Category Archives: Echo Chambers

BBC Bias On Net Neutrality

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A US Appeals Court has rejected an attempt to damage and control the internet provider market. Or, as the BBC put it yesterday:

Net neutrality threatened by court

Which is it, then? Since this is the BBC and a US issue, it’s a good bet that it’s not what the BBC is telling you. First, here’s the BBC’s explanation of what the “Net Neutrality” rules created by the FCC:

Net neutrality is the principle that ISPs should not block web traffic for customers who pay less to give faster speeds to those who pay more.

Sounds pretty reasonable, no? But is it really the goal of the FCC’s rules? We’ll leave for another time the debate about how this is another example of how federal departments are now essentially a fourth branch of government, enacting laws and making legal decisions on their own, outside the three official branches of government. The BBC wouldn’t be interested in that anyway. The BBC’s report continues:

Supporters of net neutrality said the ruling was a major threat to how people use the internet.

The rules were designed to ensure that small or start-up organisations had as much chance of reaching an online audience as a large, established company.

But broadband providers argue that some traffic-heavy sites – for example, YouTube or Netflix – put a strain on their infrastructure.

They say they should be able to charge such content providers so that users who pay more can get faster access to those sites than other customers.

As a consequence, companies who did not pay would find that access to their services could be slower for customers.

It might have been helpful for the reader to appreciate this in the proper context if the BBC had included the background information that YouTube and Netflix account for around half of all internet traffic during peak hours. In fact, Netflix shares dropped a few percentage points after the decision was announce, as investors speculated that this would eventually have an adverse affect on profits. And it’s only going to get worse as Netflix starts adding 4K content and more and more YouTube videos and content on other popular streaming services like Twitch.tv and LiveStream are in higher definition, requiring more and more bandwidth. At some point, something will have to give, and unpleasant decisions will have to be made.

But is it really about “fairness”? Wise people get suspicious whenever that term is used, as it often turns out to mean a highly selective set of beneficiaries.

Verizon had said in September 2013 that if it were not for net neutrality rules they would be looking at different pricing models.

In a statement released after the ruling Verizon said that the court’s decision would not affect customers’ ability to access and use the internet as they do now.

“The court’s decision will allow more room for innovation, and consumers will have more choices to determine for themselves how they access and experience the internet,” it said.

This is more or less true, although there’s a caveat. In reality, consumers are already paying more in some areas because the ISPs have to make up the revenue somewhere else. My own ISP offers consumers a choice to pay $10 more per month for higher speed and more bandwidth. The same people who are in favor of this “net neutrality” rule are against tiered pricing as well, and for the same fundamental reason. I’ll get to that reason later. Some ISPs cap their customers’ bandwidth usage, and some deliberately throttle it during peak hours or when doing a certain type of activity. Which type of activity is likely to get throttled? The voice the BBC provides as standing up for freedom and fairness is the giveaway:

The boss of BitTorrent – a system for sharing large files using peer-to-peer technology – warned that the court’s decision would be a major threat to innovation, free speech and “the internet as we know it.”

“For the ISPs, it’s a momentous decision. This ruling will consolidate their powerful role as arbiters of culture and speech.

Why the choice of BitTorrent here, which is used largely to distribute pirated content, as the voice for freedom? It could be because BBC journalists not involved in the business side of protecting property rights see them as heroes in the way most BBC staff see Julian Assange and the Occupy movement as inspirations. There’s another key bit of background information which didn’t make its way into the report. This graph says it all:

Source: Sandvine

Source: Sandvine

BitTorrent still accounts for more than a third of uploading bandwidth. The article where I found this graph has a little more pertinent information:

 Meanwhile, file sharing continued emaciating on many fixed-access networks as streaming video options like Netflix, YouTube, and others proliferate.

File sharing now accounts for less than 10 percent of total daily traffic in North America, down from the more than 60 percent it netted in Sandvine’s first Global Internet Phenomena Report released more than 10 years ago.

Five years ago, it accounted for more than 31 percent.

ISPs have been throttling torrent use for some time now. That’s the freedom BitTorrent and their advocates are really worried about, and the thought of having to pay ISPs for people to use the technology will be a nearly final blow. The BBC really should have pointed this out in order to paint a more honest picture of the debate their presenting.

