"Net Neutrality" - Another Big Government Overreach ?

Some interesting commentary:

Charles Krauthammer:

On the FCC’s vote to implement net neutrality:

There is nothing in life that grows and thrives on its own that a liberal won’t come along and want to regulate and control. That is happening here.

I have not heard complaints about how free or fair or accessible the Internet is. In fact the FCC admits it’s trying to anticipate problems In the future. Government has a hard enough time trying to regulate what is happening now and they want to regulate what they think will happen in the future.

It’s particularly arrogant with the Internet which is evolving and changing rapidly as anything in the history of communications. I think that in and of itself is scary.

There is a procedural issue. They tried to do it in 2005 and were slapped down [by the courts] in 2008. Now the FCC is now trying to find a different basis of regulation. So instead of an information source it’s a telecom entity. Thus the FCC says it can regulate under the laws of the late ’30s regulating the phone company and its copper wires.

I think this is a hell of a stretch. It has no authority unless it is given a grant of authority from Congress. It ought to stay out of this.

Michelle Malkin:

http://michellemalkin.com/2010/12/22/internet-access-is-not-a-civil-right/

Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

When bureaucrats talk about increasing your “access” to X, Y, or Z, what they’re really talking about is increasing their control over your lives exponentially. As it is with the government health care takeover, so it is with the newly-approved government plan to “increase” Internet “access.” Call it Webcare.

By a vote of 3-2, the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday adopted a controversial scheme to ensure “net neutrality” by turning unaccountable Democrat appointees into meddling online traffic cops. The panel will devise convoluted rules governing Internet service providers, bandwidth use, content, prices, and even disclosure details on Internet speeds. The “neutrality” is brazenly undermined by preferential treatment toward wireless broadband networks. Moreover, the FCC’s scheme is widely opposed by Congress – and has already been rejected once in the courts. Demonized industry critics have warned that the regulations will stifle innovation and result in less access, not more.

Sound familiar?

The parallels with health care are striking. The architects of Obamacare promised to provide Americans more access to health insurance – and cast their agenda as a fundamental universal entitlement. In fact, it was a pretext for creating a gargantuan federal bureaucracy with the power to tax, redistribute, and regulate
the private health insurance market to death – and replace it with a centrally-planned government system overseen by politically-driven code enforcers dictating everything from annual coverage limits, to administrative expenditures, to the make-up of the medical workforce. The costly, onerous, and selectively-applied law has resulted in less access, not more.

Undaunted promoters of Obama FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s “open Internet” plan to expand regulatory authority over the Internet have couched their online power grab in the rhetoric of civil rights. On Monday, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps proclaimed: “Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right…[though] not many people have talked about it that way.” Opposing the government Internet takeover blueprint, in other words, is tantamount to supporting segregation. Cunning propaganda, that.

“Broadband is becoming a basic necessity,” civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks added. And earlier this month, fellow FCC panelist Mignon Clyburn, daughter of Congressional Black Caucus leader and Number Three House Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina, declared that free (read: taxpayer-subsidized) access to the Internet is not only a civil right for every “nappy-headed child” in America, but essential to their self-esteem. Every minority child, she said, “deserves to be not only connected, but to be proud of who he or she is.”

Calling them “nappy-headed” is a rather questionable way of boosting their pride, but never mind that.

Face it: A high-speed connection is no more an essential civil right than 3G cell phone service or a Netflix account. Increasing competition and restoring academic excellence in abysmal public schools is far more of an imperative to minority children than handing them iPads. Once again, Democrats are using children as human shields who provide useful cover for not-so-noble political goals.

The “net neutrality” mob – funded by billionaire George Soros and other left-wing think tanks and non-profits — has openly advertised its radical, speech-squelching agenda to crusade for “media justice.” Social justice is the redistribution of wealth and economic “rights.” Media justice is the redistribution of speech and First Amendment rights. The meetings of the universal broadband set are littered with Marxist-tinged rants about “disenfranchisement” and “empowerment.” They’ve targeted conservative opponents on talk radio, cable TV, and on the web as purveyors of “hate” who need to be managed or censored. Democrat FCC panelists’ have dutifully echoed their concerns about concentration of corporate media power. As the Ford Foundation-funded Media Justice Fund, which lobbied for universal broadband, put it: This is a movement “grounded in the belief that social and economic justice will not be realized without the equitable redistribution and control of media and communication technologies.”

