Competition or FCC to "regulate" online search?

The FCC, founded in the 1930's to assign frequencies to radio broadcasters and do price fixing for the telephone company, wants to expand. They want to regulate Google and make it "fairer". They are supported by loads of webbies who feel their websites arn't getting good positioning on Google.
Google has competitors. If Google's service and site rankings don't please the web surfing public, they can and will go elsewhere. That's all the regulation needed. I see no reason to give FCC bureaucrats a say-so in how a search engine ranks websites. In fact, that could get scary, the current FCC would tell Google to rank Democratic sites above Republican sites.
Article here.

It's the crotch bomber.

ABC has a picture of the infamous bomb. It was 80 grams of PETN fixed in the bomber's jockey shorts, right between his legs. If it had detonated, the bomber would be unable to enjoy the 72 virgins promised to jehadi warriors in paradise.
Pat down searches for this kinda bomb will be embarrassing for all concerned.

The ABC story claimed that 80 grams (about 1/6 pound) could "blow a hole" in an airliner. Fortunately, well built jetliners can continue flying with a hole blown in them. 80 grams isn't much. Air to air missiles carry much bigger warheads (5 pounds) and do not always bring down their target.
I remember an F105 jet fighter that took a missile hit in the tail. Heat seeking North VietNamese missile flew right up the tail pipe and exploded. Blew the crap out of the tail section, but the aircraft returned safely to base. The engine kept running, and the rudder and elevons kept working.
I don't believe a crotch bomb has enough power to crash a Boeing jetliner.

What's the difference between a database and the circular file?

What's-his-face Obama's press secretary was on this morning explaining about how they let the leg bomber on the plane. The government has a 500,000 name data base containing derogatory information. The leg bomber's father called the US embassy to warn us about his son's radicalization. The embassy entered the leg bomber's name into the 500,000 name data base. This ain't much different from putting the name into the circular file.

Words of the Weasel Part XIII

Mitigation. When something goes wrong we don't fix the problem, we mitigate it. We create a "mitigation plan" . Which looks real good in the cover-your-ass file after the disaster. The Sunday pundits were grilling Janet Nepoliotano about the leg bomber this morning. She explained the government had a mitigation plan and exercised it. Which is easier to say than to explain how that turkey got on the plane with a bomb strapped to his leg.

Leg Bomber

The Christmas day story of a Nigerian attempting to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight with a bomb strapped to his leg is going around. Question. Would the leg bomb have enough power to destroy a Boeing airliner?
By the way, I hope the burns the leg bomber received hurt a lot.

Congressmen used to vote their district

Used to be, Congressmen always voted their district. Any issue which the voters in the district cared about, the Congressman would vote the way his voters wanted him to.
Somehow that is gone this year. The districts are against Obamacare by better than 50% (depends whose poll you read, but they all show the voters don't like Obamacare). Yet we have the Senate voting Obamacare in by 60%, a supermajority.
What are those Senators thinking? Can they believe their district doesn't care? Or that the district won't remember which way they voted come next November? Or that currying favor with the Democratic Congressional leadership is more important than what the district thinks?
It's a puzzler. Congress didn't used to work this way. I think the voters will remember in November this time. Too bad they won't be able to repeal Obamacare then. Firstly you can't take goodies away from people. Second, Obama would veto a repeal bill. So we are stuck with it.

Why ObamaCare is a disaster.

The Senate voted for cloture on the ObamaCare bill in the wee hours of the morning. That required 60 votes. Actual passage of the bill only requires 51, so passage looks highly likely. (Would you believe a done deal?)
Right now the United States spends twice as much on health care as any other country in the world. US public health is not the best in the world, a number of other countries have greater life expectancy and lower infant mortality than we do. In short we are wasting vast sums of money on health care.
Obamacare will make tens of millions more eligible for medical benefits. This will pour another god awful amount of money into health care.
America cannot afford today's health care costs. 18% of GNP gets poured down the health care rathole. Obamacare will jack that up a lot.
Obamacare does nothing for the malpractice scams that enrich lawyers, does nothing to allow interstate sale of health insurance. and does nothing to permit importation of cheaper prescription drugs.
Obamacare is going to pay for itself by taxing healthcare. This ain't gonna work.
In short, the costs of Obamacare are great enough to drag the United States into a permanent recession. Kind of like the lost decade in Japan.
Start tightening your belts folks, life is gonna get a lot worse.