“Verizon Communications Inc.” on The Daily Caller

Just before the House passed the healthcare reform bill, Speaker Nancy Pelosi infamously remarked that “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it.” It’s been nearly six weeks now and we’re finding out that what’s in it isn’t necessarily good for health care. (more)

Immediately after President Obama signed his health-care bill into law, several large companies disclosed to investors just how big the tax hit from it would be. AT&T, for instance, said that the law’s tax increases alone would cost the company $1 billion. (more)

“Billions of more documents” will be have to be filled out by small businesses for the IRS so that a “spendthrift Congress can shake a few extra bucks out of” them to pay for ObamaCare. They will have to spend countless hours to “gather information,” such as about the person they buy a used car from, and the mom-and-pop landlords who lease space to them, even if the small business has to spend more money gathering the information than the IRS will collect in taxes as a result.  (The new health care law will raise far more revenue by taking away medical-tax deductions of “15 million very sick people” with “major medical expenses” starting in 2013.) (more)

The man who mysteriously wears an astronaut suit to nearly every home game of the Washington Capitals is Geoff Dawson, a local bar mogul who co-owns a spaceship-themed bar in Chinatown, the Daily Caller has determined. (more)

Broadband and Web service companies are beefing up their lobbying forces in Washington as the multibillion-dollar battle over Internet regulations gathers momentum. (more)

Google has just announced that they will now begin factoring page speed in their search algorithm rankings.  That means the faster a website loads, the higher up they show up in Google searches.  Sluggish sites on the other hand will be knocked down the search rankings even if they have the most relevant information.  While I believe that Google’s latest actions are rational and that it serves consumer interests since no one wants a slow results, it does raise an interesting dilemma for “Network Neutrality” advocates who propagate the myth that all websites should operate at the same speed. (more)

A subsidiary of Taiwan netbook PC pioneer Asustek has won orders to manufacture Apple’s iPhone to run on the CDMA standard, a source said on Tuesday. (more)

In the closing days of the Congressional health care debate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told the National Association of Counties: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Today marks the end of just the first week of life under Obamacare and Speaker Pelosi has been proven right: we are just now finding out what is in it. This past Friday, AT&T, the biggest U.S. telephone company, announced that it would take a $1 billion charge against earnings thanks to tax changes buried in the 2,300+ page bill. $1 billion. That is a full third of AT&T’s $3 billion earnings for the fourth quarter of 2009. (more)

When Barack Obama played Monopoly as a kid, I can only imagine he did not carefully cultivate a business reputation and earn enough money to buy properties on Boardwalk and Park Place. He probably created a special Democratic version of Monopoly, [intlink id="236613" type="post"]the Hugo Chavez Edition[/intlink], where he would denounce the owners of properties as “greedy and mean” and then simply legislate himself control of those enterprises—for the “greater good,” mind you. The “greater good,” of course, is the perpetuation of his power.
As long as he can conjure up envy from 51 percent of the population, he can take from the more productive 49 percent, thus creating a culture of dependency. The more people need you, the greater your tributary of votes in the next election. It is sad that the rugged individualists who built this country have slowly been replaced by “hitchhikers of virtue,” as Ayn Rand described them in Atlas Shrugged.
Aside from expanding the misguided policies of the Bush administration by taking over automobile companies, firing CEOs and inserting his own operatives, Obama has bullied financial companies and taken control of one-sixth of the economy with a nefarious health care vote he had to buy from his own party (Louisiana Purchase, Cornhusker Kickback, etc.). His government now has quietly taken complete control of the $72 billion student loan lending business, outlawing any private lending in that area.
Obama has been a strange agent of the “change” he promised. He quickly “changed” Washington, D.C., into [intlink id="669123" type="post"]a corrupt, Chicago-style, political strong-arming system[/intlink] of graft, self-dealing, intimidation and payoffs.
Obama found the Bush administration’s wasteful spending on unnecessary wars of choice and prescription drug entitlements to be a good start. He set out to ramp up the pace, enlisting the audacity of dopes to rack up a record $3.2 trillion in national debt in his first six months. In just five years, the Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate will run up another $10.5 trillion in debt, as much as it took every President from George Washington through Dubya Bush to accumulate.
Harry Reid looks like a creepy operator. He reminds me of the only proctologist in town who takes your insurance, and Nancy Pelosi is like his wife who works at the practice keeping two sets of books.
Obama’s Washington has impressed many in the world including Fidel Castro, who applauds his efforts. Even the Somali pirates are so taken by his boldness that they have asked to send some of their pirate trainees to Washington to intern with the Obama administration this summer. (more)

A subsidiary of Taiwan netbook PC pioneer Asustek has won orders to manufacture Apple’s iPhone to run on the CDMA standard, a source said on Tuesday. (more)

In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. Senate War Investigating Committee called hearings in an attempt to publicly shame and excoriate industrial titan Howard Hughes. Hughes was accused of wasting taxpayer money on his F-11 and HK-1 projects. The hearings backfired as the stubborn Hughes accused the Senators of corruption and blackmail and of being beholden to his competitors, and he detailed the millions of his own dollars he spent on these projects.
The committee, embarrassed by the unexpectedly effective defiance of the infamous recluse, disbanded without filing a report. (more)

Free Press is asking the FCC to consider a number of changes to the NPRM Net Neutrality regulations which they claim will “promote investment”. But once we examine their proposal in detail, we find that it will produce just the opposite and devastate the U.S. economy. Not only would Free Press preclude broadband providers from innovative new business models and economic opportunities, they would substantially undermine their existing business models and revenue streams. Yet despite all this, Free Press insists that their proposals would not deter broadband companies from investing money but that it would spur new dotcom investments at the edges of the network. (more)

With 16.5% of the nation “underemployed” and economists gloomily doubting next-generation job creation, Washington is considering a number of strategies, including the President’s “jobs bill.” “Jobs,” President Obama insisted in his state of the union address, “must be our number one focus in 2010.” (more)

Feb. 10 (Bloomberg) — Google Inc. is planning to build high-speed fiber-optic broadband networks in the U.S. to offer Internet speeds that are more than 100 times faster than what Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T Inc. sell today. (more)