Pun Salad

• Works better, maybe. Robby Soave is managing the Reason Roundup, and his lead item is: 4 Years After the FCC Repealed Net Neutrality, the Internet Is Better Than Ever.

  Exactly four years ago, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed the internet regulation known as net neutrality, which had forced internet service providers (ISPs) to treat all content identically in terms of download and streaming speeds, for instance. Since the popular policy had come into existence during the Obama administration, and was gutted during President Donald Trump's term, its demise was treated as the end of the internet as we know it by panic-stricken #resistance liberals. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) predictably said the Republican attack on net neutrality was an attack on democracy itself. (What isn't?)

  The term net neutrality was coined by law professor Tim Wu in 2006; his big idea was that the government needed the power to restrict ISPs' ability to offer different levels of service to different customers. "Throughout the '00s and into the late Obama years, Wu cautioned that without rules requiring internet service providers to treat all traffic and content equally, the internet as we had come to know it would cease to exist," wrote Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown, summarizing Wu's position. "Big corporations would create a digital fast lane for rich users and content providers, while average people would suffer through slow service and throttled access."

  The fact that the internet had operated for years with minimal government intervention, never producing such a two-tiered system, did not deter Wu, and the Obama administration eventually codified net neutrality under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. (Wu now serves as an adviser on technology policy for the Biden administration). When then–FCC Chairman Ajit Pai undid the policy on December 14, 2017, Democratic policy makers and pundits widely anticipated that the end was nigh.

  Spoiler: the end was not nigh.

  Note that the stuff that appears on your screen might not be "better than ever". You'll have to figure out how to deal with that yourself; don't expect the government to wade in and make that better.

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• No, George F. Will did not misspell "anus". But that's how I, like many Americans, read the headline on first glance: Build Back Better would make Biden’s annus horribilis even worse.

  At the end of his year of Old Testament afflictions — the political equivalent of Job losing his camels and acquiring boils — President Biden might be muttering: Job was at least spared Sens. Joe Manchin III and Kyrsten Sinema. These Democrats, however, stand between him and the potentially worst of his self-inflicted wounds, the Build Back Better bill.

  It is a sow’s ear made from the silk purse of his election, which was the nation’s plea for temperateness. The everything-including-the-kitchen-sink process that has produced BBB has completed the collapse of Biden’s credibility, and his party’s. The process has resembled Winston Churchill’s description of an intragovernmental negotiation: Britain’s Admiralty favored building six battleships, and the economists favored four, so they compromised on eight.

  BBB treats all Democratic constituencies like baby birds with their beaks wide open. Including journalists: There is a $1.7 billion payroll tax credit of up to $25,000 for each local journalist an organization employs in the first year and $15,000 for the next four — with the usual make-believe that this dependency of media on government will then end. The media will always proclaim their independence, but progressives’ politics is always about multiplying dependent constituencies.

  As I type this Thursday morn, BBB seems to be dead, at least for this year. (Lindsay Graham says it's "dead forever", certainly that would be nice.)

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• Magic money appears from nowhere. Michael Graham reports on Secretary of Transportation Buttigieg's visit to New Hampshire. And noticed Mayor Pete's Missing Math on Manchester Rail Project.

  What Mayor Pete didn’t tell anyone — and apparently nobody in the media asked — is how much this new rail service will actually cost. What’s the price tag for the project Buttigieg and the state’s entire federal delegation spent more than an hour discussing?

  If you attended the presser or watched every interview or read every news article from yesterday, you’d have no idea.

  Yes, the delegation talked a great deal about the approximately $1.2 trillion of spending in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. And they hyped the $1.4 billion New Hampshire will reportedly get for roads and bridges. Plus there’s $126 million for Granite State public transportation, too.

  By the way, $1.4 billion is 0.12% of $1.2 trillion.

  And $126 million is just 9% of that.

  Good luck finding where everything else is going.

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• I have no idea how this would work in practice, but… Robert Zubrin's National Review article, Gerrymandering: How to Stop It proposes a wonderfully geeky solution.

  I suggest it be done as follows. Let’s let the majority party in the state legislature take the first shot at proposing a redistricting plan. The sum of the perimeters of all the proposed districts can then be added up to create a score for the majority plan. The minority party can then be given 30 days to come up with an alternative plan. If they can come up with a design whose total perimeter is less than the majority plan’s, then the minority plan is adopted. If not, then the majority plan remains in place.

  Creating districting boundaries in this way will not prevent the creation of safe districts for one party or another in all cases. But it will leave the matter to fair chance and geography, rather than the arbitrary actions of political cabals.

  At least here in NH, there would be the extra detail that you wouldn't want to run district lines through a community. Would that mess things up?

Another book down on the "Reread Crais" project. It's the sixth Elvis Cole novel, and the author, Robert Crais, is really hitting his stride here.

But (alas) I have a consumer note: it's also in the tradition of Crais titles having absolutely nothing to do with the book contents. As near as I can tell. Maybe there's some obscure symbolism I'm missing?

But it begins with the discovery of a woman's corpse off Mulholland Drive (where, it seerms, most Los Angeles-based crimes occur). It's the wife of Teddy Martin, and when the cops track down Teddy, he claims his wife's been kidnapped, he paid the ransom, and ohmigod, are you telling me she's dead?

Unfortunately for Teddy, the cops turn up the murder weapon, a gory hammer, nearby on the lawn. Book 'im, Danno.

Cut to Elvis, weeks later: he's visited by famed celebrity lawyer Jonathan Green, who's handling Teddy Martin's defense. Elvis is hired to check out reports that one of the arresting cops, Angela Rossi, has planted evidence in the past, and may be doing so again. Did she really find that hammer at Martin's house, or did she take it from the body-dump site, and claim to have discovered it in its incriminating position?

Elvis is on the case. He quickly finds evidence that the past claims against Rossi are bogus. Assigned to follow up tips, his outstanding detective work digs up indications that it might have been a kidnap plot after all. Good news for Teddy and Green!

But that's on page 136 of a 392-page book. By page 194, Elvis is wondering "What in hell is going on here?" So things aren't as simple as they seem.

There's also a subplot where Lucy, the love of Elvis's life (at least for another book or two) is visiting from Louisiana, with her son Ben. Since (sssh, spoiler) I know this romance is doomed, this part didn't hold a lot of interest.