There is no inconsistency between protecting an open Internet and safeguarding intellectual property. Protecting intellectual property is not the same as censorship; the First Amendment does not protect stealing goods off trucks.

This isn’t even wrong: it just takes two unrelated concepts — internet content and theft — and puts them in vague proximity to one another. We’re supposed to hear “stealing” and think oh noes stealing! and then blindly sign on to whatever it takes to make the stealing stop — which, in this case, means making the internet, as we know it, stop.

Because what our current laws do protect (sticking with this demented mixed metaphor for a moment) is the right to drive your truck around even if there’s a chance that it contains stolen goods — or, more to the point, even if someone gets it in his head that it contains stolen goods and asserts as much, without proof. If we were to apply the same standard to truck content as this stupid bill does to website content, then:

1. The truck could be forced off the road if some jerk with an axe to grind writes a letter to the Trucking Authority saying he suspects it’s carrying contraband. That’s all it would take. No judge, no lawsuit, no cops — just a notice.
2. The trucking company could be cut off from its payment processors and advertisers — effectively preventing it from doing business — and removed from the yellow pages. Again, without due process.
3. Furthermore, any third party running an ad for — or otherwise directing customers to — the trucking company would also be breaking the law, and be liable for damages, because of the bill’s “anti-circumvention” clause.
4. Conversely, if the Trucking Authority — either through an (understandable) excess of caution, or for more nefarious reasons — preemptively does any of this stuff without an actual due-process-free takedown notice, they’d be effectively immune from liability.

And this is to say nothing of the government itself — which, as the silencing of Wikileaks has demonstrated, is more than willing to bring extra-legal pressure to bear in order to silence its critics, even without the express authority to do so.

In short: if this becomes law, we can look forward to media behemoths training their giant howitzers on little guys who post non-infringing content, taking them down without even having to pull the trigger. We can look forward to curated link sites like BoingBoing and Slashdot severely curtailing what they link to, and getting sued out of existence if they’re not careful enough (or even if they are); and sites that depend on user-generated content (like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and MetaFilter) going dark, unless they find a way to severely restrict what people can post.

We can look forward to sites suddenly disappearing from the internet, just like that.

Again: the end of the internet as we know it. An endless vista of possibility reduced to a nightmare of chainlink fences and disappeared websites and everyone always looking over their shoulder, not sure where the next blow is going to come from, or why.

Anybody who tells you this isn’t a free speech issue is either deeply confused about what free speech is or — far more likely — lying. Don’t believe them.

Well, waterboarding is torture. It’s illegal under international law and under our law. It’s also immoral. And it’s also very impractical. There’s no evidence that you really get reliable evidence. Why would you accept the position of torturing 100 people because you know one person might have information? And that’s what you do when you accept the principle of torture. I think it’s uncivilized and has no practical advantages and is really un-American to accept on principle that we will torture people that we capture.

It’s too bad Paul is so cooky in other ways — he’s smart and consistently reasonable about these sorts of things, certainly more so than most of his peers. Herman Cain sounds a lot more like a GOP candidate:

I agree that it was an enhanced interrogation technique….I don’t see it as torture. I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique.

I think the lesson for the kids here is that the way to get away with doing bad stuff is through the magic of calling it something else. Example:

Teacher: Young man, I want you to stop talking during my class.

Lil’ Yoo: I wasn’t talking. I was practicing extroverted thinking techniques.

Teacher: What?

Lil’ Yoo: I was thinking with sounds.

Teacher: You were talking to Lil’ Rummy.

Lil’ Rummy: He was extroverted thinking in my direction.

I’d call this Orwellian, but it lacks the panache of something like, say, the Ministry of Love. It’s just dumb.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

And this, on the slow, steady degradation of our political institutions:

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

I think you can argue that the eight years of the Bush/Cheney presidency — and the Delay congress — puts Nixon to shame, at least in terms of damage done. Pound for pound, those guys did more to soil our precious little plot of democracy than anyone that came before them. But it sounds like Nixon was their template.

Which just turns reasonable people away from politics. Which, in turn, strengthens the zealots’ hand.

• Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid are essentially cordoned off from any of the immediate cuts, though Medicare providers aren’t.
• There really aren’t much in the way of cuts in the short term, so if by some miracle the economy pulls out of its nosedive before the end of the year this deal might actually not make things worse — at least not immediately.
• $350 billion of the near-term cuts come from the war budget, which is usually sacrosanct. This is genuinely surprising, and a real win for the Dems.
• We probably haven’t destroyed our own economy.

Yay? I guess the list could have been even shorter, but this is still pretty depressing. 95% awful still qualifies as awful.

Specifically: this bill is all spending cuts. There aren’t any new revenues of any kind. That can has been kicked down the road, to a small congressional committee that’s going to negotiate a super-deal at the end of the year that will be bipartisan and wise and fair and not at all a reprise of the clownshow we’ve endured for the last couple of months, and they shall meet in a cloud city under a huge rainbow with unicorns flying around them scattering pixie dust.

If they don’t come to some sort of agreement, then a set of pre-ordained cuts go into effect automatically — half discretionary spending, half war spending, carving into both sides’ sacred cows. That, plus the threat of allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire entirely (which they should!), will supposedly goad both parties into doing the right thing. Kevin Drum has already enumerated some reasons why it probably won’t.

But really this feels mostly bad to me, for all the obvious reasons: what this economy needs is more revenues, more spending, more infrastructure, and it needs a strong spendthrifty federal government to make all that happen. Obama is telling us that’ll come in December, from the super-duper committee, but, for one thing, that committee is just a distillation of the deadlocked congress as a whole, and there’s no reason to express the GOP will be more reasonable in microcosm; and for another (as Chris Hayes points out) even a committee half-full of democrats won’t produce anything authentically progressive.

So, to summarize: right now our economy is gutshot, curled up on the ground, gasping for breath, and all this agreement manages to do is not put a gun to its head and pull the trigger.

But, worst of all, the GOP now has their very own BFG. Obama can raise the debt ceiling more or less at his discretion til the end of 2012, so theoretically Boehner and his crew of nihilists won’t be able to grab the wheel again and steer the whole country off a cliff for a while. But the fact remains that the GOP now has a new weapon in their arsenal. A really really good one. Paul Krugman makes the argument that all this is just another sign that our system of government has stopped working — or, rather, that it’s being steadily dismantled by bad actors. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to argue with that.

The long-term unemployed don’t vote much, they aren’t organized, and in electoral numbers there aren’t that many of them. All true. But thanks to a political and media class that’s mostly pretty well off, they’re also largely invisible. Writing about them is more like an anthropological exercise than a simple description of your friends and neighbors. And it’s one reason that we’re doing so little to help them.

This reminds me of something I read a while ago, about the advent of the middle class in Europe: the rising bourgeoisie, just now clawing their way out of poverty and oppression, were beginning to question — and rebel against — the small group of wealthy landowners who had for a long time used their power to suppress and exploit everyone else.

Those early plutocrats didn’t fight the new upstarts, exactly. They realized that it would be easier, cheaper, and more effective to just draw them into their camp: if you can’t beat them, co-opt them. So they granted this new class just enough prosperity to make them happy and complacent. They gave them something to lose.

Which worked out well. The new rabblerousers, relatively few in number, learned to just shut up and enjoy the fruits of their capitulation, and the rest of the populace went back to being quietly oppressed and ignored.

We have an actual (though dwindling) middle class now, but you could argue that something similar is happening today. The powerful have discovered that they can’t control the message without controlling the messengers, and the best way to do that is to give them a seat at the table — or at least under the table, where the crumbs are plentiful, and the rest of the world, going about its sullen business beyond the wall of wingtips and sharply pressed trousers, is only just barely visible.

I just don’t know what to say anymore.

The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.

There’s one job available for every five people out of work. Maybe the feds pause occasionally to worry about this, in between war planning meetings, but if so they’re hiding it pretty well.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet.

However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room.

I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.

This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process!

Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise.

And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.

The Republican party’s paleolithic embrace of willful ignorance as a platform is one of those don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry situations. Markey’s chosen to laugh, but unless someone figures out how to stop these people we’ll all be crying soon.

“Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.” As soft-spoken a revolutionary as you’re ever likely to see.