We have just passed through the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) brouhaha.

A bill intended to stop theft – an important goal, and a necessary function of government.  But SOPA was overly broad, and deserved in its most recent iteration to go away – which it did.

Because of a bipartisan oppositional uprising – but the two sides arose for very different reasons.

The Theft-Left is vociferously opposed to private property rights.  SOPA is aimed at protecting private property.  So the Left said No.

The Right is loathe to grow government control of anything – including the Web.  And having just witnessed the recent Big Government Network Neutrality Internet power grab, their antennae were highly sensitized – and they said No.

Now, Washington is talking cyber security.  Where there is, again, a legitimate role for government – but we have, again, a bill that defines said role much too broadly.

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Long ago, Jefferson warned, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”  The exceptions to that rule have been few and far between recently, and ought to be celebrated when they occur.

One did this past week with the announcement that supporters of the so-called “Stop On-Line Piracy Act” and the “Protect Intellectual Property Act” have indefinitely postponed their measures after an unprecedented protest across the Internet.

SOPA and PIPA pose a crippling danger to the Internet because they use the legitimate concern over copy-right infringement as an excuse for government to intrude upon and regulate the very essence of the Internet – the unrestricted and absolutely free association that links site to site, providing infinite pathways for commerce, discourse and learning.

It is not the Internet per se that has set the stage for the next quantum leap in human knowledge and advancement – but rather the free association at the core of the Internet.  And this is precisely what SOPA and PIPA directly threaten.

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It’s a curious thing, the sudden and bizarre demonization of true constitutional conservatives like Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tennessee) by some conservative online agitants.

Most conservatives understand that Rep. Blackburn is one of the more reliably intelligent and sober figures in contemporary politics.  That’s particularly true when it comes to technology policy.  While most political leaders speak in simplistic talking points, Rep. Blackburn is known for developing real knowledge about, and applies her steady conservative principles to, the issues.

As the most prominent example, Rep. Blackburn remains one of the most steadfast and informed opponents of so-called “Net Neutrality,” which truly will launch governmental micromanagement of Internet service.

So it’s especially odd and ironic that some conservatives suddenly slur her.  Said RedState’s (and CNN’s) Erick Erickson, “I am pledging right now that I will do everything in my power to defeat her in her 2012 re-election bid.”  His rationale?  Erickson has joined the likes of MoveOn.org, Demand Progress, the Marxist group Free Press and others on the left in fanatically opposing legislation to stop foreign Internet piracy, H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  In doing so, he and other generally reliable conservatives are promoting lawlessness and outright theft by foreign pirates over constitutionally protected property rights.

So what is SOPA, and why all of the fuss?

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The controversial anti-piracy legislation that set off an unprecedented wave of opposition from the technology sector is withering on the vine, with additional Members of Congress withdrawing support for the bills on an almost hourly basis.

What’s interesting is that of the over 30 Members who have recently come out in opposition to the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the vast majority have been Republicans, who have long been considered the stodgy side of the aisle when compared to their tech-savvy Democratic counterparts. While the tech world, who Dems claim to support at every turn, aggressively protests SOPA and PIPA, the very officials they helped to elect – including Democratic party leaders – have abandoned them in the face of their most important issue: internet privacy.

The word on the Hill that in the past 24-hours alone Sens. Rubio, Cornyn, Hatch, DeMint, Kirk, Grassley, Blunt, Boozman, and Ayotte have all come out in opposition of PIPA, with several among them withdrawing their original co-sponsorship of the legislation. What do these nine Senators have in common? They’re all Republicans.

Even within individual states the divisions don’t make sense; New Hampshire’s junior Senator Kelly Ayotte withdrew her co-sponsorship and support for PIPA citing overwhelming constituent opposition, whereas Democratic senior Senator Jeanne Shaheen has remained on board. Did New Hampshire voters somehow reach out to Ayotte to register their disapproval but leave Shaheen out of the loop? Unlikely.

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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (and its Senate alternative, the Protect Intellectual Property Act [PIPA]) have been taking a bipartisan beating.  Conservatives have joined with Leftists to savage the bill and thus its chances for passage.

I too am opposed to this iteration of SOPA – it remains too overly broad.

