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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.
Trump should appoint Howard Stern as the FCC Chairman.
What the hell is this? Yes the future FCC may be different from the current one, but we still have a current FCC. The government can't just shut down for two months after an election.
This is the same logic they used to block the supreme court nomination, and is wrong for the same reason.
The FCC could pass regulations that will be invalidated upon Trump's inauguration, or they could avoid wasting everyone's time and do this. They took the cost-cutting choice.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Because it forces the next person to actively undo them, which can potentially be a news story with political backlash. Instead, the next person now doesn't have to do anything and they get their way, and no one will remember when it just doesn't happen.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Half of Trump's transition team has been fired. Chris Christie was fired because he was Governor when Trump's son-in-law's Jared's, father was prosecuted on fraud charges and didn't pardon the fraudster.
Mike Rogers left after getting a briefing on the Trump Russian links from the CIA.
Trump then assigned son-in-law, Jared and his children, to his transition team, but US code 5 USC 3110, Trump may not "appoint, employ, advance, or advocate for" relatives in "the agency in which he is serving or over which he exercises jurisdiction or control".
Nepotism is illegal. They're also not security cleared.
Trump may be a sad joke, but Putin is not.
By framing Trump's win as being the result of sexism you fail to acknowledge that many people chose not to vote for Clinton for various flaws, completely unrelated to her gender. Without some convincing proof otherwise, I'd assume that the number of people who voted for Trump _because_ Clinton was female is vanishingly small. The number for whom it was a consideration may be higher, but is still dwarfed by the number of people who rejected Clinton for her ties with banks and big business, 'pay for play' and accusations of corruption, scandals relating to mishandling of classified material, feeling that the Democrat's no longer represented the interests of those who once voted for them and/or any of dozens of other reasons that came up during the campaign.
The degree to which any of those has merit can be debated. What can not is that these had a marked impact on various groups of voters that may previously have voted for a Democrat candidate.
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...