For progressives who cloak their ambitions in the mantle of “fairness,” it’s all about control. It’s always about control.

John Fund @ WSJ

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703886904576031512110086694.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

Woody Allen: Let Obama Be Dictator !

Spoken like a true Kool Aid drinker:

Woody Allen has a strange take on the democracy that allowed him to become rich and famous.

The "Scoop" director said it would be a cool idea for President Barack Obama to be dictator for for a few years.

Why?

So he could get things done without all the hassle of opposing views getting in the way.

In an interview published by Spanish language newspaper La Vanguardia (that we translated), Allen says “I am pleased with Obama. I think he’s brilliant. The Republican Party should get out of his way and stop trying to hurt him.”

But wait - there's more!

The director said "it would be good…if he could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly."


Somewhere, Thomas Friedman is smiling ....

What Kind of Socialist is Barack Obama?

Good question from Jonah Goldberg ....

What Kind of Socialist is Barack Obama? [Jonah Goldberg]

As I've been hinting for a while, I have the lead essay in the new issue of Commentary on Obama and the socialism charge. It's long, but I think necessarily so. I tried to cut through a lot of the clutter on the issue. John Podhoretz has kindly taken it out from behind the firewall for folks who want to check it out. Please do, and let me know what you think. After the weekend I'll respond to some of the feedback.

Political Cartoon of the Day

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/PhotoPopup.aspx?id=530895

Anita Dunn (Obama Advisor) Hearts Mao

Another (!) Communist Advisor / Sympathizer in Obama's inner circle.

Why am I not surprised ?

Anita Dunn and Mao Zedong    [Hans von Spakovsky]

Glenn Beck showed an absolutely damning video of Anita Dunn on his show yesterday. As everyone knows, she is the White House communications director who has declared war on Fox News. The video shows Dunn giving a speech in which she highlights the two most important political philosophers shaping her outlook on politics: Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa. The first “political philosopher” Dunn is praising was a tyrannical dictator who imprisoned, tortured, and killed millions of his own people. In fact, it is estimated that the Chinese Communists — led, inspired, and controlled by Mao — have killed 65 million Chinese citizens since 1949 through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Gulag system of slave-labor prisons (the “Laogai” system) that Mao implemented.

Imagine what would happen if a White House communications director cited Adolf Hitler as one of her favorite political philosophers. Not only would it be an above-the-fold, front-page story in every major newspaper in the country, but there would also be outraged howls in the editorial pages. Mao killed more people than Hitler — they were two of the three worst mass murderers of the 20th century (the third being Joseph Stalin). However, the revelation of Dunn’s comments will probably be greeted by the mainstream media with a big collective yawn.

Re: Anita Dunn and Mao Zedong   [Andy McCarthy]

Let me just add two points to Hans's post.

1. While Dunn's anabashed affection for the most execrable mass-murderer in history is shocking, the Maoists in Obama's attic are not a new story — just a story obstinately ignored by the mainstream media. Before the election, I wrote a column ("Another Communist in Obama's Orb") about Obama pal Mike Klonsky. Here's a sampling:

Here’s what you need to know. Klonsky is an unabashed communist whose current mission is to spread Marxist ideology in the American classroom. Obama funded him to the tune of nearly $2 million. Obama, moreover, gave Klonsky a broad platform to broadcast his ideas: a “social justice” blog on the official Obama campaign website....  Klonsky’s communist pedigree could not be clearer. His father, Robert Klonsky, was an American communist who was convicted in the mid-Fifties for advocating the forcible overthrow of the United States government — a violation of the Smith Act, anti-communist legislation ultimately gutted by the Supreme Court. In the Sixties, Klonsky the younger teamed with Ayers, Dohrn, and other young radicals to form the Students for a Democratic Society. It was out of the SDS that Ayers and Dohrn helped found the Weatherman terrorist group.