But something similar and more finely, sharply crafted – must become law.  And conservatives will need to reorient themselves when a better version of the bill comes along – and support it.

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We cannot look at the SOPA debate without putting it into the broader context of the immediately preceding Network Neutrality debate.

Conservatives rightly became highly tuned to Internet censorship as a result of the Left’s drive to impose the truly censorious Net Neutrality by any means necessary.

Following so closely on Net Neutrality’s heels, SOPA got swallowed up in this righteous protect-free-speech verve.

But there are some fundamental differences between SOPA and Net Neutrality that must be acknowledged.

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Of wireless Internet bandwidth hogs, that is.

We have for months been odiferously awash in word of the Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) “movement.”

Intellectually and ideologically sloven, these gathered gaggles have been commandeering sporadic public spaces (and some private ones) all across the fruited plain.

When asked why they are so doing, you get an inanity cornucopia – think Jay (Leno) Walking or (Jesse) Watters’ World on ignorance steroids.

The only semi-comprehensible – but still factually vacuous – thing to emanate from the whole mess is the 1% – 99% nonsense.

That being the #OWS-ers saying that the upper 1% of Americans control most of the money and power and thusly must be…destroyed?  Certainly taxed and regulated into utter oblivion.

In an always-and-forever failed effort to “spread the wealth around” – misery being the only thing that ever ends up equally distributed.

Work, work ethic and talent never enter the #OWS equation – but then again, why should they?

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The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a nightmarish piece of legislation moving the House Judiciary Committee currently which Hollywood is pushing hard for. The Tinsel Town lobbyists are in full press on Capitol Hill, doing all they can to get the legislation out of committee and up for a vote. The problem is, SOPA in no uncertain terms is a direct assault on a free internet.

One of the reasons many of us get our news and entertainment from the Net these days is because we find the legacy media lacking. We have turned our backs on old media because it has failed to serve us. We no longer have to tolerate obvious and unceasing news bias, or watch only boxed and packaged melodrama. We are now free to pursue news and entertainment where we like with the click of a mouse or a swipe of the Ipad.

Hollywood, and most of legacy media are unhappy about this and would prefer that we continue to listen to their propaganda and watch their terrible movies. I mean, how many sequels can these guys crank out? SOPA seeks to put we the media consumers back in line.

SOPA is being sold as a way to stop the piracy of movies and music from overseas sites, and this is a problem, but the bill goes much further than just addressing this issue.

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The Barack Obama Administration has, since its inception, been moving the United States dramatically leftward, trying to (at the very least) make us a western European socialist entity. Ideologically, a full-on participant in – rather than a rational outlier of – the patently absurd United Nations (UN).

Perhaps the greatest – and worst – example of President Obama’s UN-ing of America was his Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s December 2010 illegal Network Neutrality Internet power grab.

The Administration going to these unlawful lengths to commandeer control of the ‘Net makes it a little more difficult to persuade international autocrats and dictators to leave alone their portions of the World Wide Web.

Or ours.

Which brings us to the United Nations. (more…)

An anti-Islam blog that failed to remove inflammatory comments from a few of its readers will be permanently taken down by its hosting company, WordPress, on January 6 as the result of a number of complaints filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The site, “Bare Naked Islam: It isn’t Islamophobia when they really ARE trying to kill you” (www.barenakedislam.com) will be taken down in two weeks by WordPress according to the website’s owner, Bonnie (*last name withheld).

Bonnie, in an exclusive interview, told Big Government that WordPress suddenly blocked her site “around Thanksgiving” and sent her a message to contact them because the company had some questions about comments that had been left on her site.

“There were some not so nice comments in responses to stories about Muslims killing people and raping little girls,” she said. The comments, she said, “are always a reaction to the stories,” that are posted, “although I do moderate the comments. I sometimes skim through the ones from people I know, and I mistakenly let some go through that were threatening. One was about burning a mosque, one said ‘nuke the Middle East…’.”

Bonnie says that one of the concerns WordPress had was a comment in which someone mentioned a specific mosque in Virginia and another reader responded that they walked by that mosque every day. According to WordPress, the language of the post could have been inciting violence or suggesting an attack on a particular place at a specific time.

