Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski is a big advocate of net neutrality. The agency is considering implementing rules that would greatly advance this goal.

Opponents have described the effort as a government plan to take over and manage the internet.  However, it seems Genachowski actions are raising questions about the FCC’s ability to regulate with any degree of competence. On Wednesday, Genachowski requested a one-month extension of the deadline for the FCC to formulate a national broadband plan.  Under current law, the FCC is supposed to hand over its national broadband plan to Congress on or before February 17.

According to Colin Cromwell, a senior adviser to Genachowski, the Agency needs more time to:

“fully brief commissioners and key members of Congress, to get additional input from stakeholders, and to fully digest the exhaustive record before the agency”

However, publicly and privately, critics are slamming Genachowski for mismanagement and an apparent inability to get things done on time.  Robert McDowell, a Republican member of the FCC said in a statement this week:

(more…)

For those who were expecting the election of Barack Obama to yield a peace dividend in the war on terror, the resurgence of Al-Qaeda has come as a surprise. Obama’s obsequious diplomacy was supposed to be a tonic to the aggressions of the Bush years, but his appeasement seems to have only encouraged more war. Rather than calm the Islamic world, Obama’s passivity has invited attack.

As in the Cold War, the current battle of ideology takes place in proxy wars. Unlike in the Cold War, the war on terror is largely fought through symbolic actions. Islamists do not make tactical attacks. They do not bomb Boeing factories or destroy highways and rail lines. Instead they destroy iconic buildings, trains, and airplanes. They use the spectacle of destruction, carried out in a diabolical way by suicide agents, as their means of waging war. That is the definition of a terror campaign.

The proper response to terror is not appeasement but counterattack. Islamists wage their terror campaigns in order to cow American influence abroad, especially in the Gulf. The answer to such attacks, if we hope to avoid them in the future, is to increase American involvement in Muslim countries both through soft influence and force of arms. Such a strategy was one of the best but least articulated justifications for the Second Gulf War.

(more…)

Coming this winter to C-SPAN:

The true story… of 535 politicians…picked to live in two houses…work together and their lives taped…to find out what happens…when Congress stops being polite…and starts secret, detailed negotiations on a sweeping, transformative health care reform bill…This is the real Real World DC.

Featuring Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Charles Rangel, Robert Byrd, Barney Frank, Max Baucus…and billions of taxpayer dollars.

(more…)

By Barack Obama

It certainly was a holiday to remember.  Since I’m President of the United States, I was able to choose anywhere in the world to spend a long, lazy couple of weeks.  So, we got the 747 gassed up to head to Hawaii for the Holidays.  When I learned Health Care Reform might be held up in the Senate on Christmas Eve, many felt nervous that the holiday kickoff would hit a snafu.  Sure, it’s one of the most complicated and controversial bills in American history, but we had turkeys to baste and chestnuts to roast.

Great news, we cooked up a plan to slap a 10 percent tax on people who go to tanning beds — that ought to fix paying for all this!   Plus, Senator Harry Reid ensured the democrats who were going to bail on the bill were handsomely paid off, so we quickly squeaked out a win on that sucker before anyone had a chance to read it!  The partisan divide may now be bigger than ever, but I made it out of D.C. on time to head for some quality climate change —  to the land where palm trees sway for some holiday island fun — Mele Kalikimaka!

(more…)

My last article, Medicare is Already Rationing Care, focused on one small aspect of a much larger story, a story every American needs to know. The battle over the meaning of medicine began 2,500 years ago, not last spring.

In the late 1990’s I gave a lecture entitled “Post-Hippocratic Medicine in the Shadow of Nietzsche” in response to Peter Singer, the chair of bioethics at Princeton University. Singer had proposed we not consider humans “fully human” until they reached five weeks of age (after birth). During the first four weeks, he argued, we should allow the overt killing of infants with disabilities. This was “cost-effective.” It served the “greater good” by controlling the skyrocketing cost of healthcare.

For a decade I studied the question ”How did America reach a place in her history where we could seriously consider resurrecting the ancient practice of infanticide?” What I discovered changed my life.

For the past 2,500 years physicians served only one of two roles in Western culture. They either followed Hippocrates and served the wellbeing of their patients, or they followed Plato and served the greater welfare of the State. The philosophy of Peter Singer is not new—it has been with us for millennia. We once again stand at these same fated crossroads of Plato and Hippocrates as we debate the future of American healthcare.

Based on my study of history, philosophy, and current events, I feared we were rapidly returning to the world of Plato; a world where physicians worked at the behest of government, not solely for the patient. To help Americans understand what was about to transpire, I launched  Physicians for Reform in 2006.

(more…)

Today, in 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense.

Friday morning Jamie Allman and I interviewed Claire McCaskill who gave further signs of Democrat infighting as she agreed to issue a press release saying that she supports having a broadcasted conference committee on the fauxcare negotiations. She was challenged as to why, whenever on the Sunday morning talk shows or making other media rounds, she had not taken the opportunity to voice dissent against the actions of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to make the deliberations private.