Our favorite “Echo Chambers” feature has weighed in as well. (I’ve given up my experiment on that for the moment, pending a rethink.)

The concept, called net neutrality, has been the source of a great deal of debate – in the US Congress, courts and the media. Supporters view it as a way to ensure freedom and fairness on the internet, while opponents call it unnecessary government intrusion on business.

There’s that word again: “fairness”. The editor, Anthony Zurcher, first offers the conservative, anti-government regulation point of view from the Wall Street Journal. That view is essentially that it makes no economic or legal sense to prevent ISPs from charging more for more use of their service than it would to prevent a retailer from charging more when somebody buys more than one item. This kind of damper, they say will also impede other providers from getting involved because their chances of getting a return on their investment is severely curtailed.

Also from the Wall Street Journal is an op-ed from the former FCC commissioner, Robert McDowell, who says the whole thing is a bad idea because there are already plenty of measures in place to protect freedom. He’s been a staunch opponent of government meddling with the independent commission and attempts to get around legal infrastructure for some time. Furthermore, he says, more regulation could pave the way for a global body to try and regulate everything, which would ultimately place at least parts of it under the control of those who seek to crush freedom. That’s the part of his piece Zurcher feels was important to cite, anyway. I, on the other hand, think the bit immediately preceding it is more worthy of your attention:

But the trouble is, nothing needs fixing. The Internet has remained open and accessible without FCC micromanagement since it entered public life in the 1990s. And more regulation could produce harmful results, such as reduced infrastructure investment, stunted innovation, slower speeds and higher prices for consumers. The FCC never bothered to study the impact that such intervention might have on the broadband market before leaping to regulate. Nor did it consider the ample consumer-protection laws that already exist. The government’s meddling has been driven more by ideology and a 2008 campaign promise by then-Sen. Barack Obama than by reality.

What ideology could that be, you ask? McDowell has been fighting against this for quite some time. Zurcher doesn’t want you to think about that. Instead, to balance out the two opinions from the Right-wing echo chamber (which are really the same opinion, albeit one has the appeal to authority), we get the notionally impartial Yahoo blogger, a venture capitalist with a vested interest Zurcher forgets to point out, and his usual collection of Left-wing Progressive voices: Slate, Ezra Klein, and Juan Cole, the latter of whom is way, way out there on the far-Left fringe.

The best point from that side is the only one that comes close to something resembling fairness. It seems reasonable to worry that, as we’ve all become so spoiled by fast speeds that we’re wont to click away when something doesn’t load instantly, and choose faster loading sites over slower ones, the little guys will be harmed, and the internet won’t be an even playing field because they can’t pony up like the big boys can. Of course, that’s most likely not going to be the case as the ISPs are only going to try to squeeze the big boys, as the little guys aren’t using up all the damn bandwidth. More moaning about “preferred access” crushing new ventures and Rupert Murdoch’s “growing power” (like Mrs. Thatcher, he’s never far from a Beeboid’s thoughts, is he?) won’t change that.

If the point of this installment of “Echo Chambers” is to unscramble the noise, you can see which side of the debate the editor feels is the best one. As always, it’s of the Left.

Zurcher or the writer of the BBC Technology article could have offered another point of view, one that suggests this ruling isn’t really bad at all because it actually acknowledges that the FCC has more power to force behavior on ISPs. It’s from the Left-leaning Los Angeles Times:

The appeals court ruling Tuesday that rejected most of the Federal Communications Commission’s “net neutrality” rules sent a fair number of Internet advocates into panic attacks. But the worst-case scenarios laid out in the media — consumers gouged, rival websites blocked, commercialization triumphant — are for the most part overblown.

That’s because the ruling was actually a victory for the methodical rule-making process conducted by former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski (shown in an unflattering photo above). In sharp contrast to his predecessor’s attempt to force broadband Internet providers to treat all legitimate traffic on their networks equally, Genachowski’s rules weren’t thrown out wholesale.

In fact, the court held that the FCC established that it did indeed have the authority to protect “edge providers” — that is, websites, services and uploaders — against mistreatment by broadband Internet service providers. What the court rejected were the specific rules the commission adopted to preserve openness online.

