What’s the ideal situation for the cable television marketplace? A free market. Cable providers should be able to negotiate, or not, with broadcasters and copyright holders to purchase streams to resell to their customers. Jim DeMint is trying to bring us closer to that by ending special leverage in the marketplace given to broadcasters.

You see, the rules in place now are not designed to create a free market. Just as the Net Neutrality regulations are designed to restrict customer choice, out of fear that those customers would favor paying for superior service, so too did regulators fear that cable companies would win in the marketplace. So regulations were put into place to favor local broadcasters.

There’s a lot of inside baseball here in the retransmission consent debate. It’s tricky to unwind a complex regulatory system. But DeMint’s plan is a step forward.

So is CISPA. Some say the bill is risky and may get too much information out into the open, with too little oversight. That might be right. The bill might stand tweaking. But the concept is good. I find it interesting that Google isn’t taking a position on it, possibly out of fear of a left-wing backlash.

You see, there’s more to CISPA opposition than just CISPA. There’s also the Lieberman-Collins cybersecurity bill at stake.

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What’s the ideal situation for the cable television marketplace? A free market. Cable providers should be able to negotiate, or not, with broadcasters and copyright holders to purchase streams to resell to their customers. Jim DeMint is trying to bring us closer to that by ending special leverage in the marketplace given to broadcasters.

You see, the rules in place now are not designed to create a free market. Just as the Net Neutrality regulations are designed to restrict customer choice, out of fear that those customers would favor paying for superior service, so too did regulators fear that cable companies would win in the marketplace. So regulations were put into place to favor local broadcasters.

There’s a lot of inside baseball here in the retransmission consent debate. It’s tricky to unwind a complex regulatory system. But DeMint’s plan is a step forward.

So is CISPA. Some say the bill is risky and may get too much information out into the open, with too little oversight. That might be right. The bill might stand tweaking. But the concept is good. I find it interesting that Google isn’t taking a position on it, possibly out of fear of a left-wing backlash.

You see, there’s more to CISPA opposition than just CISPA. There’s also the Lieberman-Collins cybersecurity bill at stake.

Read More →

I’m seeing some real panicked shouting online about CISPA, a new bill that some are calling “the new SOPA.” It’s absurd. The bill may not be perfect. It could have flaws. But the argument being hammered against CISPA again and again is that it may be used against copyright infringers who abuse networks. So? The only reason to oppose that is if you wish to destroy copyright property rights entirely, as the radicals do.

I warned about this way back during the SOPA debate. I predicted that the left side of the anti-SOPA coalition would try to hijack the movement into a general one against copyright, as the anarchists over there tend to do, and the shrieking over CISPA is proving me right. CISPA is not a bundle of mandates. It is an avenue to information sharing. Note that everything in CISPA is “totally voluntary,” per The Hill.

If someone and disprove that, and point to one or more mandates in CISPA, I’d like to know. Until then, the burden of proof is on the radicals to prove they’re not really out to protect Anontards and copyright infringers.

For now, it’s looking like CISPA is a solid response to The plans by the President and Democrats to expand government online, by regulating the Internet. Double regulating in fact, as every ‘critical’ industry is already regulated. So this whole “critical infrastructure” thing is more pretext than anything

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I’m seeing some real panicked shouting online about CISPA, a new bill that some are calling “the new SOPA.” It’s absurd. The bill may not be perfect. It could have flaws. But the argument being hammered against CISPA again and again is that it may be used against copyright infringers who abuse networks. So? The only reason to oppose that is if you wish to destroy copyright property rights entirely, as the radicals do.

I warned about this way back during the SOPA debate. I predicted that the left side of the anti-SOPA coalition would try to hijack the movement into a general one against copyright, as the anarchists over there tend to do, and the shrieking over CISPA is proving me right. CISPA is not a bundle of mandates. It is an avenue to information sharing. Note that everything in CISPA is “totally voluntary,” per The Hill.

