(Alaa Wardi)
.
As a technological idiot, do I need to worry when Slate warns about the “Bandwidth-Throttling Copyright Enforcement System Launche[d] Across [the] U.S.”, Six Strikes?
Also possibly worrying (I’m still thinking this guy runs as a ‘moderate centrist Democrat‘ in 2016), the Washington Post says Chris Christie is being snubbed by CPAC:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who has fallen out of favor with some conservatives in recent months, is not being invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference, according to someone close to CPAC who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The big conservative confab in the Washington area is a routine stopover for potential future potential GOP presidential candidates and has already nabbed most top 2016 contenders….
Christie’s apparent snub comes as most other big-name potential 2016 GOP presidential candidates have been invited and accepted the invitations, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R), Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), former Alaska governor Sarah Palin (R), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and former senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.)…
Randy P
I just love these “People’s Front of Judea” Republican purity stories and they keep coming. But how can they be so self-unaware as to not see them?
Oh well.
Randy P
@Randy P: that was supposed to end with (munch, munch) but WP ate it. And won’t let me edit.
MattF
The problem is that Christie doesn’t hate Obama– and wingers aren’t going to forget or forgive that. OTOH, Christie as a Dem… I just don’t see that happening.
danielx
Chris Christie can’t be on the same bill as Bible Spice? I’m sure he’s weeping bitter tears into his morning espresso about that.
Patricia Kayden
Christie will be fine. Even if he doesn’t run in 2016, he’s still very popular as a Governor. I’m sure he’ll survive this snub.
@Danielx:
“Bible Spice” — Ha!!
raven
Joe and Mika are even raging about this.
Linda Featheringill
Christie will probably be okay.
Even more interesting would be to see politicians snub CPAC and not have it adversely affect their careers. That will probably happen some day.
[And, yes, Bible Spice is cute. :-)]
PeakVT
Here’s today’s Italian general election liveblog. Because Italian election law allocates bonus seats in the lower house, the left coalition controls the Chamber of Deputies. The same coalition also won a very narrow plurality in the Senate, but would have to ally with either M5S or Berlusconi to form a majority. The Germans are already badgering Italians to stick with Monti’s sucky austerity plan, natch.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: Seems like Joe just called the CPAC folk grifters.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: And lunatics!
raven
Barnicle is so fucking full of shit.
Schlemizel
@raven:
Water is so fucking wet
sky is so fucking blue
Barnicle does less work
make makes twice me and you
Baud
Really, Anne? You’re asking a bunch of liberals on a blog whether you need to worry? You should be worried if you’re not worrying.
ETA: WE’RE DOOMED!
WereBear
I lean towards the theory that the loonies in the House will be offered a door to run through, and they will.
Some face-saving way to agree to NOT push forward with the sequester… it has already been advanced from 1/1/2013, hasn’t it?
Because when it comes right down to it, these are not sturdy oaks with their roots in principles so much as stubborn assholes.
danielx
@Baud:
We may well be doomed – McMegan has actually written a column which makes a limited amount of sense. Limited by her point of view, granted, but still nothing with which I can take issue except that she didn’t pursue this far enough. The mandarins to which she refers are, in actuality, a bunch of fuckups just like the rest of us – worse in some ways because their mistakes become disasters for so many.
Considering that this here U.S. of A. has staggered from one politico-economic catastrophe to another for about the last fifty years* or so, it does cause one to wonder in what sense our “betters” (also known as Very Serious People) are considered to be “elite”.
*Not coincidentally, the period corresponding to the rise of the modern Republican party.
Edit: if she had gone further it probably would have limited future dinner party invitations, and we certainly can’t have that.
magurakurin
Interesting how all this is now directed at movies and not really songs. I think the battle is lost for them with songs. You can download a single song on an Android phone in about 2 seconds. There are dozens of downloaders available at any given moment in the Google Play Store. The amount and variety of songs one can download is vast. Once the storage and data transfer technology makes a DVD similarly small, there will be nothing they can do, short of just shutting down the Internet. They are going to lose, the paradigm has shifted. The big media companies are dinosaurs watching the mammals chow down all their eggs.
PeakVT
@danielx: The linked column isn’t by McAddled.
BruceFromOhio
Gaia, what a line up. Crazy People Action Committee is more like it.
Lurking Canadian
@PeakVT: Of course they are. Why, after all, should what the voters want matter, especially in a democracy?
brantl
Maybe they’re trying to leave him as an electable option. Nobody who stars at CPAC-o-shit has been electable, so far. And ‘moderates’ who lurch their way to pick up votes are unelectable, too.
Baud
@WereBear:
Maybe the Republicans have realized that their best shot in 2016 is to throw the elections in 2014 and allow the Dems to control government for two years. It worked in 1992 and 2008. Hopefully, the Democrats can learn from history if that does happen this time.
kay
I don’t think Christie’s big sin was hurting Romney. Gingrich’s vanity run and Santorum’s crusade both hurt Romney.
