Who ‘Wins’ With Obama’s Net Neutrality? – Tea Party Nation

Who ‘Wins’ With Obama’s Net Neutrality? – Tea Party Nation.

Posted by Seton Motley

 

The Barack Obama Administration’s Thursday Internet uber-power grab is awful for just about every American. It will lead to dramatically more expensive Web access – because of both raised service costs and huge new taxes.

And we will see a spiraling, regressive devolution of speed. It will be a return to the spinning wheel of Web-waiting death. When government regulation increases – private investment decreases. When investment goes – forward progress goes with it. And this Obama power grab is lots and lots and LOTS of regulation. The government just turned backwards the clock on the unfathomable increases in speeds we’ve seen for two-plus decades.

Remember 28k dial-up? If not, you’ll be reminded of it here in a bit – and you’ll be paying $200 per month for it.

All of this leads one to ask – who actually wanted this grab?

—- The Useful Idiots —-

Soviet Communist leader Vladimir Lenin is purported to have referred to those unknowingly helping the Collectivist cause as “useful idiots.”

There are many people who were very vocal about Net Neutrality – who had zero idea about what they were speaking. And had zero idea that what the Administration just did is to Net Neutrality what a single plankton is to a blue whale.

For instance, there is Tumblr founder David Karp – who just about singlehandedly convinced President Obama to ramp up …. He last week appeared on CNBC. And in response to fairly rudimentary facts he – after multi-second flubberings and silences while the mouse in his head repeatedly had to retake its treadmill – blubbered things like “I confess, that’s not my area of expertise.”

Then there is Congressman Hank Johnson – who just wrote an op-ed defending the Administration’s huge grab. Congressman Johnson is most famous for thinking islands with too many people on them will “tip over and capsize.”

Think HBO comedian John Oliver has any idea what’s actually going on?

Thank goodness guys like these are helping to lead this charge.

—- The Left Leadership —-

The Left consists of two groups of people. The Useful Idiots – who think these horrendous ideas are good ones. And the Leadership – who know they are awful and will destroy everything, but they’ll be in charge after the grand collapse so they don’t mind so much.

What government touches – it destroys. The Internet has become a free speech-free market Xanadu precisely because it had remained pretty much untouched by government. No longer. The Administrations “fundamental transformation” hadn’t yet gotten to the Web – now it has.

One of the leaders of the Media Marxist Movement is college professor Robert McChesney. He knows what Net Neutrality really means.

“(T)he ultimate goal (of net neutrality) is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

How very Hugo Chavez of them. What else does the good professor have to say?

“Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.”

Outstanding.

—- The Crony Socialists —-

Then there are the giant Friends of Obama companies who will benefit tremendously from this – first among them Netflix and Google. These two companies alone consume more than half of all U.S. Web traffic. And the Administration’s grab just outlawed their being charged for it.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can only charge two people for the bandwidth they build. Hogs like Netflix and Google – or us. So our prices will skyrocket – to augment the profits of Hogs like Netflix and Google. Net Neutral, right?

How Crony Socialist was all this? The Administration’s Obama-campaign-coin-bundling Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler steadfastly refused to take any input from the Commissions two Republicans. He steadfastly refused to wait for Congress to go first – as the Commission is Constitutionally required to do. He steadfastly refused to release to We the People the text of the grab prior to its Thursday ram-through.

But the day before said ram-through – this happened:

Tom Wheeler Tweaks Net Neutrality Plan After Google Push

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has made some last-minute revisions to his net neutrality plan after Google…pressed for the changes, according to sources at the commission.

The Obama Administration wouldn’t take input from Congress or Republicans on the Commission. They wouldn’t let We the People read it. But somehow Google got a copy, didn’t like part of it – and FCC head-waiter Wheeler dutifully took their order.

Who else benefits from the grab? Of course:

The Left gets to have the government hire – with our coin – their uber-over-charging Marxist attorney friends to defend the power grab.

Here’s hoping this obnoxious uber-power-grab is dumped in court. But…

Even When Government Power Grabs Are Overturned – The Left Wins

Heads-they-win – tails we-lose. It’s all upside for the Crony Socialist, Useful Idiot Left.

Note: This first appeared in Human Event

Obstruction Leader Harry Reid to Attempt Historic Filibuster on Override of Keystone Veto

Originally posted on A Moral Outrage:

FreeBeacon

Harry Reid is taking unprecedented steps to block Senate Republicans, even though his actions will result in nothing but procedural delay.

