RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP57

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 57 - download now - subscribe now - review us on iTunes!

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We had a heck of a time with the show today. TalkShoe burped on us, and we lost the first iteration of the show. The second attempt was much better.

It was a day of light technical stories today, but some very important political stories. In our ongoing coverage of the 'Vonage Crap' saga, a unique little fold emerges:

Court Says Vonage Needs To Throw Away Money Into Wasteful USF Program
The Universal Service Fund (USF) is a well-known joke. It's a hugely wasteful program with almost no oversight. Yet, last year, the FCC decided that VoIP companies needed to pay a huge chunk of their revenue to the USF, despite the fact that doing so would actually slow progress on getting universal service. That's because the money would go from these new, cheaper services into the bank accounts of the big incumbents who would then promise to provide universal service... without much actually happening. Vonage stood up to this decision and sued, claiming the FCC had no say in the matter, but a court has ruled against Vonage, saying that the FCC didn't overstep its bounds. With Verizon breathing down Vonage's neck over patents, the real irony may be that Vonage will now have to hand over money into the USF, that will go right over to Verizon and not into extending service to underserved areas.

And in news that everyone else but me thinks is important:

The Algorithm Is A Disappointment
There's a lot of discussion today about the newly revamped Ask.com, which remains in the unenviable #4 spot in terms of search market share. Basically, the site seems to have sharpened up its interface a little bit, while incorporating things like news and images into its results page. Additionally, the site offers suggested refinement searches, so if you search for "Sopranos", it'll show you a link where you can get results for "Sopranos Merchandise". All of this is fairly inoffensive, but it's really hard to see how this is going to move the dial at all. Despite the company's insistence that it has developed "A Truly New Way to Search", the whole thing looks like a spin on Google's recently announced universal search strategy, which involves incorporating more types of media into its results. The look and feel is a tad different, but so what? Even if the new Ask.com returns "better" results than Google in some instances, there's nothing here that will actually get people to switch. Right now, the company is making a big effort to explain why the new changes are cool, but most people giving the site a try won't have the benefit of someone explaining to them why the site is now so great. As such, they probably won't see it themselves.

Turning to political news, power balances out and changes hands:

Wyoming Sen. Craig Thomas Dies at 74
WASHINGTON (AP) - Wyoming Sen. Craig Thomas, a three-term conservative Republican who stayed clear of the Washington limelight and political catfights, died Monday. He was 74.

The senator's family issued a statement saying he died Monday evening at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. He had been receiving chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia.

Just before the 2006 election, Thomas was hospitalized with pneumonia and had to cancel his last campaign stops. He nonetheless won with 70 percent of the vote, monitoring the election from his hospital bed.

Two days after the election, Thomas announced that he had just been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

Gov. Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, will appoint a successor from one of three finalists chosen by the state Republican party.

In big big news, the corruption charges finally come down on Jefferson:

U.S. congressman indicted in bribery case

Rep. William Jefferson, D-Louisiana, was indicted Monday on federal charges of racketeering, soliciting bribes and money-laundering in a long-running bribery investigation into business deals he tried to broker in Africa.

The indictment handed up in federal court in Alexandria., Virginia, Monday is 94 pages long and lists 16 alleged violations of federal law that could keep Jefferson in prison for up to 235 years, according to a Justice Department official who has seen the document.

Among the charges listed in the indictment, said the official, are racketeering, soliciting bribes, wire fraud, money-laundering, obstruction of justice, conspiracy and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case.(Read the indictment [PDF])

Jefferson is accused of soliciting bribes for himself and his family, and also for bribing a Nigerian official.

Almost two years ago, in August 2005, investigators raided Jefferson's home in Louisiana and found $90,000 in cash stuffed into a box in his freezer

And another Republican throws his hat into the ring:

Gingrich Rips 'Dysfunctional' Administration
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, said Sunday that President George W. Bush is leading an administration that "is not functioning.

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RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech - EP38

RizWords - Daily Politics and Tech
Episode 38 - download now - subscribe now

Special guest co-host Bill Grady of You are the Guest joins me today.

• A member of the TechPodcast Network @ techpodcast.com. If it's Tech, it's here.
  
