Back when Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith came out, it was popular to compare the villains with the Bush administration. But now I see Google fitting better as Senator Amidala’s opponents, when now the firm’s supporters cheer as Eric Schmidt refuses even to consider the option of not storing your personal data. Says Fortune at CNN:

In one of the sharper exchanges of the afternoon, a questioner challenged Schmidt with the fact that Google is collecting a staggering amount of information about who we are, what we’re thinking, and even where we are. “All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?” It was quite the effective moment that showed we still trust government less than we trust Google. But should we trust either?

It doesn’t even cross their minds that we might ask Google not to build the database to begin with, because it’s a basic law of databases that they can always be put to another purpose.

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The California Republican Assembly, a 75 year old conservative group in this state, endorsed Chuck DeVore for Senate today with over 75% support on the first ballot.

“CRA must keep working and producing solid conservative candidates for office at all levels of government, and I hope that my fellow Californians will join the CRA team and get involved with a local chapter.” Ronald Reagan said that of the CRA years ago, and today the group proved itself to live up to those words still. The doubters question DeVore, even after his convincing debate victory, saying he has no name recognition, he has no fundraising, and he can’t win. The CRA stood up today and pushed back. Conservative activists know who he is, stand ready to give, and can be the backbone of a DeVore victory.

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The California Senate race is becoming a real free for all, as the candidates go after each other’s records with gusto, and it appears that Tom Campbell is taking the worst of it. It’s not a good sign when a candidate has to say that he does not help terrorists. What’s worse for him is that Carly Fiorina is not letting it go at that.

The Campbell statement to me seems rather weak, as it repeatedly tries to drag George W. Bush down with him, to use him as a shield in some vague way. But Fiorina is now calling on Campbell to correct that page, saying that the findings of the Investigative Project on Terrorism refute Campbell’s denial that he has worked to assist Sami Al-Arian, who has been convicted in the US of aiding anti-Israeli terror.

While it’s on the record that Sami Al-Arian once snagged an invitation to the White House under President Bush, apparently through campaign contacts, there is no record of Bush going out of his way to give assistance to the man specifically. Campbell on the other hand did.

Can friends of Israel trust Tom Campbell in the Senate or anywhere else where he can influence America’s foreign policy? I’m skeptical.

Update: There’s a debate coming at noon Pacific between the Republican candidates for Senate, which will be available online at ktkz.com live. Listen and judge for yourself if you like.

Senators Coburn, Inhofe, and Kyl have put out a letter explaining why conservatives should back Carly Fiorina for Senate instead of Chuck DeVore. I have problems with this letter. Here’s how.

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How do you like your Demon Sheep cooked? Or maybe you prefer him squished, mocked, or just plain sheared? Whatever your preference, today’s the day to Finish Him! with a hop on over to Chuck DeVore’s new Demon Sheep extermination website.

The California Senate primary has heated up in recent weeks. After Tom Campbell tucked tail from the Governor’s race, he immediately drew fire from the previous frontrunner, Carly Fiorina. And while her ad drew… attention, it is true that Tom Campbell is not the libertarian Republican he appears to be. Many support him because they believe he is a compromise: strong on fiscal issues, and “moderate” on social issues. The sad part is though: he’s neither.

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Mark Cuban is known these days for being the owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, a team he took from years of malaise to the NBA Finals. He didn’t get his start in sports though, no. He made his money in a pair of business ventures. First he sold a company called MicroSolutions – a hardware and software integrator – to CompuServe. From there he joined what became broadcast.com – an online multimedia streaming service – which netted him the billions in a sale to Yahoo. He’s since stayed in the broadcast field, now heading a venture called HDNet – a high definition video broadcasting service.

Suffice it to say Mark Cuban knows audio and video broadcasting.

So when Mark Cuban writes a lengthy article explaining in great detail how Senator Al “Stuart Smalley” Franken is completely, totally, and utterly wrong in his pronouncements on the future of online video, I listen.

Cuban conclusively shows how Franken’s proposed government mandates would make the Internet more expensive for everyone, would cripple a media giant, and make online television worse for the people who do use it today. Nobody wins under the Franken plan.

