Zoe Lofgren Backs Google -- Wow, What a Surprise

As Andrew Albanese notes in his excellent summary of Google Books comments for Publishers Weekly, "Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, suggested that Congress should stay away. 'At this point, we don’t have a role to play,' she said, adding that the settlement was 'the private sector achieving what we failed to achieve' in terms of legislation."

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, is a major Lofgren campaign contributor (most recently, $2,000 on October 8, 2008).

"What we failed to achieve" at the legislative level -- indeed.