Category: Virginia

I have halfway been following the race for the Republican nomination in the 99th, especially after Albert Pollard announced that he would not be running for reelection, leaving the presumptive winner to be whoever manages to win the Republican nomination.

One of the candidates that is running is John Lampmann, a resident of Portobago subdivision in northern Caroline County. I always thought the guy was a squish, now I am thinking he’s just an idiot.

I find it bizarre that a man that talks about how he will “[s]hore up protection for our property rights and property values and” “[r]e-create the foundation for more and better jobs that pay a living wage in the Northern Neck”, has been one of the foremost opponents of the special exception permit request by Vulcan and Black Marsh Farms.

Lampmann is an enemy of private property rights and wants to deny the citizens of Caroline 14 full-time jobs and $100,000 annually in tax revenue.

Lampmann: Already Bought and Paid For

Even more bizarre to me is that Lampmann goes on and on ad nauseam about how he is going to fight the “urban special interests”.

Right, the guy that has spent the last six years as a corporate lobbyist is going to fight special interests? To make matters worse, Lampmann is not even honest about what he does for a living referring to his job as a “Washington Representative”. Yes, seriously:

Upon leaving public service, John joined Johnson, Madigan, Peck Bolland & Steward as a Washington Representative for two years.  John now runs his own consulting company where he continues to serve the public interest by helping private organizations make government work for the public good.

To Lampmann, “serv[ing] the public interest” is getting corporate welfare and subsidies for private companies and organizations.

Who have been some of Lampmann’s lobbying clients?

• AARP, one of the biggest supporters of Obamacare.
• “Compete America”, a collection of different corporate interests that support issuing more H1-B visas for immigrants. So while Lampmann is talking about how the Northern Neck has no jobs, he has been representing a client that thinks that jobs should go, not to Americans, but immigrants.
• WilmerHale, a law firm that defended, pro bono, the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold “campaign finance law” before the Supreme Court of the United States which ruled the law to be an unconstitutional violation of the people’s right to freedom of speech.

But here’s my favorite: According to Lampmann’s biography he was the chief of state for Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary for 18 years.

In 2006, after leaving his job as chief of staff, Lampmann was a lobbyist for the “National Music Publishers Association”, a trade association that attempts to get legislation passed seeking tougher penalties for copyright violations. The same year that Lampmann was a lobbyist for the association, his former boss introduced a bill that would have:

The 24-page bill is a far-reaching medley of different proposals cobbled together. One would, for instance, create a new federal crime of just trying to commit copyright infringement. Such willful attempts at piracy, even if they fail, could be punished by up to 10 years in prison.

It also represents a political setback for critics of expanding copyright law, who have been backing federal legislation that veers in the opposite direction and permits bypassing copy protection for “fair use” purposes. That bill–introduced in 2002 by Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat–has been bottled up in a subcommittee ever since.

[…]

But one of the more controversial sections may be the changes to the DMCA. Under current law, Section 1201 of the law generally prohibits distributing or trafficking in any software or hardware that can be used to bypass copy-protection devices. (That section already has been used against a Princeton computer science professor, Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov and a toner cartridge remanufacturer.)Smith’s measure would expand those civil and criminal restrictions. Instead of merely targeting distribution, the new language says nobody may “make, import, export, obtain control of, or possess” such anticircumvention tools if they may be redistributed to someone else.

[…]

The proposed law scheduled to be introduced by Rep. Smith also does the following:

• Permits wiretaps in investigations of copyright crimes, trade secret theft and economic espionage. It would establish a new copyright unit inside the FBI and budgets $20 million on topics including creating “advanced tools of forensic science to investigate” copyright crimes.
• Amends existing law to permit criminal enforcement of copyright violations even if the work was not registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
• Boosts criminal penalties for copyright infringement originally created by the No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 from five years to 10 years (and 10 years to 20 years for subsequent offenses). The NET Act targets noncommercial piracy including posting copyrighted photos, videos or news articles on a Web site if the value exceeds $1,000.
• Creates civil asset forfeiture penalties for anything used in copyright piracy. Computers or other equipment seized must be “destroyed” or otherwise disposed of, for instance at a government auction. Criminal asset forfeiture will be done following the rules established by federal drug laws.
• Says copyright holders can impound “records documenting the manufacture, sale or receipt of items involved in” infringements.

Draw your own conclusions there.

And speaking of Lampmann’s former boss, Lamar Smith, he thinks that “the liberal media bias” is a gravest threat facing this country, even worst than a recession and a terrorist attack:

Do we want our next Delegate to be a Beltway insider and a corporate lobbyist?