Despite Obama’s Doubletalk, Death Panels Are Back on the Agenda

Remember the Death Panels Sarah Palin complained about in the Obamacare legislation to take over the American Health Insurance industry?   Even the voicebox of our president went after her chastising and chastising.  Well………

…..here is an interesting article in the New York Times by Robert Fear, “Obama Returns to End of Life Plan That Caused Stir.”

“WASHINGTON — When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.

Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.

Congressional supporters of the new policy, though pleased, have kept quiet. They fear provoking another furor like the one in 2009 when Republicans seized on the idea of end-of-life counseling to argue that the Democrats’ bill would allow the government to cut off care for the critically ill.

The final version of the health care legislation, signed into law by President Obama in March, authorized Medicare coverage of yearly physical examinations, or wellness visits. The new rule says Medicare will cover “voluntary advance care planning,” to discuss end-of-life treatment, as part of the annual visit.

Under the rule, doctors can provide information to patients on how to prepare an “advance directive,” stating how aggressively they wish to be treated if they are so sick that they cannot make health care decisions for themselves.

While the new law does not mention advance care planning, the Obama administration has been able to achieve its policy goal through the regulation-writing process, a strategy that could become more prevalent in the next two years as the president deals with a strengthened Republican opposition in Congress.

In this case, the administration said research had shown the value of end-of-life planning.

“Advance care planning improves end-of-life care and patient and family satisfaction and reduces stress, anxiety and depression in surviving relatives,” the administration said in the preamble to the Medicare regulation, quoting research published this year in the British Medical Journal.

The administration also cited research by Dr. Stacy M. Fischer, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who found that “end-of-life discussions between doctor and patient help ensure that one gets the care one wants.” In this sense, Dr. Fischer said, such consultations “protect patient autonomy.”

Opponents said the Obama administration was bringing back a procedure that could be used to justify the premature withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from people with severe illnesses and disabilities.

Section 1233 of the bill passed by the House in November 2009 — but not included in the final legislation — allowed Medicare to pay for consultations about advance care planning every five years. In contrast, the new rule allows annual discussions as part of the wellness visit.

Elizabeth D. Wickham, executive director of LifeTree, which describes itself as “a pro-life Christian educational ministry,” said she was concerned that end-of-life counseling would encourage patients to forgo or curtail care, thus hastening death.

“The infamous Section 1233 is still alive and kicking,” Ms. Wickham said. “Patients will lose the ability to control treatments at the end of life.”

Several Democratic members of Congress, led by Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, had urged the administration to cover end-of-life planning as a service offered under the Medicare wellness benefit. A national organization of hospice care providers made the same recommendation.

Mr. Blumenauer, the author of the original end-of-life proposal, praised the rule as “a step in the right direction.”

“It will give people more control over the care they receive,” Mr. Blumenauer said in an interview. “It means that doctors and patients can have these conversations in the normal course of business, as part of our health care routine, not as something put off until we are forced to do it.”

After learning of the administration’s decision, Mr. Blumenauer’s office celebrated “a quiet victory,” but urged supporters not to crow about it.

“While we are very happy with the result, we won’t be shouting it from the rooftops because we aren’t out of the woods yet,” Mr. Blumenauer’s office said in an e-mail in early November to people working with him on the issue. “This regulation could be modified or reversed, especially if Republican leaders try to use this small provision to perpetuate the ‘death panel’ myth.”

Byron York Writes ‘A Good One’ about New York Times Slouch, Frank Rich

Some of the country’s most noted ‘fools’ opine for the New York Times.   Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof,  and Frank Rich, by any public demand would lead the list, but not necessarily in the order I have arranged. 

I like company in my assessments.   It’s rather human, depending on what company one collects.

I value Byron York’s values.  So I offer Prager fans the following article about Frank Rich, a joke at the New York Times:

By: Byron York 12/26/10 12:55 PM
Chief Political Correspondent

Nothing irritates New York Times columnist Frank Rich more than Republicans who — in Rich’s view — want to turn the clock back to the 1950s.  That long-ago time in America was never the idyll it is sometimes portrayed to be, Rich believes, but rather a “phony nirvana” rife with racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic injustice.