• Remember, if you're listening on the podcast recording, you can call into the show live if you tune in through TalkShoe.com at 2:30 PM EST every weekday.
• If you like the podcast (and you haven't already given us a rating), head over and do so, and don't forget to sign up for the discussion list.
• Other Podcast Plugs:
  
• TalkGirls comes on Tuesday nights. Check out the TalkGirls Podcast ... it's good times!
• Cotolo Chronicles: Frank is a good friend of the show, and an associate of the late great Wolfman Jack. Check out his podcast.
• NewsReal: Good friend to Art and I - has one of the best hours of news podcast each week.
• You Are the Guest: Bill Grady turns the microphone on the internet's most interesting people.
  
• Sponsors:
  
• Try GoToMeeting for 45 days! Visit www.GoToMeeting.com/podcast to start your free trial today.
  
• AACS - Guaranteed improved credit - http://aacsnet.com/ - Mention RizWords and get $50 off your entry to the program.

Back in my BlipMedia days, we did a quote for the Pentagon that was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Needless to say, they're not taking our bid, opting into the good ol' boy's network @ 18 mil, instead:

Pentagon phone system to go VoIP

A major renovation to the Pentagon has taken a VoIP twist. The Department of Defense has awarded General Dynamics an $18.4 million contract to design and deploy a VoIP phone system as part of what's called the Wedge 2-5 stage of the Pentagon's modernization program. The 4 million square-foot project is intended to modernize building systems, increase security and upgrade technology in the world's largest office building. The VoIP contract is meant to provide a building-wide multimedia phone system integrating voice, video and data communications-in both secure and non-secure channels. VoIP not secure? One hopes there will be an unclassified White Paper someday about how the Pentagon made IP telephony more secure than some thought possible.

For more about the Pentagon's coming VoIP phone system:
- read this FCW.com article

In other VoIP news, it's a Vonage article that doesn't talk about Verizon. Of course, that doesn't mean we won't talk about it on the show... :)

Has Comcast passed Vonage?

Has Comcast replaced Vonage as the Number 1 VoIP carrier? Some back-of-the-envelope figuring by Network World thinks it might have happened. Comcast ended the first quarter of this year with 2.4 million VoIP customers--nearly 1.9 million more than it had a year ago and roughly 10 percent of the number of cable customers it serves. Vonage, in the fourth quarter of 2006, reported 2.2 million customers. And given its legal problems, financial drain and marketing distractions, it seems unlikely that Vonage's growth would keep pace with Comcast's explosive gains. We should know Vonage's numbers pretty soon, but bragging rights may well have passed to Comcast.

For more about Comcast's market penetration:

- read this Network World article

In one of the more interesting news from inside the beltway, recently - it's politics AND sex!

DC Escort Services Becomes Latest Scandal
Randall Tobias, Director of US Foreign Assistance and US Agency for International Development Administrator, became the first political casualty this week in a slow cooking scandal over a Washington DC escort service. Tobias abruptly resigned after ABC News contacted him about employing the services. Tobias maintains that he only recieved massages, but that doesn't really matter at this point. His political career is over, and if thousands of pages of phone records provided by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the services' proprietor, pan out, more will follow. In the meantime, news organisactions posessing the list are undecided as to what their next step will be -- now that they have outed the lists's only republican.

Palfrey was indicted on federal racketeering charges in February for allegedly running a $300-an-hour call-girl ring that dates back 13 years. "20/20" will be airing a segment on the scandal this week, allowing Palfrey, who has a checkered legal past, to say the least, another opportunity to mug before the cameras. Following a pattern that fits almost every sex scandal that unfolds in the Swamp, Palfrey is portraying herself to be the victim, putting the spotlight instead of the political class who took advantage of the services she provided.

Of course, there are no innocents in this tawdry saga. Even if no laws were broken, the lack of moral rectitude in our nation's capital should trouble all of us. Founder John Adams may have said it best: "WE have no government aremd with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitutional as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Nice try, I'll pass on that one, though:

