Here is a detailed breakdown of the SOPA alternative "OPEN Act."

The OPEN Act: significantly flawed, but more salvageable than SOPA/PROTECT-IP

I've been hearing the observation that Microsoft isn't exciting people with their products a lot lately.

Enterprise has been built to the point where it is replacement cycles, not innovation driving their profits. Consumers are migrating from desktop to mobile to handheld — none of which plays into their strengths.

Microsoft, Value Traps and the Paradigm Shift | The Big Picture

If we want Protect-IP to die in the Senate, we need to step it up. SopaOpera.org has a list of people who are for, against, and undecided on PIPA. If your representative is undecided, contact them immediately! All of them are potential allies. Tell them about the damage PIPA could do to free speech, and to the American economy. Even the ones in favor of PIPA are worth contacting. If they think that enough people will vote against them in the next election, they might just change their minds.

Both of my senators have signed on as cosponsors of PIPA. I sent them both emails today using the web forms on their respective sites, and asked them to reconsider their support for this approach. I also contacted my Congressman, who is on the House judiciary committee, but doesn't seem to have taken a position on SOPA.

Fight PIPA, SOPA's Senate cousin, with this Senate scorecard - Boing Boing

Very interesting:

Flowers are sprouting in January in New Hampshire, the Sierra Mountains in California are nearly snow-free, and lakes in much of Michigan still have not frozen. It's 2012, and the new year is ringing in another ridiculously wacky winter for the U.S...

This winter's remarkable AO/NAO pattern stands in stark contrast to what occurred the previous two winters, when we had the most extreme December jet stream patterns on record in the opposite direction (a strongly negative AO/NAO). The negative AO conditions suppressed westerly winds over the North Atlantic, allowing Arctic air to spill southwards into eastern North America and Western Europe, bringing unusually cold and snowy conditions. The December Arctic Oscillation index has fluctuated wildly over the past six years, with the two most extreme positive and two most extreme negative values on record. Unfortunately, we don't understand why the AO varies so much from winter to winter, nor why the AO has taken on such extreme configurations during four of the past six winters.

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog : Remarkably dry and warm winter due to record extreme jet stream configuration : Weather Underground

Our legislators are still amused by their own lack of internet prowess, indicating that they still believe the web to be some sort of "outlier" whose opinions can be easily dismissed. It's a cognitive gap, but it explains why the mainstream TV news so willingly ignores SOPA and the building momentum of its opposition: it's just the internet. It can be either humored or feared, but never respected.

Study Confirms: News Networks Owned By SOPA Supporters... Are Ignoring SOPA/PIPA | Techdirt

The headline here is possibly a bit misleading.

Its not clear that Paul Ryan had previously taken a position on SOPA. However, Paul Ryan faces a credible challenge in the upcoming election from Rob Zerban, and that makes him vulnerable. Zerban had taken a clear anti-SOPA position. Therefore, a great deal of support flooded in to him from grassroots opponents of SOPA organizing via Reddit. Ryan has therefore announced that he does not support SOPA.

A sustained campaign coordinated by redditors has evidently convinced Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the House Budget Chair, to drop his support for the Stop Online Piracy Act.

More here:

On the heels of this news, Paul Ryan has announced he will not support SOPA legislation. After receiving large contributions from pro-SOPA interests, Paul Ryan was put on the defensive. Rob Zerban lent his full and early support to the independent effort to stop this legislation, and joined the movement to stop this online on sites including Facebook, Twitter, and the online community of Reddit. Zerban's efforts received the attention of many online, especially the Reddit community, resulting in significant unexpected contributions and thousands of new volunteers and supporters.

Paul Ryan's decision, as a partisan leader and head of the Budget Committee, to back away from legislation actively pursued by another Republican Committee Chair, is a major accomplishment. Americans organized online and achieved significant policy impact in very little time. It showed even a high and mighty leader, considered by many as extreme, realizes he is accountable to the public through their online efforts.

Lamar "I Can't Hear You!" Smith does not seem to have a serious challenger in the upcoming election.

Congressman drops support for SOPA - Boing Boing

Why are evangelicals overwhelmingly the largest block of Tea Party supporters?

This poorly understood and carefully limited alliance of libertarians and the religious right can be partly traced to a strategic shift by Paul Weyrich during the Clinton years.

The Moral Majority Becomes the Tea Party | FrumForum

Its not clear to me why the NYT chose today to publish those two Gitmo editorials.

They are an important reminder of why it was wrong for the US to operate a policy of detaining people apprehended anywhere in the world forever without so much as a habeas hearing.

But why today? What are the politics behind the timing?

Perhaps its a reminder that Obama promised to close Gitmo and hasn't. Frankly, a continued advocacy of this is stupid - it doesn't matter where the prison is. Whats important are the policies that apply there.

Since Boumediene's case we've got Habeas hearings. Since then, honestly, I've seen the detention issue as having been resolved. What else do you want?

Greenwald is claiming that since Boumediene Obama is routing suspects to Bagram in order to avoid Habeas review, but its not clear that such a loophole actually exists.

The government couldn't have transferred them to Bagram for the express purpose of avoiding habeas review. In fact, the court implies that had the government done that in this case, they might have ruled differently, and they might do so in the future should a case of that nature reach them. "Perhaps such manipulation by the Executive might constitute an additional factor in some case in which it is in fact present."

Greenwald raises other concerns about drone strikes and dishonest partisan enforcement by liberal activists that are much more difficult to dismiss... (Emphasis mine.)

Thus, so goes this reasoning, to demand that issues like indefinite detention and civilian deaths be prioritized in assessing the presidential race is to subordinate the importance of other issues such as abortion, gay equality, and domestic civil rights enforcement on which Obama and the Democrats are better. Many of these commentators strongly imply, or now even outright state, that only white males are willing to argue for such a prioritization scheme because the de-prioritized issues do not affect them...

...it’s much easier to... insist on their de-prioritization in favor of other policies because their white, non-Muslim privilege means that they aren’t the ones who are going to be indefinitely detained, assassinated without due process, or have their homes and children targeted with drones and cluster bombs.

But, these things aren't really about detention policy, unless you reckon we're doing more drone strikes because if we captured people we'd have to explain why in court, and even the most shrill voices aren't going there as far as I've seen.

On the other hand, conservatives, to a man, seem to have completely forgotten their vocal opposition to habeas hearings for terrorism suspects and their protes... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Murat Kurnaz:

During their interrogations, they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach; they don’t call this waterboarding but it amounts to the same thing. I was sure I would drown.

At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days. A doctor sometimes checked if I was O.K.; then I would be strung up again. The pain was unbearable.

After about two months in Kandahar, I was transferred to Guantánamo.

Notes From a Guantánamo Survivor - NYTimes.com

Lakhdar Boumediene:

ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me...

It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again.

So long as Guantánamo stays open and innocent men remain there, my thoughts will be with those left behind in that place of suffering and injustice.

Its probably worth reiterating that I don't really think it matters whether or not Guatanamo is open or closed. What matters is what the detention policies of the US are regarding enemy combatants. The focus on the specific prison has been used as a way of avoid substantive discussion of the real questions about the policies.

Wikipedia includes this quote from the judge who released Boumediene:

"To allow enemy combatancy to rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court's obligation; the court must and will grant their petitions and order their release. This is a unique case. Few if any others will be factually like it. Nobody should be lulled into a false sense that all of the ... cases will look like this one."

My previous thoughts about the case here.

My Guantánamo Nightmare - NYTimes.com