Sun, 01 Mar 2009
Tax cuts: expire
When I see that MoveOn has put this in my email box:
Subject: 10 Things You've Gotta Know About Obama's Plan
I procrastinate reading it, and I prepare for the worst.
Finally, later in the day, I manage the strength to open it. The list is not the doom and compromise I expected but instead ten lovely things.
The article cites the New York times and declares, "[Obama's budget] lets the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans expire."
With grace, President Obama lets the worst of the Bush cuts expire; they're just a thousand memories.
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Sat, 31 Jan 2009
Hope Watch begins
I attended Obama's inauguration ceremony in DC a bit over a week ago. It was inspirational and rendered me to tears.
I'm awestuck in the same way to read (a few days late) from Larry Lessig that "Rick Boucher is taking over the Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet (renamed Telecommunications Subcommittee)".
In 1998, Congress passsed a bill that made circumventing any copy protection scheme illegal; since then, even if you just want to play a DVD on a system where an officially-sanctioned DVD decoder has not been written, you are breaking the law. Rick Boucher introduced a bill to the House named the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA) that reverses the most egregious of the pains that anti-circumvention law brought. He introduced it first in 2003 and again in 2005. I read these actions as, "I'm going to introduce this bill that is overwhelmingly reasonable. You all can watch as this corrupt institution drops it on the floor."
I know that Rick Boucher being the chair of this committee does not mean that a re-introduced DMCRA will immediately become law. But I believe in gestures, and this one feels like a personal message from this new Democratic Party under President Obama to me that the issues I believe are important have a chance of being addressed.
So here we start Hope Watch. Somehow, here in reality, actions by Congress touch me with hope that we might make this country and world a dramatically better place. If something else touches me, I'll try to make a note.
What an overwhelming feeling that is.
