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Posted on July 9, 2015 July 8, 2015

Sound Familiar : The New Totalitarians Are Here

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Totalitarians want their rule, and their belief system, to be accepted and self-sustaining – even if it takes bludgeoning every last citizen who disagrees.
By Tom Nichols
JULY 6, 2015

There’s a basic difference in the traditions of political science between “authoritarians” and “totalitaritarians.” People throw both of these words around, but as is so often the case, they’re using words they may not always understand. They have real meaning, however, and the difference between them is important.

Simply put, authoritarians merely want obedience, while totalitarians, whose rule is rooted in an ideology, want obedience and conversion. Authoritarians are a dime a dozen; totalitarians are rare. The authoritarians are the guys in charge who want to stay in charge, and don’t much care about you, or what you’re doing, so long as you stay out of their way. They are the jefe and his thugs in a brutal regime that want you to shut up, go to work, and look the other way when your loudmouthed neighbor gets his lights punched out by goons in black jackets. Live or die. It’s all the same to the regime.

Totalitarians are a different breed. These are the people who have a plan, who think they see the future more clearly than you or who are convinced they grasp reality in a way that you do not. They don’t serve themselves—or, they don’t serve themselves exclusively—they serve History, or The People, or The Idea, or some other ideological totem that justifies their actions.

They want obedience, of course. But even more, they want their rule, and their belief system, to be accepted and self-sustaining. And the only way to achieve that is to create a new society of people who share those beliefs, even if it means bludgeoning every last citizen into enlightenment. That’s what makes totalitarians different and more dangerous: they are “totalistic” in the sense that they demand a complete reorientation of the individual to the State and its ideological ends. Every person who harbors a secret objection, or even so much as a doubt, is a danger to the future of the whole project, and so the regime compels its subjects not only to obey but to believe.

Authoritarians merely want obedience, while totalitarians, whose rule is rooted in an ideology, want obedience and conversion.

This is what George Orwell understood so well in his landmark novel “1984.” His dystopian state doesn’t really care about quotidian obedience; it already knows how to get that. What it demands, and will get by any means, is a belief in the Party’s rectitude and in its leader, Big Brother. If torturing the daylights out of people until they denounce even their loved ones is what it takes, so be it. That’s why the ending of the novel is so terrifying: after the two rebellious lovers of the story are broken and made to turn on each other, the wrecks left by the State are left to sit before the Leader’s face on a screen with only one emotion still alive in the husks of their bodies: they finally, truly love Big Brother.

https://thefederalist.com/2015/07/06/the-new-totalitarians-are-here/

Posted on June 28, 2015 June 27, 2015

America’s post-Constitutional culture

By William Smith

Published June 26, 2015
FoxNews.com

Conservatives seem stunned that the U.S. Supreme Court ignored the plain language of the ObamaCare statute and upheld the legality of the premium subsidies that will flow indefinitely as the nation’s newest entitlement. Their surprise is similar to the shock they express every time the GOP congressional leadership passes a pork-laden spending resolution that lasts through the end of the fiscal year, essentially denying budget hawks the opportunity to trim federal spending.

This march of federal spending is an entirely predictable outcome. As foreseen by Tocqueville in 1835, America has developed a post-constitutional culture in which citizens are transformed from independent citizens into weak dependents, fully reliant upon the dispensations and “protections” of government. The Supreme Court and the Congress are now largely infirm, fatally weakened by the growth of an Executive branch that provides ever-expanding dispensations and “protections.” The entitlement state has killed the separation of powers.

The fundamental goal of the Constitution’s authors was to ensure liberty; by separating the different powers of government they barred one branch of government from having all the tools to dominate the body politic. As James Madison wrote in Federalist #47: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” Over the last 100 years, with the growth in the federal government, the Executive branch has accumulated powers so vast that Madison’s admonition has been reduced to an interesting historical artifact.