So it’s perhaps not quite the blow to “fairness” and “freedom” that all those from the Left-wing echo chamber claim. It’s a very complicated web (sorry) of services, technologies, and markets (the latter is a real problem regarding monopolies and fairness and harm to the consumer, but that’s another topic) and the author, John Healy, is aware that this might open the doors for ISPs to weight their services toward more profit-making content, but also says that history tells us that consumers and technology won’t put up with restricted freedom and choice for very long. He suggests it’s in the best interests of everyone for the ISPs to work something out that isn’t too restrictive. Why Zurcher decided to go with his usual opinion-mongering suspects instead of this more measured voice I have no idea. Maybe the LA Times isn’t in his echo chamber feed.

Getting back to the true reason behind all this, I’d suggest a different analogy about the folly of preventing ISPs from charging more from the one the WSJ editorial offered, perhaps one the BBC is more likely to understand. Preventing ISPs from charging more when more of their service is used would be like preventing Hertz or Avis from charging more when somebody rents a BMW rather than a Ford Focus. In this case, the rental company certainly can’t force BMW to lower the cost to get the car into their fleeet, so they have to pass that on to the consumer. Nobody complains about this because it’s obvious, up front. “Net neutrality” would similarly prevent ISPs from charging Netflix or Google (YouTube) more for offering their products, so they will continue to have to pass the expense on to the consumer.

And therein lies the true reason behind this whole thing. Behold:

The Origins of the Net Neutrality Debate

Telecommunications companies and their suppliers have been nursing dreams of tier pricing for years.

I mentioned tier pricing earlier, and here’s where it gets interesting. By the way, this is from 2006.

On June 28, the Senate Commerce Committee rejected amendments that would have built a ban on tiered pricing for Internet access into the big telecommunications bill Congress is trying to pass this session. It was a big blow for “net neutrality” advocates, who argue that if the major cable and telephone companies are allowed to sell certain customers faster Internet connections, those who can’t afford the new tolls will be relegated to the slow lane.

I think you can see where this is headed, no? John Fund wrote the following article in 2010 in that apparent bastion of the Right-wing echo chamber, the Wall Street Journal:

The Net Neutrality Coup

The campaign to regulate the Internet was funded by a who’s who of left-liberal foundations.

I’m sure you’re all shocked, shocked to learn that.

The Federal Communications Commission’s new “net neutrality” rules, passed on a partisan 3-2 vote yesterday, represent a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility.

There’s little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.

Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn’t have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he’s had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.

Like with the IRS scandal, we keep learning about these bosses of allegedly independent departments having lots of meetings with the President just before that department launches an obviously ideological initiative. However, I should also point out that Genachowski worked with McDowell for years, and he, too stepped down last year. McDowell, as it happens, praised his colleague when the former announced his departure, while acknowledging ideological differences. So perhaps he’s not quite as bad as Fund alleged. As for the ideology in question:

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies,” he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. “But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”

Sounds like he’d fit right in at the BBC. Read all of Fund’s piece to get the full picture of the ideology McDowell was worried about. This is the true goal of the whole “net neutrality” thing: to put a stop to evil corporate capitalist profits, period. After all, first the advocates wanted to prevent ISPs from charging customers more for using more of their service, then they wanted to prevent ISPs from charging content providers for placing a higher burden on their services. The only goal of either approach is to prevent profits, no matter how much it’s dressed up as consumer advocacy and “fairness”. Instead, the BBC hides this from you and frames it in a “fairness”, David vs. Goliath context, just like all the Left-wing echo chamber voices Zurcher quotes.

Zurcher is a titled editor. In that sense, he operates on his own, and while he has a supervisor on some level he is not, so far as I’m aware, subject to editorial directives from on high, or from anyone else which might direct him to publish something reflecting the same point of view as the BBC Technology journalist who wrote the first piece I cited. The bias happens naturally, because they all think the same way. An echo chamber, indeed.

 

“Echo Chambers” – An Alternative To The BBC Feature #2

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The first installment with my own mission statement is here. Zurcher’s next topic was inevitable, so here goes. Again, I’m doing this without having read any of it other than the title and the first sentence.