I think Christie’s big sin was he said Obama was competent in a natural disaster. Katrina is still an open wound on the Right. There’s a reason media and conservatives have spent 4 years looking for “Obama’s Katrina”. Katrina really rattled their sense of Republicans as good managers and “grownups”.
Katrina was the point where that media-conservative myth became impossible to sustain.
Baud
@kay:
I agree with that. I think it’s also why they are so obsessed with Benghazi. They want something to be Obama’s Iraq.
Gin & Tonic
@raven: How do you have the stomach to watch that shit every morning? You must be made of far sterner stuff than I.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: TV is stuck on th3e channel from Imus.
eta Gibbs is on now and he won’t be gettin bullied.
dmsilev
@Baud: And before that, Solyndra. Which I think was supposed to be Obama’s Watergate.
max
As a technological idiot, do I need to worry when Slate warns about the “Bandwidth-Throttling Copyright Enforcement System Launche[d] Across [the] U.S.”
Do you run BitTorrent? If the answer is no, then you should be fine.
The CAS apparently is monitoring the BitTorrent ports for traffic and checking for the kinds of uploads. You don’t run BitTorrent, no problem. No uploads, no problem. Uploading to BitTorrent: problem. Also, if your WiFi has been hacked and someone is leeching your bandwidth by using Bittorrent, then problem.
You can get around the limitations by using non-BitTorrent file-sharing or a VPN or what have you. Basically the ISPs can join the various BitTorrent streams and SEE all these movies and so they’re just going to monitor that.
max
[‘Kind of the same thing as going after Usenet because of the binary groups.’]
raven
@max: What about capturing youtubes with Quicktime or stuff like flashvideodownloader.org/
kay
@Baud:
My husband said “all those MBA’s and they can’t get bottled water to Mississippi”.
I think Katrina was emotionally devastating to Republicans, because it was about basic managerial competence and merit. A test.
TS
@raven:
Gibbs was seriously underwhelming
Baud
@kay:
Yep. And they failed.
It took a while after Sandy for gasoline and power to come back, and there was an incipient attempt on the right to blame it on Obama’s mismanagement. That obviously didn’t stick.
jeffreyw
Moar kittehs are needed.
gene108
@kay:
Nothing can really dent the media-conservative myth about Republicans being the Very Serious People.
How else could Republicans go from the collapse of Lehman-Brothers, under a Republican President and doubling the debt in six years of Republican rule to the Party of true fiscal conservatives by February 2009?
In a rational world, where 71% of Americans support raising the minimum wage, the politicians, who oppose it should be pilloried by the media for standing against the will of the people. When minimum wage increases on state ballot initiatives routinely pass, with overwhelming support indicating it is truly something both Republican and Democratic voters agree is a good thing, Republicans still get treated like the Very Serious People they are because they oppose it.
No matter how much the media succeeds in putting a shine over the shit that is the modern Republican party, we the people can occasionally accept reality, when we witness it.
Raven
@jeffreyw: That’s great shot but they look like cats.
jeffreyw
@Raven: but..but… Cats? When did this happen? I’ll have to get back to you on that.
NotMax
@raven
Wouldn’t fret about it. What’s attempting to be targeted are torrent users, high-volume exploiters and dissemination of media not yet available through normal distribution channels.
BTW, if you have Firefox, handy add-on is DownloadHelper.
Southern Beale
Yesterday I went to the doctor for my annual and it turned into a pretty depressing conversation about politics.
Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937
This is good news for John McCain.
rikyrah
@kay:
Katrina is still a bitter pill for this Democrat. I watched an American City drown. I just believe there was more that could have been done, but the GOP didn’t give a shyt.
PeakVT
The outcome of this SCOTUS case being heard tomorrow could be a BFD.
different-church-lady
@kay:
Weren’t just that — it was a bullshit decloaking device. Dude is up there on the TV saying everything’s fine and good job Brownie, and another dude is standing on a bridge lit by a flashlight holding up babies and crying on national TV. An entire country goes, “Hooooly sheeet… first dude is LYING to me.”
Mark S.
I’m not that worried about 2016.
JPL
@PeakVT: Wait a minute, that can’t be.. “Corporations are people, my friend”.
CA Doc
@Southern Beale: The problem with “the doctors” is that our traditional vehicles for speaking out, medical societies and specialty societies, are big unwieldy groups that set policy only a few times a year and have their own problems with placating their 27% members. These organizations are member supported with dues so tend to be gunshy about wading too far into controversy. That said, ACOG is actually quite good on the topics in your post. Majority of docs are uninvolved BUT there are lots of us that are and work both through our traditional groups and through newer groups like Doctors For America to influence the system.
Ash Can
@Southern Beale: What’s depressing is that a doctor could care so little about her profession as she does.
danielx
@PeakVT:
Fixed.
We may well be doomed – McMegan has actually written a column which makes a limited amount of sense. Limited by her point of view, granted, but still nothing with which I can take issue except that she didn’t pursue this far enough. The mandarins to which she refers are, in actuality, a bunch of fuckups just like the rest of us – worse in some ways because their mistakes become disasters for so many.