So it is surprising that in a new column, “Who Killed the Disneyland Dream?” Rich waxes nostalgic about…the 1950s.  He tells the story of Robbins Barstow, a union official living in suburban Connecticut who in the 50s was an avid home-movie maker.  In 1956, Barstow, his wife, and three children won a trip to Disneyland in a contest sponsored by 3M, the makers of Scotch Tape.  The home movie Barstow made of the experience, “Disneyland Dream,” portrays the happy family boarding an old Constellation propeller aircraft to fly to the paradise of Southern California and enjoy the wonders of Disneyland.  It has become something of a classic of post-war Americana.

To Rich, the Barstows lived in “an America where great corporations like 3M can be counted upon to make innovative products, sustain an American work force, and reward their customers with a Cracker Jack prize now and then.”  Even when American optimism was shaken, as it was after the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik in 1957, there was a “bedrock faith in the American way” that leaders like John F. Kennedy could call on to “reclaim America’s heroic destiny.”

More than anything, Rich asserts, the America of the 1950s brought promise, hope, and optimism. “The sense that the American promise of social and economic mobility was attainable to anyone who sought it permeates ‘Disneyland Dream’ from start to finish,” writes Rich.  “Economic equality seemed within reach in 1956, at least for the vast middle class.”

Rich devotes a few words to some of the non-wonderful things about the 1950s, making a passing reference to the absence of “a nonwhite face among [the Barstows’] neighbors back home or at Disneyland.”  (Just for the record, the Barstows lived not in Yazoo City, Mississippi but in Hartford suburb of Wethersfield, Connecticut.)  On the whole, though, Rich paints a glowing picture of the 50s to stand in stark contrast to today, when middle-class wages are stagnant, and, according to Rich, people no longer trust capitalism to reward hard work.  “Many of America’s best young minds now invent derivatives, not Disneylands,” Rich writes.  So unlike those great 1950s!

What a difference a few years and a change in political leadership can make.  Back in 1995, when Republicans took control of Congress, new Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich cited the 1950s as proof that years of liberal social policy had done great damage to America.  “Why do we have all these problems we didn’t have in 1955?” Gingrich asked.

Rich was livid.  “May we go back to 1955 for a moment?” he asked in an angry response to the new Speaker.  The 50s were “not all ‘Father Knows Best’ and sunny Normal Rockwell family tableaux.” In fact, Rich wrote, the 1950s were rife with out-of-wedlock births, drug use, and divorce.  The image of the happy middle-class, Mom-and-Dad-and-Buddy-and-Sis family — a family like, say, the Barstows — was a cruel deception.

“The truth about the 50’s is that all the post-World War II fissures in American life were present and simply papered over — with the aid of racial segregation, the denial of equal social and economic status to women, the repression of homosexuals and the refusal to recognize crimes like wife battering and child abuse,” Rich fumed.  “It was inevitable that this phony nirvana would crack at the seams, as it did in the 60s.”

When Gingrich and other Republicans advocated conservative positions on issues like school prayer, abortion, and sex education, Rich said, they were using “code phrases for turning back the clock to 1955 — when the rights of religious minorities went unprotected, when teen-age girls had back-alley abortions, when women were expected to be seen but not heard, when homosexuals stayed in the closet and when de facto segregation ruled in the nation’s schools.”

Rich could barely contain himself by column’s end. “Ah, the good old days!” he raged.  Newt Gingrich, he said, was “America’s most selective and powerful historian,” conjuring up images of a happy 1950s that never existed, simply to score political points.  So what does that make Frank Rich today?

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2010/12/frank-rich-rewrites-history#ixzz19LoFPhD7

Comment:  I often am on the alert to read matters about the 1950s.   This was the decade when I was most alert and thrilled to learn as much as possible  about the world around me, both near and far, as I could.   This is the decade of my college years, my military service,  my marriage, the beginning  of my teaching career, my entry into some kind of adulthood.    I was exposed to be the person I was, whether I liked that person or not; whether I was ready for that person or not.  

