CAPITOLISM

Right now, I am sitting in a room on the House side of the Capitol Building. Nationally-read political bloggers are covering it live. I'm saving my thoughts for the day job, but I just noticed that the United States government — that is, their ethernet network — is currently helping me illegally download a torrent file of last Sunday's "Curb." (I left it on last night... so there was no malicious intent, except for the whole theft thing. Memo to HBO: Put your programs on iTunes, now.) The Buzz, who is live-blogging the event, tells me it's the best of the season. We will see. Speaking of TV, this whole thing is basically one long photo op, and I may be on CNN later today. We will see.

Also, big shout-out to Matt Margolis for letting me borrow his power cord for a few minutes... otherwise I wouldn't be typing this now.

Okay, back to work.

UPDATE THE FIRST — Turns out I was wrong. The file I was downloading was corrupt. So unless intent counts (I'm sure one of my law student readers will tell me it does) the U.S. government didn't help me do anything illegally. At least they (or as taxpayers, all of you, myself included) helped me do nothing, illegally.

UPDATE THE SECOND — My report on the House Republican/conservative blogger conference is now up, at you know where. In the interests of nonpartisanship, I'll add that my report from the Atrios-centric EschaCon is also available in the archives.

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posted by WWB at 12:11 PM |