A “level playing field” sounds inherently fair, so why should domestic solar manufacturing have to suffer for the sins of legacy energy production?

After the death of PIPA this morning comes the news that Lamar Smith, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee who planned on resuming the markup of SOPA, the House version of anti-piracy legislation, in February, has put the bill into cold storage. The work of the grassroots coalition did the trick: SOPA and PIPA are dead for now.

Wired is censored today. So is TBogg’s mini-site. The Google doodle is blacked out. And part of Daily Kos. And a lead story at The Huffington Post. And even right here. Sites like Wikipedia and Reddit and I Can Haz Cheezburger and Raw Story and Informed Comment and thousands more are completely dark today, not providing any content. It’s part of the largest online strike in history.

Many of the design principles for the insurance market exchanges in the Affordable Care Act were based on unproven, discredited, and frankly absurd conservative notions about the economagic of free markets. But too many liberals refused to acknowledge this until they saw Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney make the same arguments.

Let’s define some terms here. The Internet censorship bills have different names depending on which chamber of Congress you’re talking about. The House bill is called SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. That bill is currently in the committee process and has not yet cleared the Judiciary Committee. Observers thought this would happen at the end of last year, but House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith cancelled the conclusion of the markup at the last minute.

But in the Senate, the Judiciary Committee has already cleared their version of the legislation, known as PIPA, the Protect Intellectual Property Act.

The notion that the health insurance exchanges required by the Affordable Care Act would reduce health care costs using “competition” between concentrated health insurers was always one or more unbridgeable chasms away from a plausible theory.

But the myths of competitive markets are so deeply ingrained in our political discourse it was inevitable that a nominal Democratic President not constrained by conceptual coherence and a corrupt Congress would try to sell us the conceit as the only politically feasible model for health care reform. The economists — not to mention international experience — told us it was gibberish, but nobody cared.

The markup in the House Judiciary Committee of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, has begun. Observers expect at least two days of markups, and the bill wouldn’t see the House floor until sometime thereafter, probably next year. There are over 60 amendments on the bill, and opponents on the committee are dragging out the proceedings. Rep. Zoe Lofgren refused to waive the reading of the bill, so Judiciary staffers needed to spend an hour doing that.

Understand that this bill is getting a hearing, and a markup, because very wealthy interests want it to pass. It so happens that very wealthy interests want it to fail, but that puts it on the agenda as well, because both sides can go to their funders and raise money off the threat of the bill passing or failing. This becomes a bonanza for K Street lobbyists. There are over 1,000 of them working on SOPA.

In a surprise move, Paul Ryan found a Democratic partner to propose a new Medicare plan that does not fully privatize it, but instead keeps fee-for-service Medicare as an option alongside a premium support plan. This is the same proposal that the front-running Republican Presidential candidates have made.

Sen. Ron Wyden joined Rep. Darrell Issa, of all people, in announcing the counter-offer. The “Copyright Alliance,” the umbrella trade group pushing the Internet censorship bill, didn’t like it, so it’s making the right enemies. There’s a bit more on the alternative here. Rather than turning federal judges into mediators of international copyright disputes, this proposal at least puts the question in the right venue.

In effect, Wyden would put a hold on the legislation, forcing a series of time-consuming votes to get Protect IP passed. Republicans do this routinely. But with so much on the calendar and not much time to get it all done, this could at least block the bill for the rest of the year.