Tele-Confusion: The Telecom Act of 1996 was crippled by the adoption of the economically-incomprehensible TELRIC pricing scheme, which assured that unbundled network elements would have to be sold by Baby-Bell ILECs to independent CLECs at less than cost. The FCC today decided to throw out baby and bathwater by ending line-sharing requirements that preserved competition in the last-mile broadband market.

After several years of increasing consolidation, ILECs control roughly 89% of deployed xDSL services. However, although they enjoy roughly 8x the established xDSL lines, the ILECs only have 2.3x the number of corporate xDSL customers as the CLECs do, meaning that competition is still very strong in the business provisioning sector. Today's ruling, in which the FCC essentially abdicates its responsibility by giving to the states the primary burden of determining impairment in local service, is a serious blow to independent carriers, a point made in dissents by both Powell and Copps.

Powell's dissent is notable; according to a Reuters article, "An FCC chairman has not dissented from a high-profile FCC ruling for roughly 15 years," a sign that Powell's belief in strong deregulation may be running into some resistance from other commissioners. The FCC is reportedly worried that media deregulation allowed voracious conglomerates like Clear Channel to virtually engulf entire markets and leverage their monopolies into unfair and perhaps illegal competitive advantages. However, today's ruling rewards not competition, but government-sanctioned monopolization. It's the wrong medicine for the wrong patient.

 
Do not pass Go: University of South Florida professor Sami al-Arian has been arrested by federal authorities and charged under RICO with conspiracy and racketeering as a material supporter of terrorism. Also indicted were three other individuals arrested at the same time as al-Arian, and four who remain overseas.

Al'Arian has been charged with a leadership role in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group originally formed in the 1970s by members of the ur-Islamist Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Fathi Shiqaqi, Bashir Musa, and Abd al-Aziz Odah. Shiqaqi et al believed that the overthrow of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the establishment of a Palestinian state was a precondition for the creation of the pan-Arab Islamic caliphate. Using the Iranian revolution as a model, PIJ has consistently opposed not only Israel and America, but most Arab governments as well, considering them irrevocably tainted by the West.

In 1995, Shiqaqi was assassinated, and USF professor Ramadan Abdallah Shalah took over the reins, moving to Syria to take direct control of the organization. The DoJ believes that al-Arian and others in Florida were left behind to coordinate the terror group's logistics.

More information on the PIJ can be found at the ADL.

But do collect $200: In vaguely related news, the Bureau of Prisons has a new director, Harley Lappin, formerly warden of the federal prison at Terre Haute, Indiana, where the executions of domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh and drug lord Juan Raul Garza took place in 2001. Lappin instituted a controversial policy at Terre Haute constricting media access to death row prisoners and information about them; having weathered that controversy will no doubts stand him in good stead, as the BoP continues to lock down access to information about arrested terror suspects.

 
411 on the 419s: Like most people with e-mail accounts, I've gotten more than my share of "419" scams -- the e-mails supposedly from Nigerian bureaucrats trying to smuggle cash out of the country. Despite the storied history of the 419 scam (the earliest version I've seen was a letter from the mid-1980s received by an acquaintance working as a petroleum geologist at the time) it's become an annoying, omnipresent, and sometimes disturbingly successful aspect of online life.

I've got to respect the beleagured systems administrators tasked with cleaning up these spam accounts. Witness this e-mail forwarded to me this morning:

Thank you for contacting our abuse desk.

The account you reported is now terminated, along with today's quota of sundry other Nigerian generals, bankers, engineers, attorneys and relatives of dead dictators. ...

 
Was ist das again? During World War One, a sustained campaign to eradicate German terms from the American vernacular took hold: frankfurters became "hot dogs," German Shepherds transformed into "police dogs," hamburgers were "Salisbury steak" (named after a 19th-century British physician with unusual dietary beliefs) or "liberty sandwiches." Even humble sauerkraut, claimed by no other civilized nation, took on the appellation "liberty cabbage," and the childhood disease rubella, commonly known as "German measles," became "liberty measles," a grand name for a sometimes-fatal disease.

In any case, here's an amusing echo of that past. I humbly suggest that warbloggers and imperialists should order freedom fries with their meals until Iraq has been completely occupied; Black Bloc anarchists and revanchist hippies, on the other hand, should ask to supersize their pommes frites.

 
No, seriously, folks: A German court has convicted al-Qaeda member Mounir el Motassadeq of 3,045 courts of accessory to murder and five counts of attempted murder and bodily injury. Motassadeq was given the maximum penalty under German law: fifteen years in prison.

Um.

In other news, The Hill reports that the GAO dropped its investigation of Vice-President Cheney's energy task force in response to threats by Republican lawmakers, "rais[ing] concerns that Congress’s all-purpose auditor has sacrificed its traditional role as an independent arm of Congress."

Last December, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates dismissed the GAO's lawsuit in a decision that was marked by a great many legal commentators (including John Dean, who knows a thing or two about institutional power) for reversal on appeal and (to me, anyway) seemed to hearken back to the days of Schechter Poultry and Panama Refining v. Ryan, two 1935 cases that were the end of attempts by the Court to restrain Congress by way of "excessive delegation."

The GAO's decision to abandon the Cheney suit came as no surprise, given the reclaiming of the Senate by the GOP, but there is some truth to the concern that the GAO has been strong-armed into submission. Congress can easily halt an investigation at any time, but chose in this case to use sub rosa threats to the agency, leaving no discernible fingerprints behind -- a cowardly, and undemocratic, machination.

 
Red, red wine: A spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert's office has confirmed that a proposal is circulating to place a warning label on French wines, because they use cow blood as a clarifying agent. (A recent FrontPage article on the subject is here.) Is this true?

A small number of modern wines use what are known as "fining agents," which chemically clarify the wine by bonding positively-charged agents like gelatin or bentonite to negatively-charged protein clumps that appear during the winemaking process. The resulting compounds sink to the bottom of the winemaking vessel, and the clarified wine can then be bottled.

For centuries, a variety of at least nominally edible foodstuffs were used as fining agents, such as fish bladders, egg whites and, yes, oxblood. However, today fining is both more sophisticated and increasingly rare. Most large wineries run their product through diatomaceous earth filters instead of using fining agents, and those wineries that still fine purchase specially-designed chemicals for the purpose.

In 1997, the E.U. banned the use of blood as a fining agent during the height of "mad cow" fears, a ban that also exists in the United States. Although there have been a few seizures of tainted wine produced by small wineries, it's fair to say that you can drink your vin de l'appellation without checking yourself for fangs first.