If someone and disprove that, and point to one or more mandates in CISPA, I’d like to know. Until then, the burden of proof is on the radicals to prove they’re not really out to protect Anontards and copyright infringers.

For now, it’s looking like CISPA is a solid response to The plans by the President and Democrats to expand government online, by regulating the Internet. Double regulating in fact, as every ‘critical’ industry is already regulated. So this whole “critical infrastructure” thing is more pretext than anything

Read More →

Monday night, as promised, we still have some catch up work to do. So let’s start with those Amazon Taxes, those Internet sales taxes of dubious Constitutionality. Colorado’s got tossed in federal court and Illinois’s didn’t raise any money. Obeying the Constitution counts, folks. Pass a true interstate compact through the Congress first.

Also as promised, there’s the matter of the Next Generation Television Marketplace Act. This is the one where ACU has come out against Jim DeMint, and that caught my attention. I have to side with the bill DeMint is sponsoring. I think ACU simply misunderstood what’s at stake here and had good intentions, but the excessive complexity of the regulations defeated them here.

The bill does not let cable providers become free riders, retransmitting others’ streams for free. It just stops the law from trying to dictate the parameters of the negotiations on retransmissions. I see no harm in that, and potentially much good.

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Monday night, as promised, we still have some catch up work to do. So let’s start with those Amazon Taxes, those Internet sales taxes of dubious Constitutionality. Colorado’s got tossed in federal court and Illinois’s didn’t raise any money. Obeying the Constitution counts, folks. Pass a true interstate compact through the Congress first.

Also as promised, there’s the matter of the Next Generation Television Marketplace Act. This is the one where ACU has come out against Jim DeMint, and that caught my attention. I have to side with the bill DeMint is sponsoring. I think ACU simply misunderstood what’s at stake here and had good intentions, but the excessive complexity of the regulations defeated them here.

The bill does not let cable providers become free riders, retransmitting others’ streams for free. It just stops the law from trying to dictate the parameters of the negotiations on retransmissions. I see no harm in that, and potentially much good.

Read More →

While there seem to be a large number of people active on Facebook and other social media swearing they won’t vote for one or another of the candidates if their own choice is not the winner of the GOP presidential primaries, Rick Santorum’s new string of victories will surely make him the top target of the naysayers in the next week.

The Santorum victory in Alabama and Mississippi simply means that, whether it is Santorum or it is another candidate, Mitt Romney’s trouble with the conservatives and the “values voters” isn’t fading or going away.

The pundits and pols continue to echo this myth that to win a GOP presidential primary you “run to the right’ in the primary and then as soon as you have it locked up  you swing “back to the middle” (ie. to the left).

The proponents of this view never suggest this idea to liberal Democrats and that’s funny… they ARE liberal Democrats.

With a few exceptions, the people who buy into this “run to the right, then go left” idea are either liberals or people who do not have an enormous capacity for intellectual discussion, to put it as gently as I can.

So if you swing over to MSNBC TV you get the usual suspects there giving their “advice” to the Republicans, and what are they advising us?

As usual, they say that women don’t like conservatives.  And most especially, they aver, women don’t like Christian conservatives.

They insist that the government has to pay for their contraception or else it diminishes or eliminates their constitutional right to sex before and after and for those who unlike Rachel Maddow are engaged in heterosexual marriage, marriage-sex with your own partner.

Therefore, women have to be against Santorum because he is a Catholic trying to take away their ability to have sex, and their rights to have a healthy life.

This really is the level of discourse on the left, going past the theatre of the absurd..  And it reminds me of what people used to say about Jerry Falwell, the first major “social conservative” or “values voter” leader from over 30 years ago.

Falwell and his “Moral Majority” they said, were (also) trying to tell people how to live their lives, and using the power of the government to make people do what they believe is right.

