Dick Armey's Freedom Page 16
trinitishwar writes "House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.) has a site where you can vote to express your opinion on Carnivore:
http://www.freedom.gov/vote/vote4.asp.
Just let him know how you feel."
The poorly-worded poll is for political purposes
(TexasCowboy23
points out the
House putting pressure on Reno
at this exact moment) but it doesn't hurt to vote anyway. What I want to know is, where in
RFC 2146
does it say a politician can own FREEDOM.GOV?! Complete with 468x60 banner ads promoting Deep Thoughts by Dick Armey ("Cloning is the way amoebas reproduce") and his other site FLATTAX.GOV. I guess this started when nobody made serious complaints about GOP.GOV (see
Jim Warren's comments
and
an Armey staffer's response
back in December) ... did someone change the rules when I wasn't looking?
Hello... (Score:2)
Yeah, I think they shouldn't allow just anyone to get a
Heck, he should buy up slashdot.gov and yahoo.gov while he's at it! Start selling
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Slanted survey (Score:2)
Time to protest? (Score:3)
Could I suggest someone protests to the delegated naming authority, which is listed as:
Federal Networking Council
4001 N. Fairfax Drive
Arlington, VA 22203
Phone: (703) 522-6410
EMail: execdir@fnc.gov [mailto]
URL: http://www.fnc.gov [fnc.gov]
.
And the same thing, formatted (yes, I know...) (Score:3)
Here's a standard form email ...
To: execdir@fnc.gov
Subject: RFC 2146, Freedom.gov, Flattax.gov
Sirs
You are listed in RFC 2146 as the delegated naming authority for the .GOV domain.
RFC 2146 sets out rules for naming eligibility under this domain. (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2146.txt)
I note the existence of two domains: Freedom.gov, Flattax.gov.
I should be grateful if you would:
a) Explain under which term of RFC 2146 such names have been allowed
b) Consider withdrawing these domain names if you are unable to substantiate their legitimacy in terms of either of:
B1) FIPS 95-1 - http://www.nist.gov/itl/fipspubs/fip95-1.htm
B2) US Government Manual - http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/browse-gm-99.html
yours sincerely
Hmmmm... (Score:1)
sorry...couldn't resist
--
You need to look a little harder (Score:1)
Web polls; Armey (Score:1)
But if you click through, you'll see a nice letter to Janet Reno [freedom.gov] complaining about Carnivore. Even if the domain name is suspect (and I think it is), at least Armey is on the right side of this issue, from the YRO point of view.
sulli
2 thoughts... (Score:1)
2. Does a
There are definately other governments out there, and I would hazzard a guess that there are bigger, and better governments than the US gov.
"Damn world! Stealing my internet." --Al Gore.
Re:You need to look a little harder (Score:2)
If Mr. Armey happens to like naked clowns, is he allowed to register "nakedclowns.gov" just because he happens to be majority leader, and "majority leader" is an entity listed in the government manual?
Re:You need to look a little harder (Score:1)
Okay, well, we could try the section on page 2:
and ask how Freedom is derived from "Office of the House Majority Leader"Or, we could try the section on page 2 which says:
and wonder about how Armey has wound up with Freedom.Gov and Flattax.Gov
IMHO, the same problem pertains to GOP.GOV. And, after some more digging, I find that it is nowadays nic.gov [nic.gov] that administers your GOV namespace, and one Daisy Bhagowalia [mailto] who is the Domain Registrar. Sadly, she does not seem to respond to email enquiries about why she has allowed RFC 2146 rules to be broken. Perhaps she needs more emails from others concerned with partisan pollution in that namespace.
Re:Slanted survey (Score:1)
"dot con" (Score:1)
Heh ... well, .con is appropriate for some members of congress. But political jokes aside, I can think of two reasons why this isn't the best proposal, one of which is specific to the proposed tld (and is thus trivial) ".con" is, on most keyboards, less than a centimetre away from ".com"
Secondly, It'd be easy enough to generate listings under the .gov domain for the various congressional districts (ny-dist12-houserep.gov) and you could, I suppose, route requests for bob-etheridge.gov to nc-dist5-houserep.gov so the folks who remember their house rep's name but not their district can find them. I like this because I think it should be explicit that these domains are for congressfolk in their official capacities.
Re:Time to protest? (Score:1)
(unrecoverable error)
----- Transcript of session follows -----
>>> RCPT To:
550
Re:You need to look a little harder (Score:2)
The notion that we should be guessing at authors' intentions, rather simply reading the RFC, is unworthy of a distinguished forum like Slashdot, and should be relegated to regions of low intellectual climate... like the Supreme Court. ;-)
This is because the three branches of our government are coequal.
I'd be very much interested in hearing this claim justified... I frankly believe it to be untrue, either in theory or in practice.
The US Consitution neither declares them coequal nor unequal, it simply delineates the powers of each. You could perhaps argue that said powers are equal, though that would be a tough argument to make, IMHO. I certainly don't think you can argue that the folks at the constitutional convention intended us to understand that the branches should be kept equal. Most foresaw a relatively weak judicial branch; their unpleasant experience with English magistrates effectively acting as legislators was pretty fresh on everybody's mind. I would strongly argue that the legislative was intended to be most powerful... but I won't, unless anyone cares. :-)
Think of it this way, the Speaker of the House is third in line to the presidency, and has a greater Constitutional claim to his own domain than any appointee of the president.
The Speaker can lay no constitutional claim to a domain name, for the simple reason that the constitution doesn't grant him any such privilege. Nor can he lay statutory claim to a domain name, unless there's a law on the subject I don't know about. According to the conventions laid out by RFC 2146, we may regard his office as warranting an appropriately-named domain. But as tagishsimon points out, Rep. Armey is actually in violation of RFC 2146. His actions, whatever the intentions, are uncouth and show poor netizenship. We should tell him so, and hope he makes amends.
jamie.... (Score:1)
Well, I for one certanly won't, thats for sure.
A reply from Dairy which sucks (Score:1)
Her email address is daisy.bhagowalia@gsa.gov [mailto]