Chris Christie’s Bridge-sized Headache

Somebody has leaked or stolen some emails by the popular and prominent New Jersey Governor detailing and gloating about deliberately blocking traffic on a vital commuter conduit in order to retaliate against a local politician who didn’t endorse Christie in the last election. The deputy chief of staff – whom Christie has now fired – seems to have made no bones about what they were doing, and even expressed pleasure in doing so in emails between her and the the Port Authority official in charge of running the George Washington Bridge, who’s a high school friend of the Governor and was appointed by him. It does have all the appearances of being very cozy.

It’s ugly business, not because it’s a national incident but because it’s a clear case of using government power to harm a political opponent, which is a major issue on its own thanks to the IRS scandal, never mind the negative affect it had on ordinary citizens, apparently simply because most of them voted the wrong way. As this editorial from Investor’s Business Daily says, “What’s infuriating is how this kind of politics is becoming the norm.”

This is a major national story also because Christie has a national profile not only because of his public image as a straight talker and a caring, competent administrator after the devastation of parts of his State from Hurricane Sandy, but because he’s been considered by many in the media and political wonk class to be the front runner for the Republican candidacy for President in 2016. Anything that calls his integrity into question is going to be big. It’s especially going to gain legs regardless of the facts because at the moment he’s the number one obstacle to President-in-waiting Hillary Clinton. So Christie now has the biggest target on his back of anyone in the country.

He’s going to get the vetting that the media never did for the Junior Senator from Illinois in 2008, or even during Obama’s first term as President. It’s no secret that the mainstream media knows they didn’t do their job properly, and that they really did use the power of the press to support him and attack enemies. There’s been a little pushback in the last couple of months, and it was probably always going to be inevitable that they were going to overreact in order to reestablish public trust and prove that they really do want to hold politicians accountable and speak truth to power.

As Paul Bedard points out in the Washington Times:

The Big Three networks, in a frenzy over New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s traffic headache dubbed “Bridgegate,” have devoted a whopping 34 minutes and 28 seconds of coverage to the affair in just the last 24 hours.

By comparison, that’s 17 times the two minutes, eight seconds devoted to President Obama’s IRS scandal in the last six months, according to an analysis by the Media Research Center.

“While routinely burying new stories on the IRS scandal, the media practically fell over themselves to start taking shots at the potential 2016 Republican presidential nominee,” said the conservative media watchdog.

It’s important to keep this background in mind when considering the media coverage now, regardless of the facts as they come out. Opinion on the validity of the IRS scandal can be viewed as a metric. So, naturally there’s noise in both the Left and Right echo chambers. Christie says he didn’t know the truth and was misled by his staff about the whole thing. Naturally, some won’t trust him and are asking “What did he know and when did he know it?”, while others are taking him at his word. While it’s impossible to prove a negative, many are pointing to his known brusk, tough-talking, and at times aggressive behavior as evidence that this attitude was endemic in his administration, and thus he shares blame.

A good example of this comes from the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart. Just his blog title says it all:

Chris Christie: ‘I am not a bully’ – LOL

During his 107-minute me-me-mea culpa over the traffic fiasco that plunged his national political fortunes into chaos, Gov. Chris Christie said something that was LOL funny. It came in response to a question from NBC News’s Kelly O’Donnell: “Your critics say this reveals that you are a political bully, that your style is payback,” she asked the New Jersey Republican known for his love of rhetorical fisticuffs and penchant for retribution. “Are you? And does this compromise your ability to serve?

Capehart then cites a couple of instances of Christie making snarky retorts at people asking him challenging questions. Those responses are part of what made independents and people on the Right like him, while it tended to anger those on the Left. To Capehart and those in his echo chamber, it’s proof that Christie is a bully, and proof that he either knew or his style encouraged the corrupt behavior.

At the top of that echo chamber is this editorial from the New York Times:

There are plenty of questions that Mr. Christie and his aides, current and former, need to answer.

First, is it plausible that officials as high up as Ms. Kelly and Mr. Christie’s top appointees at the Port Authority, which controls the bridge, would decide to seek revenge and create this traffic chaos on their own?

