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FCC Abides By GOP Request To Stop What It's Doing, Deletes Everything From Meeting Agenda (arstechnica.com)
One day after republicans from the house and senate sent letters to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, urging him to avoid passing regulations before Donald Trump's inauguration as president, Wheeler appears to have complied with the request. The FCC today "announced the deletion of all items that were originally scheduled to be presented and voted on at tomorrow's meeting." Ars Technica reports: Before the change, the agenda included votes on price caps for "special access" business data services; Universal Service funding to expand mobile broadband networks; wireless roaming obligations; and requirements for audio description of TV programming for blind and visually impaired people. The only item not deleted from tomorrow's meeting is part of the "consent agenda," which means it is routine and wasn't going to be presented individually. Of the major items, the business data services proposal had received the most attention. These are dedicated wireline circuits provided by traditional phone companies like AT&T and Verizon; the services supply bandwidth for cellular data networks, indirectly affecting the price consumers pay for wireless service. The business data services are also used by banks and retailers to connect ATM machines and credit card readers, by government and corporate users to connect branch offices and data centers, and to support public safety operations and health care facilities. The now-deleted agenda item would have phased in price cap decreases of 11 percent over three years to account for "over a decade of efficiency gains" since the last price cap adjustment.
I'm suspicious of every article I see posted by BeauHD these days regardless of content, almost to the point of avoiding reading anything he posts - simply because of his tailored anti-Trump agenda, including his legendary twitter account posts that would have him twitter banned for hate speech if twitter uniformly applied their anti-hate rhetoric across political lines.
I only posted this because I just realized that I've been avoiding a good chunk of slashdot to avoid this garbage.
And now I'm sad.
The republicans always get what they want. Just like they got to deny Obama his Supreme Court appointee even though he still had a year left in his presidency. Get used to it because it's only gonna get worse.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Invaliding an FCC regulation would require legislative action by the congress, specifying what to chance, since the regulatory authority over these matters has been vested by congress with the FCC.
It's not like Trump would have the power to take office and unilaterally void all the FCC rules without any debate in the house.
You're right that the constitution doesn't dictate the number of justices but the Judiciary Act of 1969 does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Consequently, it's not optional to have eight except for temporary purposes (like retiring judge). Again, it doesn't matter because the republicans will do whatever the fuck they want anyway.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Yes, this request was made in 2008: "At a time when serious questions are being raised about transition readiness, it would be counterproductive for the FCC to consider unrelated items, especially complex and controversial items that the new Congress and new Administration will have an interest in reviewing." http://commerce.senate.gov/pub...
At least they've set a precedent now, so if any judges die/retire after Jan 2020... they're gonna have a tough time arguing that one.
No they won't. Have you ever paid attention to the Republican party? For example, they love deficits when they are in power and hate them when Dems are in power.