If we see military action in Iran in the next several months, you can trace part of the reason back to a redistricting quirk in the San Fernando Valley and a debate between Democratic House Representatives Howard Berman and Brad Sherman, redrawn into the same district. They spend most of the night trying to be the most belligerent to Iran and most solicitous to whatever Israel wants.

ACTA is basically an attempt by legacy media companies to leverage their hyperbolic rhetoric and wildly inaccurate math into an extralegal framework that would allow them to dictate which web sites are permitted to exist.

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.

[Editor's Note: For the Latest on PIPA, Vote Postponed.]

We are very close to being able to predict a loss for the Protect IP Act, or PIPA, in next week’s cloture vote in the Senate. According to the Open Congress whip count, which is user-generated and seems to have the most updated information, 33 Senators are either co-sponsors or leaning toward supporting PIPA, and 38 Senators are either confirmed No votes or leaning that way. As we all know, it takes 41 votes to block a cloture vote. So if the leaners pan out we’ll see cloture go down.

A variety of links to articles/interviews on current topics that may be of interest.

Yesterday’s SOPA strike was enormously successful, not only raising attention to the issue but moving a tremendous amount of politicians for a one-day event. Over 4.5 million people signed Google’s petition against SOPA. The Wikipedia action gave high-profile attention to the issue as well, and even if Facebook and Twitter’s responses were muted, overall the online community made themselves heard.

But those of us charting the protest yesterday were struck by how most of the lawmakers turning against the bill were Republicans. If you look at the latest whip count on PIPA, for example, you see that more Republicans oppose it at this point than Democrats.

The series of anti-SOPA activism going on today has already claimed an early victory. Marco Rubio, the Florida Senator and Tea Party favorite, dropped his support after being a co-sponsor of the bill. Now other Senators are starting to announce their opposition.

The U.S. House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation and the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) are the talk of the Internet primarily because both bills, in an attempt to address third-party copyright infringement and online piracy, are an overreach that threatens free speech and brings into question the scope of “fair use.”

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.

There’s a very good TBogg post on ___ that he wrote and FDL would have run this a.m., but if Congress passes legislation that allows the internet to be censored and sites like ours to be shut down arbitrarily by unaccountable government or corporations, you might never know what you’re missing. You can help unblock this post.