Did Mr. Christie know in December, when Mr. Baroni and Mr. Wildstein resigned, that these two members of his inner circle had taken part in the scheme? Did he ever ask them what happened?

Piers Morgan says it’s as big a scandal as Watergate.

The echo chamber from the other side is obviously more willing to give Christie the benefit of the doubt. But they’re certainly not just accepting his side of the story and drawing a line under the incident. Charles Krauthammer is taking a wait-and-see attitude. He even suggests that if Christie’s toughness image comes across after this as “a petty toughness”, he’s “toast”.  That and the IBD sentiment I mentioned above are echoed by Red State’s Eric Erickson (writing for Fox News here):

I’m ambivalent on his run for the presidency . But I don’t see him getting that far for the very reasons underlying this issue — he and his staff operate as divas.I have had congressmen, governors, and the staffers of congressmen and governors tell me horror stories about dealing with Christie’s people.

All of them seem to dread it.

It seems that even if Christie comes out of this with clean(ish) hands, the bully label is going to stick. Of course, nobody in either echo chamber is comparing that to Hillary Clinton’s own horror stories about how she treats people, but it’s only a matter of time if Christie does eventually declare.

So is it going to doom Christie’s presidential hopes? It’s too soon to tell, of course, but there are plenty of guesses out there. Lisa Schiffren in the National Review Online’s “The Corner”, thinks this too shall pass and Christie the (eventual) candidate might even come out of this the better for it. The other echo chamber, here in the form of Jason Linkins of the HuffingtonPost, thinks there’s always the possibility of a “Comeback Kid” story, as the media likes to create these Narratives.

There’s one other facet to this story – particularly the coverage and the opinion-mongering – which goes back to what I said about how opinion of the IRS scandal can be a kind of metric. The same people on the Left who defended the President on that saying he couldn’t possibly have known, and his behavior had no influence on the IRS going after his political enemies, are now certain that Christie’s behavior influenced and led to everything, and of course he probably knew.

Before closing, we must also consider the other, other echo chamber: Twitter.

 

 

It’s too early to know how this will turn out, but the various opinions have been far more revealing of the attitudes and politics of the people making them than about anything in the story itself.

“Echo Chambers” – An Alternative To The BBC Feature

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Last November, the BBC website created the “Echo Chambers” feature, and assigned one of their experienced editors and journalists, Anthony Zurcher to curate it. The mission statement as he originally stated it is this:

Welcome to Echo Chambers, a new blog about opinion and commentary in the United States and around the world.

The purpose of this blog is to discover and present quality opinion journalism wherever it may be – to find value amid the noise. We’ll unearth interesting material and underreported views from the BBC, on the world’s newspaper opinion pages, and in think tank reports, magazines, blog posts and scholarly journals. The venue isn’t important; the content is.

A condensed version of this is permanently in the upper right corner of the Echo Chambers page.

Unscrambling the noise of the global debate, from social media to scholarly journals, Kansas City to Kathmandu.

As has been pointed out many times, I’m not a professional journalist and so cannot understand the arcane arts, but to me, this means that the blog is meant to make some sense of the chatter on both sides of an issue. After all, we’ve been told countless times by journalists and defenders of the indefensible that this blog is just a Right-wing echo chamber, and we often complain that the BBC functions as a Left-wing echo chamber. We all know the drill about Fox News or the Guardian, each often described as an echo chamber for their own side of the political spectrum, and intellectually lazy people who want to stifle debate simply dismiss any point made or evidence offered from either as invalid, simply due to the source, relieving the accuser of the need to address the actual point itself. Media in both the US and UK have become highly politicized, from local newspapers and obscure blogs all the way up to national papers and network and cable news. There’s far more opinion-mongering going on everywhere these days than actual objective newsgathering and reporting. In fact, even the top outlets like the Washington Post and the BBC are moving more and more towards opinion journalism.

One would think it’s a good idea to try and sort through the noise and attempt to distill it down to some semblance of reality, to point out merits or flaws in arguments coming from each side of an issue. The question for the BBC’s Echo Chambers feature, then, is does it meet its remit?

