WASHINGTON: Yesterday Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) announced his opposition to Kagan’s appoint to the Supreme Court. We here at the NIP hope that other Senators will put personal interests aside and remember their oath of office. Hatch enumerates two main objections, lack of experience and a proclivity toward judicial activism. The NFL draft has tighter standards than this judicial process. It’s time to take it seriously.

Orrin Hatch Opposes Kagan as SCOTUS

I have carefully examined Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s record, actively participated in the entire Judiciary Committee hearing, and considered the views of supporters and opponents from Utah and across the country. Qualifications for judicial service include both legal experience and, more importantly, the appropriate judicial philosophy. The law must control the judge; the judge must not control the law. I have concluded that, based on evidence rather than blind faith, General Kagan regrettably does not meet this standard and that, therefore, I cannot support her appointment.

Supreme Court Justices who, like General Kagan, had no prior judicial experience did have an average of 21 years in private legal practice. General Kagan has two. The fact that her experience is instead academic and political only magnifies my emphasis on judicial philosophy as the most important qualification for judicial service.

Over nearly 25 years, General Kagan has endorsed, and praised those who endorse, an activist judicial philosophy. I was surprised when she encouraged us at the hearing simply to discard or ignore certain parts of her record. I am unable to do that. I also cannot ignore disturbing situations in which it appears that her personal or political views drove her legal views. She promoted the Clinton administration’s extreme position on abortion, including the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion. As Dean of Harvard Law School, she blocked the access by military recruiters that federal law requires. And she took legal positions on important issues such as freedom of speech that could undermine the liberties of all Americans.

General Kagan is a good person, a skilled political lawyer, a brilliant scholar, and was a fine law school dean. I like her personally and I supported her to be Solicitor General. But applying the standard I have always used for judicial nominees, I cannot support her appointment to the Supreme Court.  Orrin Hatch

WASHINGTON: Coming to a computer near you, “Your PC becomes a boat anchor.” The NIP has been warning for some time about the administration’s attempt to seize control over the Internet. Last Thursday Senator Lieberman’s Committee on Homeland Security passed the doublespeak “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010″ which instead of protecting cyberspace nationalizes it.

A US Senate committee has approved a wide-ranging cybersecurity bill that some critics have suggested would give the US president the authority to shut down parts of the Internet during a cyberattack.

Senator Joe Lieberman and other bill sponsors have refuted the charges that the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act gives the president an Internet “kill switch.” Instead, the bill puts limits on the powers the president already has to cause “the closing of any facility or stations for wire communication” in a time of war, as described in the Communications Act of 1934, they said in a breakdown of the bill published on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee website. Grant Gross, TechWorld

The enables the President to seize the Internet and control it in any manner he wishes, without Congressional oversight for a period of 120 days, which could be further extended with Congressional permission. Traitorous Susan Collins (R-Maine), co-sponsor of the bill, says detractors like the NIP are just being inflamatory: Read more…

WASHINGTON: This administration, fearful of the power that an open and free media has to disseminate truth, feels that it needs to bail out traditional newspapers and dinosaur networks to keep control of the flow of information. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) just released a major discussion draft that proposes bailouts for traditional media. The Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) “Diversity Czar” Mark Lloyd has called for the same takeover of media in the US that Chavez has instituted in Venezuela.

Stocks of Internet providers fell dramatically in early May as the FCC said it would move forward with net neutrality rules as the FCC is moving closer to seizing control of the Internet. Investors fear that increased federal regulations will present significant challenges to the viability of fledgeling new media. Verizon and other providers are alarmed that the FCC is trying to reclassify broadband to put it under their control:

CTIA and Verizon expressed alarm over FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s proposal to reclassify broadband under Title II of the Communications Act.

CTIA President and CEO Steve Largent said in a statement that he was “disappointed” with the announcement. “This complex, interdependent ecosystem is currently thriving to the benefit to all Americans,” he said. “Putting that success at risk is unnecessary and dangerous, particularly in today’s economic environment.” Maisie Ramsay, Wireless Week

It is the same principle as the EPA reclassifying carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Carbon dioxide is required by all plant life on the planet but the EPA has seized control over it in order to leverage power over every aspect of American life. Now the FTC wants to use the same ploy to control the Internet:

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is seeking ways to “reinvent” journalism, and that’s a cause for concern. According to a May 24 draft proposal, the agency thinks government should be at the center of a media overhaul. The bureaucracy sees it as a problem that the Internet has introduced a wealth of information options to consumers, forcing media companies to adapt and experiment to meet changing market needs. FTC’s policy staff fears this new reality…

With no faith that the market will work things out for the better, government thinks it must come to the rescue. Read more…

WASHINGTON: Comments by the FCC’s “Diversity Czar” Mark Lloyd reveal this administration’s attempt at seizing control of media in an attempt to shut down freedom of speech.

