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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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 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…)

$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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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…)

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…)

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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As the Tea Party and its Less Government agenda continue its ascendancy, Leftists and the DC GOP,  the establishment, chequed-golf pants Republicans, have gone through serial ideological and numerical contortions.

So as to feign the appearance of getting with the government cutting program – while carrying on with the Huge and Huger Government status quo.

One need only momentarily, cringingly recall the debt ceiling debacle for recent evidence of the Big Talk, No Action nature of all of this.

Where we saw the Tea Party, Insurgent-supported plan – which would have seriously cut and capped spending, started the ball rolling on a Balanced Budget Amendment and averted U.S. credit downgrade – be almost summarily dismissed by the DC Establishment so that they could instead force feed us a non-cutting, Super (Stupor) Committee alternative that fails utterly to address our catastrophic deficits and debt.

Wonder why Congress’ poll numbers are so low these days?  This is why.

Perhaps the worst faux government cutting offenders of all are to be found in the Barack Obama Administration.  Members thereof have been making so many head fakes towards Less Government that many must by now be suffering from whiplash.

(Luckily for them, ObamaCare has not yet gone into effect.)

Leading this disingenuous charge is the Commander in Chief his own self.

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We have oft-written about the flagrant disingenuousness of very many of the D.C. political class.

What those of us here in the Real World refer to as “lying.”

This serial falsehood-ity is executed in large part to buttress and bolster a Huge Government agenda – which these D.C. Denizens wish to continue implementing, but to which We the People are demonstrably opposed.

How else, for example, to explain the Democrat-led United States Senate defiantly and illegally refusing for more than 800 days to pass a budget?

They would rather shirk a fundamental job responsibility – and break the law doing it – than tell We the People just how much they want to grow the already obscenely obese federal Leviathan.

Which brings us to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  Which has – in pursuit of their portion of the Barack Obama Administration Huge Government itinerary – taken serial liberties with the truth.

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The entire political landscape is currently engulfed in debt ceiling flames, for largely artificial and concocted reasons.

This man-made inferno is now centered around and fixated upon the August 2 so-called “drop dead” date for reaching a deal to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.

If we do not by then do so, we are told, America will go into default.

Which is little more than repetitive absurdity.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has already given us numerous such “drop dead” dates.  March 31?  April 15?  May 16?  May 31?  July 8?  July 22?  These were all “drop dead” dates with which Geithner previously tried to concern us.

Now we’re even being told it’s as likely to be August 10 as any of the others.

In short, on this federal government power grab disguised as a fiscal “crisis,” Lil’ Timmy Geithner is many times over the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

These ever-rolling “drop dead” dates prove (at least) one additional thing: conservative Republican leverage for a deal to their liking indubitably increases every day after the date passes – else Geithner would not be so keen on repeatedly moving it.

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More Breaking News: As you may have noticed, the sun rose again today.

The Huge Government crowd always demands ever more regulations of and more taxes on those who do the hiring in the United States – the “evil corporations” who don’t care about anything but “obscene profits.”

The Huge Government crowd is, of course, woefully ignorant about how businesses – and business – work.

The “evil corporations” can’t make “obscene profits” unless they care about something else – what their customers want.

Customers almost always want the same thing from every company – the best possible goods/services at the lowest possible price.

The companies that best deliver this do well.  The ones that do not, do not.

Pretty simple stuff.  But it is stuff that fully eludes the Huge Government crowd.

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When it comes to the Barack Obama Administration and “deregulation,” their words are often belied by their actions.

In January, President Obama placed quill to parchment for the Wall Street Journal and claimed his Administration had since Day One worked tirelessly “to strike the right balance” between the free market – which works – and the federal government and its pantheon of regulations – which mostly do not.

Which is a quintessentially disingenuous statement.  The Executive Branch panoply of departments, agencies and commissions was during that time frame in overdrive to execute as many power grabs via regulatory fiat as possible.

To briefly discuss but a few….

The Democrat Congress couldn’t pass the energy sector-killing Cap & Trade?  No problem, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just began to implement it as if it did.

The Democrat Congress couldn’t pass the union-payoff, anti-free choice Employee Free Choice Act?  No problem, President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) just began to implement it as if it did.

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Seems in this weekend’s House deficit-cutting exercise, public media got a haircut – federal subsidies for PBS will end if the House budget holds sway.  Not surprisingly, PBS (and all its supporters in the media, blogosphere, twittersphere and on Capitol Hill), were freaking out.

As one series of highly organized “grassroots” tweets trilled:

RT @jcstearns: New House budget will NOT fund #pubmedia, #netneutrality, #epa but WILL fund gov sponsorship of Nascar http://nyti.ms/eOEgNk via @aschweig

The DoD’s NASCAR recruiting and marketing campaigns – at about $15 million in all – survives, but PBS’ $430 million gets axed.  “Say, what?!!!”  That just isn’t right, Free Press’ Josh Stearns seemingly tweet-claims.

