Shellacked Obama Readies His Regulatory Runarounds
The big media question after the mid-term shellacking wasn’t so much whether President Obama would move to the middle, but how far to the middle he would move (for the record, I never thought he would moderate at all and still don’t). The answer is now becoming clear. On high profile issues where the people’s representatives actually get a vote and the press spills lots of pixels, he’ll move as far to the middle as he must to maintain a veneer of bipartisanship and reasonable compromise. But on lower profile issues where the people’s representatives don’t get a direct vote, he will stay over on the hard left and dare anyone to challenge him. If his actions survive a Congress or two, they’ll live on long after his presidency ends.
That is precisely what the president has done on two fronts this week. In the first, his appointees to the Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines to insert itself as a regulator of the Internet. The rules they adopted were only delivered to commissioners late the night before the vote, which also seems to be a strategy that the Democrats under Obama have mastered: Delay disclosure so that hardly anyone knows what they’re actually voting on. They did this with ObamaCare, they did it with omnipork, they did it with the DREAM Act, and they did it with the net neutrality rules. So much for transparency.
As John Fund notes, there has been no public outcry to get the government involved in Internet regulation, but various voices on the left have been pushing for “net neutrality” for years, and now they have nearly all that they wanted. Net neutrality’s roots are anything but neutral.
The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies,” he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. “But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”
A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”
So Obama’s FCC has taken action that began with agitation from the far, far left, and over the objections of both the courts and a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, 300 of whom have gone on the record against net neutrality. The most likely impacts of net neutrality include chilling of innovation and empowering of centralized government bureaucratic authority, and rising costs due to compliance with whatever the FCC ends up dictating to ISPs. Regulatory regimes tend to grow, and hardly ever shrink, over time, so now that the FCC has inserted itself on the net, expect its tentacles to slither about and keep growing and growing and growing. Unless either the Republican House or the courts put a stop to it, anyway.
Excellent column, thank you.
This administration will keep try governing by ukase, the new Congress must act swiftly and must act decisively against this stalinist trend.
The marxists are no longer walking their “long march through the institutions”, they are now at the heart of the system and they are trying to subvert the whole system.
Energy and communications are basic military targets, and the marxists are directing their attack against the core of Freedom.
The attack against the freedom of Internet constitutes a true coup.
Of course any observant person would have known he would escalate the criminality he has already been committing for 2 years, but that doesn’t stop these activities from being no less than the actions of a dictator.
The most fundamental principle of the country is government by the people for the people.
Yet we have a criminal who lies his way into office and proceeds to spend 99.9% of his time circumventing the process that has been developed over a 230 year period to fulfil the first principle.
More consequential than the actions, and make no mistake, they are bad enough, is the idea that somebody would do it. The only thing that makes these things different from a president refusing to enact the laws passed by Congress is that he has been able to get away with it. That’s the ONLY difference.
In other words, little lenin has no intent to govern according to the Constitution, no intent to govern according to the wishes of the people, no intent to even listen to the people. It’s jackboot, arm down the throat complete and utter totalitarianism to the absolute razor edge of what he thinks he can get away with. And that would be true even if he was implementing something that 100% of the country agreed with.
He’s a thug, a criminal and a dictator. You can’t sugar coat it because same fraction of the country is thrilled about it. Even if polling were to show (it doesn’t) that the unilateral actions are the wishes of the people, they are still fundamental attack on everything that the country stands for.
“The shellacking only changed his tactics, not his goals.”
We will constantly hear how Barack Obama is reaching out to Republicans and becoming a centrist. The MSM will do virtually everything possible to push this con job. Obama is a nonviolent leftist following in the tradition of Saul Alinsky and Martin Luther King, Jr. He has no hesitation to deceive the American public.
Another area being regulated by mandate is prescription drug coverage; Kathleen Sebelius has just issued a memorandum removing drugs useful in fighting breast cancer from pharmacies, read about it here… http://beautifulletters-bls.blogspot.com/2010/12/kathleen-sebelius-explains-avastin.html
Republicans have permitted this intrusion of marxism into America, and the only way it can be turned around is for genuine American conservatives to get power and ruthlessly repeal unconstitutional legislation, and abolish entire departments and their regulations in one stroke. Otherwise, our gooses are cooked.
Fellow Texan, it seems secession is the only answer when the mess is this big. Looters, socialists, crooked politicians, “intellectually superior” liberals, wellfare recipients, illegals, college professors: “Come and get it.” You need us. We don’t need you.
