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When Congress updated copyright laws and passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, it ushered an era of investment, innovation and job creation.  In the decade since, companies like Google, YouTube and Twitter have emerged thanks to the Act, but in the process, they have disrupted the business models and revenue streams of traditional media companies (TMCs).  Today, the TMCs are trying to fast-track a couple of bills in the House and Congress to reverse all of that. Through their lobbyists in Washington, D.C., media companies are trying to rewrite the DMCA through two new bills.  The content industry's lobbyists have forged ahead without any input from the technology industry, the one in the Senate is called Protect IP and the one in the House is called E-Parasites.  The E-Parasite law would kill the safe harbors of the DMCA and allow traditional media companies to attack emerging technology companies by cutting off their ability to transact and collect revenue, sort of what happened to Wikileaks, if you will.  This would scare VCs from investing in such tech firms, which in turn would destroy job creation. The technology industry is understandably alarmed by its implications, which include automatic blacklists for any site issued a takedown notice by copyright holders that would extend to payment providers and even search engines.   What is going on and how exactly did we get here?

On Dec. 16 I will join Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern and several military veteran activists outside the White House to protest the futile and endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of us will, after our rally in Lafayette Park, attempt to chain ourselves to the fence outside the White House. It is a pretty good bet we will all spend a night in jail. Hope, from now on, will look like this.

Most people don't go to the corporate world to find model for ethical behavior - not unless they're marketing a new product made of lead and margarine called, "I Can't Believe It's Not Ethical". Still, a company has to really suck to stand out amongst their fellow gougers, cheats, and soulless greedheads.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15, 2010 - Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is pleased with today's House of Representatives vote to repeal the law that bans gays from serving openly in the military, Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said, and he hopes the Senate will follow suit before its current session ends.

In the next week the action moves from Wisconsin to Washington, where the deadline looms for a possible government shutdown over the federal budget. President Obama has to take a more direct and personal role in that budget battle - both for the economy's sake and for the sake of his re-election. But will he? Don't count on it. Worried congressional Democrats say the President needs to use his bully pulpit to counter defections in Democatic ranks, such as the ten Democrats and one allied Independent who on Wednesday voted against a Senate leadership plan to cut $6.2 billion from the federal budget over the rest of fiscal year 2011. They want Obama to grab the initiative and push a plan to eliminate tax breaks for oil companies and for companies that move manufacturing facilities out of the country, and a proposal for a surtax on millionaires. Most importantly, they're worried the President's absence from the debate will result in Republicans winning large budget cuts for the remainder of the fiscal year - large enough to imperil the fragile recovery. But Obama won't actively fight the budget battle if the current White House view of how he wins in 2012 continues to prevail. Shortly after the Democrats' "shellacking" last November, I phoned a friend in the White House who had served in the Clinton administration. "It's 1994 all over again," he said. "Now we move to the center."

It's a coming-of-age story, you see. It's about a representative who has come of age from the voting booths of a town to accept the responsibilities of performing rousing debates on the floors of Congress with the interest of a constituency in mind while adhering to house rules. Don't fear, I'm not describing a remake of the "Cider House Rules" replacing the doctor with a Congressional representative. No, I'm describing the latest shock-and-awe disorderly behavior by a representative of a member of the 111th Congress. Enter Joe Wilson, a Congressional representative from South Carolina. In the aftermath of inappropriate timing, will the enforcement of ethical standards be abdicated in the US while many see that taking precautions in keeping the public trust in Congress is still the responsibility of everyone sitting in that room?

Let's be clear: It was never in the political interests of House Republicans to force a government shutdown over this -- and John Boehner, who was a member of his party's leadership when the GOP suffered a P.R. disaster during the shutdowns of late 1995 and early 1996, knew it. But the House Speaker also knew that the best way to keep his fellow Republicans from insisting on one -- and, potentially, from throwing him overboard in the process -- was to extend the negotiations as long as possible, making it look like he was as hell-bent on confrontation with President Obama as they were, and to hope that influential conservatives would eventually give him cover to cut a deal. That seems to be what finally happened late on Friday night, just over an hour before funding for the government was set to expire and mass furloughs were set to begin.

"Never has the time been so right," Louisiana State Representative Noble Ellington told conservative legislators gathered in Washington to plan the radical remaking of policies in the states. It was one month after the 2010 midterm elections. Republicans had grabbed 680 legislative seats and secured a power trifecta-control of both legislative chambers and the governorship-in twenty-one states. Ellington was speaking for hundreds of attendees at a "States and Nation Policy Summit," featuring GOP stars like Texas Governor Rick Perry, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Convened by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-"the nation's largest, non-partisan, individual public-private membership association of state legislators," as the spin-savvy group describes itself-the meeting did not intend to draw up an agenda for the upcoming legislative session. That had already been done by ALEC's elite task forces of lawmakers and corporate representatives. The new legislators were there to grab their weapons: carefully crafted model bills seeking to impose a one-size-fits-all agenda on the states.

BLACK MAILED BY OBAMA

YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP! OBAMA IS UNBELIEVABLE! WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT THIS GUY TO BE PRESIDENT?????