Marsha Blackburn: On Municipal Broadband

Ms. Blackburn issued this press release recently. I'd like to ask the Congresswoman to clarify something. You are defending the states' rights, yes. But which rights, specifically? The rights to override the will of the people of a city or town? You claim to be in favor of small, local government. Yet the policies you are defending seem inconsistent with this. You are, in fact, defending the power of central government over local, and using the power of an even more remote government to do it.

I'd like to better understand how this is consistent. Why is it acceptable for the states to dictate terms to the people of their cities? I understand the legal structures are different, but that's a technicality and a cop-out. As a matter of principle, why should a remote central government be able to override the will of a local government in this one case, but not in others?

Please understand, I'm neither Republican nor Democrat, neither conservative nor liberal. Others may put me in such boxes, but when it comes to politics, I'm simply an engineer. I want things to work, I want to fix broken things. And like any observer, I can tell you that our broadband market is broken. Internet speeds in Tennessee are slow, service is abusive, and there is no market of competition to drive innovation. This map shows that the majority of the state doesn't even have two broadband options; you need far more than that to drive a free market! Further, Comcast is a clear example of regulatory capture and the continuous legalized bribery of our elected officials. We live in a government-sponsored monopoly, not a free market.

So if we live in a government-sponsored monopoly, what's so wrong with admitting that, and doing it right? It's what we do with every other utility, and they operate quite well. Several municipalities in Tennessee built local fiber networks before 2008, when the state legislature was 'lobbied' into making building such networks much harder. All these networks provide vastly better speeds than the state or national average. Some are among the fastest in the country, literally a hundred times faster than the rest of the state, and remain a point of technological pride for our state.

In short, municipal broadband works. Or at least it has some hope of working. It's perfectly clear that our current corporate ISPs don't, and never will.

So I have to ask, Ms. Blackburn, why are you fighting so hard to maintain the status quo? Right now, most of our state is locked into an unresponsive, dysfunctional monopoly, with no hope of competition to improve our lot. Those cities that have acted to improve the situation have succeeded; their citizens have better lives and more options. Yet your actions work to lock us into the same dysfunctional system. Why? What matter of principle could possibly justify such a hurtful act towards the people you were elected to serve? It's clearly not about central government vs. local government, we've established that already.

So what is it? Even if your constituents don't deserve modern utilities, they at least deserve an answer from you on this.

The GOP candidate field (part 1)

We all know the 2012 elections will be a poor imitation of a functioning democracy. All our elections in my lifetime have been that. Our democracy is fundamentally broken on a number of levels, and if you follow this blog for long, you'll read plenty about the exact reasons why!

But that doesn't mean you give up. Democracy is best served by ensuring that we, the voters, have the best possible candidates to choose from. It's a foregone conclusion that, for good or ill, Pres. Obama will be the Democratic party's candidate in 2012. It's similarly as certain as one can reasonably be that either a Democrat or a Republican will win that election. This means that the most significant impact most of us can have on this election may be to help select the Republican nominee. I encourage everyone who can, either as party members or in open primaries, to become informed and vote in the Republican primary. I similarly encourage those who do not care to become informed to not vote, which would only serve to reduce the influence of those of us who care.

To that end, I will be posting my comments on the GOP contenders as the primary progresses. It is my hope to provide useful information to any who are planning to vote.

Let's take a look at the candidate field, and make some preliminary observations. As of this writing, there are fifteen declared candidates. I'll knock out the easy ones first. Keep in mind that I'm not looking at any polling data so far, beyond preliminary indications that Paul and Bachmann are doing well. This is all based on positions and public statements.

• We can reasonably conclude that Jonathon Sharkey is not a serious candidate.
• Rick Perry has a few points against him. He seems to think it's perfectly okay to throw about public accusations of capital crimes that he can't back up in court. By that standard, I suppose it would be okay for me to say Rick Perry is a murderer. If he can't tell the difference between a political opinion and a statement of hard legal fact, he has no business being in any sort of office. It's also impressive how he both claims credit for Texas' balanced budget, while decrying the Federal handouts that covered Texas' budget shortfall. Total hypocrisy. And his Politifact record is not encouraging.
  
• Michelle Bachmann has a Politifact record as bad as any I've seen. She frequently makes public political statements that are totally divorced from reality. She's either horribly uninformed, or purposefully deceptive, neither of which is an acceptable quality in a leader. In congress, she complained that the 2010 census has become to intrusive, even though it's nearly identical to previous censuses. She believes that CO2 is in no way harmful. (It is.) And then there's the simple fact that she's been part of the Republican House effort to hold the entire country hostage via the debt ceiling to achieve their unpopular political ends. Oh, and she voted to reauthorize the PATRIOT act, as well.
  
• McCotter, also in the House, also held the country hostage, also voted to reauthorize the PATRIOT act. Any of those makes him unacceptable in my book. On the plus side, he did vote to end the Bush tax cuts, one of the leading drivers of the present deficit, after having earlier voted to extend them. Of course, so did Bachmann, so that's not exactly saying much. His voting record and positions don't seem totally insane. Perhaps the best we can say for him is that he hasn't opened his mouth on camera enough to even have a Politifact record.
• Newt Gingrich has surprisingly sane positions on a number of things, but again, his politifact is just ridiculous. My biggest single problem is his total flop on Libya. There's just no way on earth to buy his explanation of that. I see no better answer but that he was disagreeing with Pres. Obama just to do it. Newt's also got a couple other flips and pants-on-fire moments that raise eyebrows.

So those were five relatively easy ones: I can't support any of them. Newt is perhaps the least offensive, but that's damning with faint praise.

Cain, Huntsman, Johnson, Karger, Martin, McMillan, Paul, Roemer, Romney, and Santorum will wait for another post.