I intended “Come and TAKE it,” a slogan used in the Texas Revolution in 1835 as a challenge for the Mexican army to come take a symbolic cannon.
Why are you working to do what Obama wants? He wants the US destroyed and you are saying destroying it is the only thing we can do.
As in Europe, where bureaucrats are the real power, and no politician dare challenge them.
Laws are not for Obama. After all he isn’t even American born. He thumbed his nose at that also. If everyone that can stop him continues to look the other way as they have with his Kenyan birth, the crimes will continue. If someone is robbing a bank, you tell the police, they proceed to call you a kook and look the other way, the banks will continue to be robbed.
At what point does everyone else in this country trump his complexion? After all that is why he has gotten away with bullying America for the past two years. He doesn’t deserve it.
Bryan, I am quickly coming to the conclusion that this is all a waste of time.
Because those of us who oppose rampant, unchecked leftism refuse to spotlight the tactics on global level, these little articles and essays are rendered nearly meaningless.
Stanley Kurtz’s book has been virtually ignored…and when it has been reviewed by the “faux centrists/Obama apologists” (I know firsthand what a true centrist looks like, it is not these folks), it is by way of intentionally misreading the clear implications and heavy duty research done in the book Radical-In-Chief.
The Republican Party once again…has let itself get outmaneuvered, outwitted, out-messaged and checkmated into a corner.
They simply are clueless when it comes to explaining the facts on the ground. True, the lapdog media brazenly cheats the truth out of the hands of the American people and should be tried for treason for it, but, that does not excuse the repeated weak, limp, lame, and utter comedy of errors that we see repeatedly from the GOP.
Obama spent two years radicalizing the nation and in two weeks erased the memory of those two years, playing chess with a bunch of checkers amateurs.
Of course he is play-acting. His whole life is one straight line of extreme radicalism, hidden behind soothing words and populist masks. He sets traps for Republicans and they tell him when the trip wires are loose, then fix them for him, put their own legs inside and wonder why they look like fools, hanging upside down, dangling and twisting in the wind.
Of course he is going to pretend to be bi-partisan and centrist. Of course he is going to put on another mask. He needs the “center” to be fooled again. And the Republicans are just the jesters to do it for him.
Americans have a mess on their hands with obama. He is out to destroy this nation. I am tired of the press telling us how obama has made such strides over the past couple of days to reach out to republicans and has achieved so much because he, he, was willing to compromise for the good of this nation….bullpocky
Republicans did “okay” nothing special, nothing special at all, certainly nothing to write home about..
I have been saying this for two years now. This guy is a fascist/communist hell-bent on destroying america by hook or by crook—mostly by crook. I had been warning people that 2010 Elections won’t change anything. Indeed it becomes EASIER for him, because he doesn’t even have to pretend to be fighting legislative battles—he will do things by executive decrees and/or regulations, and/or judicial fights. And there is NOTHING anyone can do about it PROCEDURALLY, LEGISLATIVELY, OR JUDICIALLY. First two are now obvious, as the author of the above post is learning. And even JUDICIALLY—look at what he did with twice judcially rejected moratorium on driling. Look at what he did with ‘netneutrality’—appelate court told the crooks they have no authority to do it, and they did it anyways. Who is going to ENFORCE what the judiciary rules—even if assuming that in some rare cases it will rule against him? The enforcement is constitutionally in the hands of Dept. of Justice, which is under HIM!! Do you see Holder enforcing ANY judicial rulings that have been against the administration crooks? IF tomorrow, SCOTUS rules that ObamaCare is unconstitutional and strikes it down—who is going to stop Obama and Sebelius from implementing it anyways? If GOP House says it will not fund ObamaCare, who is going to stop Treasury (along with quasi-govt agency FED) to PRINT the money?
And by the time 2012 comes, i can guarantee there will BE no elections and democracy and Constitution LEFT to even nominally stop this crook. You must understand that this position of power the Left has gained after 100 years of nonstop effort at undermining the Constitution. And it KNOWS that it has revealed just too many of its cards in past two years to ever gain anything similar to power it has now. It will NEVER give up this kind of power because what they call ‘a piece of paper’ (i.e. the Constitution) says so. Not once in the history of the Left has it willingly and without violent fight given up power merely because some Constitution said so, or some Elections said so. Never. Not once.
There is only one way to stop this beast. A head on fight of We, the People, with this government. All we have to do is get enough number of people to DC and DEMAND that they step down and get out of our castle. And not leave until that happens. It is our RIGHT to do so, and it is the ONLY possible means left to stop the complete ruin of this Republic.
