Legislative Bloopers

I'm late on this one, but Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) gave the following explanation for voting against a net-neutrality amendment when it came up for a vote in the Senate Commerce Committee:

There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet* and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. . . .

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

More at Wired Blogs.

Stevens, a grumpy old man who will go to any lengths to defend his pork barrell projects, is an easy target for Daily Show viewers like myself. But Alaskans love the guy, and he represents them well, so those of us in the other 49 states just have to accept Stevens as a prominent member of the U.S. Senate. (He is currently the president pro tempore.)

But as a high-ranking member of the Senate, Stevens needs to do some research before making public statements about subjects he knows little about. Getting blasted by cyber-bloggers won't hurt Stevens politically, but his warped understanding of the subject of an important committee vote hurts the Senate's credibility.