She also acknowledged that the legislation does enforce penalties for Americans who do not choose government-run fauxcare.

McCaskill also singled me out by saying my calling her out on her fauxcare vote (because the majority of Americans and Missourians do not support it and her approval rating is sliding as a result) was “politicizing the issue.” I’d say not making yourself available to your constituents (her staff was nice but callers rarely get through and the senator obviously disregards the polling data) and voting for an unconstitutional bill which abuses the commerce clause for the sake of giving Democrats a win under the guise of providing real reform while not actually providing real reform – is real politicizing.

(more…)

Saturday is my favorite day to read the newspaper. That’s the day reporters and editors print stories they know they have to cover but don’t want to get wide attention. The latest evidence for this theory is the Washington Post’s treatment of the revelation of remarks made by Sen. Harry Reid during the 2008 Presidential campaign:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) apologized today for referring to President Barack Obama as “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect” in private conversations during the 2008 presidential campaign.

“I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words,” said Reid in a statement. “I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments.”

Poor choice of words? Exactly what other combination of words could Sen. Reid have used to convey his point? And what, exactly, was his point anyway? What was the relevance of these observations? We don’t have the full context for the remark in the Post’s reporting. It simply notes that Reid’s comments are revealed in a new book, “Game Change”, authored by reporters from Time and New York magazines.

Interesting that the two magazine reporters, Mark Halperin and John Heileman, have been sitting on their knowledge of Reid’s remarks for so long. Holding onto such a scoop to promote book sales would be understandable, except that the incident doesn’t even make it into the promotional blurb for the book. Just move along, nothing to see here.

Which got me thinking about Trent Lott.

(more…)

Wade Radthe, who admits to helping cover up his brother’s alleged million dollar embezzlement and tax evasion, must be very pleased with Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer’s universal voter registration plan:

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, and Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, have plans to ram through legislation that will produce universal voter registration. No matter what they claim, the rule changes will make it possible for illegal aliens to register to vote and for others to register multiple times. [LINK]

Why does this please Wade? Because it’s his plan!

(more…)

Politico reports (emphasis mine):

“As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility,” Obama said.

Obama said an intelligence review found that the U.S. government had the information needed to thwart the plot but failed to do so because of a series of compounding shortcomings, including that intelligence analysts didn’t focus heavily enough on information warning that al-Qaida in Yemen wanted to strike the United States…

Obama’s buck-stops-here message marks a change in tone from earlier statements in which Obama and other officials repeatedly noted that the watch-listing system that failed to flag the suspect, Umar AbdulMatallab, was put in place under the Bush administration.

You know I’d like to be able to commend the President for doing what his Administration should have done right out of the gate in accepting responsibility for this series of blatant security failures. But the cynical side of me suspects that this is an attempt to deflect attention away from the fact that the TSA and DHS under Janet Napolitano conducted a comprehensive review of the terrorist watch list system in 2009, and adamantly defended the status quo.

(more…)

In earlier posts – here and here – I drew attention to the pre-eminence of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu in and for a time after the eighteenth century, and I suggested that at least one of the reasons for his pre-eminence is still pertinent today. There are other such reasons, which I addressed at length in Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty and in Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, and they, too, deserve consideration. I will discuss one such here.

Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws is a large book, and it is difficult to know which elements within it are the most salient. There is, however, one passage in which Montesquieu tells us outright that what he is about to say is fundamental to everything else that he says. “I,” he writes near the end of the first of the work’s six parts, “shall be able to be understood only when the next four chapters have been read.” Then, in those four chapters, he argues that forms of government are closely related to the size of the territory that must be governed. Republics are well-suited to polities small in extent; monarchies, to polities of intermediate size; and despotisms to polities great in size.

The pertinence of this claim to the situation of the American Founding Fathers should be obvious. Especially in modern times, this would appear to mean that republicanism can only be viable in mountainous places such as Switzerland, where the geography virtually rules out the establishment of anything but tiny states. It is, then, in no way surprising that the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists turned to a considerable extent upon the question whether it is somehow possible to establish a viable republic on an extended territory.

(more…)

It is cold everywhere. [Insert global warming joke here.] Might as well try to enjoy it.

Earlier this week the Department of Education hosted an event at a local high school in Washington, DC. The purpose of the event, which featured Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) and the second lady of the United States, Dr. Jill Biden was to promote the new FAFSA application. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) has been compulsory for any students wishing to receive financial aide or subsidized loans.

The event was well scripted, except for a Biden gaffe. But, in this case, it was not the Vice President who opened his mouth and inserted his foot, it was his wife, Dr. Jill Biden.

Jill Biden has been in the academic circles for close to three decades. She has been an educator for over 29 years. She currently teaches at Northern Virginia Community college, and she has made education one of her focal points in this administration.  In fact, Jill Biden regularly travels on behalf of the administration and to visit schools and universities across the nation.

