Eideard

The Obama administration said over the weekend that it would not support legislation mandating changes to Internet infrastructure to fight online copyright and trademark infringement.

“Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security,” the administration said in a statement on Saturday. “Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk…”

The DNS-redirecting provisions in both bills were designed to prevent American citizens from visiting sites the attorney general maintains are dedicated to infringing activities…without having to prove a damned thing in a court of law!

The Obama administration’s announcement appears to have conceded to opposition from security experts who say the plan would sabotage U.S. government-approved efforts to secure DNS against hackers and break the Internet’s unified naming system by introducing lies into infrastructure. The government is agreeing with experts who maintain that the SOPA and PIPA and the Senate’s Protect IP Act would break the Internet’s universal character and hamper U.S. government-supported efforts to roll out DNSSEC, which is intended to prevent hackers from hijacking the net through fake DNS entries.

Victoria Espinel [L] with some other folks from work

The White House announcement was penned by Victoria Espinel…Aneesh Chopra…and Howard Schmidt…

The usual creeps – ranging from RIAA and MPAA to individual Congress-critters beholden to lobbyist bucks – made the usual excuses and ready themselves to fall back on revisions which still mean operating outside constitutional law.

Home on the Range

Federal drug regulators announced Wednesday that farmers and ranchers must restrict their use of a critical class of antibiotics in cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys because such practices may have contributed to the growing threat of bacterial infections in people that are resistant to treatment.

The medicines belong to a class of antibiotics known as cephalosporins and include such brands as Cefzil and Keflex. They are among the most common antibiotics prescribed to treat strep throat, bronchitis, skin infections and urinary tract infections. Surgeons also often use them before surgery to prevent bacterial infections.

The drugs’ use in agriculture has, according to many microbiologists, led to the development of bacteria that are resistant to the drugs’ effects, a development that many doctors say has endangered the lives of patients.

Antibiotics are often added to animal feed and are used routinely to encourage rapid growth of livestock, but officials at the Food and Drug Administration have been increasingly vocal in their concerns that overuse of antibiotics in agriculture is endangering human health. The agency proposed rules in 2010 to slow the use of penicillin, tetracycline and other antibiotics simply to promote growth or prevent disease in feed animals, but those rules have yet to be made final…

Perish the thought we offend a drug company or the owners of cattle feed lots.

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Altogether, now – how can you tell Newt Gingrich is lying?
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The Gingrich campaign has now confirmed a longstanding business relationship that enabled his consulting group to receive between $1.6 and $1.8 million from mortgage giant Freddie Mac. But it wasn’t for “lobbying,” Newt Gingrich insists. It was for “strategic advice on a wide range of issues…”

“It reminds people,” Gingrich said, “that I know a great deal about Washington.” And as he continued, “If you want to change Washington, we just tried four [sic] years of amateur ignorance and it didn’t work very well, so having some-body who knows Washington might be a really good thing.”

Newt Gingrich is certainly right about that. There is no candidate for president who has had more experience in changing Washington than Gingrich. Indeed, there may be no American since James Madison who has had more of an effect in making the institution of Congress what it is today.

For as far too few remember, more than any other living American, it is Newt Gingrich who gave us the current version of our hopelessly dysfunctional Congress — an institution which, according to a New York Times/CBS poll, now has the confidence of 9% of the American people. That monster is his baby, and no one should deny him his parental bragging rights…

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Almost everyone with a landline has felt the annoyance of picking up the phone and realizing that a call is not from a friend or a family member but rather is a prerecorded message delivered by a software-robot…

Telemarketers cannot make prerecorded calls to either residential landlines or cellphones, unless the recipient has provided express consent or has a business relationship with the caller. For commercial calls that do not involve an explicit sales pitch, the law extends special protection to cellphones: automated equipment cannot be used unless the recipient has provided consent.

