There are few problems that Congress (or almost any legislative body) addresses that they themselves didn’t create. Case in point:

Chairman of the subcommittee, Lamar Smith, criticised the Cupertino company’s failure to show up, saying: “This interoperability issue is of concern to me since consumers who bought legal copies of music from Real could not play them on an iPod. I suppose this is a good thing for Apple but perhaps not for consumers.

“Apple was invited to testify today but they chose not to appear. Generally speaking, companies with 75 per cent market share of any business, in this case the digital download market, need to step up to the plate when it comes to testifying on policy issues that impact their industry. Failure to do so is a mistake.”

In other words, it would be a shame if your nice store here were to catch fire. If you pays de boys an me some protection money, we could make sure dat never happens to ya, pal. I think actually the Mafia is more subtle than Congress.

Of course, why is it possible that Apple is able to encrypt their format so that no one else can use their hardware? Why, Congress passed a little law, called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that, among other things, made it illegal to “circumvent” copy protection, no matter how silly or needless it may be. Most companies use it to lock you in to their proprietary scheme. For example, the movie industry uses it to ensure that you can only play their DVDs in the regions they choose to sell them, wether or not this makes any sense. Another company uses it to make sure that everybody who makes software to interface with a DVD player has to pay them buckets of money and, incidentally, keep upstart DVD manufacturers out of the business and leave it for the big players. This benefits established industries who would rather not be bothered improving their products much, and consumers none.

Enter Apple. They mistook the DMCA to mean they could actually implement a copy protection scheme meant to, well, keep people from copying stuff. Their player will play other formats, but the only copy-protection scheme it uses is the one they created. And instead of using this as an excuse to foist of second-rate junk on an unsuspecting populace, they actually produced the little white doodad everybody but me seems to think is a must have, except for die-hard Nomad users who resemble Apple users of 10 years ago.

So two key ingredients are missing from Apple’s use of the DMCA. They don’t screw consumers by shipping inferior crap and using the DMCA to force them to buy it anyway, and they don’t help established players keep out newcomers. Anybody could come up with a better player and music store and beat Apple–there’s no requirement to use Apple stuff, and switching costs are still relatively low–most of the cost for 99.9% of the public will just be in switching hardware, which they tend to do anyway.

But this is not enough for those used to riding off the backs of monopoly rents protected by government force of arms, oh no. So they’ve summoned their lackeys in Congress to reinsert the feeding tube into WMA, and Congress, being the unreliable ronin they are, are offering Apple a chance to outbid the RIAA and Real Media for their votes.

To his credit, Napster CEO William Pence, has a firmer grasp of market economics than his marketers:

“It is my belief, and the essential point of my participation today, that marketplace forces will continue to drive innovation in the DRM arena with attendant consumer benefits – new ways to enjoy digital music at a variety of different price points – while also gradually ‘solving’ the interoperability problem,” he said.

So there you go. A Republican Congress grandstanding to protect you, the consumer, from a law they crafted and a Democratic President signed. And, of course, the irony of it is utterly lost on them.

Think the whole Terri Schiavo issue is brand-new, breaking new ground in philosophy?

Uh-uh:

Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

-Thomas Jefferson

Go read more Thomas Jefferson quotes. There is much in there to confound Left and Right.

Since I lived in Poland for a year and have felt close to the country for more than a decade now, I wanted to add my voice to the remembrances of Pope John Paul II. There were many areas where I, as one who seems to lack the faith gene, disagreed, often vehemently, with the Pope, but here are things I found admirable:

1. He demystified the papacy. By traveling and embracing global telecommunications, he made the Pope a much more human figure. His admissions of Church error and requests for forgiveness made the Catholic Church itself a more human institution. He even admitted that Galileo was right.
2. He was an incredibly staunch friend of freedom. He would frequently travel to dictatorships, even his beloved Poland, and criticize the regimes on their own soil.
3. He was consistent. While a foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, Jan Pawel did remain true to his beliefs from beginning to end. He did not remain silent on Iraq just because George W. Bush shared his view of abortion. He privately met with and forgave the man who tried to kill him.
4. He reached out to other religions, particularly Judaism, who had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church. He had Jewish friends in Wadowice (OK, because it’s driven me crazy recently, it is pronounced vah-doh-VEE-tseh, and “Cracow” is really spelled Kraków and is pronounced KRAH-koof) and genuinely seemed to “get” the relationship between anti-Semitism and the horrors of Nazi Germany.

