• Regulating the Internet and Bush’s new nomination Regulating the Internet and Bush’s new nomination Denver Rocky Mountain News, Friday, Oct. 2 The Internet was devised by U.S. military researchers in the 1960s, and under U.S. auspices it has flourished.
• Regulating the Internet and Bush’s new nomination
Regulating the Internet and Bush’s new nomination
Denver Rocky Mountain News, Friday, Oct. 2
The Internet was devised by U.S. military researchers in the 1960s, and under U.S. auspices it has flourished.
Now that it is running so well, other nations think that what the Internet needs is more supervision by other governments, preferably through the United Nations.
The effort at imposing international control on the Internet is being led by a handful of nations, including China, Iran and Cuba, which should tell you something.
This wouldn’t normally amount to much except that at a preliminary meeting to the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society next month the European Union suddenly and unexpectedly dropped its objections to handing the Internet over to international regulation.
It doesn’t take any great insight to realize that what most of these countries want is control over the information their peoples have access to. It’s a short step from tion controlling the means of communication to controlling what is communicated.
Given the importance of the Internet to world commerce and economic growth, the United States owes other governments a continued commitment to noninterference.
Handing the Internet over to the U.N. is a terrible idea.
The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel, Tuesday, Nov.
At the top of President Bush’s to-do list Monday morning was to regain the momentum after the worst week of his presidency. And the place to start was to quickly make up for the Harriet Miers debacle.
Thus, Bush nominated Samuel Alito, 55, to the Supreme Court. In contrast to Miers’ scant qualifications, Alito has been a federal appeals court judge for 15 years, a Justice Department official for 13 years and has a huge paper trail.
In the normal course of a politically and socially conservative Republican presidency, the choice of Alito, already approved once by the Senate unanimously, might not have been all that controversial. On the explosive question of abortion, his record is not totally rigid.
Alito’s is the kind of nomination Bush pledged to make in his two presidential campaigns. But Alito would be replacing the court’s swing vote, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, meaning he, more than any other justice, will determine the court’s direction. …
While the political extremes are ready for a good and nasty partisan bloodletting, the rest of us aren’t. And, while Bush owes something to his political base, a consensus candidate in the Roberts mold would have been more conducive to the domestic tranquility.
