Category: Blogosphere

We’ll see

~ susie

Net Neutrality flyer

These guys will try, but I don’t know that it’ll be enough:

A group of Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives to restore net neutrality rules at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

The two bills, introduced Monday, come about three weeks after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District Columbia Circuit struck down rules, passed by the FCC in late 2010, prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web traffic.

The new bill, called the Open Internet Preservation Act, would restore the FCC’s net neutrality, or open Internet, rules. The rules would remain in effect until the FCC takes new action on net neutrality, after the court left open the agency’s authority to pass new rules if it finds a new way to write them.

Among the nine Democratic cosponsors in the House are Representatives Henry Waxman, Anna Eshoo, Zoe Lofgren and Doris Matsui of California. Among the six Senate cosponsors are Senators Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Al Franken of Minnesota and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

Internet outages today

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I couldn’t get into the site for a while.

Here’s the map of AT&T outages. It also affected Comcast, Verizon and Charter customers.

Some of us could only get into some pages. It’s better now than it was an hour ago. Many subscribers are without internet, television or working phones. When I find out what happened, we’ll update.

Working

~ susie

Cluster Headache

The birds are twittering. A picturesque snow flurry is falling. And as I sit here, I have excruciating pain on the right side of my head that starts at the top and runs all the way down behind my ear. That is why I am drinking a Diet Pepsi and wearing a Velcroed ice pack around my head.

I’m beginning to think this has more to do with the chronic TMJ problem than my sinuses. (I have an appointment with the chiro this afternoon.)

I have such chronic tension in my neck and shoulders, you could bounce a brick off me. I’m running the other site, where it gets so busy, I sometimes forget to come back here and post. (Sorry!) I’m always feeding that goddamned media beast. So between that and the mechanical problems that come with being deskbound all day, I am fucked up. I am an assembly-line worker.

It’s my life has been wasted/And I who’ve been a fool/To let this manufacturer use my body for a tool.

Writers are no longer paid to write, they’re “content providers.” And the machine grinds on.

Virtually Speaking Sunday

~ susie

6pm PT/9pm ET
This week, commentators Dave Johnson (Campaign for America’s Future) & Cliff Schecter (Libertas LLC) talk about good public policy as popular public policy. and how a government jobs program with a minimum wage increase would be both, e.g. Moral Mondays and Gillibrand’s populist “Opportunity Agenda.”

A ridiculous moment from Culture of Truth…

Then potential progressive options to a Clinton candidacy e.g., Sanders, Schweitzer, O’Malley; and the impact they may have on the Democratic Party as well as Clinton’s positions and campaign.

Listen live or later.

Work, work, work

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

bedtime for workaholic 1

I have to say, I’m working my butt off over at the other place for the past few weeks. It’s kind of addicting, putting stuff up and seeing the page views jump like that. It’s been years since I had that experience!

But of course many of the regulars are very angry. Change is hard, routine is comforting, and many of them hate the design. They ridicule almost everything we put up, and complain that we don’t do more.

I don’t get to vent over there, so I will here. Here it is: Political blogs do not run on rainbows and unicorns, especially the big ones. All those little goodies readers like, like the videos and the daily newsletter, cost money. It’s a couple of thousand dollars a month just to rent the servers to host the videos. And as far as donations go: meh. Here’s the weird part: I get more in donations than they do, and I’m just this small blog.

And the readers are being quite vocal and nasty. They accuse us of selling out (we didn’t). If I put up an interesting story in the tech section about some new gadget (you know how I like this stuff), they insist it’s a paid ad. (I wish.) Then they complain if no one writes a post about something in the news — as if, you know, I had a staff and could make assignments. I don’t and I can’t. It’s not 100% volunteer, but maybe 98%.

Anyway, the contrast reminds how much I like the little community we have here. It keeps getting smaller, but I like y’all and I’m glad you’re here. Now just turn off your Adblocker (because that’s how I make money) and I’ll be happy as a pig in shit.

Sorry

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

For being so distracted, but as you may already know, we’ve given birth to a new design over at C&L and I’ve been working like crazy this week. Please stop by when you can and take a look!

cl_theme_logo

Virtually Speaking Thursday

~ susie

Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd – 9p ET –

From Jay:
Ian’s been raising a bit of ruckus these days. You can read about his history of the failure of the netroots to influence Democratic politics and therefore US policy makers, which engendered a number of reactions. This week we discuss the issues embodied in three of Ian’s recent posts:

Baseline Predictions for the next sixty years

A New Ideology

How to Create a Viable Ideology

Listen live or later