You wouldn’t know it by reading the headline, but Obama is losing – or has already lost – those few loons in America who truly want Socialism to replace Capitalism. Here’s the headline, from the American Journal of Loons, aka Mother Jones:

Should Obama Control the Internet?

One would think by the headline that Obama remains entirely safe in his cushion of media protection.  After all, if the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 had been the Cybersecurity Act of 2007, proposed under the Bush administration, the headline would have been far more provocative, something like “Off with Bush’s Head!  He Wants to Control Our Internet!”  But Mother Jones actually asks if it’s OK to hand over control of history’s greatest leveler of information to government.

Should President Obama have the power to shut down domestic Internet traffic during a state of emergency?

Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) think so. On Wednesday they introduced a bill to establish the Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor—an arm of the executive branch that would have vast power to monitor and control Internet traffic to protect against threats to critical cyber infrastructure. That broad power is rattling some civil libertarians.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security.” The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president.

It does?! And you’re asking?! (Here’s the draft bill if you don’t trust Mother Jones.)

Fawning and forgiving as the article is, the comment section gives us a window into the true thinking of the whacked-left readers of the magazine. There are nearly 150 posted as of this moment; here’s a smattering:

Oh, please, it has nothing to do with socialism. It’s called fascism, or corporatism, or perhaps even better a plutocracy. True socialism’s goal is the equality of all people. What’s going on now has nothing to do with the common good of the people. It’s the international bankers and the kings and princes of our age vying for ultimate power — Just the way it has been for centuries.

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how is this admin any different from previous admins?

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No difference. Both sides of the aisle are and have been doing their best to destroy the Republic. Scum bags who have risen to power by lying, cheating and stealing. No matter how you dress them up, they are the scum of the earth.

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Oh, please, it has nothing to do with socialism. It’s called fascism, or corporatism, or perhaps even better a plutocracy. True socialism’s goal is the equality of all people. What’s going on now has nothing to do with the common good of the people. It’s the international bankers and the kings and princes of our age vying for ultimate power — Just the way it has been for centuries.

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Gee – maybe we’ll be just like Orwell’s vision in 1984… we’ll get rid of any remaining truth and depend only on the mainstream media talking heads spewing government press releases as if they were journalists. Then we’ll be docile and controllable – and what the heck, who needs the constitution???

There’s a healthy debate about whether it’s socialism or fascism, and the smart ones get it:  It’s both.  Obama wants the legal framework of fascism to give him greater control over government, and he wants to use that control to redistribute wealth.  The left may be OK with the latter, but they’re definitely not happy with Obama’s direction on the former.

So they’re half-way with us.

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magine, for just a moment, that the Bush/Rove Constitution Shredding Brigade had proposed to give the president the right to monitor without warrant all private communicaitons, emails, bank records and medical records on the internet … and even to shut it down, if he deemed it to be a threat to America’s security.

Do you suppose the Left might have become just a bit unhinged? A teeny, tiny bit? Knowing the answer, where do you suppose they are today as the Dems are proposing just that, something far, far more liberty-crushing than anything Bush ever proposed? It’s the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, a nasty little bill crafted by Jay Rockefeller and (RINO) Olympia Snowe.  Here’s Power Line on it:

The most controversial provisions are Sec. 18 (2), which gives the President authority to shut down all or any portions of the internet that he may designate as “critical infrastructure information systems and networks,” and Sec. 14 (b)(1), which gives the Secretary of Commerce access to “all relevant data concerning such networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.” Critics have interpreted this clause as giving the Secretary the ability to access, without any sort of search warrant, any internet communication. That looks like a reasonable interpretation, as long as the President has designated the network “critical infrastructure,” which he has unfettered (and unguided) discretion to do.

You know how generous and open I am, how I’m always willing to give the Lib goons the benefit of the doubt, so it shouldn’t surprise you that I went to the ACLU site and did a search for the act. But guess what?  Nothing.  Surprised?

hat-tip: Jim

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ighty-eight million Chinese joined in on all the Internet fun in 2008, bringing the total of on-line Chinese to nearly 300 million - talk about a rapid pace of change!  It wasn’t that long ago that the Chinese had to content themselves with a little red book of Mao’s quotes.

Not only has internet use soared, so has blogging, says Xiao Quiang, director of the China Internet Project:

“The sheer number of bloggers and the sheer number who are willing to express themselves politically are growing dramatically” he added.

“The language is changing from implicit to more and more explicit, communities are swarming and their opinions and influence are getting stronger — even compared with six months ago.”

