Another representative has gotten back to me about my idea of a civilian aviation award. This time it was Tammy.

Dear Mr. Stehling,

Thank you for contacting me about creating a civilian equivalent for the Distinguished Flying Cross. It is good to hear from you.

I appreciate you sharing your idea about creating an award similar to the Distinguished Flying Cross to recognize acts of exceptional and life-saving flying by civilian airline pilots. As you mentioned, the pilots of Jet Blue Flight 292 are certainly deserving of recognition for their calm in safely landing with faulty landing gear on September 22, 2005. Please know that I would support Congressional recognition for their heroism.

Again, thank you for sharing your views. Your opinion matters to me. If I can be of service to you in any other way, please do not hesitate to let me know. As a result of the anthrax incidents, all mail sent to Congress is first irradiated. This process causes significant delays. To ensure the fastest response, I encourage all constituents who have access to the internet to contact me through my website at http://tammybaldwin.house.gov.

Sincerely,

Tammy Baldwin
Member of Congress

Still no world from Feingold. I wonder if he’s even going to get back to me.

I don’t mind search engine spiders. Without them it would be hard to find anything on the Internet. But some spiders don’t know how to behave. So far this month 21.36% of the kilobyte traffic on my site is attributed to the Gigabot spider. It’s hit my site from 7 IP addresses for a total of 6808 hits. That’s 296 times a day on average. That’s a bit aggressive. The spider seems to be downloading my site every few minutes. That’s not necessary.

I’ve banned only one other search spider in my life and that would be the Alexa bot. That spider wasn’t causing a problem or being annoying, I’m just opposed to Alexa’s business practices and its use of spyware/adware. I’ll have nothing to do with ripping people off or annoying them with ads. But Gigabot can join the ranks of Alexa. I know nothing about Gigabot or its search site Gigablast. In fact I’d never heard of Gigablast before today. It’s probably just another upstart that’s trying to archive the entire Internet quickly without regards for manners.

So The Onion broke the law by using the Presidential Seal on their website. No big deal, all they should have done was admit wrongdoing, misunderstanding of the law and cease using the Seal. I bet the issue would’ve been put to bed. Why didn’t they come up with a comical mockery of the Seal in the first place? That’s not what they’ve chosen to do though. They’re trying to argue that their use is obviously satirical and not for commercial gain. Very few could confuse The Onion for serious and factual journalism, but they’re lying about the commercial gain. They don’t charge for hard copy prints of their paper or for access to the website, but they do make money on it. The Onion makes nearly all of its money through placement of advertisements in the paper and on the website, that’s commercial gain. Of course readers of The New York Times would be led to believe that The Onion makes no commercial gain. Good job getting the facts completely wrong again NYT.

The White House has the obligation to protect the Seal and seek enforcement of the laws governing its use, regardless if the President is a Republican or a Democrat. Also, having the White House counsel write a letter to The Onion asking them to cease using the Seal does not cost additional taxpayer money. The counsel is already on staff and paid. That counsel costs the taxpayers the same amount of money if they sit in the Rose Garden all morning playing cribbage or if they spend that morning writing a letter to The Onion.

Here’s an idea Onion, just say oops and get one of your artists to come up with a mock seal. Maybe give the eagle on the Seal an eye patch and a big “#1” on the shield. In my opinion, The Onion got lazy on this one. I suppose it was only a matter of time before they turned lame after they moved to New York City. Think they’ll consider moving back to Madison once they realize they’re not as funny as they used to be?

One of the Internet’s most famous pirates, Stephen Michael Cohen, has been apprehended by Mexican authorities and handed over to US agents. Cohen has been on the run for 4 years to avoid paying a $65 million court judgment. When I call him a pirate, he is a real internet pirate. Not the definition of pirate that used by the RIAA or MPAA. No I’m not talking about people that download files from the Internet and make no money from doing so. I’m talking about real piracy. Cohen is a con artist. He steals things, including websites to make money from the Internet. His most lucrative con and the reason he is now in law enforcement custody was his illegal acquisition of sex.com. Using forged documents he obtained control of the DNS server settings, which point Internet browsers to the IP address of a website.

One of his most recent projects was called Earth Station V. It was a filesharing application which claimed to protect users IP addresses using encryption and proxy servers. That claim didn’t stand up to investigation by various filesharing groups. It was soon discovered that pretty much nothing claimed by the developers of Earth Station V was true. One of the most outrageous claims was that developers worked out of a Palestinian refuge camp. Attempts to interview or locate the developers produced nothing. One journalist even went to the refuge camp and discovered that no one there heard of any programmers at the camp. Despite efforts to increase the networks popularity, users were not switching over. Major websites that review and offer unofficial technical support were giving Earth Station V terrible reviews and advising users about the false claims made by the developers. The developers fired back with a barrage of attacks against these websites and websites of other filesharing applications. This only prompted further investigation into the truth behind Earth Station V. This was when it was discovered that Cohen was involved with the project. The developers claim he was hired as a consultant to help with advertising. Many believed he was more deeply involved, including being part of the project conception and fabrication of its strategy of lies. Money was of course the motivation. The plan was simple. Create a mildly functional program, eliminate competitors and then sell advertising banners. The developers just greatly underestimated the filesharing community.

I’d love to know how much money Cohen wasted on the Earth Station V project. People like him deserve to have their bad deeds come back to haunt them. I hope he gets a significant prison sentence and the rest of his crimes are exposed.

Remember the lauded bi-partisan McCain-Feingold Act? The one that was supposed to clean up politics by letting your neighbors spy on your political donations and other wonderful attacks on freedom. A nice invasion of privacy brought to you in part by a man that claims to fight for the rights of the people. But invasion of privacy is nothing compared to what else that law allows. It’s now become a de facto restriction of free speech similar to Brenda Konkel’s efforts to remove the people from city politics by making them register as lobbyists. In Seattle some radio hosts supporting an anti-gas-tax initiative are now being persecuted for not reporting their comments as “in-kind political contributions”. What’s next, will bloggers also be forced to report their comments and then have to stop making comments when they’ve reached the limits set forth by the McCain-Feingold Act?

Why did they choose to go after radio hosts? Why not a newspaper? Newspapers take sides and write editorials on nearly every political issue. How exactly does limiting free speech clean up campaigns? Isn’t free speech the lifeblood of an open society?

Where’s Feingold on this issue? He sponsored this bill and worked to make it pass. He is responsible for how that law is applied. Especially since he’s trying to fashion a bid for the Presidency. He needs to take a stance on the draconian manner in which his law is being used. Unless of course he supports these violations of rights.

I’m embarrassed that Wisconsin keeps electing Feingold. We can do better and deserve better.