Verizon Says It Has A First Amendment Right To Illegally Give Your Call Records To The Government
The nation's biggest telcos are working hard to make the lawsuits against them for passing customer call records and other info to the government as part of its program of warrantless wiretaps disappear. AT&T's argument that it was just following government orders didn't wash with a judge, and now Verizon is claiming that its passing of information to the government is protected by the First Amendment. Yes, you read that correctly: it says the Electronic Communications Privacy Act is unconstitutional, and the information it passed to the government -- in apparent violation of it, and to comply with the sort of warrantless surveillance the ECPA was designed to prevent -- is constitutionally protected free speech. This seems tenuous at best, but it fits with Verizon's MO. The company always tries to whitewash its customer data leaks by filing lawsuits and trying to shift the blame onto pretexters and information brokers, and making the problem appear to be solely these people's activities, rather than its own inability to protect customer data. Likewise in this case, it contends that it's done nothing wrong, and that the ECPA makes the mistake of trying to prevent free speech, rather than putting restrictions on the government's ability to ask for the information. Of course, those restrictions exist (in the form of having to get a warrant), but didn't really work so well here. Verizon's complicity seems pretty obvious and its free-speech claims look like little more than a hail-mary attempt to shirk liability for disclosing the customer information. That may not be necessary, though, if the Bush administration's attempts to get Congress to pass a law giving the telcos immunity from these sorts of lawsuits are successful.

Lay off the movies, bozos:

Canadian Coins Not Nano-Tech Espionage Devices
Necrotica writes "An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind the U.S. Defence Department's false espionage warning earlier this year. The odd-looking — but harmless — "poppy coin" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For some reason, we've been following (and rooting for) Sarkozy's quest for French Presidency. Bill weighs in heavy on this issue:

Sarkozy Takes French Presidency
'Conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has won the hotly-contested French presidential election

'The final count gave Mr Sarkozy 53.06%, compared with 46.94% for socialist Segolene Royal, with turnout at 85%.

'Mr Sarkozy, 52, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, takes over from the 74-year-old Jacques Chirac.

'Riot police have fired tear gas at a small group of demonstrators who were protesting in central Paris against Mr Sarkozy's victory.'

From CATO on the same topic:

It spoke volumes that Sarkozy was the only French presidential candidate to visit the United States. On a highly publicized trip to Washington, he was photographed with President Bush. He also gave a strongly pro-American speech. Sarkozy told his audience that, "Friendship is respect, understanding, affection but not submission ... I ask our American friends to let us be free, free to be their friends."

In response, former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius proclaimed that Sarkozy was seeking to replace British Prime Minister Tony Blair as Bush's "poodle." A Royal aide labeled Sarkozy "an American neoconservative with a French passport," a criticism that stuck to him for the campaign's duration.

First, the Bush administration has belatedly concluded that a very public transatlantic dispute has damaged American interests. The White House is now committed to playing nicely with Chirac's successor.

Second, there will be a new American president within 21 months. Circumstance will force the next president, Republican or Democrat, to present a more pragmatic American face to the world.

The White House's next inhabitant will occupy an office diminished in stature by his or her predecessor's diplomatic failures. President Sarkozy will quietly offer to help his ally pick up the pieces.

Any excuse to say the words 'Nappy Headed Hos':

Don Imus to sue CBS for full contract
More than three weeks after CBS Radio and MSNBC unceremoniously dropped his highly-rated morning talk show, "Imus in the Morning", Don Imus is preparing for a legal battle with his former employers.

This from my blog post earlier, brought up some good end of show discussion with Bill and I:

MSNBC's Republican Debate

I watched the debate, and I must say I was impressed with the aptitude that the Republicans handled themselves. I suppose that after years and years of being exposed to Republican ineptitude, its refreshing to be exposed to the flip-side of it.

Here's the most interesting thing to come out of this debate; given the huge field of the early Republican lineup of candidates that prevented Paul from elaborating much more on what makes him so very different from the rest of the pack, and the scant 90 minutes afforded the public to know who they are, Paul did as well as he possibly could going from near last to FIRST place.

This shake-up is very interesting.

BEFORE the Republican "debates":

1. Giuliani 41%
2. McCain 31%
3. Romney 28%
4. Huckabee 14%
5. Thompson 11%
6. Tancredo 10%
7. Brownback 10%
8. Paul 9%
9. Hunter 7%
10. Gilmore 4%

AFTER the Republican "debate" at 9:28am the next morning:

1. Paul 35%
2. Romney 30%
3. Giuliani 25%
4. McCain 20%
5. Huckabee 16%
6. Tancredo 10%
7. Brownback 9%
8. Thompson 9%
9. Hunter 8%
10. Gilmore 7%

Here's where you can watch and judge for yourself:
Part 01 of 10 of MSNBC's first Republican Presiden...
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Part 10 of 10 of MSNBC's first Republican Presiden...