“Consent” is not hard to secure. Current law assumes that it is given by the act of providing one’s phone number, even if it was just for a one-time home delivery or was mentioned in reply to a clerk’s spoken question. This allows automated cellphone calls that may not be especially welcome, like a “customer satisfaction” survey administered entirely by robo-software, or robo-messages about an overdue payment.

The Federal Communications Commission has been working on a draft of a stricter rule defining consent. Businesses might be required to secure the customer’s consent in writing or from a box clicked online if automatic calling equipment will be used to call the customer’s cellphone in the future.

The American Bankers Association, the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals and other trade groups want to prevent the F.C.C. from strengthening the consent requirement. They are backing a bill in the House, H.R. 3035, that they say would clarify issues of consent surrounding automated calls…

The bill is opposed by the National Association of Consumer Advocates, the Consumer Federation of America, Americans for Financial Reform, Consumer Watchdog, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and other consumer advocates…

Cellphones are an immeasurable convenience. But the fact that the phones go wherever we go means that unwanted calls of any kind feel far more intrusive than calls that came in to the home number (for those who remember home numbers). The banks’ last nifty idea for consumers was a monthly charge for debit cards. Their fight to block stronger protection of our cellphone numbers is just as consumer-friendly.

So, uh, when you have a chance, drop your Congress-critter an email and ask which side they’re going to support? I wonder if they’ll straight-out support consumers or dance around the Maypole for a while and offer a canned corporate rationale?

Jack Abramoff and Dickhead

Ethics reforms put in place since the influence-peddling scandal surrounding high-rolling lobbyist Jack Abramoff haven’t cleaned up the system “at all,” a now-free Abramoff says.

Abramoff served three and a half years in prison for conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion before his release last December. In an interview…he said the reforms imposed after his guilty plea have little effect while campaign finance remains untouched.

“You can’t take a congressman to lunch for $25 and buy him a hamburger or a steak or something like that,” he said. “But you can take him to a fund-raising lunch and not only buy him that steak, but give him $25,000 extra and call it a fund-raiser — and have all the same access and all the same interactions with that congressman…”

“There’s an arrogance on the part of lobbyists, and certainly there was on the part of me and my team, that no matter what they come up with, we’re smarter than them — we’ll just find another way through,” he said.

The high-flying Republican lobbyist pleaded guilty to a raft of federal corruption charges in 2006 and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors investigating Washington influence-peddling. He admitted illegally showering gifts on officials who provided favors for his clients in a probe that led to convictions or guilty pleas for 20 lobbyists and public officials — including Ohio GOP congressman Bob Ney and Stephen Griles, the Bush administration’s deputy interior secretary.

Between the two phony political parties – and a Supreme Court packed with rightwing political appointees – democratic processes in legislation and regulation continue to be removed as quickly as they were the day Newt Gingrich rolled out his contract on the American people in 1994.

Abramoff was the champion of gaming the system designed by corrupt corporate ideologues, agreed to nowadays by both Democrats and Republicans. He ought to know how it works.

This idea is catching traffic again in opinion blogs around the circuit as Congressional Republicans block infrastructure jobs bills. That is – unless we’re willing to give up environmental safeguards, of course.

Thanks, Helen

Members of the congressional Super Committee have received more than $300,000 from 93 special interests in just six weeks since they were appointed, according to an analysis of FEC data by iWatch News. More than a third of the money came from health-related interests as the committee of 12 debates serious cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

The donations from political action committees slightly favored the Republicans on the panel…Republicans got 84 donations for $181,000; Democrats received 63 donations totaling $121,000.

The analysis covered Aug. 11, the day the committee was formally announced, through Sept. 30, the end of the third quarter reporting period. And those dollar amounts will likely increase when the Senate contributions, which are not filed electronically, are submitted to the FEC…

The select panel has until the day before Thanksgiving to finish its work…

Of the 93 special interest groups who donated via their PACs…seven gave at least $10,000. They were:

FedEx, the shipping giant — $10,500
Pfizer, the pharmaceutical manufacturer — $10,000
The National Beer Wholesalers Association, a trade association for beer companies — $10,000
The American Dental Association, the trade association for dentists around the nation — $10,000
Walt Disney Productions, the entertainment conglomerate — $10,000
Chevron, the oil giant — $10,000
The Associated General Contractors of America, the trade association of the construction industry — $10,000
Fresenius Medical, a major dialysis provider— $10,000

A mix of health and pharmaceutical companies made up at least $111,500 of the donations, by far the biggest business sector. One focus of the Super Committee is to find ways to save money on health care, which many have speculated means potential cuts into Medicare and Medicaid.