Considering that this here U.S. of A. has staggered from one politico-economic catastrophe to another for about the last fifty years* or so, it does cause one to wonder in what sense our “betters” (also known as Very Serious People) are considered to be “elite”.
*Not coincidentally, the period corresponding to the rise of the modern Republican party.
Edit: if she had gone further it probably would have limited future dinner party invitations, and we certainly can’t have that.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@max:
That $35 filing fee to contest false alerts is a bit worrying though. If the Center for Copyright Information happened to be run by a bunch of assholes it could harvest a nice sum by sending flurries of alert notices to random internet users in hopes of getting people to shell out the money rather than chance being throttled.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
the Conster
@kay:
Katrina explained the cock up in Iraq. Everything came into focus because of Katrina.
sw
You’d be a fool to take anything you read in Slate seriously.
NonyNony
So basically:
* Good for the Christie “brand” – he gets to shore up that credibility of being a “reasonable, moderate Republican” and everybody can try to forget the disastrous mistakes he made pandering to the Tea Party and losing out on development and education dollars earlier in his tenure as governor.
* Good for the CPAC “brand” – they’re purity trolls and always have been. This is a conference that has had Rush Limbaugh as a keynote speaker. I mean come on – why would they ever want to associate their brand with the brand that Christie is trying to build up?
* Bad for the Republican Party – which is good for the country so I’ll take it. Anything that disassociates the words “moderate” and “reasonable” from the words “conservative” and “Republican” is good in my boat. Best thing that could happen with Christie is that he becomes a conservative Democrat. Probably won’t happen because it would mess with his brand and I doubt that the Democratic machine in Jersey would let him slip in like that, but it would be the best outcome to see someone who was once the great hope of the Republican Party get pushed out.
jeffreyw
@Raven: I have asked around and was assured that they are kittehs, for sure GI.
PeakVT
@danielx: If ever there was a work that deserved the ‘who are you and what have with X’ response, that would be it. The second link in the first comment seems to answer that question. :)
raven
@jeffreyw: so solly
Litlebritdifrnt
In today’s WTF moment Pat Buchanan skewers Jennifer Rubin
realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/02/26/infantile_conservatism__117165.html
Cacti
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Buchanan has always been for a non-interventionist foreign policy.
And a mental midget neocon like J-Roob is low hanging fruit.
PeakVT
@Litlebritdifrnt: That’s not really surprising. Rubin is a neocon, while Buchanan is a paleocon who generally leans towards less overseas involvement. It would be an interesting spat if the palecon movement consisted of more than the 20 or 30 people who write for Buchanan’s magazine. But the neocon mentality is pretty much unassailable in the Republican party right now.
ETA: Or what Cacti said.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Litlebritdifrnt: WTF indeed. A definite literary shiv from the old racist coot to the batshit insane Rubin. A couple excerpts that stood out:
…
NonyNony
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Not a WTF moment at all. Pat Buchanan and Jennifer Rubin are both conservatives, but they actually represent two different factions quite well. Buchanan represents the isolationist (and racist-but-not-so-racist-that-he-can-be-thrown-off-television-for-it and sexist-but-not-so-sexist-that-he-can-be-thrown-off-television-for-it) wing of the party, while Rubin is a neoconservative in the mold of Bill Kristol. Kristol and Buchanan also hate each other’s guts as well as each other’s positions, so I’m not surprised that Buchanan would be equally offended that Rubin is being labelled as a conservative when she opposes so much of what he considers conservatism to be about.
ETA: Or what the other guys above me said more succinctly.
Paul in KY
@jeffreyw: Ghost cats!
Gin & Tonic
@Litlebritdifrnt: That dick is still alive?
Paul in KY
@Southern Beale: Your doctor is obviously a Republican. Just mouthing the talking points & making money…
Paul in KY
@Ash Can: What’s wrong with her profession (from the doctor’s point of view)? The patients come in, we do a few things, make a perscription, and they leave & we bill a nice juicy bill.
What’s not to like?!
Cacti
@Thor Heyerdahl:
My personal fav
Too bad no one in the librul media has the stones to point out what a self-serving little weasel Bibi is.
Paul in KY
@Litlebritdifrnt: Would be nice if someone on the Right who didn’t have as much ‘Jewish Baggage’ as Mr. Buchannon had written the piece.
I certainly agree with the thrust of the article.
Southern Beale
This Christie thing sets my bullshit meter off. The guy is serious about 2016, and the very LAST thing he’d ever want is to have YouTube videos of him pandering to the CPAC base out there,
Maybe I’ve just been doing this too long.
Marc
Oh my god, Pelosi on Boehner on the sequester:
Love this woman.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Marc: Except it isn’t their nose and she can’t say that word in American media.
Mike E
Tom Daschle on Diane Rhem, waxing nostalgic about the Days Of Bipartisanship with Dole, Lott & Frist.
Sweet tapdancing Moses on a trampoline.