Justice Roberts’ opinion in King v. Burwell confirms Tocqueville’s prediction. He writes that the Court must uphold the statute because, to do otherwise, “would destabilize the individual insurance market”. In other words, federal benefits must flow no matter what the law actually says. In a feat of verbal gymnastics that would make a German philosopher blush, Roberts explains over many paragraphs that the language of the law is “ambiguous” when it is actually quite plain and simple. For the Court’s majority, it appears, protecting the flow of premium subsidies is what really matters, not the law. Roberts’ opinion claimed fidelity to the congressional statute when, in fact, he was simply protecting the political reputation of the Court by avoiding an assault on the entitlement culture.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/06/26/americas-post-constitutional-culture.html

Posted on June 26, 2015 June 25, 2015

“How the Feds Asked Me to Rat Out Commenters” – And Why We Pushed Back

This sort of thing is one more reason why confidence in government is at all-time lows.

Nick Gillespie|Jun. 25, 2015 8:38 am

Regular readers of Reason.com know all about the recent federal subpoena and gag order we received.

The subpoena asked for identifying information we had on a half-dozen readers who left angry comments on a post about the verdict in the Silk Road Trial.

The comments ranged from suggesting the judge in the case should burn in hell to suggesting, in a well-known Internet homage to the movie Fargo, she be fed “feet-first” into a woodchipper. As Matt Welch and I have written, “The comments are hyperbolic, in questionable taste–and fully within the norms of Internet commentary.” They certainly don’t rise to the level of threat that should trigger requests from federal prosecutors.

We notified the commenters, who could have moved to quash the subpoena. Then the government hit us with a gag order, prohibiting us from talking about even the existence of the subpoena and the gag order. We fought to get the gag order lifted and once it was, we’ve been talking about the case.

I’ve got a new column up at The Daily Beast that gives more background on the matter. Here are some snippets:

https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/25/how-the-feds-asked-me-to-rat-out-comment

Posted on June 20, 2015 June 19, 2015

Supreme Court Rules Government Can’t Pick and Choose What Speech Is Free

Hans von Spakovsky / @HvonSpakovsky / Elizabeth Slattery / @EHSlattery / June 18, 2015

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court struck down a town’s sign ordinance as an unconstitutional, content-based regulation of speech. This ruling for free speech means the government can’t pick and choose what speech deserves more protection based on the content of the speech.

Like most other towns in America, Gilbert, Ariz., regulates when, where and how signs may be displayed around town. Temporary non-commercial signs are classified by their content, and each category has its own set of regulations.

Real estate signs, for example, may be up to 80 square feet, and political signs may be up to 32 square feet; political signs may be displayed for four and a half months before an election, including in the public right of way; and homeowners’ association event signs may be displayed for 30 days.

The Good News Community Church, which holds services at different facilities such as local schools because it doesn’t have a permanent church, uses signs to invite people to services. Because the signs include directional information (i.e., an arrow pointing to the location of the service), they may not be bigger than 6 square feet and can go up only 12 hours before their Sunday services start, meaning the signs are posted late on Saturday night when they are hard to see in the dark.

The church challenged the town’s sign code in 2007 as an impermissible content-based restriction on speech in violation of the First Amendment. The district court in Arizona upheld the sign code, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, finding that there was no evidence that the town adopted its sign code for a discriminatory purpose.

Today, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Good News Community Church, concluding that these sign restrictions are content-based regulation because they define the categories of temporary, political and ideological signs on the basis of their messages and subject each category to different restrictions. As Justice Clarence Thomas points out,

If a sign informs its reader of the time and place a book club will discuss John Locke’s ‘Two Treatises of Government,’ that sign will be treated differently from a sign expressing the view that one should vote for one of Locke’s followers in an upcoming election, and both signs will be treated differently from a sign expressing an ideological view rooted in Locke’s theory of government.

The court found that these restrictions are subject to, and do not survive, strict scrutiny because the town did not demonstrate that the differentiation furthers a compelling governmental interest and is narrowly drawn. Assuming the town has a compelling interest in preserving its aesthetic appeal and traffic safety, the code’s distinctions are highly underinclusive.

Thus, the town cannot claim that placing strict limits on temporary directional signs is necessary to beautify the town when other types of signs create the same problem, and it did not show that temporary directions signs pose a greater threat to public safety than ideological or political signs.

The Supreme Court also pointed that the 9th Circuit made a basic error in its analysis that the town’s regulation was not based on a disagreement with the message conveyed. As Thomas explains, “an innocuous justification cannot transform a facially content-based law into one that is content-neutral.” Thomas continued:

Innocent motives do not eliminate the danger of censorship presented by a facially content-based statute, as future government officials may one day wield such statutes to suppress disfavored speech … [O]ne could easily imagine a Sign Code compliance manager who disliked the Church’s sustentative teachings deploying the Sign Code to make it more difficult for the Church to inform the public of the location of its services.

