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U.N. could tax U.S.-based Web sites, leaked docs show
Whoa! This is getting too much! The Useless Nations is sure wanting to take over the freaking world, or at least the USA! It is damn time for our government to clamp down hard on the un!
Global Internet tax suggested by European network operators, who want Apple, Google, and other Web companies to pay to deliver content, is proposed for debate at a U.N. agency in December.
The United Nations is considering a new Internet tax targeting the largest Web content providers, including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix, that could cripple their ability to reach users in developing nations.
The European proposal, offered for debate at a December meeting of a U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, would amend an existing telecommunications treaty by imposing heavy costs on popular Web sites and their network providers for the privilege of serving non-U.S. users, according to newly leaked documents.
The documents (No. 1 No. 2) punctuate warnings that the Obama administration and Republican members of Congress raised last week about how secret negotiations at the ITU over an international communications treaty could result in a radical re-engineering of the Internet ecosystem and allow governments to monitor or restrict their citizens’ online activities.
“It’s extremely worrisome,” Sally Shipman Wentworth, senior manager for public policy at the Internet Society, says about the proposed Internet taxes. “It could create an enormous amount of legal uncertainty and commercial uncertainty.”
The leaked proposal was drafted by the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association, or ETNO, a Brussels-based lobby group representing companies in 35 nations that wants the ITU to mandate these fees.
While this is the first time this proposal been advanced, European network providers and phone companies have been bitterly complaining about U.S. content-providing companies for some time. France Telecom, Telecom Italia, and Vodafone Group, want to “require content providers like Apple and Google to pay fees linked to usage,” Bloomberg reported last December.
ETNO refers to it as the “principle of sending party network pays” — an idea borrowed from the system set up to handle payments for international phone calls, where the recipient’s network set the per minute price. If its proposal is adopted, it would spell an end to the Internet’s long-standing, successful design based on unmetered “peered” traffic, and effectively tax content providers to reach non-U.S. Internet users.
Read more HERE (and pass this on to your family, friends, and moer!)
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Somewhere between the time in October 2010 he threatened to sue Patrick Frey and the decision last week to make a similar threat toward Ali Akbar, Brett Kimberlin crossed a Rubicon of desperation and burned the bridge behind him. In the past three weeks, Kimberlin and his allies have escalated their deceitful war against conservative bloggers to the point that it cannot be ignored, and must now be fought to a conclusion with the entire political world watching.
A convicted perjurer and drug smuggler, Kimberlin became infamous as the ”Speedway Bomber” who terrorized an Indiana town in 1978. Kimberlin somehow managed to secure a well-funded role in the progressive movement after being released from federal prison in 2001. Ten days ago, when I covered Kimberlin’s bizarre activities in an American Spectator column (“Terror by Any Other Name”), the director of the 501(c)3 non-profit Justice Through Music Project was just beginning to gain renewed attention. On May 25, a broad spectrum of conservative online activists joined together for “Everybody Blog About Brett Kimberlin Day” to call attention to Kimberlin’s harassment and intimidation of bloggers who wrote about his criminal history.
During his 17 years in federal custody, Kimberlin became a skillful “jailhouse lawyer,” filing more than 100 legal proceedings on his own behalf and, over the past two years, he has deployed those methods in a series of lawsuits and criminal accusations against his chosen targets. Another non-profit Kimberlin co-founded, Velvet Revolution, made headlines by offering rewards for evidence of wrongdoing by public figures including GOP strategist Karl Rove and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue. And then a left-winger who used the alias “Socrates” began to speak out on a number of Internet forums, expressing his suspicion that Kimberlin and his Velvet Revolution partner, prominent liberal blogger Brad Friedman, were running a dishonest scam.
“Socrates,” it turned out, was an eccentric young Massachusetts resident named Seth Allen. Believing that Velvet Revolution’s frequent accusations of Republican election fraud and other right-wing crimes were a bogus fundraising gimmick, Allen started doing online research, discovered Kimberlin’s infamous history and persistently wrote about it, getting himself banned from several progressive websites in the process. In October 2010, Kimberlin sued Allen for more than $2 million, charging him with “defamation, libel, cyberstalking, and tortuous interference with business.” That lawsuit tipped the first in a series of dominoes that have been sequentially toppling with increasing rapidity ever since.
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Free speech is under fire. Online thugs are targeting bloggers (mostly conservative, but not all) who have dared to expose a convicted bomber and perjuring vexatious litigant who is now enjoying a comfy life as a liberally subsidized social justice operative. Where do your elected representatives stand on this threat to our founding principles?
On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-GA, bravely stepped forward to press this vital issue. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Chambliss decried the “harassing and frightening actions” of Internet menaces who recently have gone after several conservative new media citizen journalists and activists.
GOP Rep. Kenny Marchant of Texas added his voice, telling Holder in a statement that he is “very afraid of the potential chilling effects that these reported actions may have in silencing individuals who would otherwise be inclined to exercise their Constitutional right to free speech.” And the American Center for Law and Justice, a leading conservative free speech public interest law firm, announced it was providing legal representation to the National Bloggers Club — a new media association that has provided support and raised funds for targets of this coordinated harassment. (Full disclosure: I volunteer on the National Bloggers Club board of directors.)
The ACLJ described the importance of the case very simply: “Free speech is under attack.”
Read more HERE>
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President Obama is backpedaling furiously after his poorly chosen words at a news conference this morning caused a massive backlash:
We’ve created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months; over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine.
Mitt Romney’s camp quickly seized on the slipup, calling it the “gift that keeps on giving”:
People know what the president said is terribly out of touch. But they also know that his actions have been terribly out of touch. So what he is saying is shocking but it’s not anything that people haven’t felt.
Ours is a reality-based campaign, and this is reality.
Obama attempted to clarify his remarks this afternoon: ”It is absolutely clear that the economy is not doing fine. That’s why I had a press conference.”
From : mediaite
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For those of you that think rachel maddow is okay at times? Get freaking real!
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was honored in Washington during a discussion and light lunch hosted for a largely female audience at the Sewall-Belmont House & Museum. She was honored by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who “largely praised Pelosi throughout the interview” and at one point referred to her former speakership as “Sam Rayburn-esque.” Rayburn was Speaker for 17 years and one of the House office buildings is named after him.
“TARP, the stimulus, health reform, Wall Street reform, student loan reform, the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the new GI bill,” Maddow began. “The number of major pieces of legislation that you not only saw passed in the House — but we can also include cap-and-trade, we can include the DREAM Act there — but beyond those, the ones that also became law is, and I don’t just mean to flatter you, but is [the] kind of list of legislation we associate with people whom we name large buildings after in Washington.”
The Washington Examiner added that Maddow’s suggestion got a wave of applause and one shout of “yes, please” from the largely female crowd.
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‘True Blood’ Creator Says Conservatives Are the Same as Vampires
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Koran-burning pastor hangs Barack Obama in effigy in Florida church’s front yard Now you know holder and company will be all over this guy! Plus of course those race baiters al sharpton and jesse jackson!
CBS: Boss’ ‘partisanship’ comment doesn’t mean CBS
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