50 independent states, but one nation under the control of Washington bureaucrats.

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery… If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it.”
- Abraham Lincoln

On top of Lincoln not being concerned with ending slavery, his own generals were raging anti-Semites.

“General Henry W. Halleck linked ‘traitors and Jew peddlers.’”[2] General Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No.11 in 1862 which banished all Jews in his military district, an area that included all of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. 

At first Lincoln ignored protests that GO #11 violated the Constitutional rights of Jewish citizens.  Rallies in St. Louis, Louisville, and Cincinnati fell on deaf ears. 

Only after Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation did he feel enough pressure to rescind Grant’s order.

Today Lincoln is only remembered for freeing slaves, an act he was unfortunately reluctant to carry out.  Instead, he should be remembered for strengthening the central government so much so that it now finds no problems with infringing on the rights of its citizens and ignoring the rights of its states.

No matter, the simple truth still exists, Lincoln could have appeased slave owners and freed the slaves without firing a single shot, without expending 600,000 lives had he employed the same abolitionist techniques as our British allies, that of simply purchasing the slaves and then freeing them.

Paul’s conclusions about Lincoln are not only spot on, they are appropriately timed given the recent overreaches by the federal government.

Democrat Hank Johnson Afraid of Environment Impact of Moving 8,000 Marines to Guam

Rep. Hank Johnson demonstrates how Democrats have a firm grasp on environmental issues from global warming to over population.  During congressional hearings Johnson warns an admiral that moving 8,000 US Marines and their families to the small island of Guam may cause it to, “tip over and capsize.”

Meanwhile, Senators are wondering why NASA climatologists are telling people their temperature data is unreliable and to go to East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit for more accurate records. Bare in mind this is the same temperature data East Anglia University’s own climatologists admitted was incorrect, falsified, and included “enhanced” statistics.