Zurcher’s opening mission statement was that he intends to “find value amid the noise”, and the permanent mission statement is to “unscramble the noise”. In practice, it seems that, with the exception of a weekly list of links about various topics, the installments are  mostly an exercise in Left-wing editorializing. Much of the time, Zurcher is basically presenting stuff from the mainstream Left-wing echo chamber as value in reaction to an issue which seemed to be momentarily gaining traction from the Right. His choices of who writes quality opinion is revealing. One has to give him credit for being one of the more industrious BBC journalists. He sure cranks out a lot of these in a short space of time. A list of links to my analyses of several of his pieces can be found in the comments section of this post about it by Daniel Pycock. Personally, I’m sick to death of opinion journalism, and I think it’s done far more damage to public discourse than help crystalize any ideas. But again, I’m not a professional journalist, so not qualified to judge the priest caste.

With this in mind, I’m going to try a little experiment. For the next five Echo Chambers installments (not including the next simple list of links), rather than do my usual long-winded parsing and complaining, I’m going to attempt an alternative version of what I think it says on the tin. That is to say, I’ll try to actually present a few opinion pieces on whatever topic catches Zurcher’s fancy. I won’t read his piece, just check the title and the opening lines to see what the issue is. I’ll even use his title. Then I’ll curate my own collection of “value”, adding my own brief (I promise) comments so the reader gets the idea of what I think is going on. Each one will include a link to the BBC Echo Chambers piece, and everyone can view them side-by-side and judge for themselves not so much if I’m doing a great job, but whether or not Zurcher is really doing his properly, and just how much of a Left-wing echo chamber he lives in. I may or may not link to the same things he does. Without reading it in advance, I’ll have no idea. If I do, it’s purely coincidental. This whole thing is nothing more than opinion journalism on that level anyway, and anyone who has read two or three of these things will know in which bubble Zurcher lives.

So, below is my first installment. Four more will follow as and when.

*********************

Senator Ted Cruz, still Canadian

One of the most prominent politicians on the Right these days is Ted Cruz, the Republican junior Senator from Texas. He was elected on the strength of Tea Party backing, and in these days of desperation for a fresh face is already being touted as a possible presidential candidate in 2016. Many on the Left see him as a possible threat because he is Hispanic, and identity politics is a very important tool for them. So he’ll most likely get more attention early on than a junior Senator with no experience would otherwise. Sounds familiar, somehow. Cruz is also hated on the Left because of his support for last year’s government shutdown. In other words, there’s a big target on his back.

So it was inevitable that people would start looking for something on Cruz. As it happens, he was born in Canada. His mother was a US citizen at the time of birth, so US law says he’s a citizen at birth, regardless of where he was born, even though his Cuban father was not. Cruz claims he didn’t know because he was told in his youth that he had to make some official affirmation to finalize his Canadian citizenship, and since he never bothered, he forgot all about it. It’s actually automatic, no need for him to do anything. Of course, it’s impossible to prove he’s lying.

The noise first started, really, back in March 2013, after he introduced Sarah Palin as keynote speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). One of her main topics was gun control and the Obama* Administration’s press for more and stricter background checks in the aftermath of the mass murder of children at a school in Newtown, CT. At one point, she made quip about maybe we should have started checking his background first.

You can guess what happened next. Rick Ungar in Forbes saw support for Cruz as “Birther Hypocrisy”.

While Palin’s return to birtherism accomplished the intended laugh from the appreciative crowd, there was someone in the room who was likely not laughing.

That would be Senator Ted Cruz—the man who so glowingly introduced Ms. Palin and a man who clearly views himself as being on a populist track to the White House. He’s not alone in that regard as four percent of the votes registered in the CPAC straw poll were cast in support of Mr. Cruz, the man often referred to as the Republican Barack Obama.

Ironically, there can be little doubt that among those who expressed their support for a Cruz presidency at CPAC were attendees who continue to question the current president’s constitutional right to hold the office.