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$787 billion.  Plus interest.  At downgrade – and thusly increased – rates.

Behold the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – the “Stimulus.”  Brought to you by President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and their Congressional Democrat cohorts.

Passed in the panicked wake of the 2008 Community Reinvestment Act-Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac-government-induced global economic collapse.  Because “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Passed, we were told, to create “or save” jobs.  In places like non-existent Congressional districts.

Passed, we were told, to keep unemployment below 8%.  How’d that work?

The unemployment rate when Obama took office was 7.6%. The stimulus was passed in February 2009. According to Obama, it was never supposed to go above 8% — well, it was already at 8.1% when the stimulus became a law. And it never got any better. According to the Bureau of Labor & Statistics, the unemployment rate remained high. There were some predictions that it would stay above 9% until 2012 (and this was from the White House no less). The CBO also predicts that the unemployment rate would be 8.2% come November 2012 which is higher than when he took office.

It worked swimmingly.  Drowning-ly, actually.

As we said way back in February:

Government attempting to “assist” the private sector is the D.C. version of the elementary school game Red Light-Green Light.

If the government has given itself the Green Light – and is lumbering and lurching around the free market, blindly and ignorantly throwing around laws, regulations and money – the private sector freezes in place, afraid to move in any direction for fear of the next federal anvil to fall.  The overactive government has thusly emplaced a Red Light in front of the private sector.

Rarely if ever has the federal government been more active than they have been these past two plus years.  And as a result the private sector has been exceedingly timid – which explains why our “recovery” has been so pathetic – if not non-existent.

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Which brings us to the government “helping” the Internet.

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The vote on Senate Joint Resolution (S.J. Res) 6 – the Resolution of Disapproval to undo the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s illegal, unilateral Network Neutrality Internet power grab – is a watershed moment for the members of the Senior Circuit.

The FCC – in fact no federal Agency, Department or Commission – can do anything unless and until Congress writes a law that says “Yo – do this.”

As a unanimous D.C. Circuit Court pointed out in April of 2010, Congress has never done this for the FCC with regard to the Internet and Net Neutrality.

The Commission clearly, simply doesn’t have the juice to do what they again did last December.  It is an egregious overreach, and it must be undone.

Senators – not agencies like the FCC – write laws.  That’s their gig.  Each and every Senator that votes against S.J. Res 6 is giving up on what they asked their constituents to send them to Washington to do.

To vote No is to give up on being an elected representative of We the People.

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Specifically, on Senate Joint Resolution (S.J.Res. 6) – the vote to overturn the Obama Administration Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Net Neutrality Internet power grab.

If you live in Massachusetts – please call/email/fax the Senator and let him know he’d be very wrong to do so.

And that he next year needs Conservatives and Republicans – from Massachusetts and around the nation – if he has any hope to keep his seat.

• Scott Brown – Massachusetts
  • Phone: (202) 224-4543
  • Fax: (202) 228-2646
  • Email: Here

From most appearances, the Senate will this week vote on Senate Joint Resolution (S.J.Res) 6 – the Congressional Review Act Resolution of Disapproval of the Obama Administration Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s illegal Internet Net Neutrality power grab.

Only 51 votes are required for passage – which means only 4 Democrats are needed.  There are 23 Democrat Senate seats up for reelection next year.  A few of these folks aren’t running.  The rest are – many in center or center-right states.  Additionally, there are a few other Senators that should also be subject to Constitutional reason, and thusly contacted.

Behold a list below the fold of some of these Senators and their contact information.  Reach out and tell them to vote Yes on S.J.Res 6.  Also tweet it all out using the hashtag #freethenet. (more…)

President Barack Obama last week unveiled his latest attempt to divert attention away from his horrendously failed economic policies and record.  In his ongoing effort to “fundamentally transform America” and his loomingly piteous campaign to get reelected, the newest phraseology is “We Can’t Wait.”

From his weekly radio address on Saturday:

“The truth is, we can no longer wait for Congress to do its job….So where Congress won’t act, I will.”

