Open thread for night owls: Net neutrality politics is local, and locals are fighting for it
Timothy Karr is the senior director of strategy for Free Press. At CommonDreams, he writes—Net Neutrality Politics Is Local:
It’s easy for cloistered Washington politicos to assume that Net Neutrality is dead, undone in December by the Trump FCC and its Verizon-friendly chairman, Ajit Pai. But any elected official who follows O’Neill’s advice and walks beyond the Beltway is hearing a very different story.
In the eight weeks since the FCC voted to take away Net Neutrality, a groundswell of activism by local advocates and politicians has revived prospects for lasting open-internet safeguards.
Elected officials in more than 25 states (see below) have introduced measures to prevent large phone and cable companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from blocking, throttling or otherwise interfering with online content.
Just last week, the governors of Hawaii and New Jersey joined those from Montana and New York in issuing executive orders that force internet service providers that do business with their states to abide by strong Net Neutrality standards.
On Friday, Washington State legislators voted 93–5 to pass House Bill 2282, which prohibits access providers from blocking or impairing online traffic. The bill is now working its way through the state Senate.
Similar legislation is under consideration in statehouses from Georgia to Oregon, by way of Tennessee, Nebraska, South Dakota and many points in between.
Attorneys general from 21 states (plus the District of Columbia) have filed a lawsuit claiming that the FCC’s repeal violates federal law.
Municipalities are joining the fight too. Last month, San Francisco announced that any private-sector applicant seeking a contract to build the city’s proposed fiber network must abide by the Obama FCC’s 2015 Net Neutrality rules. […]
Supporting Net Neutrality is a winning political issue. That’s become hard for lawmakers on the left and the right to ignore, though some have tried. This support percolates up from cities and states to the nation’s capital, where momentum is building for a Congressional Review Act resolution that would reject the Trump FCC’s unpopular ruling against an open internet.
So far 50 members of the Senate have signaled their support for the resolution, just one shy of the number needed for it to pass the chamber. A companion bill in the House has garnered support from more than 140 lawmakers.
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“However you feel about guns and their place in America—whether we’re talking about rifles for hunting or assault rifles, or anything in between—it’s undeniable that the gun lobby has refused to acknowledge or entertain any sort of regulation or reform aimed at making us a safer and saner nation. The reason why: because that does not make it more money. A customer base kept terrified at all times that this will be ‘the last chance before the government bans’ whatever gun manufacturers are peddling is much more valuable. A customer base absolutely convinced that the just-about-anyone-can-buy culture we have is politically necessary without seeing that it serves those companies is what they’re after. They have achieved it.”
~Trae Crowder, The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Outta the Dark (2016)
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— JeLLe ♓ (@AmethystJ24) February 15, 2018
On this date at Daily Kos in 2012—The death of the Republican dog whistle:
In the idealized version of the GOP primary, establishment Republicans would curry favor with their Wall Street pals while sending coded dog whistles to their foot soldiers—on race, immigration, reproductive freedoms, etc. Those dog whistles would motivate the GOP base without revealing their true radical nature to the American mainstream. It was a genius system while it worked, one that saw no parallel on the progressive side.
But the days of the dog whistle are over. The election of President Barack Obama created an entire cottage industry trying to prove how un-American and Kenyan he supposedly is, while Republicans like Rep. Pete Hoekstra run blatantly anti-Asian ads. Republicans laugh about electrocuting immigrants who will cut off your head in the desert if they’re not stopped, while passing laws openly hostile to brown people. Attacks on homosexuals have escalated to new hysterical highs as society becomes more tolerant and open to equality.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin is on hand to round up headlines, but we’re once again doing the show under the cloud of a mass shooting. And yes, they’re getting worse. Also getting worse: the food-in-a-box “idea,” White House security clearances, and cabinet corruption.
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