Susan Estrada
President, FirstMile.US
http://www.firstmile.us

Big Broadband Bill of Rights

Preamble

During the last 20 years, the main tenets of Internet development included building and sustaining an open, interoperable, scalable network of networks that robustly supports a variety of applications and devices. As we look forward to a ubiquitous big broadband environment, these basic philosophies still hold true.

To understand how big broadband should evolve, it is essential to understand the three distinct portions of a big broadband connection.

The first is the pipe — essentially the path, street or highway connecting you to the rest of the broadband network. These can be wireless or wired or a combination of the two.

The second portion is the applications - this is what you can do over the broadband pipe. These are sometimes software-based, but may be built-in to certain devices.

And, finally, there are devices and computers that you need to attach to your pipe that provide specific functions to help you more readily access applications.

These articles will best ensure the benefits of big broadband for all members of the American public.

The Atlantic Monthly for July - August has two remarkable essays that are very much worth the effort to find and read. The Atlantic famously does not make its content available online without a full subscription. The essays are, however, easily worth the $6.00 newstand price for the issue.

The first essay is by James Fallows and is titled:

Countdown to a Meltdown
America’s Coming economic crisis.
A look back from the election of 2016

Fallows describes three periods leading up to the demise of the two party system:
1] Cocking the Gun; 2] Pulling the Trigger and 3] Bleeding.

Oliver Willis has a great blog posting that exposes the hypocrisy of the Tom Delays of the Religious Right Party: Where Were the Republicans? This sad event took place in TEXAS last September 25th.

“I talked to him, I told him that I loved him. Inside of me, my son is still alive,” Wanda Hudson told reporters afterward. “This hospital [Texas Children’s Hospital] was considered a miracle hospital. When it came to my son, they gave up in six months. … They made a terrible mistake.”

Sun’s death marks the first time a U.S. judge has allowed a hospital to discontinue an infant’s life-sustaining care against a parent’s wishes, according to bioethical experts.

snip…

Facing a chasm in higher ed
By Derrick Z. Jackson

Mr. Jackson has an excellent Op-Ed in today’s Boston Globe that clearly illustrates a stark choice facing the Democratic party. Is the party to once again become the party of the people with a membership that is as well and fully educated as the members of the Money Party led by the GOP? Will the 80% of the population that goes to public colleges get an education based on the justice as fairness of equal opportunity for all?

Governor Howard Dean, M.D.
Chairperson
Democratic National Committee
430 S. Capital Street, SE
Washington, D.C. 20003

Dear Governor Dean:

Let me congratulate you on becoming the head of the Democratic Party. Let me introduce myself. I am the chairperson of the Medford Democratic Issues Committee. I have been a member of the Democratic Party since I was eighteen years old, even though at that time I didn’t have the right to vote. I have seen a lot of changes in the party since then. As a Democrat, I would probably be considered an FDR liberal or a Johnson liberal. I have worked on the campaigns for President Johnson and worked in his administration on education for disabled people at the Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare under contract. I have also worked on President Carter’s campaign as a coordinator on a volunteer basis. I have been involved in Democratic Party grassroots ever since President Carter’s losing campaign. My committee and I firmly believe that what you are trying to accomplish is both noble and essential for the party of the “big tent”.

David Eisenberg has a great blog entry on John Negroponte over on his isen.blog

John Negroponte in Honduras

Torture, especially when my country does it and helps others do it, ties my stomach in knots when I think about it. Denial is easier. But the nomination of John Negroponte by the Bush Administration to be U.S. “security” czar demands non-denial.

John Negroponte was US Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985. This jaw-dropping 1995 article in the Baltimore Sun documents this era with declassified U.S. documents, interviews with survivors of torture by U.S. trained troops that took place with U.S. knowledge, and with a 1993 investigation by the Honduras government itself.

A few excerpts from the Sun article:

“Extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detentions and the lack of due process … characterized these years of intolerance,” stated the [1993] report of the National Commissioner for the Protection of Human Rights in Honduras. “Perhaps more troublesome than the violations themselves was the authorities’ tolerance of these crimes and the impunity with which they were committed.”

and …..

I strongly recommend Jonathan Raban’s new essay in the New York Review of Books.

The Truth About Terrorism

1.

In his November 3 victory speech, President Bush, sounding the keynote of his second administration, pledged to “fight this war on terror with every resource of our national power.” By saying “this” rather than “the” Bush stressed the palpable, near-at-hand quality of the war whose symbols have grown to surround us in the last three years—the tilted barrels of security cameras, BioWatch pathogen-sniffers, and all the rest of the technology of security and surveillance that Matthew Brzezinski somewhat overexcitedly details in Fortress America. Voters, at least, have been impressed. Responding to the exit pollers’ question “Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?” 32 percent of Bush supporters named “Terrorism” (as against 5 percent of Kerry supporters), 85 percent of Bush supporters said that the country was “safer from terrorism” in 2004 than it was in 2000, and 79 percent said that the war in Iraq “has improved the long-term security of the United States.”

by Dana Blankenhorn
Can the Constitution contradict itself?
It has before. The original document, and its amendments, made a clear claim to equality. But the same document valued black slaves as being 3/5th of a human being, for census purposes, and endorsed their status.
The 14th Amendment was added, after the Civil War, to end this contradiction. (http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.amendmentxiv.html)
“No […]