RTFA for examples of the cut-and-paste hogwash used to justify the existence of the gladhanders.

Not all members of the committee are raising big bucks around their committee membership. Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, promised last month that he would raise no money until the committee’s work is completed in late November. Sen. Jon Kyl is not running for re-election.

Thanks, Eric

It will be a profitable Xmas season

The bipartisan congressional supercommittee charged with finding $1.5 trillion in budget savings is leaving Washington lobbying firms in a quandary, seeing their clients pitted against one another in a competition for government cash.

Major defense contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin have a dozen or more lobbying firms working for them, many of whom also represent the health-care industry, another likely target of budget cuts. While firms often deal with conflicts of interest, the supercommittee represents an unusual challenge, said Clyde Wilcox, a government professor at Georgetown University in Washington.

“This actually is going to be much more like a zero sum game,” Wilcox said. “If someone wins, someone loses…”

If all else fails, “I suspect that they’ll be rational businesspersons and make a decision based on their long-term financial interest,” Jeffrey Berry said. “They have a bottom line, just like their clients.”

You do recall, I hope, that principles, ethics, the needs of the people are irrelevant?

The 12-member panel, whose work has taken on greater urgency since Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. credit rating in August, will be the central focus of political and lobbying activity for the next few months…

“It’s akin to working with congressional leadership, which we — as most firms — do all the time,” Stewart Verdery [whose clients include clients Boeing, General Dynamics, Eli Lilly & Co. and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America] said…

The politicians will have their hands out – and will find them filled.

Two women are fending off a vicious man-handling of investor protection. As Congress pettily wrangles over the debt limit and the next budget, Mary Schapiro and Elizabeth Warren are fighting to protect you against the ravages of Wall Street.

Wall Street and its Republican allies would like to make the Dodd-Frank financial reforms disappear. The money trust has been pouring millions into lobbying to eviscerate the budget of the Securities and Exchange Commission and blocking the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau…

While the SEC gathers most of its revenue from fees and fines, it can’t seed key investor protections like an office of investor advocate without the additional funds. Its budget was supposed to double under Dodd-Frank over the next five years. The money trust wants to keep the status quo and de-fund the agency…

Elizabeth Warren is fighting a separate battle to save the funding and independence of her consumer bureau, which President Obama asked her to start up. Republicans have proposed that another commission run the agency or answer to other regulators, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of neutering it.

The consumer bureau, Warren hopes, would curb anti-consumer credit practices in banking. Her common-sense approach is simple: Boil every credit agreement down to a plain-language form that tells you how much it will cost you, is it affordable and is it the best deal. That’s something that would benefit every American who gets a credit card, mortgage or other financing.

Not only are GOP proposals punitive to Warren’s fledgling agency, they are unfair. No other banking agency would have to answer to a commission or be hostage to Congressional appropriations. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a banking regulator, has a single director and obtains its budgets from bank fees, for example…

There shouldn’t even be a fight over these two agencies. After the money trust nearly deep-sixed the global economy in 2008, triggered a massive recession and unemployment, they should welcome more cops on the beat. They are like three-year-olds with a pile of money and an endless supply of finger paint. They need parental supervision or things will get messy again.

The Republican Party and their fraternal flunkies in the Democrat Party would like nothing better than to leave investment banks and their frontmen in the “analyzing” business free to handicap every Main Street individual who invests on their own. Keeping the markets a closed corporation as far as honesty and opportunity are concerned – remains the operating framework of politicians bought and paid for by Wall street.