I was close enough in memory of my formal education and its meanings (and preachers) and above all by 1950 I had already been molded by  the most dramatic cultural event of my lfetime…….the years of World War II.

Only my family and  my schooling  and church stood over me more overwhelmingly than the sum of the days under the spells of that war.   We suffered no casualties.  My parents spoke little of the war.   I can’t even remember a single word relating to it.  Yet my dad, too old to serve,  joined the air raid wardens and my mother the nurses’ corps.  (in St. Paul, Minnesota, mind you).

I learned to read via the war.  I drew its maps.  By age nine  I knew ever capital city of Europe.    Nearly every Saturday I went to the matinee movies with some neighbor kids….without adults.   Watching  MovieTone News or The March of Time  news reels on the screen before each movie feature was for me the high light of the day….except when I was “Lassie Come Home.”     

We kids were mobilized for the War Effort, and we knew that.  We collected tin cans, kitchen a garage grease and oil, newspapers, and milkweed pods.    At school we  were expected to buy War stamps to fill up our War bond books to help buy equipment for the effort.    Our Miss Mabel Ryple’s fifth grade class  collect enough money to buy  a jeep for the invasion of France.    We had our picture taken with the jeep published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

In 1942 my dad had signed the family up to grow and maintain a Victory Garden beginning that Spring.     At age 8 I was put in  charge of controlling the potato beetle population, planting and harvesting, cultivating and picking off cabbage worms and squishing them….eventually by the hundreds.  

It was there at garden side where I built my fort to protect me from the Germans; the site  where my friends and I would bomb with stones and clay clogs.  …………..I was a B-24 bomber.   My friends were Lockheed Lightenings.

What a lucky time for me to be alive as a kid.   The community in the city was never more  tightly connected.  Never was decency of human behavior better demonstrated.  Life was clean……and innocent.   GIs came home and went to school.  

By 1950 for the first time in 20 years Americans, at least those in my family and neighborhood, began to buy things.    In 1949 my Dad bought a second hand 1949 DeSoto using his 1941 Plymouth 4 door as a trade in.   Paint was now available to fix up ones house.

When Frank Rich’s fangs are exposed he spews repression.

I was ‘repressed’ by my parents, teachers, church, movies, neighbors to be a modest and tolerant Christian;  to be a decent human being, God fearing, kind, generous, and a worthy citizen in the greatest country on Earth.  I had to go to school to learn the duties and knowledge of a good citizen first, and incidental to that, to prepare for a  worthy life’s occupation, upon which my good character and learnings would be based.

In 1948 I entered an out-of-my-neighborhood high school, a public school in which the largest minority was black.  They were people who were as civilized as I was.   There were no drugs, no federally mandated texts and schemes to interfere with normal teenage camaraderie.    There were school dress codes  which all students followed.   I had become  an explorer by age 12 investigating  through neighborhoods by streetcar and hikes.   Negro homes were unpainted  and had a lot more kids running around in the streets than in other neighborhoods.  Fathers live in those homes.   The kids were civilized and very likeable.  

Yet, there was a wall, a thin one, but a wall, nevertheless, history had still built between us.   I was captivated by it.

In my four years of high school experience I was not aware of a single entanglement between the races there.  I was never attacked or verbally assaulted.    

A few years ago I read in the St. Paul paper that some black was quoted   complaining about public transportation in the Twin Cities being segregated during the 1940s and 1950s.   She had to stand at the back of the  bus.  

She was not mistaken.  She had told the reporter a lie or repeated one she had heard from someone else. 

Until the cultural revolution of the 1960s Christian ethics governed the community.  One could not have asked for a better more peaceful environment in which to grow up and explore ones surroundings.   I was driven by my religion and my school that the more I learned the closer to God I could come….and also be a decent citizen to boot.

I admit it was a bumpy road at times, but it was a terrific time for this kid to find his way through life.

U.S. Postal Service Continues to Lose Billions

A Bailout for the U.S. Postal Service?

