The U.S. Census has terminated its contract with ACORN, and both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House voted overwhelmingly this week to cut off all its federal funding, after a series of undercover videos showed ACORN staff in five offices across the nation offering tax evasion and business advice to two people posing as criminals intending to establish a prostitution business with underage illegal aliens.

The entire story is at www.biggovernment.com.

Homeowners’ advocate Margaret Hammond asked for such a map when Glendale Organized Against Cell Towers (GOACT) first came before city council to ask for stronger controls on wireless installations. The city did not have an existing map, so staff created this one.

In addition to the work mapping must have entailed, city attorney staff have researched federal and state laws governing telecommunications installations. General Counsel for Public Works Christina Sansone presented two reports to city council yesterday, this one on a resolution to send to the White House and the U.S. Congress calling for revisions in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the report with maps above which also deals with extending the city’s current moratorium on wireless installations.

This is a lot of footwork and legal research. The goal for Glendale is to craft a state-of-the-art wireless ordinance that protects residential areas and provides a sensible and fair method for processing wireless permit applications.

Earlier in the week, the Evangelical Outpost discussed President Obama’s mortgage plan and reminded readers of an ancient Roman senator’s skeptical outlook on the redistribution of income. Quoting from Cicero:

“When politicians, enthusiastic to pose as the people’s friends, bring forward bills providing for the distribution of property, they intend that the existing owners shall be driven from their homes. Or they propose to excuse borrowers from paying back their debts.
“Men with those views undermine the very foundations on which our commonwealth depends. In the first place, they are shattering the harmony between one element in the State and another, a relationship which cannot possibly survive if debtors are excused from paying their creditor back the sums of money he is entitled to. Furthermore, all politicians who harbour such intentions are aiming a fatal blow at the whole principle of justice; for once rights of property are infringed, this principle is totally undermined.”

In Chicago there is quite a bit of skepticism and frustration over the stimulus package and the mortgage modification plan. CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli issued the infamous televised rant last week that elicited a direct White House response. Sunroom Desk filed Dennis Byrne’s Chicago Tribute column, The Slow Drip of Financial Ruin, in its links. Byrne says:

Reason is the facility of the mind used to intelligently form judgments, make decisions and solve problems. Emotions are feelings, desires, fears, hates and passionate drives–all of which are the tools that Obama deployed to sell the stimulus package to a gullible public. Endeavor to go through all 1,100 pages of this stuffed piggy and you’ll find little rational connection between the nation’s problems and its solutions–other than if we throw enough money out there, some of it will stick to the wall.
The lightning-like passage of this colossal spending package (amounting to more than the Iraq war) took just three weeks. Congress is supposed to be a deliberative body, making decisions judiciously, openly and unhurriedly. This was steamrolled.
Worse than the insult to the democratic process, however, is the substance of this lunacy. Our national debt will nudge close to 100 percent of gross domestic product, something that hasn’t happened since World War II when the threat to our country was external, mortal and real, and not of our own making.

The first entry in this week’s Paperweight section, the Wall Street Journal’s Congress Approves Broadband to Nowhere, discusses

• how the current stimulus package doesn’t reflect the Obama Administration’s goal of national broadband deployment, and
  
• how politicians are aiding a few large companies (the cable, telephone “duopoly”) in dominating the market for internet services without investing in world-class technology.

Excerpts:

…broadband, once thought to be in line for $100 billion as part of the stimulus legislation, ended up a low priority, set to get well under $10 billion in the package of over $800 billion. This is a reminder that even with a new president whose platform focused on technology, and even with the fully open spigot of a stimulus bill, technology gets built by private capital and initiative and not by government.

More fundamentally, nothing in the legislation would address the key reason that the U.S. lags so far behind other countries. This is that there is an effective broadband duopoly in the U.S., with most communities able to choose only between one cable company and one telecom carrier. It’s this lack of competition, blessed by national, state and local politicians, that keeps prices up and services down.