Via some outfit called VoIP News, I’m intrigued to learn that my insidious paymasters at Cato number among the 15 greatest enemies of net neutrality. Scary!  Turns out Cato is a “hired voice of reason” which, along with CEI “seems to draw its funding from a smattering of every major corporation ever to fund lobbyists.” […]

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I’ve got one of a bunch of letters in the Sunday Washington Post objecting to their facile editorial on PATRIOT Act renewal, which weirdly asserted that a “reasonable balance” is struck by a bill that reauthorizes surveillance powers almost unaltered. My original letter, incidentally, had somewhat more pointedly said that the Post “duly transcribed” the […]

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I’d flagged this Techdirt post by Mike Masnick to say something about but never quite got around to it. It’s part of a broader critique of journalistic norms of—or pretensions to—objectivity that’s been currently lately, for many good reasons.  But I’ll at least say a word for the idea of maintaining some neutrality rules at […]

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I feel like you don’t see quite so many good old fashioned blog rants anymore, so it’s sort of nice to see Freddie DeBoer let one rip over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. The first part is a long criticism of what Ross Douthat’s been up to since taking his gig at the New […]

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According to the narrative that appears to have been in place by Saturday, reactions to the news that Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize were sharply split on partisan lines: Democrats celebrating and conservative Republicans reacting with “outrage.”  Now, between Twitter and my RSS feed, I woke up to a whole slew […]

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So, the video in my previous post—rather half-assedly assembled on a late-night whim in my apartment (and judging by the comments, I should really tidy up said apartment a bit next time such a whim strikes)—seems to have become a whole lot more successful than I’d have thought possible. What I’d love to do in […]

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Addendum: I guess the folks claiming Democrats want to repeal those PATRIOT provisions missed the Senate’s hearings, where Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) says, right around 165 minutes in: Your testimony concludes in very all-or-nothing fashion that the roving wiretap authority, the  215 order authority, and the lone wolf authority should all be continued, should be reauthorized. […]

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Instapundit points his readers to an explanation of just why it’s so “dangerous” to impute racist motives to the Tea Party protesters.  Apparently, the danger is that lazy, criminal negroes “who are looking for any sort of reason to justify their anti-social behavior will latch onto such screeds as a defense.” Instead, we learn, they […]

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I had the same reaction as Virginia Postrel to the claim that an NBC producer sent a brazenly anti-Semitic e-mail to the group Americans for Limited Government. Even if the producer in question harbored such crude sentiments, you don’t get to a position of even minor responsibility at a major media outlet like that without […]

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So it looks as though Al Franken reading the Fourth Amendment to DOJ’s David Kris has blown up on lefty and/or privacy-friendly blogs. Look, I appreciate the sentiment, I really do.  I want to see Senators reciting the Fourth Amendment to representatives of the executive branch every time there’s a hearing.  I want them to […]

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