This idea is so bad, it’s a good thing the Democrats aren’t also proposing to regulate the entire Internet, in some sort of “Net Neutrality” scheme. Then they might really goof up.

When FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski uses words like “regulate” and “Internet,” they mean precisely what he wants them to mean when he says them. So when he says he does not want to regulate the Internet, he means that he only wants to treat the Internet the way he treats your local NBC affiliate broadcasting USA Curling to your home. That affiliate, of course, is fully regulated by the FCC.

Now a federal court appears poised to say no, that Comcast is right, and the law does not give the FCC the authority to regulate firms that provide information services, such as ISPs. In response to such a ruling, which would kill the vast “Net Neutrality” regulatory scheme before it started, the FCC is going to declare that ISPs are no longer IT firms. In other words, Julius Genachowski will take an unfavorable court ruling, change the meanings of the words, and do what the court just told him is illegal. He is arrogant and believes himself above all oversight and control.

Don’t think that’s a likely outcome? Every big name in the ISP industry says otherwise in a letter to Julius Genachowski acquired by The Hill.

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The conventional wisdom in this country is that incumbent Presidents effectively just don’t lose short of some freak events, such that in 2012 we should go in expecting defeat. That’s not the case. While it is true that in 2012 we will start off behind President Obama, the historical advantage of incumbency is not insurmountable. Especially if the President receives a serious primary challenge, we should go into the election expecting to beat him, not merely to contain losses downticket.

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A Senate debate was scheduled for the next California Republican convention, but Flash Report says it could be cancelled. The Chuck DeVore campaign says that effort is led by Carly Fiorina, a claim supported by her campaign’s announced refusal to participate in a Brandman University debate.

Jon Fleischman, who runs Flash Report and is taking the above linked poll, is a member of the board of the CRP. If his poll gets strong support for keeping the debate going, then he will likely use that as ammunition to argue for the actual vote to go in its favor. The vote is this morning though, so hurry over and vote and express yourself.

Julius Genachowski is Barack Obama’s head of the Federal Communications Commission. He thinks you’re an idiot. After famously calling for broadly expanded FCC powers to mandate “transparency” and “neutrality” on the Internet, and having that plan rejected by a growing, bipartisan coalition, he now denies he wants to regulate the Internet.

Meanwhile he also claims the FCC is trying to “win the case” against Comcast, who has sued to get a federal court to overturn the FCC’s claimed authority to regulate Internet activity. But we’re supposed to believe he doesn’t want to regulate the Internet. Right. The Wall Street Journal says that the FCC “took a beating” during an appeals court hearing on the case. A decision against the FCC could be crippling of Genachowski’s plans, but unfortunately on that front there’s nothing we activists can do but watch, and wait.

Though we can also join in the second comment period that the FCC has opened up on Net Neutrality. Your guess is as good as mine as to where on the FCC’s website we can do that, though. They’re not exactly transparent.

Given all the recent talk about Sarah Palin, and specifically whether she’d be a better President than the incumbent, we give you the Slurm® Keys to the Presidency, brought to you by new Slurm® Energy Drink. Keep the energy to party all night, Slurms MacKenzie™ Style!

Character

Under the stress of the job, the personal failings of “the man behind the desk” will come out. It’s no contest on this one. We’ve got a mother whose worst failings were to use the wrong email account and to stand up to a wife beater, versus the cokehead Community Organizer.

Score: Wholesome Mom 1, Chicago Roughhouser 0

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Now that word has spread that the works and sources of the International Panel on Climate Change are neither “peer reviewed” nor based on “peer reviewed” publications, here come the consequences and loss of credibility. India is quitting the IPCC, and the quote from Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh is just beautiful:

There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science.

Don’t mess with this Ramesh, either.

The fraud at the IPCC is particularly relevant to India because the Himalayan glaciers are a local matter, so India is now to found its own National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to study the matter. It will begin producing its own reports in November. Of course, those will probably be blacked out in the press because they’re not blessed by international bureaucrats and WWF reports.