Excellent column and excellent comments, though I’m not as confident as David T. about BHO being a non-violent leftist. The violence he has done to the constitution could just as well be applied to the citizenry (Fema camps, race riots and so on) and he still wouldn’t care. Would welcome it, in fact, as a sign of the true ‘revolution’ he thinks is needed.
So….is somebody going to STOP HIM?
It’s a movement financed by Unions, Soros, America Haters and led by the tools in the MSM. If o-blah blah was thrown out of office tomorrow it wouldn’t change anything. Focus on stopping the movement not the idiot man child obama.
I need to be informed by a fellow reader: what LEGAL power do agencies have to implement and force their decisions? By their genesis of having been created by Congress?
If Comcast or ATT says to FCC – “screw you”: what happens to ATT/Comcast?
I will be watching the Republicans very carefully regarding Obama’s end run via regulation. The Repubs had better pay heed to the message sent on November 2nd; the size of this bloated, unconstitutional, leviathan had best be substantially reduced or the Repubs will go the way of the whigs. I demand that departments be defunded and sunsetted. The EPA, Energy, and Education depts need to be defunded or eliminated. The states need to take over these functions, if their people so choose. The FCC should be eliminated altogether, it has become irrelevant given the rise of the internet, cable and satelite communication.
Our federal government needs to be trimmed by at least 40%. This can be done with a restoration of liberty occuring as part of the bargain. Wake up and demand that Article 1, Section 8 be respected.
If this President means to have a war, let it start regarding regulation and the extinction of federal departments. The American people will appreciate their new liberty and the additional funds jangleing in their pockets.
During the Bush years the Left in this country was nearly in revolt; some of the things it did were in fact treasonous. But along comes Obama and his czar buddies and the vast majority of the country that hasn’t and never will drink the Obama-Aid are expected to sit by while these people do their faculty lounge version of making the world right? These people are truly amazing.
One wonders what the punditry has been imbibing of late to make the claim that the Bamster is good for 2012. If you thought this year’s lame duck Congress was a disgrace and a hellhole wait till he loses his reelection bid.
The move his henchmen in the FCC have made on our freedoms are exactly why I’ve cautioned many of my friends against taking their eye off Washington DC and the inner workings after the Nov elections. They were saying well we can relax now – the calvary has arrived – I heartily disagreed with them. I’ve gotten emails from a few of them about the FCC regs – a few seemed surprised – not me.
The timing of this move by the FCC was planned for by these thugs to coincide with the slow news cycles of the holidays – hoping nobody would notice just what it was they were up to. Why bother? The MSM looks the other way – no big deal. It’s the internet, their mortal enemy – why should they care? One of these days it’ll be their turn. Why would I care?
The audacity of these thugs seems to know no bounds. Even after getting hammered by the Courts on their prior net neutrality (what a joke) plans they go ahead and implement it anyway. Like a 2 year old that was just told no – but go at it again. We can only hope that the new Congress will start hearings on this right away to thwart these thugs.
To repeat my earlier comment, it seems secession is the only answer when the mess is this big. Looters, socialists, crooked politicians, “intellectually superior” liberals, wellfare recipients, illegals, college professors: “Come and take it.” You need us. We don’t need you.
(“Come and take it” was a Texas Revolution battle cry placed on a flag with a picture of a symbolic cannon).
All states with no state income tax and a business-friendly environment unite.
The current administration and the former congress have not done their core Constitutional jobs, which is to ensure the national defense and pass a budget. They have instead focused on the progressive agenda. This is outrageous.
Unless Obama’s stalinist scum are stopped through defunding or legal action, internet freedom will be destroyed.
We’ve already had about 4 years of Democrat Party Annexation of the U.S. Private Sector. And they’ve been successful at funneling federal funds through their favorite unions to support their campaigns. How else do you think Harry Reid got re-elected?
The worse thing that could happen to this Regime, is for Barracky boy to break his arm and prohibit him from signing anything. But, I’m sure the puppet masters could manage to manipulate the other arm to sign whatever legislation they put in front of him.
And the Republicans in Congress, are going to shoot themselves in the foot by cutting spending (the complete opposite of the Democrat Party), and cut their own federal campaign funding by being fiscally responsible.
It’s easy enough to stop this kind of thing. Congress stops funding the FCC. Let everybody know there are consequences to attempted power grabs. Problem solved.