He, of course, was flawed, like all men. But he did rise to the occasion more than most and made radical changes in the Catholic Church. I wish he could have gone further, but in a little over a quarter century he did quite a lot.

First, read the most lucid, concise summary of the Shiavo case I have yet read, courtesy of Ars Technica. This puts a lot of misinformation that has been bandied about talk radio to rest. A few highlights about the husband:

• Michael Shiavo has not signed book or TV deals, and has turned down offers of millions and millions of dollars. The medical malpractice settlement money he got has all been spent. So it’s hard to argue he is doing this because he got the money and now needs to dispose of the money.
• He lived with the Schindlers (Terri’s parents) for several years, and they suggested he date again. So why do right-wingers keep bringing this up as if it were some horrible secret he kept from the world?
• Michael tried some fairly extensive things, including experimental treatments, to revive Terri. It’s not like he was just hoping she’d die.

Now some unpleasant things about the Schindlers:

• They have signed media deals. They are, whether cynically or not, profiting from their daughter’s condition. So any aspersion about Michael must be equally cast at them.
• Their accusations of spousal abuse only surfaced after Michael decided there was no hope and Terri should be allowed to die.

I’m sure they are grieving. It must be horrific. But they are not angels, nor is Michael a devil. Yet many on the right are claiming just that.

Now a few facts about Terri:

• Her CAT scans from 1996 show massive atrophy in the brain. There is simply little tissue she could use for awareness. These are rarely shown by press reports and never mentioned by right wing commentators.
• Her heart attack was brought on by an eating disorder that so starved her it weakened her heart. That irony is rarely to never mentioned, and I heard one commentator deny it outright.
• The electrodes from the experimental treatment mentioned above are still in her brain. Calls for MRIs are calls for manslaughter, as MRIs use powerful magnets for imaging and would cause the implanted electrodes to act as a blender inside her skull.
• She cannot swallow (hence the feeding/water tube). Several “life-centric” protesters would have killed Terri Schiavo had they succeeded.

Clearly, there isn’t a lot of science education on the side of the so-called conservatives (in reality, big-government theocrats).

Their hypocrisy has been pretty stunning:

• They claim to be conservatives, but are advocating government involvement in a private matter.
• They claim marriage is sacred–at least when it’s between a man and a woman–but are seeking to undermine marital rights.
• They claim to hate an unelected judiciary, but didn’t complain when it gave George W. Bush the presidency.
• They claim that new advances might give Terri a chance at healing, but are against the stem-cell research that underlies most new neural treatments.
• The claim that the liberal media is full of distortions and half-truths and innuendo, but as has been shown above, they’re only concerned about media integrity when it is practiced by liberals.
• They claim this is about “torture” but fail to apply that standard to:
  1. Conscious Iraqi inmates of Abu Ghraib (“fraternity pranks” I believe was the term)
  2. People who are fully conscious who choose death over a painful terminal illness
  3. People who are denied certain classes of drugs because said drugs can be used in naughty ways
  4. Any similar case where the patient was not previously a photogenic white Christian woman, and there are thousands of these cases

However, liberals are not without hypocrisy in this matter:

• They claim to value the rule of law and decisions of the court system, but set up an almighty whine when it selected George W. Bush instead of their guy. Both conservatives and liberals claim the circumstances are different, but it’s hard to escape the impression that they love the judiciary when it’s not their ox that’s being Gored.
• They claim to value a personal right to choose, but seek greater medical regulation that removes choices not dealing with reproduction–in fact, in almost every area of life besides reproduction and choice of sexual partner. The days of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement are long behind us.

Two points versus six. I think the Right, as usual, wins the biggest hypocrite award. How power corrupts. Given that the thoroughly-spanked Left has two points, I wonder if they’ll remember the lessons they’ve learned when the wheel turns and they are on top of the DC power game.