Lloyd called Chavez’s totalitarian regime “an incredible revolution, a democratic revolution,” when it really was anything but democratic. In the first video below he points out the Obama administration needs to learn from Chavez that the takeover of private media outlets is essential to shut down dissent to further the ends of an autocratic government. In the second he hints at his plan to shut down talk radio. Like much of this administration, Mark Lloyd is in fact a Saul Alinsky disciple:

In his [Lloyd's] 2006 book entitled Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America, he calls for an all-out “confrontational movement” against private media.  He wants leftist activists – through incessant political pressure – and the government – through the creation of a totally untenable operating environment of fees, fines and regulations – to work together to force the commercial broadcasters out, to be replaced by  public broadcasters.

And in his tome, Lloyd had this to say about the First Amendment: Read more…

WASHINGTON: Senate Employees were warned yesterday to stay off the Drudge report:

The Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works issued an urgent email late Monday claiming the DRUDGE REPORT is ‘responsible for the many viruses popping up throughout the Senate.’

The committee ordered hill staff: ‘Try to avoid’ the DRUDGE REPORT ‘for now’.

On Monday DRUDGE served over 29 million pages with NOT ONE email complaint received about ‘pop ups’, or the site serving ‘viruses’.

The site was seen 149,967 times since March 1st from users at senate.gov and 244,347 times at house.gov. [10,825 visits from the White House, eop.gov]  Drudge

The only virus that Senate employees risk by visiting the site is the virus of freedom of speech. Obviously the Senate wants its staff to be as insulated as possible from the opinions of the American public in order to facilitate ramming the Socialist healthcare agenda down the throats of the American people. Open wide and say, “Ahhh.”

BABE HUGGETT: On Thursday morning, February 18^th, with one minute left of his popular San Francisco Bay Area early morning talk show on KSFO 560-AM, veteran radio host and dedicated conservative, Lee Rodgers, received his pink slip without warning for refusing to. “…say nice things about Muslims.”

Rodgers, a 25 year veteran of ABC Radio and a 15 year veteran at KSFO with his highly rated and profitable Lee Rodgers Show, was in the normal process of renegotiating his contract for renewal in July when he was fired last week. In a clear violation of his contract, Rodgers said that his leaving, “…was forced upon me, with no notice.”

Talk Show Host Lee Rodgers

ABC Radio is owned by Citadel Corporation and is in bankruptcy. Its move to terminate one of its highest rated and profitable hosts in a major metropolitan market seems counter-productive but is not unusual under Citadel’s current management. Earlier in the month Chicago sister station, WLS-AM 890 fired in mid-week the abrasive but entertaining libertarian, Mancow Muller, and his co-host, Pat Cassidy, for, as Muller put it, “no rhyme or reason.”

In an email sent to his fans, Rodgers wrote, “The top management of Citadel, led by a CEO named Farid Suleiman–widely regarded as the most incompetent executive in broadcasting–decided that I was making too much money after 25 years with ABC and fifteen as morning host on KSFO, taking no note of the fact that I’ve generated large sums of money for the company.”

Read more…

We never thought we would see such a brazen effort in the US to deceive ordinary folks in an effort to steal their rights and subject them to control. You come to expect that in dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, but not in the freest country on earth.

Communists are masters at naming their governmental grabs for power just the opposite of what they really want to accomplish. The Great Leap Forward did just the opposite, ending in widespread famine and economic ruin that resulted in tens of millions of deaths. The Cultural Revolution stripped traditional culture, values, and education from China, and brought chaos to the formerly great nation.

SavetheInternet.com is a bogus website dedicated to the destruction of the very freedom you enjoy on the Internet. Sponsored by FreePress.net, another example of opposite-day nomenclature, SavetheInternet.com has the goal of taking the Internet out of private hands and putting it into the government’s. Read more…