What does Google-Free Press Net Neutrality plan mean for the American economy? We’ve already seen that American innovation would be harmed, but what about the politically all-important question of employment and the economy now?

Entropy Economics tackled that question and and the results aren’t pretty.

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I ‘d just like to pass along a story I’ve been told about Free Press, one of the neo-Marxist groups spearheading the Net Neutrality drive. These guys so often will condescend to you and assume you know nothing of technology or the issues if you dare to disagree with them.

And yet…

So Free Press is supposed to be this expert on Telecoms and what not, but I just tried to sit on a press conference call with them and it was a cluster[****]. First, they sent out a number and password that didn’t work, so their phone lines were busy with reporters calling in to say they couldn’t get in on a call. Then, once the call started, they apparently didn’t know how to put all the reporters on mute. The end result was that some AP reporter absentmindly put the call on hold and then started watching some AP report on her computer or television. So halfway through the call all of a sudden the entire thing is drowned out by this news caster’s voice, and the Free Press people start panicking and screaming at the people to turn the newscast off. By the time they got everything situated, 15 reporters had left the call and they weren’t even able to finish the QandA session.

It makes me laugh just imagining this, as even a non-reporter like me has been on calls run with varying levels of expertise. I wish it had been recorded.

The FCC has opened a second comments period regarding the Free Press-Google Net Neutrality plan (the White House having publicly tucked tail on the matter), so here’s another reminder of why we need to oppose the whole ball of wax: It serves to benefit freeloaders at the expense or producers in a manner so pure it might fit in an Ayn Rand novel.

In short, groups like the EFF are saying the current draft doesn’t go far enough to protect copyright infringers and their downloaders from ‘abuses’ by copyright holders, their agents, and ISPs. Seriously. Says Spencer Dalziel at theinquirer.net:

Channeling well known Scottish actor, Mel Gibson’s bravado call to action in Braveheart, EFF’s Richard Esguerra said, “Carving a copyright loophole in net neutrality would leave your lawful activities at the mercy of overbroad copyright filtering schemes, and we already have plenty of experience with copyright enforcers targeting legitimate users by mistake, carelessness, or design.”

Freeloading, cheapskate downloaders who refuse to spend $10 on a movie or an iTunes album expect you (yes you, dear reader), me, and everyone else to subsidize their use of the network to make those downloads. Seriously. They want to make it illegal for ISPs to clamp down on such activities, and at least thwart efforts to make the users of BitTorrent-based download services pay for their pipe-busting activities.

No, BitTorrent the protocol is not exclusively used for copyright infringing downloads, but the peer-to-peer download setup, combined with the tracker’s ability to go without hosting the source material and instead just host hashes, is great for giving centralized hosts deniability as well as pushing last mile bandwidth use far beyond any normal use pattern. The latter is even a deliberate design feature of the protocol. But the freeloaders want to get to pay the same amount for that use, that you or I may pay for ordinary email and webpage use.

Ayn Rand’s famous novel had America’s best and brightest withdraw from society entirely. Net Neutrality as wished by the far left may not send anyone that far, but subsidzed copyright infringement will sure make some of America’s creative people go Galt instead of just putting their works out to be stolen online. I’m no Atlas, but I shrug at the EFF’s selfish, immature moaning at the plight of the looters, parasites, and moochers of our new economy.

Update: I’m told that today is Ayn Rand’s birthday. What a day for her to have been proven right about government.

The Chuck DeVore moneybomb is still going! Thanks to the support of 43 generous RedStaters, my moneybomb tag has us atop the chart! But we have to watch out: One max donation to another of the leaders could take away our position.

And as for the bomb itself, DeVore needs only $11k more of the $60k he wanted to raise today. I know times are hard in this Obama economy, particularly for those of us in Democrat-run California, but candidates like Chuck are the way out. So please consider chipping something in if possible, especially if you haven’t given to Chuck before.

Chuck DeVore has a money bomb going today to aid his effort to humble and unseat Babs Boxer. I hope the right can flex some muscle and support him.