In another example of Democrats playing the role of obstructionists, Harry Reid will force the Senate to go through procedural hurdles to delay Majority Leader Mitch McConnell from bringing up the president’s Keystone XL veto for an override vote.

Last week, President Obama vetoed the popular bipartisan Keystone XL Pipeline bill passed by the Senate.

This week, the Senate is planning a vote to override the president’s veto. Democrats, led by Minority Leader Harry Reid, are set to revoke normal order and attempt to filibuster the override of the President’s veto message.

The cloture vote on a veto message will be the first in the history of the United States Senate. That is because the threshold for a veto override is 67, while the threshold for a cloture…

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Yep. Illegals get everything, we get nothing…

Originally posted on A Moral Outrage:

IRS defends paying refunds to illegals who never filed taxes

The IRS is defending its decision to let illegal immigrants claim up to three years’ refunds on income even if they never paid income taxes, telling Congress in a new letter last week that agency lawyers have concluded getting a Social Security number triggers the ability to go back and ask for previous refunds.

President Obama’s new deportation amnesty could grant Social Security numbers to as many as 4 million illegal immigrants, making many of them eligible for tax refunds under the Earned Income Tax Credit even for years when they cheated on their taxes, working off the books and refusing to file tax returns.

“Section 32 of the Internal Revenue Code requires an SSN on the return, but a taxpayer claiming the EITC is not required to have an SSN before the close of the year for which the…

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Well, they found out more about Obama’s schooling than anyone else so far…

Originally posted on A Moral Outrage:

Fraudsters in Department of Education are caught stealing students’ personal information to apply for loans and cellphones – and one worker looked up Barack Obama’s student loan records

Government employees have been caught stealing students’ personal information to apply for loans, credit cards and set up new cell phone accounts,Daily Mail Online has learned.

Reports on breaches of staff conduct inside the Department of Education shows how workers stole social security numbers from a database while a man was fired for trying to look up President Barack Obama’s student loan records.

Cyber security campaigners warned that the failure to protect sensitive information because of ‘bureaucratic incompetence’ is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’.

Insiders involved in illicit breaches are often overlooked, simply because the public think hackers and cybercriminals are more often to blame, they said.

Lee Tien, senior staff attorney and Adams Chair for Internet Rights at the Electronic…

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The Incoherence of Netanyahu’s Most Strident Critics

Originally posted on A Moral Outrage:

Commentary

Near the end of his new autobiography, David Axelrod sheds some light on President Obama’s distaste for democracy. “Obama has limited patience or understanding for officeholders whose concerns are more parochial–which would include most of Congress and many world leaders,” Axelrod writes, in noting Obama’s preference for supercilious vanity projects. Yet while Axelrod paints with a broad brush, he gives two examples, and they are telling. He writes: “Whether it’s John Boehner or Bibi Netanyahu, few practiced politicians appreciate being lectured on where their political self-interest lies.” This passage is an important preamble to the current dustup between the two administrations.

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Green Slander – Tea Party Nation

Green Slander – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

 

It is a sure sign that the advocates of the “global warming” and “climate change” hoaxes know that the public no longer believes that the former is occurring or that the latter represents an immediate, global threat.

 

Even though the “climate skeptics”, scientists who have produced research proving false methodology and the conclusions based on it are quite few in number, an effort to silence them by smearing their reputations and denying funding for their work has been launched and it is based entirely on a lie.

 

Scientists are supposed to be skeptical, not only of other scientist’s findings, but their own. Good science must be able to reproduce the results of published research. In the case of the many computer models cited as proof that global warming was occurring or would, the passing years have demonstrated that none were accurate.

 

As Joseph L. Bast, president of The Heartland Institute and Joseph A. Morris, an attorney who has fought in several countries to defend free speech, wrote in a February 24 commentary, “The Crucifixion of Dr. Wei-Hock Soon”, of an article co-authored with Christopher Monckton, Matt Briggs, and David Legates, and published in the Science Bulletin, a publication of the Chinese Academy of Sciences “The article reveals what appears to be an error in the computer models used to predict global warming that leads models to over-estimate future warming by a factor of three.” (Emphasis added) Their commentary has been downloaded more than 10,000 times!

 

“If the work of Soon et al is confirmed by other scientists, the ‘global warming crisis’ may need to be cancelled and we can all enjoy lower taxes, fewer regulations, and more personal freedom.” However, “having failed to refute the article, environmentalists turned to smearing the authors.”
 