Of course, wherever Chinese communicate, the communist totalitarian government is listening … and not approving:

A prominent Chinese blog regarded as a haven for liberal thought and one of the liveliest sites for discussion was also banned last week. Bullog was closed on the grounds that it contained too much “harmful” comment on current affairs. Its founder, Luo Yonghao, said at the weekend that he would reopen it overseas if the authorities did not relent. It was briefly banned in 2007. …

“While the publicly stated purpose of cracking down in the past week has been porn and internet smut, we have also seen the shutdown of Bullog and a number of websites,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong and an expert on China and the internet.

“From talking to people who work in web companies here it’s pretty clear they feel under increased pressure to control political content as much as smut … I’m being told that all of those companies are beefing up their staff who are employed to police content and the software and other mechanisms to flag content which gets them in trouble.” (UK Guardian)

The Guardian says China announced Monday that 90 Web sites have been closed.  Little wonder.  This year, the Chinese will mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests (already!!), the 50th anniversary of the failed Tibetan uprising and the Dalai Lama’s flight to India, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s [?] Republic.

While I usually am able to maintain an optimistic outlook, Pollyanna doesn’t hang out at C-SM. I don’t think the Commies are going to crash down any time soon, but you just can’t look at a stat like 300 million internet users in China and think it’s a bad thing.

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Update: Bloomberg reports:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki hasn’t endorsed any specific plan for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, a government spokesman said, a day after a magazine report that he backed Barack Obama’s proposal.

Al-Maliki supports a “general vision” of U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq and has not backed a plan by Obama, the presumptive U.S. Democratic presidential candidate, for a 16- month withdrawal window, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in an e-mailed statement in Baghdad today.

This has certainly set off a swirl of controversy, but it hasn’t changed the core of this post.

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he blogosphere is a very, very prejudiced place because we surround ourselves with like-minded sorts and shun those who hold another view. The stories we bloggers select to write about suffer the same way; we ignore stories that trouble us, and pounce on those that confirm our beliefs, either that we’re right or others are wrong.

Case in point: Spiegel’s interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in which Maliki says that Barack Obama’s 16-month timeframe for a withdrawal from Iraq is the right one, and appeared to encourage people not to vote for candidate with an Iraq plan like … oh … John McCain’s:

“Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems.”

The irony of this, of course, is that everything that Obama opposed – foremost the surge – is what’s made it possible. Without the policies endorsed by Bush and McCain, Maliki would not have so optimistic a view of his country’s future. But all that matters politically is that now he does have that view, and Obama will be able to strut about looking brilliant, as if his view on Iraq was always the right view on Iraq.

That makes this story bad, bad news for anyone who feels McCain is better (even marginally) for America’s future than Obama. Maliki’s comments could effectively end the war debate, with Obama’s “See, I told you so” much more resonant than McCain’s “Wait! It was me!” And that makes this story one the leftybloggers love and we conservatives have largely ignored.

Just check out memeorandum. It headlines about a half dozen different news articles and blog posts on the story, including the Spiegel story and a Reuters story that seems to have scooped Spiegel internationally, then links to about 40 news and blog posts on the story. Yes, there are some posts from the conservative side making points similar to those I’ve made above, like this, from The American Mind:

First, realize Maliki sees Obama as the Presidential front runner. It’s rational not to rock the boat. Second, Iraq and the U.S. wouldn’t be in this situation if it weren’t for the surge that quelled violence.

But many many more leftyblogs are listed, making comments like this:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki found a pony and it’s name is Obama. While John McSame was busy questioning Obama’s foreign policy credentials the Iraqi Prime Minster was endorsing them.

Or this one from Polimom that cues off the post from The American Mind above:

That is absolutely the McCain campaign’s narrative on Iraq. It has to be, since it’s all they’ve got now. And you can bet your bottom dollar that many millions of Americans will recall — with or without the reminders that are surely coming — that the dire situation that led to the surge was predicated by an incredibly stupid invasion.

Hmmm. How is it that she’s forgotten that Maliki would not be speaking at all about the progress towards a secure democracy in Iraq, were it not for the invasion she still calls “incredibly stupid?” How is it that she’s conveniently dropped the Butcher of Baghdad from her memory? Here’s why: Because, like most of us, she primarily reads the posts and news items she wants to read and ignores the ones she doesn’t.

The blogosphere is not the great equalizer, in which we all graze widely on the field of ideas (oh wait – look, even the grazing sheep are bunched together); rather it is a cafeteria, where we’re free to move about, selecting only the items that appeal to us, and never tasting the ones that don’t. (There are also those strange beings who actively scout out opposing views and leave aggressive, obnoxious comments to irritate the inmates of that particular asylum. That’s a bizarre human dynamic since they are forever assigning themselves losing battles.)

I, too, am guilty of treating the blogosphere as a cafeteria, and it’s easy to understand, since opposing points of view irritate the gut, chafe the senses … and even, occasionally, challenge opinions that are too hard-set. That’s why I do spend a bit of time perusing the opposition, but I confess, I don’t do it often enough.

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