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We wanted to make sure you saw this editorial in the Times Herald-Record about Antonio Delgado's recent efforts to expand broadband access and rebuild rural America:

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Antonio Delgado for Congress

P.S. -- Here's the full editorial from the Times Herald-Record that you can forward to a friend:

Editorial: Delgado is promoting broadband and fairness

Rep. Antonio Delgado, D-Rhinebeck, is promoting two bills that would help his constituents compete in the modern business world, stay engaged in the academic world and in general be better informed.

One would stop those who provide internet service from pretending that the fastest connections that they are capable of providing are actually the ones that they regularly provide to their customers. The other would make sure that all the relevant and accurate information concerning local broadband service is available to individuals, local governments and community groups so they can put pressure on the Federal Communications Commission to ensure this important service is being supplied.

The two bills are getting a lot of publicity locally. They also are being praised in other parts of the country, including other rural areas where the fight for adequate broadband service has dragged on. And it might come as a surprise that the bills also are being publicized in states which we might assume are already well-equipped. California, home of Silicon Valley and many of the businesses that define modern commerce and communication, has 36 mostly rural counties with the same lack of service issues we are familiar with. Delgado's efforts were recently publicized in the Barbed Wire, the news service of the organization of those counties, Rural County Representatives of California.

That alone will not get him the votes he needs in his quest to win a second term. But it should show those who voted for him and some of those who did not that in just his first year in Congress he has found ways to promote legislation with bipartisan appeal, as well as nationwide appeal, that would help both his constituents and everyone else.

This is not the only thing he is doing for rural residents. Along with fellow New York Democrat Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Delgado is sponsoring the Rebuild Rural America Act with more reliable federal funding and grants to support economic growth.

The fight for adequate broadband service is very easy to understand. If those who find it very profitable to supply the service in densely populated areas would spend more of those profits to expand it to rural areas, where reaching all customers requires more of an investment, we would not need our members of Congress to lobby for us.

When it comes to broadband, no one put it better than David Berman, the co-chair of the citizens group Connect Columbia, at a hearing that Delgado held to let frustrated customers reach representatives of the FCC.

"Clearly, every address that gets electricity should get broadband,” he said. “Just like electricity, which runs many devices essential to our lives, large-capacity communication capability is far more than voice, internet, email and tweets."

That is an argument very familiar to anybody who has studied the New Deal and its effort to bring electric service to rural areas, transforming farms and other sparsely populated locations from an 18th Century life to one with 20th Century amenities.

Now, Delgado is trying to do the same, bringing these homes, schools, libraries and business into the century where they live, the 21st.

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