This decision will not prevent governments from enacting effective sign laws since there are ample content-neutral options available to resolve problems with safety and aesthetics, including regulating size, building materials, lighting, moving parts and portability of signs.

In fact, in a concurring opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sonia Sotomayor, Alito provides a long list of possible rules that municipalities could enact regulating signs that would not be content based and thus prohibited. They range from rules based on size and location, to rules imposing time limits or distinguishing between lighted and unlighted signs.

As Alito says, local governments retain the power to “enact and enforce reasonable sign regulations.” It is just that the rules that stopped Pastor Clyde Reed from encouraging the public to attend his church were neither reasonable nor justified by concerns for public safety or the beautification of the town of Gilbert.

https://dailysignal.com/2015/06/18/supreme-court-rules-government-cant-pick-and-choose-what-speech-is-free/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=thffacebook

Posted on June 18, 2015 June 17, 2015

Americans Have Lost Confidence … in Everything

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It’s not just Congress and the economy that have Americans concerned these days.

Americans have little confidence in most of their major institutions including Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court, banks and organized religion, according to the latest Gallup poll.

“Americans’ confidence in most major U.S. institutions remains below the historical average for each one,” a Gallup spokesman said in a news release. Only the military, in which 72 percent of Americans express confidence, up from a historical average of 68 percent, and small business, with 67 percent confidence, up from 63, are currently rated higher than their historical norms. This is based on the percentage expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in these institutions, the Gallup spokesman said.

Only 8 percent have confidence in Congress, down by 16 points from a long-term average of 24 percent – the lowest of all institutions rated. The rating is about the same as last year’s 7 percent, the lowest Gallup has ever measured for any institution.

All in all, it’s a picture of a nation discouraged about its present and worried about its future, and highly doubtful that its institutions can pull America out of its trough. In a political context, the findings indicate that the growing number of presidential candidates for 2016 will have a difficult time instilling confidence in a skeptical electorate that they have the answers to the country’s problems.

https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/ken-walshs-washington/2015/06/17/americans-have-lost-confidence-in-everything

Posted on June 18, 2015 June 17, 2015

REMEMBERING COMMUNISM CORRECTLY: NOT A “BEAUTIFUL IDEA”

BY JÁNOS MARTONYI
JUNE 15, 2015

What is communism? Is it a beautiful idea, a utopian dream of bright future? Is it a coherent ideology of “historic materialism,” one that will abolish exploitation, eradicate inequality and injustice, abuses, estrangement, alienation, or Entfremdung, as it was called in the mid-nineteenth century by a young German philosopher, Karl Marx?

Or is it something else?

Is it a mother who enters the room of a twelve-year-old kid, wakes him up in the morning at 3 AM, and tells his son: “My son, you have to get up, the Soviet Army is attacking Budapest again”? Or is it the same mother, who, a couple of months later, wakes up his son again at 4 AM: “My son, you have to get up, your father has been taken away by the political police?”

We have to give a clear answer to people who are still saying that communism or Marxism-Leninism was a great idea, a beautiful idea — only the implementation was wrong. This is utterly and fatally wrong. It is not true.

It is not true because this was an idea, which was aggressive and violent, right in its inception, right from the beginning. The language was violent, the substance was violent, and of course everything, which has happened since, has been enormously violent.

That is why somebody said, that “revolutions are like trees: you can tell them by their fruits.” Communism had a logical outcome. Because if you want to destroy the existing political, economic and social order, and you want to put a new one in its place, it is a logical consequence that while destroying the existing structures, you sooner or later start destroying the basic human rights, the basic liberties, human dignity and yes, you start destroying thousands, millions, tens of millions of human lives.

That is the true face of communism.

Winston Churchill said right at the beginning, don’t think it is a peaceful utopian idea, because sooner or later it will be converted into external aggression, external expansion, because that is the nature of the ideology.

It is not by chance that in most countries, the communist dictatorship was established by sheer military force, in most cases coming from the outside. Certainly, it was the case in my country and all countries of the region.

The support of the communists in these countries was significantly less than in many Western European countries that never turned communist. Why? Because there was no presence of the Red Army in those countries.