Imagine a company that reported losses in 14 of the past 16 quarters, has too many retail outlets by its own admission, and relies heavily on work done for its two biggest competitors for revenue.  Any management consultant would recommend the obvious: Close unnecessary offices, lay off workers, expand into new lines of business and raise prices.  But this is the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), says Angela Greiling Keane.

Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe is charged with fixing the mess.

• Donahoe told bulk mail customers on Nov. 18 that the service’s costs will exceed revenue by $2.7 billion, even after borrowing $3 billion from the U.S. Treasury, the annual legal limit.
• Total debt, now $12 billion, by law can’t exceed $15 billion.
• Revenues in fiscal 2010 were $67 billion.

The USPS’s problems are well known:  

• More customers are paying bills online and choosing FedEx and United Parcel Service (UPS) to send overnight packages.
• Labor and retiree health care costs are exploding — the service has a $50 billion obligation to its retiree health fund and is in a dispute with Congress about who should pay that balance.

The service spends 78 percent of its budget on salaries and benefits, higher than either FedEx’s 43 percent or UPS’s 61 percent.  The American Postal Workers Union, the larger of the postal unions, is resisting further cutbacks and instead wants to “restore work that has been outsourced or given to supervisory personnel,” union President Cliff Guffey said in a Dec. 1 statement.  The best hope may be that volume climbs for the USPS’s two biggest customers, FedEx and UPS, which use the service for last-mile delivery, since mail carriers go to all 151 million U.S. addresses six days a week — at least for now, says Keane.

Source: Angela Greiling Keane, “A Bailout for the U.S. Postal Service?” BusinessWeek, December 9, 2010.

For text:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_51/b4208033645172.htm

(The above article was found at National Center for Policy Analysis.)

What is….”The World’s Most Successful Propaganda Campaign”?

Folks at PowerLine have published an article, “The World’s Most Successful Propaganda Campaign” , and have Cuba in mind as the winner of the contest.

I disagree.   There is so much competition including contestants from the good old U.S. of A……such as the Obama campaign and presidency extending endless Marxist claims about troubles in the country (and world)  and solutions to those troubles.   The arrival of the great prophet of  “The  Change America has been waiting for” throughout 2008 transitioning to the present propaganda campaign, “The Change American demanded”  which propels the Obama braggings of claimed accomplishments are chapters of the greater world wide campaign launched more than a century ago.  

Don’t think for a moment this propaganda campaign is over.  Marxist-trained Obama is a believer in government rule served by obedient Americans.  Included in  his  movement’s propaganda are claims  that fellow Marxists are intellectually superior and therefore deserve by nature to rule……… By Nature, Marxists should dictate what is good for this country…….ultimately for every country until  Marxist  World Authority  micromanages affairs both individual and collective in Effie, Minnesota and all other Effies on the globe.

The Fidel Castro story is simply another  chapter in the great  tome  devoted to  World Marxism’s never ending propaganda campaign to RULE  mankind.

The Powerline article:

“Fidel Castro is one of history’s greatest villains, having turned his island nation into a prison while looting, perhaps, a greater percentage of its wealth than any warlord or tyrant on record. Yet around the world, he and his corrupt regime are viewed mostly with amused tolerance, if not outright approval.

In large part, this is due to the regime’s skill in producing propaganda. In fact, propaganda may be the only product that Cuba produces in an internationally competitive manner. The latest manifestation of this skill is a sort of all-Cuban Wikipedia. The Daily Caller terms it the “most elaborate propaganda creation ever.”

Last week, Cuba launched EcuRed, its own version of Wikipedia. It was an intriguing move for a country whose population has very minimal Internet access. But the Cuban regime produces a large amount of propaganda targeted at the outside world, and EcuRed fits neatly into that framework.

“They do these extensive media operations,” said Mauricio Claver-Carone, the executive director of Cuba Democracy Public Advocacy, and a member of the board of directors of U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, “so that eventually the rest of the world, they hope, is seeing that, and they think it’s the truth because it’s coming from all kinds of different sources.”

