Yup. Translation from CongressSpeak: "Lamar Smith (head of Judiciary Committee) had rigged everything just right, but we got caught out, folks, and now there's too much shit flying 'round. Reid, dude, let's wait a month or two and come back when nobody is watching, ok? Don't worry, we'll still cash those cheques."

Lamar Smith is a Representative and not a Senator. His committee has nothing to do with PIPA. If you're going to win this battle, then you need to get your facts correct.

While you are correct about him being a Representative, I don't see anyone saying he did PIPA. He is, however, the one who came out with SOPA, being the House Judiciary Committee Chairman.

Anyhow, I tried to bump you out of grey. It is important to have our facts straight.

I may have overreacted, but the rest of the comments are all about PIPA and the Senate.

I also get the same feeling. Say some nice things to get some support, when the bill or a very similar bill comes he will just quietly support it.

Got that impression too.

PIPA was introduced by a Democrat, SOPA by a Republican, and both have wide bipartisan support.

Gettin' paid seems to have wide bipartisan support.

This isn't a partisan thing. Some Democrats pretend not to support SOPA/PIPA as well.

The way it will work is the movie and recording industry groups will start pouring in money into party coffers. That should really read "continue pouring...", actually.

The bill will be split into smaller chunks and added as riders to completely unrelated, must-pass spending like the annual Medicare "doc fix", and passed at the end of the session over a two day period along with 1500 other bills. If there's substantial public opposition, and really there won't be because they're passing 60,000 pages of legislation in a couple days on the way out of town, the leadership of both parties will sit down and figure out who needs to vote against it to keep his seat. Amazingly the bill will pass by one vote in both houses, with all the members in a tough reelection fight voting against.

If the blow back is surprisingly bad the Congressmen who voted for it will say "Aw, jeez, I really didn't want to vote for it, but I couldn't allow the Medicare bill to be jeopardized by this one little thing. You don't hate grandma, do you? There's plenty of time to fix it in the next session." Of course the fix will be tied up by procedural moves and then watered down into a runny legislative paste if they can't bury it altogether.

And there you have it. Another piece of crap legislation paid for and passed with the least political impact. You can't say these guys don't know what they're doing.

Because he's a politician

ftfy