There is so much disingenuousness contained in just this tiny excerpt.  The truth is, there is nothing at all new about this.  President Obama has been end-running Congress to unilaterally “fundamentally transform America” since (at least) November 2, 2010. That election day was a stinging, historic rebuke of the Leftist, Big Government policies of President Obama and his Democrats.  Not just in D.C. but throughout the nation, at the state and local levels as well.  It was a crashing, crushing wave that Obama himself described it as a “shellacking.”

We the People elected Republicans in huge numbers up and down the ticket to (amongst other things) serve as a blockade to the Socialism being further emplaced by Donkeys. Unfortunately, the will of We the People remains utterly irrelevant to Obama. After the brutal Congressional slog that was the jamming-through of ObamaCare, over the expressed objections of We the People, the President had enough of the legislative (or constitutional) way of doing things, so he began his regulatory fiat power grabs.

Can’t pass the energy sector-assault that is Cap & Trade?  No problem, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will start imposing large swaths of it as if it has. Can’t pass the workplace-assault that is the Big Union-payoff Card Check?  No problem, President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)  and Department of Labor will start imposing large swaths of it as if it has.

So for the President this weekend to pretend his democracy denying-dictaorial-ism is something new is mendacious.  He’s been going at it at a pretty good for years and he’s only announcing that he’s now really going to ramp it up. He isn’t tired of “wait(ing) for Congress to do its job.”  He long ago lost any interest in anything having to do with Congress — save their utility as an electioneering punching bag. Congress is in fact doing exactly the job we (in part) elected them to do: Be an impediment to the President’s overarching, overreaching Leftist agenda. And they have been largely successful when Obama isn’t illegally, serially, wantonly going around them.

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We have often discussed the incredible peril Network Neutrality poses when placed in the hands of government — it’s the incredible economic and First Amendment damage that can (and will) be done by the federal Leviathan once it gets its Net Neutrality tentacles around the World Wide Web. Nearly as pernicious, are the private big companies who benefit from big government generally – and the incredible Big Government power grab that is Net Neutrality specifically.

We’ve heard a little about Netflix – the gigantic pro-Net Neutrality Internet movie delivery company.  Netflix is pro-Net Neutrality because Netflix wants grandmothers to pay more to email their grandchildren so that they can continue to use tons and tons of Internet bandwidth to make tons and tons of money – and not pay for it. This is one of the terrible things Net Neutrality does: It prevents Internet Service Providers (ISPs) – the people who spend billions of dollars building and perpetually bettering the highways and byways of the World Wide Web – from charging people who use more bandwidth more money.

Let us disabuse ourselves of a pro-Net Neutrality myth – the Internet Superhighway is not a free ride (nothing, of course, is).  Roads cost money, whether to your house or to your computer and Net Neutrality allows some of the biggest riders to do so without paying for the privilege. Net Neutrality outlaws per-use pricing.  It’s like telling a grocery store they must charge people purchasing one steak the same price as people purchasing fifty. It’s Socialism for the Internet – and we’ll end up with everyone getting equal amounts of nothing. And as we go down, your Grandma’s – and your, and my – Internet prices shoot skyward so as to subsidize the incredible bandwidth hogs like Netflix and Google.

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Americans for Prosperity’s Phil Kerpen has released a new book: Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – And How to Stop Him.

In this work, Kerpen lays out the Obama Administration’s serial abuse–in fact, outright violation–of our Constitutional republican form of government. President Obama is using the panoply of federal Departments, Commissions, Agencies and Boards to illegally force feed us new “laws.” Yet they aren’t laws at all, as Obama is bypassing Congress and the legislative process.  They are being foisted upon us by executive branch regulatory fiat. This is not democracy but dictatorship, as Kerpen’s excellent tome exhaustively proves.

Here is but a sampling of the research he presents to make his case. Chapter II: Democrats can’t pass the energy sector-assault that is Cap & Trade?  No problem, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will start imposing large swaths of it as if it has. Chapter IV: Democrats can’t pass the workplace-assault that is the Big Union-payoff Card Check?  No problem, President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)  and Department of Labor will start imposing large swaths of it as if it has.