This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you he’s another Marco Rubio, Doug Hoffman, or Scott Brown. I won’t. Every candidate has his own strengths and weaknesses, although DeVore has been outspoken in support of each of those three candidates. I will say that DeVore is the only candidate running for statewide office in California with a proven pro-life, pro-marriage, anti-spending, anti-tax voting record. DeVore has had more fundraising success than Republicans in years past did, and it’s only February 1.

Chuck DeVore has also gained the endorsement of Tom McClintock, he says. McClintock also has a proven record in fighting the Democrats in their outrageous free spending ways, and is notable in Washington for his bill to allow early TARP repayment to free businesses from Barney Frank’s and Barack Obama’s grabbing, regulating hands.

Feel free to donate under my tag or sign up to join the money bomb yourself and run up your own score.

Do we actually want to run a candidate like Tom Campbell, who favors massive gas tax hikes and goes to national magazines to write against marriage? Or Carly Fiorina who believes the American tradition equality of opportunity is insufficient, and we need rigged outcomes to get equality? I don’t think so.

I was thinking today while I was out making a quick trip: We on the right have fouled up badly our responses to the visit President Obama made to the GOP retreat.

We’ve spent the whole time bashing Republicans and talking about how great Obama looks on television, when we missed what the true, underlying message was: The President spent his first year in office trying to ignore us, but now has had to come crawling back like the miserable failure that he is.

He’s the President, so he’ll never look like he’s on his hands and knees begging for whatever legislative scraps we’ll deign to give him, but that’s precisely what he’s doing now. He’s accomplished not one major component of his long-run agenda: Card Check, Cap and Tax, Obamacare, repeal NAFTA, close Guantanamo Bay, retreat from Iraq. He’s done nothing without us, and now he needs us.

The magnitude of this failure is magnified by the huge Congressional majorities his party has commanded, including the filibuster-proof Senate majority he had between the seating of Senator Franken and the victory of Senator-elect Brown. The President is on a street corner hoping we’ll buy an apple or a pencil from him. He’s failed that badly as a President so far. Let’s remember that, and remind both ourselves and the President’s supporters of that.

I thought only the Human Rights Commission people were dumb enough to make their lifestyle issue out to be the biggest thing since Selma. But now, Free Press is doing the same thing with Net Neutrality. And I know it says it’s the “blogger” section, but this blogger is Free Press Outreach Coordinator Jordan Berg, not some troublemaker off the virtual street. But he seriously wrote last week:

As we commemorate Dr. King’s legacy – which was created and pushed by youth to inspire future generations to work toward equality – we must remember their message: It is not enough to work for change; we need the means to inspire that change. A generation ago, young people across the country organized to give us a day dedicated to that message. Today our fight for justice and racial equality is also about control of the Internet: Will it belong to us or to the corporations?

It marks Berg and Free Press as unserious even to make the mere juxtaposition of Net Neutrality with the fight against the former Confederacy’s Jim Crow adminstered by 80 years of one-party Democrat rule (which for today’s generations too young to remember, was comparable with South Africa’s Apartheid administered by 50 years of one-party National Party rule). And yet, sadly, right wing groups such as the Gun Owners of America and the Christian Coalition, as well as libertarians like Glenn Reynolds, continue to allow their names to be associated with Save the Internet, a front group of Free Press’s. I hope readers who know or are affliated with Save the Internet coalition members will speak up.

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Remember when I accused Google of censoring search hints? Some of the reactions were just hysterical. So many technically inclined people on the right have a reflexive desire to defend Google and make the kindest assumptions about the company. The company itself claimed that it was all coincidence.

Further research showed that Google was also censoring criticism of Islam, a claim that was met with the same incredulity.

Enter The Jawa Report. Their emailer noticed that hey, now suddenly Google comes up with the a whole list of negative description of Islam just like it does for Christianity, where before there was nothing. Is anyone going to claim that such a sudden, dramatic change is just the random fluctuation of an algorithm? I hope not.

Between Google standing up to China and Islam, I have to wonder if public scrutiny is making the company realize that they must actually be neutral if they want to expect others to be (net) neutral. That would be a benefit to us all given the firm’s market power. Time will tell.