Joseph Somsel broke the story of California's plan to eventually control the temperature set on thermostats of state residents on American Thinker a week ago. Since then, it has percolated through the blogosphere, talk radio, and now into the mainstream media, demonstrating yet again the way many issues appear first on the internet.

The broader stir on the Internet began when Joseph Somsel, a San Jose-based contributor to the publication American Thinker, wrote an article a week ago on the programmable communicating thermostat, or P.C.T.

Mr. Somsel went after the proposal with arguments that were by turns populist ("Come the next heat wave, the elites might be comfortably lolling in La Jolla's ocean breezes" while "the Central Valley's poor peons are baking in Bakersfield"), free-market ("P.C.T.'s will obscure the price signals to power plant developers") and civil libertarian ("the new P.C.T. requirement certainly seems to violate the ‘a man's home is his castle' common-law dictum").

Word of the California proposal hit the outrage button in corners of the Internet, was written about in The North County Times in Southern California, and got a derisive mention on Wednesday on Rush Limbaugh's radio program.

The fact that similar radio-controlled technologies have been used on a voluntary basis in irrigation systems on farm fields and golf courses and in limited programs for buildings on Long Island is seldom mentioned in Internet postings that make liberal use of references of George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" and "Big Brother," the omnipresent voice of Orwell's police state.