Remarks of Sen. Gold­wa­ter on the Lim­ited Test Ban Treaty before the U.S. Sen­ate, Sep­tem­ber 19, 1963. Mr. Pres­i­dent, after review­ing the remarks made in this Cham­ber, and the tes­ti­mony regard­ing the pro­posed lim­ited nuclear test ban treaty, I am impressed by three arguments–one in its favor, two in oppo­si­tion. In favor of it, after all is said and done, is a hope, usu­ally described as a faint glim­mer, that this may be the first step toward eas­ing ten­sion in the world. It is dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, to argue with a hope. It is an emo­tional thing; and in its soft and gen­tle glow, [ . . . ]

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Accord­ing to Reuters, FCC com­mis­sion­ers voted 5–0 today to pro­ceed with craft­ing a “net neu­tral­ity” rule, send­ing the cur­rent lan­guage (which would strip tele­com com­pa­nies of the right to con­trol how they use their own prop­erty) to the print­ing office for pub­lic com­ment. Com­ments will be accepted until Jan­u­ary 14th. The Notice of Pro­posed Rule­mak­ing is avail­able online here [PDF]. You can upload your com­ments using ECFS here, using pro­ceed­ing num­ber 09–191. You can read oth­ers’ com­ments on ECFS here. I’m writ­ing com­ments to sub­mit right now. I’ll post my com­ments here when I fin­ish. I encour­age every­one who loves the Inter­net and [ . . . ]

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“Who’s there?” “Orange.” “Orange who?” “Orange you glad you didn’t vote for McCain!” I still say Stevens is due — he’ll be 89 this year. And Gins­burg has health issues. Luck­ily all three are part of the lib­eral bloc and will be replaced with lib­er­als — not likely to upset court bal­ance. I’m in the mid­dle of finals week in my last semes­ter in law school. Assum­ing I pass every­thing, I’ll grad­u­ate on May 17th, which is inci­den­tally the septen­vig­in­ten­nial of my birth.

Things are . . . hap­pen­ing. Bad things. Sep­tem­ber 11 I thought about blog­ging on Sep­tem­ber 11, but I couldn’t think of any­thing new to say. That’s sad. Seven years, and noth­ing has got­ten bet­ter. Noth­ing tall and shin­ing has risen from Lower Man­hat­tan except the same phan­tom lights that are dragged out every year to stand in for real honor. Politi­cians putting on a show, so they look like they’re doing some­thing mean­ing­ful. The day has become a joke. An oppor­tu­nity for pub­lic dis­plays of affected grief, vapid speeches about “never forget[ting]”, and other polit­i­cal grand­stand­ing. What the politi­cians and the bureau­crats and the local civic [ . . . ]

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