Don't give up just yet.
NY's AG Eric Schneiderman is leading a multi-state (12 the last time I checked) lawsuit to block the FCC from removing the Net Neutrality (NN) rules. His key point is that by his analysis, over two million of the pro-repeal comments received by the FCC were bogus - either coming from obvious bot sites, or using stolen identities.
Some examples of the cases Schneiderman's collected:
“This comment was made on July 11th, 2017. This is a fake comment... I am her son, and can confirm it was not her. [She] died of cancer on June 8th, 2017.” – Albany, NY
“I am a service member in the United States Navy. I was… on a flight from Bahrain to Boston at the time the comments were submitted.” – Florida
“My LATE husband’s name was fraudulently used after a valiant battle with cancer. This unlawful act adds to my pain that someone would violate his good name.” – Los Angeles, CA
“My 96 year old World War Two veteran father…was offended by ‘the theft of [his] good name and honor.’ Someone used his name and address without his consent.” – Thousand Oaks, CA
“As a disabled Veteran and who owned his own computer repair shop and is involved in the IT community…I find this egregious.” – Old Saybrook, CT
“This fake comment is purportedly from my father. The problem is…the comment was posted more than a year AFTER HIS DEATH!!! Good luck in prosecuting whoever desecrated the memory of a Navy reservist and Seabee.” – Stratford, CT
http://ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman-releases-new-details-investigation-fake-net-neutrality-commentsCalifornia and Washington are preparing state legislation to insure NN as best they can in their states.
If they can persuade whatever court gets the case(s) to put a stay on the removal of the rules while the cases are being argued, we have a good chance at coming out of it OK. If not....
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Meanwhile....
"It’s become a grim ritual in Washington foreign-policy circles to assess the chances that the United States and North Korea stumble into war. But on Wednesday [Senator] Lindsey Graham (R-SC) did something different: He estimated the odds that the Trump administration deliberately strikes North Korea first, to stop it from acquiring the capability to target the U.S. mainland with a long-range, nuclear-tipped missile. And the senator’s numbers were remarkably high.
“I would say there’s a three in 10 chance we use the military option,” Graham predicted in an interview. If the North Koreans conduct an additional test of a nuclear bomb—their seventh—“I would say 70 percent.”Graham said that the issue of North Korea came up during a round of golf he played with the president on Sunday. “It comes up all the time,” he said.
“War with North Korea is an all-out war against the regime,” he said. “There is no surgical strike option. Their [nuclear-weapons] program is too redundant, it’s too hardened, and you gotta assume the worst, not the best. So if you ever use the military option, it’s not to just neutralize their nuclear facilities—you gotta be willing to take the regime completely down.”
“We’re not to the tipping point yet,” he noted, but “if they test another [nuclear] weapon, then all bets are off.”
Lindsey Graham: There's a 30 Percent Chance Trump Attacks North Korea - Uri Friedman, The Atlantic, 12/14/17
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Also worrisome is how El Presidente's self-delusion about Russia is interfering with foreign policy and national security. A lengthy piece of outstanding reportage in the Washington Post shows how bad it is in the White House:
Nearly a year into his presidency, Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House.
The result is without obvious parallel in U.S. history, a situation in which the personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat. The repercussions radiate across the government....
Rather than search for ways to deter Kremlin attacks or safeguard U.S. elections, Trump has waged his own campaign to discredit the case that Russia poses any threat and he has resisted or attempted to roll back efforts to hold Moscow to account.
“Putin has to believe this was the most successful intelligence operation in the history of Russian or Soviet intelligence,” said Andrew Weiss, a former adviser on Russia in the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It has driven the American political system into a crisis that will last years.”
U.S. officials declined to discuss whether the stream of recent intelligence on Russia has been shared with Trump. Current and former officials said that his daily intelligence update — known as the president’s daily brief, or PDB — is often structured to avoid upsetting him.
Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter. In other cases, Trump’s main briefer — a veteran CIA analyst — adjusts the order of his presentation and text, aiming to soften the impact.
“If you talk about Russia, meddling, interference — that takes the PDB off the rails,” said a second former senior U.S. intelligence official....
U.S. officials said that a stream of intelligence from sources inside the Russian government indicates that Putin and his lieutenants regard the 2016 “active measures” campaign — as the Russians describe such covert propaganda operations — as a resounding, if incomplete, success....
But overall, U.S. officials said, the Kremlin believes it got a staggering return on an operation that by some estimates cost less than $500,000 to execute and was organized around two main objectives — destabilizing U.S. democracy and preventing Hillary Clinton, who is despised by Putin, from reaching the White House.
The bottom line for Putin, said one U.S. official briefed on the stream of post-election intelligence, is that the operation was “more than worth the effort...."
“This makes me pissed because we’re letting these guys win,” a senior administration official said of the Russians. Referring to the disputed Florida tallies in the 2000 presidential election, the official said: “What if the Russians had created the hanging chads? How would that have been for George Bush?”Doubting the intelligence, Trump pursues Putin and leaves a Russian threat uncheckedBy Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe and Philip Rucker
Dec. 14, 2017