Little wonder the “Warmists” are worried; the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1996. People are noticing just how cold this record-breaking and record-setting winter is. 

The attack on Dr. Soon began with a Greenpeace news release that was republished on the front page of The New York Times on February 22^nd. Despite its august reputation, The Times’ coverage of climate issues has been an utter disgrace for decades. As public interest waned, it eliminated its staff of reporters exclusively devoted to writing about the “environment.”

 

Myron Ebell, a climate change skeptic and director of Global Warming and International Environmental Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted on February 27^th that the Greenpeace attack on Dr. Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics claimed they had secured $1.2 million in funding for his research over the past decade and that it came from energy corporations, electric utilities, and charitable foundations related to those companies.  The truth, however, is “that the grants were made not to Dr. Soon but to the Smithsonian, which never complained while taking its sizable cut off the top.”

 

Columnist Larry Bell who is also an endowed professor at the University of Houston, disputed the Greenpeace claim, saying, “First, let’s recognize that the supporting FOIA documents referred to an agreement between the Smithsonian (not Dr. Soon) and Southern Company Services, Inc., whereby 40 percent of that more than $1.2 million went directly to the Smithsonian” leaving “an average funding of $71,000 a year for the past eleven years to support the actual research activities.”

 

Focusing on Greenpeace and its Climate Investigations Center which describes itself as “a group funded by foundations seeking to limit the risks of climate change”, Bell asked “Do these activist organizations make their estimated $360,000,000 annual funding publicly available?” Bell said “Ad hominem assaults disparaging the integrity of this leading authority on relationships between solar phenomena and global climate are unconscionable.”

 

In his article, “Vilifying realist science—and scientists”, Paul Driessen, a policy advisor to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), noted that in 2012 Greenpeace USA was the recipient of $32,791,149 and that this is true of other environmental pressure groups that in 2012 secured $111,915.138 for the Environmental Defense Fund, $98,701,707 for the Natural Resources Defense Council, $97,757,678 for the Sierra Club, and, for Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, $19,150,215.

 

“All told,” noted Driessen, “more than 16,000 American environmental groups collect(ed) total annual revenues of over $13.4 billion (2009 figures). Only a small part of that comes from membership dues and individual contributions.”  With that kind of money you can do a lot of damage to scientist’s reputation.

 

They fear that the public may actually learn the truth about “global warming” and the fear-mongering claims about “climate change” does not stop with just the environmental organizations. At the same time The New York Times was printing the Greenpeace lies, U.S. Senators Ed Market (D-Mass), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) joined together on February 25^th to send letters to 107 companies, trade associations, and non-profit groups demanding comprehensive information about all funding of research on climate or related issues.

 

Among the groups receiving the letter were two for whom I am a policy advisor, The Heartland Institute and CFACT, but others include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the American Energy Alliance.

 

Following The New York Times article, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, sent letters to the presidents of seven universities asking them to provide details about seven professors who are either prominent global warming skeptics.

As Rich Lowrey, editor of the National Review, pointed out on February 27th, that “Science as an enterprise usually doesn’t need political enforcers. But proponents of a climate alarmism that demands immediate action to avert worldwide catastrophe won’t and can’t simply let the science speak for itself.”

 

This is not fact-finding. It is an act of intimidation.

 

And it looks like a carefully organized effort to quash any research that might dispute “global warming” or “climate change” as defined by the Greens and by both the President and the Secretary of State as the greatest threat we and the rest of the world faces.

 

The greatest threat is the scores of environmental organizations that have been exaggerating and distorting their alleged “science” in order to thwart development here and around the world that would enhance everyone’s life. Now they are attacking real scientists, those who are skeptical of their claims, to silence them.

 

This is what fascists do.

