Politics
There are 1,056 posts filed in Politics (this is page 82 of 106).
The closing bell has rung for filing for Raleigh City Council. Here’s how things stack up:
Mayor
Charles Meeker (I)
Mark Enloe
Gregg S. Kunz
City Council At-Large
Russ Stephenson (I)
Mary-Ann Baldwin (I)
Champ Claris
Lee Sartain
Bill Shakespeare
Hardy Watkins
Continue reading
I had a big day today for it being a day off. I started the day with a trip to Wilson to take a tour of the city’s municipal Internet system. After lunch in Wilson, I headed back to Raleigh to meet a friend for coffee and a discussion of local politics. Then I headed home to have dinner with the family before I left again for the Raleigh CAC meeting.
That’s a pretty busy day off, if I do say so myself!
This is a bit troubling, to say the least. CIA Director Leon Panetta terminated a secret CIA program that was apparently kept secret from Congress for the eight years of its existence, violating federal law. No one’s saying what the program is about, which may be even more troubling.
Can’t wait to see where this leads.
Officials are blaming North Korea for the recent cyber attacks against U.S. and South Korean government websites.
Yeah, right. Have you checked out North Korea lately? While South Korea has some of the fastest home Internet connections in the world, North Korea has … well, maybe a 56k dialup connection? Broadband companies aren’t exactly falling over themselves to offer service there and I can imagine that the quirky communist government isn’t exactly encouraging it, either.
I know Kim II Jong is a movie buff but I’m betting money he isn’t exactly streaming his shows from Netflix!
Jay Ovittore has been following the broadband backwater fight and reports that the N.C. Senate version of the bill, S.1004 was gutted yesterday.
Says Jay:
S1004 will be in the Public Utilities Committee tomorrow and for the first time I don’t have to worry about it. The Senate used a procedural rule to gut the bill and replace all text with new text that allows Progress Energy to convert some of it’s Coal fired plants to Natural Gas.
The is not a mere mention of cable, municipalities, Time Warner, none of it.
HB1252 is still alive and I will track it as always.
For now we can all claim another victory against Big Cable!
Fantastic news.
A few months ago I watched The Fog of War, an interview with Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. It was a candid, riveting interview where McNamara’s explains in his own words the decision making that pushed country deeper into the Vietnam War. It was sobering, too, to hear him call it a “terrible mistake,” but as his critics have said, he was three decades too late admitting that. It was also shocking to hear him describe how trigger-happy General LeMay almost got us all nuked during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’m glad a cool-headed guy like McNamara was there to keep us from Armageddon.
McNamara died in his sleep this morning at the age of 93. While he’ll always be remembered for Vietnam, he also was the long-time president of the World Bank and worked for nuclear disarmament.
I was pondering Independence Day as the Fourth of July is this week. I was thinking how we celebrate our independence on the day the Declaration of Independence was signed, even though independence wasn’t actually won until the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783.
Reading up on this, I hadn’t before appreciated the role that North Carolina played in independence. Continue reading
After fighting to keep North Carolina from becoming a broadband backwater, this particularly galls me. The North Carolina General Assembly is pushing a finance bill that would tax online retailers. Rather than pay a tax in a state where it has no presence, Amazon simply pulled the plug on its affiliate program for North Carolina residents. So rather than doing something positive for the state, the attempt to tax companies like Amazon has actually hurt North Carolina small businesses that depend on those referrals by cutting off access to that income.
This outcome is not surprising. Tax a company with no presence or investment in the state and that company has little to keep it from pulling the plug on serving that state. That hurts our citizens more than it does the companies targeted, and that’s just plain dumb.
I sure would like to see a smarter approach by the legislature towards technology and the Internet. Those who regulate technology should at least make an attempt to understand it.
Anyone not see this coming?
Favorite Tweet: “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman and a hot Argentine chick.” – Mark Sanford.
I watched the disturbing video today of the young Iranian student named Neda Agha Soltan being shot dead and it made me very angry. I know that many Iranians must feel the same way.
With Ayatollah Khamenei determined to stand by this election the stakes in Iran have now risen considerably. I don’t see the forces that have swept Iran this week being easily put back in the bottle. Every student in the streets of Tehran can identify with Neda, and it must now be perfectly clear to them the price they might pay if they wish to succeed.
Freedom can be theirs. The question is: how badly do they want it?
