A Word for Governor Doyle on the Broadband Expansion Tax Credit

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Wisbusiness:

Gov. Jim Doyle plans to sign the broadband bill passed by both the state Senate and Assembly on Tuesday, a top aide said Wednesday afternoon.

“The governor supports it,” said spokesman Matthew Canter. “In fact, he helped lead the way for it. It’s part of his Grow Wisconsin plan.”

The legislation will give telecommunications companies tax exemptions if they provide high-speed Internet service to parts of Wisconsin that lack it or are underserved – mostly in the rural and northern areas of the state.

I hope that Governor Doyle will insert some language into this bill that requires the recipients of this subsidy – local Telco’s – to provide symmetrical internet access, not the odd services they largely provide today where the downstream and upstream services run at different speeds. The internet is not TV. Our generally poor broadband service significantly limits the opportunities for emerging home based internet businesses and services. This is a trivial change and should be a no brainer for the Governor. Learn much more on these issues, including why the US is so far behind countries like Japan and Korea in true broadband (100mbps symmetrical speeds), here.
Om Malik tells us why this is important.

Organic Goes Mainstream

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Carol Ness:

Thirteen-and-a-half million servings of organic romaine, radicchio and baby greens. That’s how much Earthbound Farm, the biggest organic produce company in the country, sends across America from its gigantic San Juan Bautista processing plant every single week.

That’s one big bowl of salad — way bigger than when Myra and Drew Goodman started Earthbound Farm in their Carmel Valley living room in 1984. They now farm 26,000 organic acres.

1500 Square Mile Silicon Valley Wireless RFP

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802.11b Networking News:

The Joint Venture Silicon Valley public/private partnership has issued its RFP: The group of cities, counties, governmental bodies, and corporations want a wireless network of some kind–technology isn’t decided and could be a broad mix–that would cover Silicon Valley. Winning vendor(s) will be selected from the respondents to their RFP by September, and recommended to the 16 cities, San Mateo County, and 16 other jurisdictions that have signed on. I wrote in January about the scope and nature of this 1,500-square-mile potential project….

Reckoning on the “Right”

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Ed Wallace:

Worse, ethanol is not being sold to us because it will make America energy independent. It is being forced on the nation, even with all the problems that have already become apparent, because the party in power is locking in the lobbyist monies and farm state votes. And that’s not just my opinion; it’s also the opinion of David G. Victor, director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford and an adjunct senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, as published in the Houston Chronicle on April 15 of this year.

In fact, the corruption of our legislative body is so pervasive that, when Reuters Business discussed how we could immediately get more ethanol just by dropping the 54-cents-per-gallon import tax on Brazil’s ethanol, the person quoted as saying that “Congress has a backlog of important bills” and “won’t have time in this legislative year to deal with controversial legislation” (such as reducing tariffs on ethanol from Brazil), was nobody we elected. No, it was Jon Doggett, vice president of the National Corn Growers Association. Now tell me: Who is really calling the shots?

The Price Opens at the Madison Rep

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Kenneth Burns:

But Corley says the play is both personal and political, and that the current political climate makes The Price as relevant as ever.

In The Price, one of the brothers, Victor (played by Roderick Peeples), is a retired policeman who gave up a budding scientific career to care for his ailing father. The other brother, Walter (Richard Henzel), is a wealthy surgeon who has given their father only token support.

The play’s political themes emerge, Corley says, as the brothers try to make sense of their past and of their choices — and of the prices they have paid. “When Miller wrote the play, he wanted to write about the ideology that created the Vietnam War,” Corley says, “and the belief that the end of war could make things better. Both fallacies are based on a misunderstanding of the past.”