Stop Bashing! Because Here’s A List Of Obama’s Accomplishments Haters! ⋆ Patriot Newswire

Stop-bashing-because-heres-a-list-of-obamas-accomplishments-haters

Posted by Timothy Tuttle

image: http://patriotnewswire.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Obama-Estonia_Horo-11.jpg

Obama has actually accomplished quite a bit, and here’s a long list of his accomplishments, so stop bashing, haters!
First President to be photographed smoking a joint.
First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.
First President to have a social security number from a state he has never lived in.
First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States.
First President to violate the War Powers Act.
First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.
First President to spend a trillion dollars on “shovel-ready” jobs when there was no such thing as “shovel-ready” jobs.
First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.
First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.
First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S., including those with criminal convictions.
First President to demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.
First President to tell a CEO of a major corporation (Chrysler) to resign.
First President to terminate America’s ability to put a man in space.
First President to cancel the National Day of Prayer and to say that America is no longer a Christian nation.
First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.
First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke out on the reasons for their rate increases.
First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.
First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).
First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.
First President to actively try to bankrupt an American industry (coal).
First President to fire an inspector general of AmeriCorps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.
First President to appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.
First President to surround himself with radical left wing anarchists.
First President to golf more than 150 separate times in his five years in office.
First President to hide his birth, medical, educational and travel records.
First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.
First President to go on multiple “global apology tours” and concurrent “insult our friends” tours.
First President to go on over 17 lavish vacations, in addition to date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayers.
First President to have personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.
First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.
First President to fly in a personal trainer from Chicago at least once a week at taxpayer expense.
First President to repeat the Quran and tell us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.
First President to side with a foreign nation over one of the American 50 states (Mexico vs Arizona).
First President to tell the military men and women that they should pay for their own private insurance because they “volunteered to go to war and knew the consequences.”
Then he was the First President to tell the members of the military that THEY were UNPATRIOTIC for balking at the last suggestion.

‘Cap and Trade’ Is Alive and Well – Despite Having Never Passed Congress – Tea Party Nation

‘Cap and Trade’ Is Alive and Well – Despite Having Never Passed Congress – Tea Party Nation.

Posted by Seton Motley

 

Remember “Cap and Trade?” The anti-market allegedly “market-based” “solution” to man-faked global warming climate change?

A central authority (usually a governmental body) sets a limit or cap on the amount of a pollutant that may be emitted.

The limit or cap is allocated and/or sold by the central authority to firms in the form of emissions permits which represent the right to emit or discharge a specific volume of the specified pollutant.

Permits (and possibly also derivatives of permits) can then be traded on secondary markets.

Except:

Cap-and-Trade Schemes Are Not Markets

Only if (you) want government to raise energy prices, make coal uneconomical as an electricity fuel, or restrict Americans’ access to carbon-based energy.…

“Cap and trade” is a policy so disastrous it couldn’t pass a Democrat-majority Congress – with Democrat President Barack Obama eagerly waiting with pen at the ready.

(Democrat) Ben Nelson: Cap-and-Trade Will Not Pass This Congress

Cap and Trade is Dead (Really, Truly, I’m Not Kidding)

Except with this President, no terrible idea dies just because the Constitutional process demands it.

(Environmental Protection Agency) EPA: If Congress Doesn’t Pass Cap-and-Trade, We Will

And so they have. Here’s the EPA’s “Cap and Trade” page.

And in government, terrible ideas are like kudzu – they rapidly, illegally spread everywhere.

USDA, EPA Partnership Supports Water Quality Trading

The U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have announced an expanded partnership to support water quality trading.…

Oh look – the government is assaulting our farmers’ water supply. Where else have we seen that?

The EPA is Turning Water on Farms Into a Weapon Against Farmers

The EPA exists to assault the private sector. And it is teaming up with other government departments to maximize the damage.

The USDA is a complete waste of money, time and space. Humans have engaged in agriculture for 10,000 years – we did so for 9,900 of those years without a government department. I think we’ve got this.

And, of course, there is ZERO Constitutional authority granted to the federal government to have a USDA.

Having no useful purpose, the Department of Agriculture works day and night to make private agriculture more difficult and expensive. Which raises our food prices – and makes our farmers less competitive on the now-global market.

These government-inflicted regulations and costs – by a department that shouldn’t exist – foster other government programs that shouldn’t exist.

Like the horrendous Farm Bill. Government makes it nearly impossible for farmers to turn a profit – then subsidizes them.

Like Food Stamps. Government jacks the price of food – then buys tens of millions of people food at the government-inflated prices because they can no longer afford it.

The Obama Administration is assaulting the private sector with every department, agency, commission and board at its $4-trillion-a-year disposal. Including unilaterally imposing “Cap and Trade” across multiple agencies. And what has transpired during the Obama Administration’s tenure?

14 Million More on Food Stamps Under Obama

Food Stamp Growth 75X Greater than Job Creation

It would seem there is a correlation there.

