Nancy Scola

Word comes from Speaker Pelosi’s office that she and Committee on House Administration chair Robert Brady are launching a program to drive up diversity on the Hill, so that someone watching C-SPAN hearings at home doesn’t always see such a sea of monochromatic see of faces up on the dais. Harry Reid started something similar […]

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 […]

In the wake of the FCC v. Comcast decision earlier this week, a few possible paths forward on net neutrality opened up. Jack Balkin had a good rundown of them here. One option was for the FCC to claw back the regulatory jurisdiction that it gave away in 2002 by reclassifying broadband as a communications […]

Harvard’s Jon Zittrain is out with his critique of the iPad. If you’ve followed Zittrain’s work at all over the years, then you likely won’t be surprised. He’s long been sounding the alarm that technological development is trending away from the wild and wooly Web. But here Zittrain nicely frames the essential truth that the […]

Earlier this week, Google, AOL, Microsoft, and other tech companies in the business of storing tremendous amounts of user data joined forces with civil-liberties outfits like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to push for an overdue upgrade to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Simply put, the crux of the problem with EPCA’s antiquatedness […]

Perhaps this is a small quibble. But there’s something that rubs the wrong way about about how everyone’s talking today about the erotica-themed West Hollywood bar where the Republican National Committee sees fit to spend their money as a “lesbian” establishment. The club Voyeur, as everything seems to suggest, is a spectacle. It’s a zoo […]

According to The Washington Post‘s Paul Kane, several new and newish senators are starting to look around at the institution they’ve stepped into, what with its filibuster, holds, and convoluted rules on whether you can hold meetings after lunch. And they’ve begun to wonder whether the United States Senate circa 2010 is engineered in the […]

The Hill reports that in response to a probing letter sent from the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, Cliff Stearns, the head of the FCC, Julius Genachowski, revealed that the flawed National Broadband Plan he recently delivered to Congress cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million […]

I’ll admit to being surprised at the warm reception that greeted the National Broadband Plan’s arrival. There are grumblings that the Federal Communications Commission kinda snookered the press reaction by releasing an executive summary that seemed ambitious and provocative, coloring initial reactions to the report itself. But once you dig into the policy details of […]