Klonsky took a different path, albeit one that led inexorably to a new partnership with Ayers, which Obama mightily helped underwrite. Upon splitting off from the SDS, Klonsky formed a Maoist organization, first known as the “October League,” which ultimately became the “Communist Party (Marxist Leninist).” Klonsky was CP(ML)’s chairman. He was so highly thought of by Mao’s regime that he was among the first Americans invited to visit Communist China. When he was feted there in 1977, a year after Mao’s death, the communist leadership hailed Klonsky’s party as “reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people.” Klonsky was a regular guest of the Chicoms until 1981, when the relationship soured over the post-Mao leadership’s free-market reforms. (Yes, Klonsky is apparently more committed to communism than China’s own Communist Party.) So what was a Leftist radical without platform to do? Why, what else? He became an American college professor specializing in education. After getting his doctorate, Klonsky eventually made his way to Chicago and hooked up with his old SDS comrade (and self-professed “small ‘c’ communist”) Bill Ayers. Together, they co-founded the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. The goal — as Ayers has repeatedly made clear, most prominently in a 2006 speechbefore Hugo Chavez at an education forum in Caracas — is to bring the same Leftist revolution that has always galvanized them into the classroom. 

2. At his blog, Roger Kimball offers trenchant thoughts on Dunn and Mao:

N.B.: Anita Dunn is not just an Obama hanger-on. She is part of his inner circle, one of his top aides, along with David Axelrod, Rahm Emmanuel, and Robert Gibbs. What does it mean that someone in that position proffers one of the greatest monsters the world has ever seen for emulation?

Anita Dunn calls Mao a “political philosopher.” In fact, as a real philosopher, the late, great Leszek Kolakowski, understood, Mao’s real achievement was as “one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, manipulator of large masses of human beings in the twentieth century.” His violent peasant revolution mouthed Marxist slogans, but at its core was less Marxist than a particularly rebarbative form of anarchic and anti-intellectual tyranny. “The obfuscation of Western admirers of Chinese Communism,” Kolakowski observes toward the end of his magnum opus, Main Currents of Marxism, “is scarcely believable.” I wish he were still here for Anita Dunn.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many American universities, along with some other Western redoubts of privilege and irresponsibility, harbored a few deluded characters who declared themselves Maoists and were found of toting around his pathetic compendium of absurdity, “The Little Red Book.” These creatures were the sorriest detritus of our own cultural revolution. Some destroyed themselves. Others grew up, in whole or part, and were absorbed by a rich and forgiving society into the tissues of American life. Only now is it clear that some of the most radical and benighted have subsisted long enough in the outer corridors of power to find themselves suddenly translated into its inner sanctum, the White House and other top agencies of the Untied States government. It is an eventuality that would be risible were it not repulsive and, indeed frightening.

So, we have a self-professed admirer of Mao Tse-Tung in a top job at the White House. Where does it end? Where?

Fox and CNN   [Jay Nordlinger]

The White House communications director, Anita Dunn, contrasted Fox News with CNN: Fox News is just a Republican opinion outlet, she said, while CNN is a real news network. Of Fox, she said, “Let’s not pretend that they’re a news network, the way CNN is.” She said this on CNN, of course. (In the 1990s, conservatives used to refer to it as “the Clinton News Network.”)

 

I got to thinking. Fox has some opinionists, such as O’Reilly and Beck. Fox also has news anchormen and correspondents.

 

CNN has those, too. One of the CNN anchors is Anderson Cooper — he’s their star, as I understand it. The hurricane guy. When the “tea party” protests got going earlier this year, Cooper interviewed David Gergen. Gergen said, “They [Republicans and conservatives] still haven’t found their voice, Anderson. This happens to a minority party after it’s lost a couple of bad elections, but they’re searching for their voice.”

 

Then Cooper said, “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.” He said this smirkingly.

 

He was referring to a sexual practice defined by the Urban Dictionary as follows: “the insertion of one man’s sac[] into another person’s mouth.”

[note:  sounds like something Anderson Cooper would know about from firsthand experience !]

 

Would a Fox News anchor ever, ever say anything like this — ever? Can you conceive it? But that is what CNN anchormen do, apparently. When people tell you that CNN is a real news network, whereas Fox isn’t — I would just smile at them.

 

P.S. It was Anderson Cooper, the mainstream news anchor, who started the derogatory references to anti-Obama protesters as “teabaggers.” Democratic pundits and politicians quickly picked it up. (I wrote about this in a recent issue of National Review.)

 

P.P.S. Another CNN anchorman, Rick Sanchez, spread racist quotations allegedly from Rush Limbaugh. These quotes were fabrications, meant to damage Limbaugh. Do Fox anchormen engage in slander and defamation?

 

P.P.P.S. Anita Dunn tried to pass off her tribute to Mao as something she once heard from Lee Atwater. Has Lee Atwater become the Democrats’ standard — the arbiter of Democratic discourse? What an interesting turn of events.