Perhaps Josh is on to something – that is, what’s right.  Putting on my class warfare hat for a moment, how is it right that the rich have had this subsidy for so long?

Many American’s have long-known PBS’ upper-crust focus.  Inside the beltway, it’s kind of a perennial joke (or thorn in one’s side, depending on your point of view).  The $430 million in annual federal funding – representing about 15% of PBS’ budget (they get most of their support from private sources) – is just one of those subsidies that the media and intellectuals endlessly admonish the rest of us to stop worrying about.  At $1.50 per American, per year, it’s a steal.  And besides, it helps kids, the disadvantaged, minorities, etc.

Yet, when you look at who’s actually watching PBS, and the shows they air, another picture emerges.  According to this document, 73% of the audience watching any given PBS show makes household income of $75,000 or more (with 37% of the audience actually making more than $125,000).  In comparison, Census Bureau statistics show median household income in America is just shy of $50,000.

Of course, if you’re wanting for a diversity of PBS / NPR programming on states’ rights, or the right to bear arms, or the constitutional conflict to our liberties presented by the new healthcare law – you’d be hard-pressed to find much of that there.  I guess that’s what Fox is for.

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It’s an eerie echo of last year’s health care debate, but without nearly as much public attention.  Another Christmas Eve, another sixth of the economy taken over by Washington.

This time it’s so-called “network neutrality” regulation.  President Obama’s Federal Communications Commission is obsessed with regulating the Internet.  They apparently won’t be stopped by common sense, courts of law, public opinion, or a resounding electoral defeat for big government policies.  They made it official last night at midnight when they announced the agenda for their December 21 meeting: the FCC is going to regulate the Internet.

Network neutrality (also known by the even more lovely sounding marketing term “open Internet”) is an outgrowth of the larger so-called media reform project of radical left-wing activists like Robert McChesney, the socialist founder of the misnamed group Free Press, which has enormous influence on the FCC, where its former communications director, Jen Howard, is FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s press secretary.

McChesney explained where net neutrality leads to SocialistProject.ca:

You will never ever, in any circumstance, win any struggle at any time. That being said, we have a long way to go. At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.

The FCC’s new rules, likely to be approved on a final 3-2, party-line vote on December 21, take McChesney’s first step.

Network neutrality sounds simple – force phone and cable companies to treat every bit of information the same way – but modern networks are incredibly complex, with millions of lines of code in every router, and constantly evolving.

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The Germans have a word called Schadenfreude, which roughly translates into taking pleasure in the misfortune of others.  It’s the feeling most of us had when we read about Paris Hilton’s latest arrest.

Usually you feel a little guilty, but sometimes life brings an example that’s so crazy it becomes almost funny.  In other words, you get Free Press.  This is the Professional Left group founded by the avowed socialist Robert McChesney around the time he called the United States “by any honest account, the leading terrorist institution in the world today.”

This week, Free Press became so hysterical as to be almost unhinged, acting like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.  The organization launched a full-throated “shock and awe” broadside to get the FCC to begin regulating “neutrality” over the Internet.   Along with fellow liberal travelers at Public Knowledge, Free Press posted scathing attacks suggesting that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski had become a tool of corporate interests and a “toothless bureaucrat.”

As enjoyable as it is to watch these guys work themselves into a frenzy on Net neutrality, it’s even more fun to admire the irony: Free Press is pushing exactly the kind of Executive Branch power-grab that liberals scorned loudly during the Bush years!

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There are many battle fronts in the war for human freedom, but perhaps the least-appreciated of these is the battle over America’s communications and media marketplace and whether free markets or government mandates will ultimately rule them.  This battle takes on added importance since all other public policy debates depend upon an unfettered press and robust, independent channels of communication.

What many on the far Left have long understood, and many defenders of freedom have failed to appreciate, is that the battle for control of media and communications policy is fundamentally tied up with the broader war for control of our economy and society. “Instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, we learned that unless you make significant changes in the media, it will be vastly more difficult to have a revolution,” argues the prolific Marxist media theorist Robert W. McChesney. “While the media is not the single most important issue in the world, it is one of the core issues that any successful Left project needs to integrate into its strategic program.”

Normally we wouldn’t need to pay attention to what unrepentant ‘60’s radicals or neo-Marxist university professors think about media and communications policy. In this case, however, it is essential we pay attention. First, McChesney is right in one sense: history reveals that almost every successful effort to impose sweeping controls over an economy / society was accompanied by government efforts to control press and communication systems. If the State is going to have any luck gaining widespread and far-reaching control of an economy, gaining more control over “the Press” — which means all of us these days — becomes an essential part of the “strategic program” for control. Second, we need to pay attention to these radicals because McChesney and the group that he and John Nichols of The Nation co-founded — the insultingly misnamed Free Press — have given this fight new immediacy with their relentless agitation for media and communications policy “reform.”  And they are not the only ones. (more…)