Chapter V: ObamaCare–which did get shoved, bribed and cajoled through Congress–left WIDE latitude for Health & Human Services (HHS) regulators to go to town on our health care sector. And here’s a shocker; they already are. Chapter VI: The Dodd-Frank financial sector-attack slipped through Congress under cover of economic crash-fueled panic and also left WIDE latitude for a host of regulatory agencies to go to town. Shocker– so are they. And the list goes on, and on, and on… (more…)

From BusinessWeek:

There’s no hotter name in politics right now than the Tea Party. But anyone seized with a desire for smaller government who visits teaparty.com won’t find angry activists in tricorn hats spouting Thomas Jefferson. Instead, they’ll land on the website of a Canadian rock band of the same name that pioneered a style of Middle Eastern fusion known as “Moroccan roll” and broke up six years ago. This causes endless confusion for the millions of people who Google “Tea Party” each month. It’s no picnic for the band members, either. “So much damage has been done to our name by the political movement that we’re considering selling,” says Stuart Chatwood, The Tea Party’s bassist.

He and his band mates may feel a little better about the rise of the right wing if they put the domain name up for auction. With so many Presidential candidates, political operatives, and interest groups vying to capitalize on the Tea Party brand, there could be a bidding war. “Last cycle, Barack Obama raised $500 million online,” says Warren Adelman, president of GoDaddy.com, the domain registrar and Web hosting company. “If you look at the money being talked about this time around—campaigns raising $1 billion—it’s easy to expect teaparty.com to go for well over $1 million.”

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It looks like it is finally going to happen. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has finally gotten their net neutrality regulations through the bureaucratic mess, and now it [IS] only a matter of times before they start to take effect.

The National Journal reports:

Open Internet regulations, or network-neutrality rules, have cleared the final regulatory hurdle before getting on the books, a Federal Communications Commission spokesman said on Monday.

The rules, which limit how cable and phone companies can treat legal Internet traffic, are strongly opposed by Republicans in Congress, who have unsuccessfully attempted to repeal them on several occasions.

The FCC passed the regulations in December over Republican objections, creating the defining saga of commission Chairman Julius Genachowski’s tenure so far and fulfilling an Obama campaign promise.

The Office of Management and Budget, which had a procedural role in OK’ing the regulations thanks to the Paperwork Reduction Act, had to review new data-collection responsibilities that the rules apply to Internet service firms. “OMB signed off late Friday,” an FCC spokesman said in an e-mail.

One of my life’s maxims is:

Education and knowledge are often mutually exclusive.

With the Barack Obama Administration’s all-out assault on the for-profit higher education industry, one of the books I have long intended to write is becoming ever more true:

College IS for Dummies.

We the People who closely follow politics have assuredly noticed an incessant trend on Talking Head TV.  Very often the Leftist debater is – a college professor.  Often teaching some very Leftist, completely pointless “scholastic” field.

For instance, National Review’s John Derbyshire rightly calls for an end to all collegiate programs that end in the word “Studies.”  Do a little Web search, and you’ll quickly reach the same conclusion.

The point being – college campuses are rife with hard Left ideologues posing as “educators.” Hiding there because their worldview doesn’t jibe with Reality.

And because they are paid handsomely to spout utter nonsense to the next generations – at a $100,000+ premium to the victims…I mean students.

The new meat can’t even get through orientation – the indoctrination is already underway.

Is this claptrap Leftist racket worth your time and considerable coin?  Hardly.

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We have spent the last three-plus years in the Third Age of Bailout.

During which we have spent trillions of public dollars trying to create (“or save”) private sector jobs.

The results have been simultaneously disastrous and completely ineffectual.  And utterly predictable.

We on the Right were all along explaining that we have historical evidence aplenty that the public sector stealing money from the private sector to

1. Waste a goodly portion thereof (as government always does) and then
2. Slosh the remainder around to political supporters and cronies

is not the way to create jobs.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt deepened and deeply prolonged the Great Depression by so doing.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson increased and ensconced permanent, intergenerational poverty – by declaring War on and setting us up to spend trillions of dollars subsidizing it.

For resisting this serial economic and governmental folly, the Left has incessantly accused the Right of not having a plan to create jobs.

This ludicrous charge simultaneously reveals two immutable truths:

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