I’ve long thought that the Worst Person in the Senate is the senior Senator from the state I grew up in, Mitch McConnell. Of course Joe Lieberman easily outdistances the field to take the title of Most Hypocritical.
For Most Clueless, I nominate Ted Stevens. The New York Times reports on his June 28 explanation to the Senate of his opposition to the net-neutrality bill.
The Internet is “not a big truck,” Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, informed his Senate colleagues on June 28. “It is a series of tubes.”[…]
“Just the other day,” he said, “an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.”
Perhaps a bridge to nowhere would help. But really, has this ever happened to you? In my twenty-eight years on the internet, I’m unaware of an example. In fact this is what would happen without legislated net neutrality. It’s come to the point where the Republicans adopt the Big Lie strategy reflexively.
[P.S. Have you contacted your Senators and expressed your opposition to Senate Bill 2686, which in its present form dumps net neutrality?]
You asked:
But really, has this ever happened to you?
Of course not, and Senator Stevens is most likely just making it up as he goes along. I met that old windbag years ago at a fund raiser, and just a few minutes of listening to him talk spoke volumes of his lack of interest in his constituents. He is one of the most abrasive people I've ever met.
Posted by: Cranky Daze on July 10, 2006 4:20 PMIP based communications (what you generally think of as "the internet") are a "best effort" sort of deal. This means that all communications are treated the same and every effort is made to deliver each to its destination. This is not guaranteed however, and it is possible to for an email to be delayed anywhere from several hours to days. Most email servers drop any messages that it cannot relay in a specific period of time, typically three days. Usually one would not notice because one does not typically wait with bated breath for a reply, so small delays do not cause problems.
Sen. Stevens may not in fact be lying, but one should remember that old saw about politicos:
Q: How can you tell when a politician is lying?
A: You see his lips moving.
I tend to think this applies to Sen. Stevens particularly well.
Posted by: BruceH on July 10, 2006 6:20 PMOh, and he's also clueless and full of shit. His email may have been delayed, but it was almost certainly not because "it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially." It was most likely a technical issue.
And yes, I have seen the sort of delays he's talking about. It is almost always caused by a poorly configured email server or transitory connectivity issues. (Perhaps a backhoe severed a major line and it took a while to route around.)