Inevitably, dictatorships have to erect walls, barbed wires, iron curtains. But these are not external walls or barbed wires. The free minds were captured from within – as it was said by Czesław Miłosz.

A famous Hungarian poet, Gyula Illyés, wrote a fantastic poem about tyranny in which he says, “where there is tyranny, there is tyranny everywhere”. It is not just in the concentration camps, it is not just in the prisons, it is in the smile of the children, it is in your laugh, it is in your daily life.

As Havel said, the basic problem here was a morally contaminated environment: moral relativism, and moral corruption. That is to my mind the most important toxic legacy of communism.

Yet, there is an innate desire and aspiration for freedom in every human being, in every community or nation. That is why so many uprisings, revolutions, freedom fights and wars of independence took place. And finally, yes, in the ‘Year of Miracles,’ Central and Eastern Europe was liberated.

At the same time, we should never forget and we have to remember that this was only possible because there was a great nation that sacrificed more human lives to roll back and defeat communism around the world than any other nation. And this nation was and is the United States of America.

This is the reason why the stakes of moral clarity about the crimes of communist regimes in the past as well as the present are particularly high for America. This is why we hope that the mission of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation will be part of a genuine national consensus, a non-negotiable minimum of bipartisan nature.

https://blog.victimsofcommunism.org/remarks-of-janos-martonyi/

Posted on June 17, 2015 June 16, 2015

Obama: HealthCare.gov ‘a well-documented disaster’

By Jordan Fabian – 06/16/15 12:56 PM EDT

President Obama admits HealthCare.gov was a “well-documented disaster,” but says it helped the federal government better understand how to handle technology.

“With all the crises we were dealing with — the economy collapsing, the auto industry on the verge of collapse, winding down wars — this did not get the kind of laser-focused attention until HealthCare.gov, which was a well-documented disaster, but ended up anyways being the catalyst for us saying, ‘Okay, we have to completely revamp how we do things,’ ” Obama said in aninterview with Fast Company published Monday.

Obama’s comments come as he’s trying to promote his administration’s efforts to overhaul the government’s ancient technology infrastructure.

The president said outdated procurement rules and a lack of technological expertise hampered large-scale government projects, such as HealthCare.gov. But he said his administration has adopted new rules and recruited staffers from Google, Facebook and Twitter to beef up its tech efforts.

“If we are able through the U.S. digital team to recruit a baseline of talent and create a — pipeline — on a regular basis … what I do believe will happen is the government as a whole will start thinking about its relationship to citizens differently,” Obama said.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/245128-obama-healthcaregov-a-well-documented-disaster

Posted on June 14, 2015 June 12, 2015

Fascism 101 : Net neutrality rules go into effect

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By Mario Trujillo and David McCabe – 06/11/15 04:30 PM EDT

The new federal rules for net neutrality were allowed to take effect on Friday, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied a motion to stay the rules.

“Petitioners have not satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review,” the three judge panel said in its Thursday, ruling, which allowed the rules to kick in Friday at 12:01 a.m.

The court denied a request for a stay that would have put the rules on hold until a broader court battle is settled. It ruled that it will expedite the underlying case.

The ruling is not on the final merits of the challenge, but hands an early victory to net neutrality advocates.

The regulations reclassify Internet providers as utilities, giving the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) more powers to regulate them. That includes stopping providers from selectively slowing the delivery of content to users.
“This is a huge victory for Internet consumers and innovators,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “Starting Friday, there will be a referee on the field to keep the Internet fast, fair and open.”

Rep. Anna Eshoo (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, called the ruling “critical validation that the new rules to protect an open Internet are grounded in strong legal footing and can endure future challenges by broadband providers.”

But Thursday evening, Republican lawmakers said the ruling was creating “uncertainty.”

“Unfortunately, we are now in for a long, unnecessary wait while the courts determine if the commission was out of bounds,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-Ore.), and Subcommittee Vice Chairman Bob Latta (R-Ohio) said in a statement.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/244735-court-allows-net-neutrality-rules-to-take-effect-friday

Posted on June 5, 2015 June 5, 2015

4 million fed workers victimized by hack

By Cory Bennett – 06/04/15 05:17 PM EDT

Roughly 4 million current and former federal employees have had their data exposed by a hack, the Obama administration said Thursday.

