Recently, conservative Republican Steve Urquhart announced that he's running for one of the two US Senate seats in Utah. Given that I don't live in Utah, you might wonder why I'd be interested in this fact, until you realize that it's Orrin Hatch's seat that he's after.
Hatch sponsored last year's ill-fated Induce Act, which stood a chance of making illegal anything that a media company might have thought would encourage one to copy illegally. On the surface, such a law might sound plausible, until you realize how similarly vague wording in the DMCA has been sorely abused for purposes well outside its original intent. And the Induce Act was widely seen as having the teeth needed to make illegal all sorts of things, from iPods and VCRs on the serious side, to Lego's and pencils on the more outrageous.
Urquhart himself would be someone that I'd vote FOR, given his stance against abortion (more firm, apparently, than Hatch's), for smaller government, etc., but the possibility of having someone equally (or more) conservative but not in the pay of big media (Hatch has received hundreds of thousands from Disney, Sony and the like) is even more enticing.
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