(more…)

If you needed another reason to be against trying KSM and his band of merry maniacal Islamists in NYC, here it is.

New York City projects it will cost more than $400 million to provide security if the pre-trial preparation and trial of the suspects in the Sept. 11 terror attackstakes two years, which insiders say is virtually certain, according to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

It will cost another $206 million annually if the trial runs beyond two years, which some fear is possible, the mayor’s office estimates.

There may be some who think this is a great way to make the liberal elites on the upper west side put their money where their mouth is when it comes to giving terrorists the same rights guaranteed to American citizens under the U.S. constitution, but, of course, we will ALL have to pay for this.

(more…)

Politics has often been called the “Art of the Possible.”  We have seen many a strange thing happen in the history of American elections.  But nothing would be more unexpected, or more immediately helpful to the American people, than if Republican State Senator Scott Brown could pull of the mother of all upsets and capture the special election for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat on January 19^th.  A Brown victory would deny the Democrats the 60 votes necessary to shove through the takeover of the nation’s health care system.

For those political junkies who just assumed when Uncle Ted passed away that his seat would stay firmly in the grasp of the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic Party, take note, and take heart.  State Attorney General Martha Coakley won the Democratic Primary with under 50% of the vote and has taken a cavalier attitude towards what she expected would be her coronation in the general.

Meanwhile, Senator Brown, and Army Reservist and an energetic campaigner, has been waging an insurgent battle that has pulled him to within nine points in the latest Rassmussen poll. According to Rassmussen, Brown’s surge is entirely due to a swing among independent voters, who can make the difference in Massachusetts in spite of the Democrats’ 3 to 1 edge in registration.  Just ask GOP Governors Weld, Romney and Cellucci, who all have won statwide in the past two decades.

Even the New York Times, which would normally ignore any news that does not support its pro-Democrat narrative, has taken notice.  It may be that the Gray Lady is trying to wake up the moribund Coakley campaign before it’s too late, but it is none the less a sign that this race is for real.

(more…)

I distinctly remember the placards in the windows of the union hall in my union-stronghold Michigan city: “Show Us the Jobs.”  It was a thinly-veiled campaign against the Bush administration for what the AFL-CIO saw as a failure to create jobs.

The economy in 2009 and 2010 was and is far worse than it ever was in 2004.  The unemployment rate in 2004 was 5.5%.  Today, it’s 10%.  If Obama could get the unemployment rate somewhere in the middle, the Nobel Committee would likely send him the prize for economics.

Saul Alinsky’s Fourth Rule for Radicals is, “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.”  So, in true Alinsky fashion, why not turn the left’s campaign against them?  Republicans: adopt the “Show Us the Jobs” campaign.  After all, the AFL-CIO’s bus tour to swing states didn’t begin until March of that year.

(more…)

We’re the Transportation Security Administration. We’re working hard to make sure you enjoy a safe flight. And while we cannot apprehend every terrorist, you can count on us to do what we’re trained to do whenever there’s a security breach–overreact to tiny threats.

Overreact to tiny threats; ignore the big ones. That’s what we do, and we do it better than anyone.

(more…)

Outrageously, U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Secretary Hilda Solis and other DOL Obama appointees appear to have blatantly disregarded the President’s Executive Order #13490 – the Ethics Pledge.

According to a report by the National Right To Work Committee, Solis and several other appointees gave themselves unilateral waivers on the two-year moratorium in direct conflict with President Obama’s two-year mandate:

Revolving Door Ban [for] All Appointees Entering Government.  I will not for a period of 2 years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.

The White House Press Office

Solis’ only publicly available signed ethics pledge is provided by Olga Pierce and Christopher Weaver at Propublica.  National Right To Work reviewed it and other ProPublica provided ethics pledges. It is clear that other DOL appointees followed Solis’ lead and granted themselves ethics waivers in conflict with the presidential order.  The report identified Deputy Secretary Seth Harris, Assistant Secretary Phyllis Borzi, Assistant Secretary T. Michael Kerr (SEIU & AFSCME), and Assistant Secretary Jane Oates.

(more…)

There are two distinct sectors in the economy: the private sector and the government sector.  The private sector is the productive part of the economy.  Competition in the private sector promotes greater efficiency, productivity and innovation than the public, or government, sector is capable of.  Yet it is government employees who are the highest paid and have the most job security.  This helps explain why so many states are facing acute, budgetary crises.

A new report by Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute highlights the sharp disparity between public and private compensation.  Despite producing very little compared to their private counterparts, public sector employees of state and local governments averaged 45 percent more per hour in wages and benefits.  And because government never shrinks, public employees are “rarely terminated for cost-cutting or job performance reasons.”

\Unionization appears to be a factor in public sector pay.  With a few exceptions, Edwards shows that the states with the highest public pay advantage also have the highest share of union workers.  But whatever the cause may be, the excessive pension plans provided by states has placed taxpayers in a virtual stranglehold.  Unless cuts are made, they are the ones who will have to pony up to provide for public sector workers.

(more…)