Like the Taliban terrorists, which the Rachel Maddows of MSNBC and the hate-sites of the left always love to say, the Christian rightwingers or “wingnuts” as MSNBC’s Christopher Matthews likes to call us, are on a fresh new campaign to steal away all of our rights, trash the Constitution and impose our religion on everybody and run the government and everybody’s lives.

The liberal left and their witting and unwitting allies within our GOP and conservative ranks continue to say that only a more reasonable “moderate” like Mitt Romney has a chance to beat Barack Obama.

I wonder: who are the people with a handicapped ability to reason, who think this repeated argument that the left has made forever and ever, is one we should listen to?

Of course many of the people supposedly within our ranks, actually hate all Republicans and conservatives who they view as “neocons” and apologists for the liberal Republicans.

These are the people who have within their ranks the Ronald Reagan haters, and those people who love to repeat that mantra “there’s no difference” between GOP and Democrats they are all the same.

While these anti-GOP advocates get a serious hearing from people who are frustrated with how things have gone for our cause in Washington, there are a few of us who know how absurd this “Dem-GOP the same” argument is – which don’t forget goes all the way back to the 1968 “not a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.

I’ve yet to hear a good answer from these anti-conservative, anti-GOP partisans, as to which political party has 19 U.S. Senators with a 0% rating from the American Conservative Union, and which party has 9 U.S. Senators with a 100% rating last year – and why wouldn’t we want to switch that around so there’s twice as many 100% conservatives as there are 0% conservatives?

And which party has a Marco Rubbio, a Jim DeMint and a Jim Inhoffe in the Senate?

Which party has an Al Franken, Harry Reid and a Chuck Schumer in the Senate?

I do know why some keep saying “I cannot see any difference” between the parties.  They have an anti-GOP, anti-conservative axe to grind.  Or they are a little slow on basic logic and short of essential facts.

And why do so many people – supposedly within our GOP and/or conservative ranks, echo the “party line” of the Huffington Post, Media Matters, the New York Times, Rachel Maddow, Daily KOS and their ilk, claiming that candidates like Rick Santorum are trying to “make” people do anything?

These are the same people, groups and websites who “cannot tell the difference” are most often, the very same people expressing the same visceral hatred of Rick Santorum and setting up strawman arguments against him.

They have the same purpose, the same design, and they are fired up to stop evil – which is to them, those of us who are supporting Rick Santorum or any more conservative alternative to Mitt Romney.

And of course, some of them are the same old liberal-progressive forces within the GOP which we have nicknamed “RINO’s” (Republicans in Name only) like Senator Olympia Snowe.

It is a strange alliance between the RINO’s, the anti-GOP group within the Tea Party and within the GOP, and the liberal-left.

Increasingly, the top target of this group which has been the historical opponent of conservatives within the GOP, is Rick Santorum.

Meanwhile, as Santorum continues to rack up victories against all odds, Newt Gingrich continues his role as Mitt Romney’s best friend, siphoning off enough votes so that even with his 2nd and 3rd place finishes he prevents a “blowout” win for Santorum over Romney again and again, as he did tonight.

I have no doubt that Mitt – and certainly the good people supporting him – means well.

The books and videos of Newt Gingrich – which I have purchased and highly recommend – will continue to sell well because Newt stays in the public eye as a candidate.

But in my view they would continue to sell well because they are masterpieces of wit, logic and fact and very well put together.  Newt doesn’t need to continue as a candidate and as an inadvertent spoiler for Mitt Romney for his books and videos to continue to sell.

But more and more of us are wondering: do his supporters not feel worried that his continued presence in this close contest will enable Mitt Romney to emerge as the winner with less than 40% of the primary votes but a possible majority of delegates?

Many states are like Pennsylvania, where you have a “beauty contest” where you vote for your choice of Presidential nominees, but it is a separate deal who you vote for as the delegates.

That means that Santorum may win a contest but some Ron Paul delegate candidates run a stealth campaign and are elected as convention delegates, who will ignore the election results and vote for Ron Paul.