The notification from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was short on details, but it appears troves of sensitive information had been pilfered.

Separate media reports cited China as being behind the massive hack.

The digital assailants first infiltrated the system in December, four months before they were discovered, The Washington Post reported.

“Protecting our Federal employee data from malicious cyber incidents is of the highest priority at OPM,” said OPM Director Katherine Archuleta. “We take very seriously our responsibility to secure the information stored in our systems.”

The FBI said it had opened up an investigation into the breach, which The Wall Street Journalreported is believed to have come from hackers in China.

An unnamed U.S. official told NBCNews that the data breach might touch every federal agency.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesman said it noticed “malicious activity affecting its information technology (IT) systems and data in April.”

https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/244084-hackers-make-off-with-4-million-federal-employees-data

Posted on June 1, 2015 May 31, 2015

Julian Assange On TPP: Only 5 Of 29 Sections Are About “Traditional Trade,” Covers “Essentially Every Aspect Of A Modern Economy”

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Speaking from his ‘prison’ in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange explains the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, which would link his home country of Australia with the U.S. economically. “It is mostly not about trade,” Assange says. “Only 5 of the 29 Chapters are about traditional trade.”

JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS: First of all, it is the largest ever international economic treaty that has ever been negotiated, very considerably larger than NAFTA. It is mostly not about trade, only 5 of the 29 Chapters are about traditional trade.

The others are about regulating the internet, and what information internet service providers have to collect, they have to hand it over to companies under certain circumstances, the regulation of labor conditions, regulating the way you can favor local industry, regulating the hospital, health care system, privatization of hospitals, so essentially every aspect of a modern economy, even banking services are in the TPP.

So that is erecting and embedding new ultramodern neoliberal structure over U.S. law and the laws of other countries. And putting it in treaty form.

By putting it in a treaty form, there are 14 countries involved, that means it is very hard to overturn, so if there is a desire, a democratic desire to do it on a different path. For example, to introduce more public transport. Then you can’t easily change the TPP treaty, because you have to go back to the other nations involved.

Now looking at that example, what if the government or a state government decides it wants to build a hospital somewhere, and there is a private hospital has been erected nearby.

Well the TPP gives the constructor of the private hospital the right to sue the government over the expect loss, the loss in expected future profits. This is an expected future loss, this is not an actual loss that has been sustained, this is a claim about the future.

We know from similar instruments where governments can be sued over free trade treaties, that that is used to construct a chilling effect on environmental and health regulation laws. For example, Togo, Australia, Uruguay are all being sued by tobacco company Phillip Morris to prevent them from introducing health warnings on cigarette packaging…

It is not even an even playing field, lets say you were going to let companies, make it easier for companies to sue governments, maybe that is right, maybe the government is too powerful and companies should have the right to sue them in certain circumstances.

But it is only multinationals that get this right. U.S. companies that operate in the U.S. in relation to investments that happen in the U.S. will not have this right.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/05/28/julian_assange_on_tpp_only_5_of_29_sections_are_about_traditional_trade_essentially_every_aspect_of_a_modern_economy.html

Posted on May 31, 2015 May 30, 2015

Carly Fiorina: Big government is crushing Americans

Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina told a packed audience that a huge, complex and sometimes corrupt government was “crushing the potential” of Americans.

“That is not hyperbole,” she said. “That is fact.”…

https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/local/2015/05/30/carly-fiorina-big-government-crushing-americans/28207125/

Posted on May 29, 2015 May 29, 2015

Obamanomics: U.S. Economy Contracted 0.7% in First Quarter

By NELSON D. SCHWARTZMAY 29, 2015

The economy got off to an even weaker start this year than first thought, the government reported Friday, as economic activity contracted amid a disappointing trade picture and continued caution on spending by businesses and consumers alike.

The 0.7 percent decline in economic output in the first quarter of 2015 was a reversal of the initial 0.2 percent advance for the periodreported last month by the Commerce Department.

While statistical quirks and one-time factors like wintry weather in some parts of the country played a role, as did a work slowdown at West Coast ports, the lackluster report for January, February and March underscores the American economy’s seeming inability to generate much momentum.

Much of the revision was spurred by fresh data showing businesses added to inventories at a slower pace than first estimated, while net exports fell slightly more than first thought. A sharp pullback in energy exploration in the wake of falling oil prices is also putting pressure on business investment.

