Does everyone have the right to affordable access to a landline phone?

[Update: David Cay Johnston emailed me to clarify some points in my post. He said:

Also, it is not necessarily a subsidy to provide rural service at the same price as other service. Calling it a subsidy depends, partly, on making a value judgement about the network. If you cannot reach a relative or business in a rural place the utility of the network is reduced, making it less valuable to you and everyone else. So urban callers get a benefit, too, from rural service.

And as my column carefully points out, people in URBAN areas could end up without phones or with only high-cost phones under the rules the phone companies are writing and getting enacted, in four states so far, into law.]

I must admit that this is not a question that had occurred to a city dweller like me who takes such access for granted. But David Cay Johnston says that there is a nearly century-old obligation for phone companies that provided landline service to also be providers of last resort to all at the same price, so that people in remote areas are not disadvantaged. [Read more…]

Curveball admits lies

One of the key sources of false information that was fed to the US government about Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction program was from an Iraqi defector codenamed ‘Curveball’. He now proudly admits that he made it all up.

Of course, the reason he was believed uncritically was because he told the Bush-Cheney administration and its neoconservative warmongers exactly what they wanted to hear, and the government embellished his stories even further to sell that war to the public.

Ahmed Rashid on The Daily Show

The Pakistani journalist tries to explain to Jon Stewart the convoluted relationship between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US, complicated by the differences between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban. Short version: The situation in Afghanistan became a mess as soon as the US shifted its attention to Iraq without first building decent infrastructure in Afghanistan, and it is now time to leave. [Read more…]

Fox News at the Reason Rally

Via The Digital Cuttlefish I found a video that Bill O’Reilly’s show shot of the Reason Rally. It is a bit disjointed with some weird cross-cutting but not too bad. The people they interviewed were pretty articulate and gave a good account of themselves. This means that either O’Reilly’s team did not go too far out of its way to selectively edit the footage to make the rallyers look bad or that they simply were not able to get video to allow them to portray atheists as crazy people.

Being cautious with police

In a previous post, I mentioned how one needs to be very cautious in how one responds to police requests for information, unless it is clear that you are being called upon as a mere witness, say of an accident. If there is the slightest chance that you may be a possible target, then you should invoke the Fifth Amendment and get a lawyer. It is not that you should never cooperate because after all the police need the assistance of law-abiding people to solve crimes. But you usually have plenty of time to do so. There is nothing to be gained and a lot to be lost by being in a hurry to be helpful. [Read more…]