While there is no legal question about Cruz’s eligibility, it was quickly revealed that he was also a Canadian citizen, which is what happens when one is born there. So there was a call for him to renounce his Canadian citizenship, partially to make a point, and partially because many would consider it a little odd for a President to be a citizen of another country. As Wayne Slater of the Dallas Morning News explained in August:

What’s a birther to do? After years of haranguing Barack Obama as a non-citizen, what about Ted Cruz, who acknowledges he was born in Canada? He isn’t just a U.S. citizen. He has dual citizenship as both an American and a Canadian. Cruz says he’ll renounce his Canadian citizenship, but it’s not clear whether that’s enough to satisfy the birthers in his party who have long claimed at President Obama was born in Africa and therefore ineligible to be president. Obama was born in Hawaii. But most constitutional scholars agree that even if he had been born in a foreign country, he’s still a natural-born citizen under the terms of the Constitution because he is the child of an American parent.

Slater goes on to say that true Birthers claim – erroneously, of course – that nobody even born in a foreign country can be President. Cruz quickly promised to renounce his Canadian citizenship by the end of the year.

Steven Lubet in the Left-leaning Salon snarkily pointed out that there might be some complications in the process:

Only one of Ted’s parents was a citizen when he was born (his father is a Cuban émigré who did not take U.S. citizenship until 2005), and he therefore falls under a special section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that applies to “Birth Abroad to One Citizen and One Alien Parent.” Under that provision, Cruz only qualifies for American citizenship if his mother was “physically present” in the United States for 10 years prior to his birth, five of which had to be after she reached the age of 14. The only definitive way to prove Eleanor Cruz’s 10 years of physical presence would be with documents such as leases, school registration, utility bills or tax records.

Of course, we don’t know how rigorous the Canadians are about evidence of citizenship, but we do know that they will not be willing simply to take Ted’s word for it. Their form is very specific about requiring documentary proof, and that might be hard for Ted to come by. Could that be the reason for Cruz’s delayed renunciation? It would be pretty embarrassing to have his Application to Renounce Canadian Citizenship denied on a technicality.

In other words, in order to renounce Canadian citizenship, Cruz first has to go through a laborious record-collecting  process to prove his US citizenship. This was picked up in the Left-wing blogosphere and other outlets, and the Left thought they smelled ironic birther blood.  It’s now the new year, so naturally those who seek to undermine him are going to check up on it. It turns out he hasn’t officially done it yet, hence the noise this week. Why hasn’t he followed up on his promise? It should be a straightforward process. So are the Left-wing birthers on to something? Kelly McPartland from Canada’s National Post seems to think so.

Some immigration experts are wondering why it’s taken Mr. Cruz so long to complete the paperwork for his renunciation. “It’s not complicated at all,” said Stephen Green, an immigration lawyer in Toronto, according to the Associated Press.

Richard Kurland, a Vancouver-based immigration attorney, agreed: “Unless there’s a security issue that hasn’t been disclosed, unless there’s a mental health issue that hasn’t been disclosed, there’s no reason for anything other than a lickety-split process to occur.”

Hmmm. Well, something must be holding up the works, which is why Mr. Alexander should seize this opportunity to get involved. Ted Cruz is an American caught in the talons of Canadian citizenship. We need to set him free.

Yes, the Left-wing echo chambers like the Daily Kos are getting excited over this, but I’m having a hard time finding actual opinion pieces on it. Rather than seeing a lot of noise in the echo chambers which must be unscrambled, I’m seeing that almost everyone is pretty much reprinting the same Canadian Press/AP piece over and over, or quoting the relevant bits like McPartland has done. Wayne Slater in the Dallas Morning News is doing the same thing in his opinion piece. Is there anything in the Right-wing echo chamber about this? Not that I can find. I haven’t spent hours searching, and at this point it’s pretty clear that anything will be more speculation or a simple dismissal, repeating what’s already been said.

I suppose one way to look at this is that if the Right is silent, that means they’re afraid of the truth. Alternatively, they could simply feel that it’s already been proven that Cruz meets the definition of a natural born US citizen, especially since nobody is doubting that his mother didn’t live in the US for ten years before he was born, and don’t care about this. In other words, it’s exciting for the Left, who have only speculation to go on, and that’s about it. There’s nothing edifying either way other than the one supposition quoted by the AP. We’ll have to wait and see.

* I’m refraining from my usual formulation of “The Obamessiah” and the quasi-religious capital H in “Him”, etc., because I do that to make fun of the BBC’s reflexive worship and near religious devotion, and it’s not appropriate for what I’m trying to do here.