Political Irony

Matthew Spaccarelli was upset about the fact that AT&T guaranteed him “unlimited” bandwidth on his iPhone, but then slowed down (in their terms, throttled) his service. So he sued in small claims court, and won. Score one for the little guy.

What happened next is interesting. AT&T said they would appeal, and sent him a letter offering to settle, but requiring him to stop talking about the case. Considering that the award from small claims court was only $850, it is hard to imagine what a settlement would look like. Indeed, I’m sure it cost AT&T more than $850 in lawyers fees just to send the letter.

But their real mistake is that they threatened to cut off his phone service. That of course ignited a publicity storm. Oops.

In the end AT&T just sent Spaccarelli a check for $850 plus $85 for court costs.

Spaccarelli has posted the documents he used to win his case online, and is encouraging others to sue AT&T. Interestingly, AT&T helped bring this upon themselves. Their contract prohibits subscribers from seeking jury trials or from participating in class action lawsuits (which seems awfully fishy to me, but which was upheld by the Supreme Court last year). The only legal options for customers are small claims and arbitration. Arbitration is usually covered by confidentiality agreements, but not small claims.

I’ve always wondered how companies can get away with using terms like “unlimited” for something that has limits. Even worse, AT&T was throttling anyone who was in the top 5% of data users, which drives me crazy. First of all, there is no way to know if you are about to get throttled, and second, evem if everyone cuts down their data usage, there will still be 5% of their customers who will be in the top 5% and so will get throttled.

Luckily, after this case AT&T changed their rules and now they will throttle “unlimited” users after they pass 3GB of data, so at least you can tell if you are about to get throttled. Ironically, their non-unlimited plans also give you 3GB of data. The phone companies like to trumpet how you can watch movies on your smartphones, but you only have to watch two or three high definition movies before you run head first into their bandwidth limits.

© Joe Heller

It is ironic that Republicans don’t like Mitt Romney for changing his positions, when they do the same thing about candidates trying to find “Anyone but Mitt”.

I’m often confused about the whole “flip-flopping” deal. Voters want candidates who respect their wishes. When Romney was running in a pro-choice state, he was pro-choice. But when running in the Republican primary, he is pro-life. Isn’t that respecting the wishes of the voters?

We had a president who stuck to his guns and stayed the course, no matter what. He was George W Bush. How did that work out?

Reality is nuanced. Politics seems not to be.

© Drew Sheneman

After the last disastrous budget fight, you might hope that things would get better. But this time, Paul Ryan’s budget proposal has everyone — left and right — pissed off. The new budget still includes “sweeping cuts to federal health care programs and social programs aimed at the poor” but now the Tea Party caucus is also voting against his budget because it doesn’t go far enough. I guess there is no room for the real solution, which is rolling back Bush’s disastrous tax cuts for the rich, which is what got us into this mess in the first place.

© Ed Stein

I had the same reaction when I first heard about this (after all, I am a grammar Nazi), but Deon Cole says it so much better than I could.

To give you an idea of how dismal politics is today, the two top political stories are a) that Santorum’s plan is to deliberately sabotage Romney to make him lose to Obama, so that Santorum can become the candidate in 2016, and b) that nobody, not even the media, cares about the primaries any more.

There is a keen awareness in the party, particularly among fund raisers and elected officials, that Santorum is playing to hurt Romney so that Romney loses. Santorum sees himself as the nominee in 2016, and he’s playing a 2016 game. You wouldn’t continue to rip at Romney and tear at Romney and try to damage Romney if you were playing the normal, second-place game. The normal second-place approach is to rally around the nominee and become part of the leadership of the party. If Republicans lose, just by nature of the party, you are the leading contender the next time.

At the cable news networks, including CNN, the only one to provide continuous primary coverage on Tuesday, the word is out that the presidential campaign is sending the ratings south. Television, in short, has pretty much decided the race is over, Mitt Romney has won, the thing is boring everyone to death, and it’s time, at least for now, to move on. The campaign is occupying less front-page real estate in the major papers as well.