October 2010

[Commentary] Every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn't currently holding office and isn't named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News.

Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy. Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O'Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there's not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage.

As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox" — literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril. So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications? Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that when billionaires put their might behind "grass roots" right-wing action, it's not just about ideology: it's also about business. What the Koch brothers have bought with their huge political outlays is, above all, freedom to pollute. What Mr. Murdoch is acquiring with his expanded political role is the kind of influence that lets his media empire make its own rules.

So think of those paychecks to Sarah Palin and others as smart investments. After all, if you're a media mogul, it's always good to have friends in high places. And the most reliable friends are the ones who know they owe it all to you.

The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists" to protect incumbent interests, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Atlantic editor James Bennet at the Washington Ideas Forum.

"It's shocking how the system actually works." In a wide-ranging interview that spanned human nature, the future of machines, and how Google could have helped the stimulus, Schmidt said technology could "completely change the way government works." "Washington is an incumbent protection machine," Schmidt said.

"Technology is fundamentally disruptive." Mobile phones and personal technology, for example, could be used to record the bills that members of Congress actually read and then determine what stimulus funds were successfully spent.

Many of the country's largest casinos, long opposed to gambling games like poker on the Internet, are now having second thoughts.

Although online gambling is popular with millions of Americans, it is illegal in the United States, and the casino industry has considered it a threat. But the American Gaming Association -- a trade group that represents major casinos like Harrah's Entertainment, MGM Resorts and Wynn Resorts -- is working on a proposal that would ask Congress to legalize at least some form of online gambling. Gambling specialists said it was likely that any casino-supported legalization would be limited to Internet poker because it was considered the least threatening to brick-and-mortar casinos. Internet poker already had the backing of some in the casino industry, and was seen as a new and lucrative source of revenue for the casino companies.

BT is hoping to let consumer demand play a leading role in shaping where it builds its superfast broadband network in the UK.

The telecoms company is appealing to communities to go online and register their interest in getting connected to BT's high speed network. Five areas that demonstrate strong demand for superfast broadband are guaranteed to see the infrastructure run past their homes and offices by 2012. BT is spending £2.5bn on an optical fibre network that is due to reach 17m homes and small businesses by 2015. The network will mainly run past homes and offices in towns and cities. BT has already identified the locations of 7m homes that will be able to use the infrastructure. However, BT has not pinpointed the locations of the other 10m homes that could benefit from the network. BT's planned online survey of householders and businesses could therefore influence the future shape of the company's network.