The "Mac" is... nope. He's still gone.

Apparently Sen. John McCain is now campaigning against funding broadband penetration for rural communities. Oh, Senator. I, and many like me, had merely assumed that the bat-shit abomination we saw last year was simply a lost man wandering through the proverbial woods -- so driven to a goal, he was losing everything that defined himself. He made outlandish claims, like wanting to freeze all government funding. Thankfully, this idea died a quick death before it was able to catch on with the "all-government-of-any-kind-ever-is-bad" crowd.

With his grateful and graceful concession speech at the Phoenix Biltmore, most breathed an enormous sigh of relief. The real Mac was back.

Or maybe not. It seems that he may have changed for good, and the original compassionate, goofy, cool conservative from the high desert of Arizona was nowhere to be seen. [All emphasis mine]

MCCAIN: There's got to be some kind of litmus as to whether it'l really stimulate the economy and whether it will in the short-term. Some of the stimulus in this package is excellent; some of it, frankly, has nothing to do --; some of the projects and others that you just mentioned, $6 billion for broadband and internet access. That will take years.

This is disappointing, to say the least. The U.S. currently ranks fifteenth in the world in broadband, behind Belgium. Its not as bad as health-care, where the US ranks below some African nations, but its still something to be ashamed of. Penetration isn't even the most shameful statistic. The U.S. ranks twenty second in average broadband speed.

Its is ironic, in fact, that the senior senator from Arizona would rail against broadband. Considering that mere months ago, he said this:

MCCAIN: In particular, through access to high-speed Internet services that facilitate interstate commerce, drive innovation, and promote educational achievements, there is the potential to change lives. These kinds of transformations of our way of life require the infrastructure of modern communication, and government has a role to play in assuring every community in America can develop that infrastructure. This country has a long history of ensuring that rural areas have the same access to communication technology as other places.

Broadband is the next generation. The internet is not going to be a backbone in the 21st century econony, it will be the backbone. Getting it to places like Chewelah, Washington, a city of five thousand people allows them to fully enter the modern age. Government intervention is the only way to force the ISP's to lay the "pipe" out there to the waiting, eager, customers.

As an end note, what is perhaps most interesting though, is that this was the same senator who hilariously claimed unemployed Americans could earn a living hawking shit on eBay.