A new front in the political wars over sex and violence in video games opened Tuesday when Senators Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman called for a new crackdown on the industry by the federal government.

Remember that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for more of this kind of stuff. You know, children who are never exposed to reality and never have to make their own choices about right and wrong do a real good job of taking care of themselves when they go to college.

Senators target 'graphic' video games | CNET News.com

Search is big business, and search functionality increasingly shapes the information society. Yet how the law treats search is still up for grabs, and with it, the power to dominate the next generation of the online world. How will this potential to wield control affect search engine companies, their advertisers, their users, or the information they index? What will search engines look like in the future, and what is the role of regulators in this emerging market? This symposium will map out the terrain of search engine law & policy.

If you're out in the tri-state area this might be worth a look.

Yale Information Society Project: Regulating Search

Gross observes that the changes recommended by a commission appointed by the President will have much greater negative effects on taxpayers in Democratic regions. Its as if the tax changes are a form of economic gerrymandering whose impact will be to significantly reduce the net take-home pay of (surprise!) Democratic donors.

The politics of taxation

A tentative deal to extend the government's antiterrorism powers under the law known as the USA Patriot Act appeared in some jeopardy Thursday, as Senate Democrats threatened to mount a filibuster in an effort to block the legislation.

I'm glad they narrowed the National Security Letters but I'm not sure this bill really meets muster. This is one environment where the filibuster may be an honorable thing to do. On the other hand, it may just be a way of extending the existing law without the changes while creating the appearance of discourse.

Extension of Patriot Act Faces Threat of Filibuster

Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes. When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.
Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top U.S. leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world. These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that our nation's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained.
Even with our troops involved in combat and America facing the threat of additional terrorist attacks, our declaration of "You are either with us or against us!" has replaced the forming of alliances based on a clear comprehension of mutual interests, including the threat of terrorism.

Jimmy Carter expresses himself far more eloquently here then in recent interviews, and far more eloquently then Gore and Dean have in recent speaches. Reminds me a bit of Steve Wozniak's commentary at Hope. One of the things the left needs to have is a clearer voice.

This isn't the real America - Los Angeles Times

bucy wrote:
Is all this fuss just about the root zone or is there more to it?

There is a lot more to it, but a ton of people, like that author in Foreign Affairs I linked back on the 4th, seem to be under the impression that you can solve global problems with spam, computer security, inappropriate speech, hunger, and weapons poliferation by controlling the root zone. They basically have no fucking clue what they are talking about.

There are substantive international issues, but almost none of them is controversial. The only meaty ones are:

Whois privacy (something ICANN should never have stuck it's damn nose into in the first place).
Concerns about the nomenclature of the non-cc-tlds.
Concerns about internationalization/language support issues.
Concerns about monopolistic registrar practices and pricing (see Sitefinder).

The international community is involved in all of these discussions and no one who is talking about control of the root zone is concerned about any of these issues.

Thats it. Any sort of policy which outsteps this boundary is likely to be too coercive and will fragment the system. They very nearly did that with their inexplicable whois policy. Verisign very nearly did it with Sitefinder. You can rest assured that if the US pulled Iran's TLD the root servers would get a giant break on their transit bills that month. Any political or power oriented play in this space will break the system if it is successful. DNS can only function if it has nearly unanimous consent.

RE: Other Nations Hope to Loosen U.S. Grip on Internet

A bipartisan group of senators reached a compromise yesterday that would dramatically alter U.S. policy for treating captured terrorist suspects by granting them a final recourse to the federal courts but stripping them of some key legal rights.

Congress finally decides to get involved in the debate.

Senators Agree on Detainee Rights

Rove also denounced last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling Roper v. Simmons in which five justices ruled that convicted murderers under the age of 18 could not be put to death. Rove noted that 20 states allowed capital punishment for those under 18 and argued that the high court was depriving those states of the right to self-government.

Minors can't vote and they don't have much money and they don't really read the paper anyway, so the papers run sensationalistic stories on youth crime because it speaks to their target market. Local corrupt politicians want to speak to that market too, so they pass laws cracking down on young people and especially young criminals. They crack down and crack down and crack down, year after year although it really doesn't have any effect. It makes good press. It keeps people elected.
Karl Rove wants to electocute people who are too "immature" to buy a beer or vote in an election or be outside after 11PM. When Breyer mentioned the fact that we're one of the only places left in the world that does this he was simply trying to prove that he isn't crazy. However, I view this in a slightly different light. I think this is one area in which the United States, up until Roper, could be viewed as primitive and backward. There is a reason that everyone else on the planet thinks this is immoral. It IS immoral. It is a brutal and primitive practice that most societies have outgrown. By leading the charge back to this Rove bares the banner of immorality.
When the federalist society talks about "limited government" what they mean is "limited (federal) government." The fact that the "federal" part is silent is the big lie of the right. They don't want individual liberty. They want unlimited state government, so their networks of old boys who are too corrupt or too stupid to make it on a federal level can oppress the crap out of people back home without any interference from those damn feds.

Rove re-emerges at conservative lawyers' group - Tom Curry - MSNBC.com

On June 9, the church received a letter from the IRS stating that "a reasonable belief exists that you may not be tax-exempt as a church … " The federal tax code prohibits tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from intervening in political campaigns and elections.

I had no idea that this kind of thing was grounds for loosing tax exempt status. Lots of meaty philosophical questions in here. No, I don't buy the idea that this is politically motivated in absense of data that demostrates a pattern across a spectrum of cases.

Antiwar Sermon Brings IRS Warning - Los Angeles Times

President Bush nominated Ben S. Bernanke, his top economic adviser, to replace Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

Everyone seems to be quietly pleased with this nomination. This is a relief.

Bush Nominates Bernanke to Succeed Greenspan as Fed Chief