Note: This first appeared in PJ Media.

The End of Freedom in America – Tea Party Nation

The End of Freedom in America – Tea Party Nation.

 

By Alan Caruba

 

The America that has existed from the days of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, when its sovereignty was acknowledged by a treaty with England 1783, and its founding in 1788 with the ratification of the Constitution is no more. The America for which thousands fought and gave their lives is no more.

 

That America ends on February 26 when the Federal Communications Commission, under intense pressure from the Obama White House and with the votes of its Democratic Party commissioners asserts government control over the Internet with a 332-page set of regulations, dubbed “Net Neutrality.”

 

Writing in the Feb 22^nd Wall Street Journal, columnist L. Gordon Crovitz summed up what will occur saying “Obamanet promises to fix an Internet that isn’t broken…The permissionless Internet which allows anyone to introduce a website, app, or device without government review, ends this week.”

 

“The big politicization came when President Obama in November demanded that the supposedly independent FCC apply agency’s most extreme regulation to the Internet.” Of course Obama wants the Internet regulated and of course the Democratic Party will support this move to control who gets to put up a website or blog and, more importantly, who gets to say anything critical of the President.

 

 

The Democratic Party has been in everything but name the Communist Party in the United States for several decades. Obama was raised and mentored to be a Marxist. What we are witnessing is nothing less than tyranny replacing democracy.

 

Crovitz warned that “This week Mr. Obama’s bureaucrats will give him the regulated Internet he demands. Unless Congress or the courts block Obamanet, it will be the end of the Internet as we know it.”

 

Earlier this week, as reported by Giuseppe Macri in The Daily Caller the FCC’s two Republican commissioners, Ajit Pai and Michael O’Rielly, asked Chairman Tom Wheeler “to delay the vote and release his proposal to the public. ‘We respectfully request that FCC leadership immediately release the 332-page Internet regulation plan publicly and allow the American people a reasonable period of not less than 30 days to carefully study it.’”

 

There is some evil at work here because, as the Republican commissioners point out, “the plan in front of us right now is so drastically different than the proposal the FCC adopted and put out for public comment last May.”

 

Shades of ObamaCare! Even the Democrats who voted that monstrosity into law had not read it. Now neither Congress, nor the rest of America is being permitted to see regulations that will determine what can and cannot be posted to the Internet, the greatest instrument of free speech ever invented since the printing press.

 

Commissioner Pai says that the FCC is “adopting a solution that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist using legal authority we don’t have.” He estimates that the regulations will add up to $11 billion in new taxes on Internet access.
 

In a commentary, “Neutralize Obama’s Hijacking of the Internet”, Judi McLeod, the editor of CanadaFreePress.com, said “Forget NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and all warnings sent by Edward Snowden. They’ve got nothing on how Net Neutrality will silence you.”

“Someday in the near future when you type in the words “Islamic terrorists” in an Internet post, you will be knocked off the Net and find it all but impossible to climb back on again.”

 

Do I think the Congress will exercise its oversight responsibilities and stop this tyrannical power grab? No. Do I think our court system will do anything other than bow to precedent set by earlier FCC regulations? Yes.

 

As a nation founded on and devoted to freedom of speech, I think February 26, 2015 will go down in the history books as the day when that freedom came to an end in America.

 

Thanks to a National Security Agency we no longer have any privacy regarding anything we say using telephones, the Internet or any other form of communication.

 

If the Democrat-controlled FCC has its way, the Internet will slow your access and could eliminate access countless sites that provide news and express opinions the federal government finds offensive. That’s what tyrannies do.

 

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Breaking…Nuclear Deal Would Allow Iran to Build a Bomb in SloMo, Congress Will Be Ignored

Originally posted on Socialism is not the Answer:

Independent Sentinel

The NY Times and the AP reported today on a proposal in Geneva now being considered which would allow Iranians to continue nuclear production with limitations for ten years but with a corresponding easing of sanctions.

The Associated Press (AP) reported that a potential deal would phase out restrictions on Iran’s uranium enrichment activities in the final years which would potentially allow them to build a nuclear weapon unobstructed towards the end of the term.

The core idea would be to reward Iran for good behavior over the last years of any agreement, gradually lifting constraints on its uranium enrichment and slowly easing economic sanctions, AP reports.

In other words, they can not only be a nuclear threshold state with the the ability to eventually have the bomb. Sanctions, our one bargaining chip, would be thing of the past.

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