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Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) gave a
strong signal today that he intends to try to keep surveillance and
National Security Agency (NSA) reform in the news. His office has
told beltway media that Paul will not support the Senate version of
the USA Freedom Act, a legislative effort to scale back the massive
expansion of surveillance against American citizens exposed by
Edward Snowden. The problem is that the proposals have been watered
down too much. From
The Hill:

“Sen. Paul does not feel that the current NSA reforms go far
enough,” the aide said in an email.

“There are significant problems with the bill, the most
notable being an extension of the Patriot Act through December
2017.”

The USA Freedom Act, which the Senate will take up next week,
would end the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata about Americans’
phone calls, among other changes. Metadata includes the numbers
people dial as well as the length and frequency of their calls, but
not the actual content of their conversations.

Crucially for Paul, however, the bill also
reauthorizes until the end of 2017 key portions of the
Patriot Act set to expire next June.

The Hill says Paul may also push for a measure to allow
Americans to sue the NSA and other federal agencies.

Though the Senate bill has been watered down from its initial
intent, it’s not as terrible as what has become of the House
version of the bill. J.D. Tuccille wrote about the differences
between the two versions of the bill
here. There’s some American Civil Liberties Union analysis of
the legislation and some reluctant support
here.

It
took five months
for Florida mother Sarah Markham to regain custody of her new
son after the state removed the baby for being briefly
underweight.

The ordeal
started last June, when Markham took her 12-day-old son to a
doctor and found he was dehydrated and had lost 10 percent of his
weight. This is not uncommon for newborns. The pediatrician told
Markham she would need to start supplementing the boy’s breastfed
diet with a milk-based baby formula.

Markham had no problem with adding formula, but as a Seventh Day
Adventist, for whom a vegetarian or vegan diet is a part of
religious beliefs, she didn’t want to feed her son a milk-based
product. Upon telling this to the doctor, he ordered her to take
the baby to the hospital, where staff could give the infant the
dairy formula.

Markham instead went to Whole Foods, bought a soy-based baby
formula to supplement her son’s diet, and contacted another doctor
for a second opinion—not exactly the actions of someone willfully
neglecting their child’s health. In fact, Markham was feeding her
son the new formula when local police showed up to place her under
arrest. 

It seems that when Markham didn’t show up at the hospital, her
doctor had called the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office. Police
officers arrived at Markham’s apartment, arrested her for “child
neglect without bodily harm”, and handed her son over to the
Seminole Child Protective Services. Markham “was accused of
refusing to give her infant non-vegan formula even though he was
dehydrated,” ABC News reports, as if dairy-based formula has some
sort of magical hydrating properties that soy-based formula does
not. 

So for the “good” of this newborn baby, he was separated from
his mother for the first five months of his life. (The kid may wind
up with an attachment disorder, but hey, at least he was spared the
indignities of hydrating on breast milk and soy-based baby
formula!). Markham finally regained custody of her son Wednesday,
after a judge threw out the Seminole County Child Protective
Services’ claims. As a condition of the child’s return, Markham
must now meet regularly with a state-approved
pediatrician. 

When we
last checked in with Dallas Mavericks owner and Internet
entrepreneur Mark Cuban, he was tweeting about Net Neutrality and
worried that “the
government will fuck the Internet up.”

Yesterdy, Cuban sent out these five tweets on the subject:

1. the speed/quality of our home/phone broadband has improved
dramatically. We have new tech/apps/clouds/IOT every day. Its
working.

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) November 13,
2014

2. In my adult life i have never seen a situation that
paralleled what I read in Ayn Rands books until now with Net
Neutrality

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) November 13,
2014

3. The “People” want more gov to protect them so
they cant be stopped from getting movies/tv shows OTT.That is
straight out of Ayn Rand

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) November 13,
2014

4. If Ayn Rand were an up and coming author
today, she wouldnt write about steel or railroads, it would be net
neutrality

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) November 13,
2014

5. Who is John Galt

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) November 13,
2014

While I agree with Cuban’s general take on Net
Neutrality—increasing government oversight and regulation of the
Internet will make it less innovative and responsive to user
desires—he’s flat-out wrong about the “People” in this case. They
are on his side in the Net Neutrality debate.

Rasmussen Reports recently
polled Americans about regulating the Internet in the context of
Net Neutrality. 

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds
that just 26% of American Adults agree the Federal Communications
Commission should regulate the Internet like it does radio and
television. Sixty-one percent (61%) disagree and think the Internet
should remain open without regulation and censorship. Thirteen
percent (13%) are not sure….

Seventy-six percent (76%) of Americans who regularly go online
rate the quality of their Internet service as good or excellent.
Only five percent (5%) consider their service poor.

The “People,” it turns out, maintain a healthy skepticism toward
increasing the role of the government here, and they also show a
sort of native understanding of public-choice economics as
well:

Americans remain suspicious of the motives of those who want
government regulation of the Internet. Sixty-eight percent (68%)
are concerned that if the FCC does gain regulatory control over the
Internet, it will lead to government efforts to control online
content or promote a political agenda, with 44% who are Very
Concerned. Twenty-seven percent (27%) don’t share this concern
about possible government abuse, but that includes only eight
percent (8%) who are Not At All Concerned.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of voters said in December 2010 that if
the FCC was given the authority to regulate the Internet, it would
use that power to promote a political agenda.

Read more here.

(Just to make it clear that there are real limits to the
wisdom of crowds, in 2012,
64 percent told Rasmussen that they favor continued FCC
regulation of TV and radio.)

Net Neutrality has definitely captured the imagination of
the elites, who take for granted that the Internet can only survive
and flourish with increased governmental oversight and enforcement
of acceptable business practices. Yet even as customers dislike
ISPs in general (and industry giants Comcast
and Time Warner in particular), they fear the government’s
involvement even more. There’s a lesson there that should be
obvious in an age when just
2 percent of us trust the government “just about always do the
right thing.”

However rotten Comcast and Time Warner can be as service
providers, they remain more responsive than the government, if only
because they don’t wield the same sort of monopoly power.

No less than three environmental reviews have
found that the Keystone Pipeline that would transport nearly 1
million barrels per day of Canadian oil sands crude to Gulf Coast
refineries is reasonably safe. This afternoon, the House of
Representatives voted 252-161 in favor of legislation
approving its construction for the 9th time. With Sen. Harry
Reid (D-Nev.) about to be knocked off his perch as the majority
leader, when the bill comes up for a vote in the Senate on Tuesday
some frustrated Senate Democrats may feel free to vote for it next
week.

Because Reid as able to keep the legislation bottled up,
President Obama was never directly confronted with the problem of
choosing to veto the project or not. Thus he had the luxury of
vacillating between his union backers who want the project and his
environmentalist supporters who do not. Faced now with the prospect
of being forced to make a decision, the president has strongly
signaled that his instinctual anti-market ideology will guide his
actions. From
The New Republic:

“Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of
Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the
Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. It doesn’t have an
impact on US gas prices,” he said, according to
ABC News. “If my Republican friends really want to focus on
what’s good for the American people in terms of job
creation and lower energy costs, we should be engaging in a
conversation about what are we doing to produce even more homegrown
energy? I’m happy to have that conversation.”

Whenever the president invites anyone to have a conversation
with him, what he really means is “shut up while I lecture you, you
moron.” Expect a veto next week.