Others will be people put forward by the GOP establishment who will run and win, and vote for Romney.

That means you cannot expect to defeat Mitt Romney with a bare minimum of delegates.  You need a large number of “not-Romney” delegates.

I believe the only hope for conservatives right now is enough of the Newt Gingrich supporters do what I would be doing if I saw Rick Santorum losing again and again – as a donor and supporter of Rick I’d be writing and begging him to withdraw as Rick Perry graciously did, and endorse a candidate with a better chance of defeating Mitt.

I do believe this question is in the hands of the supporters of Newt Gingrich more than anything.  I pray they will use their influence because I think that is the ONLY way that Newt would withdraw as a candidate and endorse Rick Santorum.

At one time and in two different primaries (going into South Carolina and again going into Florida) I said on my facebook wall that I endorsed and would support Newt Gingrich if I lived there at that time, despite my earlier support for Rick Santorum.

I thought at that time that Newt had the best chance going into both primaries to derail Romney.

A clear majority of self-described conservatives in both states did do that, including a 2-to-1 margin with self-described “values voters” who ignored the earlier endorsement by 2/3 of the Christian-right group leaders meeting in Texas to endorse Rick Santorum.

I hope Gingrich supporters will do the same thing now – switch, do it publicly, write it on your facebook page, post a message here, write to Newt Gingrich, and get behind Rick Santorum to stop Romney.

Not because he is the most stalwart conservative.  Not because he is a Christian.  Not because his track record is so much better than Newt.  Not because you like his ideas better (personally I like Newt’s ideas about colonizing space so go ahead and expel me from the Tea Party).

These views may or may not be yours.  They are irrelevant.

The reason to get behind Santorum is that this is the very best way we have right now to get a better deal than Mitt Romney as our nominee.

I’ll vote for Romney as the nominee if he wins.  I’m delighted Ron Paul has become totally irrelevant to this contest earning less than 5% of the vote, the same that libertarian-anarchists running as pro-drug and anti-war candidates do here in Pennsylvania (yes I like libertarians like John Stossel and many at the CATO Institute despite disagreeing with them on some things).

I’m delighted and thrilled with many of the speeches I’ve heard from both Santorum and from Gingrich and even listening to Mitt Romney is a real treat after several years of President Obama speeches.

But tonight’s victories in Alabama and Mississippi totally demolish the aura of inevitability and of invincibility for Mitt Romney, end any need for anyone to take Ron Paul seriously any longer, eliminate any chance that Newt Gingrich can be a viable candidate, and show that Rick Santorum has the horsepower to seriously challenge Mitt Romney and emerge as the GOP nominee.

I hope enough Gingrich supporters step up to the plate at this critical time and thank Newt Gingrich for his many years of service, for his wonderful work as a candidate for President (well, at least most of the time), and urge him to withdraw, while openly switching to Rick Santorum for President.

And most of all, I pray that conservatives will not let differences over their choice of Presidential nominee block them from cooperating and working together on the host of important issues our country faces in the future.

HanoverHenry is Pat Henry on Facebook, and I’m on the lookout for new friends there, https://www.facebook.com/HanoverHenry

Links to my RED STATE articles at my Facebook NOTES section.  

Update: All 4 amendments were defeated, meaning we won 2 and lost 2. DeMint’s devolution amendment failed 30-67 with 14 Republicans (including McConnell) voting no; Stabenow’s green energy pork amendment failed 49-49; DeMint’s repeal of all energy subsidies failed 26-72; the Menendez-Burr handouts for natural gas cars failed 51-47.  6 Republicans supported the subsidies, including Tom Coburn! This might seem like a stalemate, but the natural gas subsidies only failed due to the 60-vote threshold.  It is also appalling that only 26 Republicans support the free-market in the energy sector.