Most experts had expected Friday’s data to show a contraction in the first quarter, and virtually no mainstream economists believe the country is on the verge of a recession. Still, the weakness is a reason the Federal Reserve is not expected to raise short-term interest rates until the second half of 2015, after speculation that a June increase was possible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/business/economy/us-economy-gdp-q1-revision.html?_r=0

Posted on May 28, 2015 May 27, 2015

Have Democrats Pulled Too Far Left?

MAY 27, 2015

Peter Wehner

AMONG liberals, it’s almost universally assumed that of the two major parties, it’s the Republicans who have become more extreme over the years. That’s a self-flattering but false narrative.

This is not to say the Republican Party hasn’t become a more conservative party. It has. But in the last two decades the Democratic Party has moved substantially further to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On most major issues the Republican Party hasn’t moved very much from where it was during the Gingrich era in the mid-1990s.

To see just how far the Democratic Party has moved to the left, compare Barack Obama with Bill Clinton. In 1992, Mr. Clinton ran as a centrist New Democrat. In several respects he governed as one as well. He endorsed a sentencing policy of “three strikes and you’re out,” and he proposed adding 100,000 police officers to the streets.

In contrast, President Obama’s former attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., criticized what he called “widespread incarceration” and championed the first decrease in the federal prison population in more than three decades. Mr. Obama, meanwhile, has chosen to focus on police abuses.

One of the crowning legislative achievements under Mr. Clinton was welfare reform. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, loosened welfare-to-work requirements. Mr. Obama is more liberal than Mr. Clinton was on gay rights, religious liberties, abortion rights, drug legalization and climate change. He has focused far more attention on income inequality than did Mr. Clinton, who stressed opportunity and mobility. While Mr. Clinton ended one entitlement program (Aid to Families With Dependent Children), Mr. Obama is responsible for creating the Affordable Care Act, the largest new entitlement since the Great Society. He is the first president to essentially nationalize health care.

Mr. Clinton lowered the capital-gains tax rate; Mr. Obama has proposed raising it. Mr. Clinton cut spending and produced a surplus. Under Mr. Obama, spending and the deficit reached record levels. In foreign policy, Mr. Obama has shown himself to be far more critical of traditional allies and more supine toward our adversaries than Mr. Clinton was. Mr. Obama has often acted as if American strength is a problem to which the solution is retrenchment, or even retreat.

Another bellwether: Hillary Rodham Clinton, in positioning herself for the 2016 election, is decidedly more liberal than she and her husband once were on illegal immigration, gay marriage and incarceration. She has called to “end the era of mass incarceration” and spoken about the importance of “toppling” the wealthiest 1 percent. She has remained noncommittal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that has drawn ire from the left.

The Democratic Party, then, has moved steadily to the left since the Clinton presidency. In fact, since his re-election, Mr. Obama’s inner progressive has been liberated. (An exception is the administration’s conditional approval of oil drilling off the Alaskan coast, starting this summer.) Other examples are his executive action granting temporary legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, his claim that gay marriage is a constitutional right, and his veto of legislation authorizing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/opinion/have-democrats-pulled-too-far-left.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=0

Posted on May 22, 2015 May 22, 2015

FCC’s Open Internet Order Won’t Stand Up To The First Amendment

GUEST POST WRITTEN BYFred Campbell

Mr. Campbell is executive director of the Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology and a former chief of the FCC’s wireless bureau.

Is watching Netflix on the broadband Internet more like (A) watching cable television or (B) talking on the telephone? Common sense suggests the answer is “A,” and the court that overturned the previous open Internet rules chose “A”; the First Amendment demands it. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) nevertheless chose “B.”

In the 2015 Open Internet Order, the FCC concluded the Internet is the functional equivalent of the public switched telephone network and is subject to the common carrier regulations in Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. If it had admitted the Internet offers communications capabilities that are functionally equivalent to the printing press, mail carriage, newspaper publishing, over-the-air broadcasting, and cable television combined, it would have been too obvious that its decision to classify broadband Internet service providers (ISPs) as common carriers is unconstitutional. Like all other means of disseminating mass communications, broadband Internet access is a part of the press that the First Amendment protects from common carriage regulation.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2015/05/21/fccs-open-internet-order-wont-stand-up-to-the-first-amendment/

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