It’s the ultimate in astroturf; one wonders whether George Soros consulted on the project. But whom, exactly, are they trying to fool?

“It’s their way of continuously rewriting history, essentially, for a foreign audience,” he said, because “domestically, the Cuban government is not going to convince anyone that all is good … they survive basically off foreign political support and foreign economic support.”

Frank Calzon, executive director of the Center for Free Cuba, agrees. “This is not for the Cuban reader,” he said.

Cubans are much too aware of the poverty and oppression in which they live to be fooled. The reality of Cuba is summed up in this news story: “11 Cuban dissidents spend 8th Christmas in prison.”

It was another lonely Christmas for the wives of 11 imprisoned dissidents slated to be freed under a deal between the Cuban government and the island’s Roman Catholic Church, as the holiday came and went with no sign they’d be released anytime soon.

“Christmas is a family holiday, and for eight Christmases, there’s been an empty seat at the table. We hope that next year, that won’t the case,” said Laura Pollan, a leader of the Ladies in White, a group made up of the wives and mothers of the dissidents.

Still, Pollan added, “There’s been no sign that any of them are going to be released soon.” …

The 11 still behind bars have said they want to remain in Cuba, a demand some observers see as a possible stumbling block to their release.

One must admit that for the last fifty years, the Castro regime’s propaganda effort has been remarkably successful. But why? Mauricio Claver-Carone explains:

“There is a huge audience out there that consumes anti-Americanism,” said Claver-Carone, calling it “the blame America first model.” The regime’s propaganda “feed[s] that anti-American audience.”

It’s sad but true: in many precincts, including some here in the U.S., being anti-American is enough to get you forgiven almost anything.”

---

“

A British Look at the Afghan War

As British troops spend their 10th Christmas in Afghanistan, Thomas Harding reports on growing signs of success in the fight against the insurgency.

 

(Warning:  The following article, “War in Afghanistan”,  is from The Telegraph…..a conservative view of things.)

“On Christmas Day, as on every other day this year, British troops stepped out to patrol central Helmand’s pleasant, Provence-like countryside of tree-lined paths and streams – fortified on this occasion by turkey and the traditional Christmas shot of “gunfire” (whisky and tea).

This is the 10th Christmas that UK forces have spent looking out on to Afghanistan’s seemingly untamed landscape. But while no one is clamouring to say it – there have been too many false dawns – there is a feeling in the air that, as yet another year of the campaign comes to a close, a corner has been turned.

Despite 2010 being the worst year for Nato fatalities, with 705 dead, the casualty rate in the last six months has dropped – and this with the “surge” of an extra 30,000 American troops. In the British sector of central Helmand, the number of deaths since July has fallen to 38, compared with 76 in the same period last year. Commanders are understandably reticent about trumpeting success in Helmand but they are getting close enough to whisper phrases such as “irreversible gains” and “unstoppable momentum”.

They also mention “virtuous circles”, one of which will become apparent in early spring with the next poppy harvest. If it is like last year’s low yield – due in part to the farmers’ fear of eradication, which led them to harvest too early – then there will be less money for the insurgents. That means fewer guns, bombs and hired foot-soldiers, which in turn means a less cowed population who will be more inclined to believe Nato’s promises of security.

Helmand now has 30,000 troops where there were just 3,000 in 2006. This means that ground being taken is being held. A single platoon can now guard a village of 800; soldiers and villagers will get to know each other’s faces and names, bonds are built and the locals point out where bombs have been hidden or inform when outsiders appear.

Clearly, problems will arise that could undo the progress made, but there are signs of confidence creeping into the local population – enough for some intriguing requests. “The elders have asked for a fitness centre,” a political adviser reports, to great mirth from the men of 3rd Bn The Parachute Regiment at their headquarters outside the flourishing village of Char-e-Anjir.

“A sure sign of middle-class progress,” their urbane commanding officer Lt Col James Coates suggests. “They could come here if they want.” There is more laughter at the thought of the locals using the Paras’ dumb-bells, running machines and exercise bikes.