Today is D-day for the Senate highway bill and all its amendments.  We must oppose this highway bill, which will raise taxes, engender future bailouts, and preclude much-needed devolution of transportation responsibility to the states.  Before voting on final passage of the bill tonight, the Senate will vote on several other important amendments.  We should support the two DeMint amendments and oppose the other amendments.

• DeMint #1756: At noon today the Senate will vote on DeMint’s amendment to abolish the federal gas tax and devolve transportation spending to the states.  His amendment will only need 51 votes to pass.  This is a seminal vote for conservatives.

After 2:15, the Senate will vote on 20 amendments.  Here are the amendments related to energy subsidies that conservatives must watch carefully.  Each amendment will require 60 votes to pass.

• DeMint #1589: This amendment would repeal all subsidies and tax credits for all energy companies.  This amendment would not only prevent the expired green energy tax credits from being reinstated, it would repeal existing ones as well.  This is one of the most important votes for conservatives.  It will separate the men from the boys.
• Stabenow #1812: This amendment is the antithesis of DeMint’s bill.  Her amendment would extend all of the green energy credits and subsidies, including many of the new provisions enacted in the 2009 Stimulus.
• Menendez-Burr #1782: This amendment would pass the T. Boone Pickens natural gas subsidies.  Boone Pickens’s plan would grant a $4,000 tax credit per car produced by all manufacturers of natural gas vehicles.  It would also give consumers a $7,500 tax credit for purchasing one of these vehicles.  Companies that install commercial fueling stations for these vehicles would be entitled to a $100,000 subsidy per station!

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Update: All 4 amendments were defeated, meaning we won 2 and lost 2. DeMint’s devolution amendment failed 30-67 with 14 Republicans (including McConnell) voting no; Stabenow’s green energy pork amendment failed 49-49; DeMint’s repeal of all energy subsidies failed 26-72; the Menendez-Burr handouts for natural gas cars failed 51-47.  6 Republicans supported the subsidies, including Tom Coburn! This might seem like a stalemate, but the natural gas subsidies only failed due to the 60-vote threshold.  It is also appalling that only 26 Republicans support the free-market in the energy sector.

Today is D-day for the Senate highway bill and all its amendments.  We must oppose this highway bill, which will raise taxes, engender future bailouts, and preclude much-needed devolution of transportation responsibility to the states.  Before voting on final passage of the bill tonight, the Senate will vote on several other important amendments.  We should support the two DeMint amendments and oppose the other amendments.

• DeMint #1756: At noon today the Senate will vote on DeMint’s amendment to abolish the federal gas tax and devolve transportation spending to the states.  His amendment will only need 51 votes to pass.  This is a seminal vote for conservatives.

After 2:15, the Senate will vote on 20 amendments.  Here are the amendments related to energy subsidies that conservatives must watch carefully.  Each amendment will require 60 votes to pass.

• DeMint #1589: This amendment would repeal all subsidies and tax credits for all energy companies.  This amendment would not only prevent the expired green energy tax credits from being reinstated, it would repeal existing ones as well.  This is one of the most important votes for conservatives.  It will separate the men from the boys.
• Stabenow #1812: This amendment is the antithesis of DeMint’s bill.  Her amendment would extend all of the green energy credits and subsidies, including many of the new provisions enacted in the 2009 Stimulus.
• Menendez-Burr #1782: This amendment would pass the T. Boone Pickens natural gas subsidies.  Boone Pickens’s plan would grant a $4,000 tax credit per car produced by all manufacturers of natural gas vehicles.  It would also give consumers a $7,500 tax credit for purchasing one of these vehicles.  Companies that install commercial fueling stations for these vehicles would be entitled to a $100,000 subsidy per station!

Read More →

The House is out of session this week. Tthe Senate will be in session to finish work on a bloated two year $109 billion highway bill. 

Big fight this week on judicial nominations with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) expected to file cloture on about seventeen nominees today.

Also, expect a fight when the Senate tries to use a House passed Small-Business bill to pass the big business Export-Import Bank reauthorization bill.

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