A commentator on NPR's Morning Edition offered that Obama's presidential memo on LGBT hospital visitation rights, enforced through hospitals' taking of federal Medicare and Medicaid monies, wouldn't have much impact in New York, where it's already standard practice. The impact will be felt more, is the implication, in places like Florida, where Janice Langbehn was denied the right to see her partner of 18 years in a Miami hospital after she collapsed with an aneurysm. But that seems to fail to consider the psychological impact of Obama's visitation order even where there aren't policy ones.

Yesterday, the D.C. Circuit Court dropped a major decision that calls into question the Federal Communications Commission's jurisdiction over the Internet. The case in question had to do with the FCC's 2008 reprimand of Comcast when the cable company throttled its customers' use of the peer-to-peer file-sharing software BitTorrent.

What the court rejected was the argument that the FCC has the power to regulate the networks that together make up the Internet under what's called "ancillary authority" extrapolated from the powers expressly granted to the FCC by Congress.