The Taliban who have found themselves in the Paras’ area of operations in northern Nad-e-Ali, a place that was previously their stronghold, have been subjected to a new battle tactic this year that has hit them hard. In the first few years of the Helmand deployment, when numbers were few, there was an over-reliance on airstrikes, which sometimes led to civilian casualties; as a result, a doctrine of “courageous restraint” was introduced – not returning fire if there was a risk of injuring civilians – but there was unease among soldiers about the casualties among their own number that this caused, so now there is “precision strike”.

With the help of advanced surveillance techniques, commanders are able to pinpoint and follow Taliban leaders and their cohorts to build up a picture of daily habits; they can then strike when they need to. The method is precise and “collateral” damage is kept to a minimum. In one incident, I watched at least 15 Taliban eliminated by two missiles and some cannon fire sent from an Apache helicopter, along with a few rounds of small arms fire from the advancing Paras.

No wonder, then, that the intelligence intercepts hint at an enemy reluctant to fight. “We have to get more men,” we heard one Taliban commander say as we patrolled north of the village of Washiran. “Hurry up and get ready,” he urged. “I can’t, I’m cleaning my gun,” a foot-soldier replied.

Although the SAS and other special forces have been eliminating insurgent commanders on an “industrial scale”, killing is not the sole point of the exercise. Precision strike is also slowly winning over civilians, who are beginning to understand the efforts made to avoid unnecessary deaths. A greater understanding of the insurgency means “we can make sure we are fighting the right people”, says Lt Col Coates.

One of his young platoon commanders has a punchier assessment. “Now we have the numbers to deliver on the promises that we have been making over the last few years,” says Lt Luke Wilson, a paratrooper and recent Oxford graduate, speaking outside the busy market in Showal, the former home of the Taliban shadow government. “The insurgents are taking such a drubbing, it has massively quietened down. They have gone back home to rest until it gets warmer. In the meantime, we are moving into their space and when they come back in the spring they will come back to a place where we are in control.”

The men of 3 Para provide an interesting case history of the British military’s journey through Helmand. As the fighting element of a small force that arrived in 2006, they fought tooth and nail to hold off the Taliban; they came back in 2008, striking randomly around southern Afghanistan in helicopter assaults; and now they are back to win the consent of the locals.

L/Cpl Andrew Wiltshire, 25, a veteran of all three tours, articulates it well. “In 2006, it was ‘man the ramparts’, the next time it was strike ops and we didn’t have much interaction with the locals. This time it seems a hell of a lot more geared to winning over the population – we have to deal with the people and are sensitive to their feelings. The locals are more helpful now because we are out there a couple of times a day. We know their faces, they know our names. We chat and sometimes they tell us where the IEDs are placed.”

There are signs that the precision strikes have contributed to a growing trickle of junior Taliban commanders changing sides – a process known as “reintegration” – in exchange for their removal from target lists. “The fact that they see key people taken out of the fight is having a huge impact,” says the British officer assisting the process. “It’s not a wind of change but definitely a breeze blowing around. People want to stand up and reject the insurgency. They’d rather give up the fight than fight to the death.” Unluckily for the Taliban commander in the town of Naqilebad Kulay, his instincts to fight while he was negotiating reintegration got the better of him. A green and white memorial to his folly now rests outside the main mosque.

Across Helmand, there are tangible signs of progress. More roads are opening; journeys that would take a day, fraught with risk, now take 45 minutes and there has been a 20 per cent rise in traffic density. Parents are happy to transport their children to school, and more schools are opening. Shop rents in Lashkar Gah have risen and last month the Afghan Elvis, Farhad Darya, played before an audience of 6,000 in Lashkar Gah – with all the security provided by Afghans.

It is now admitted that it was the appalling practices of the Afghan National Police that propelled many to join the insurgency. “One year ago, police were drug-taking, intimidating, paedophiles,” a political adviser told some high level visitors in Nad-e-Ali. It took the “Blue 25” incident in November last year, when five British soldiers were murdered by a rogue Afghan policeman, to act as a catalyst for the reform of a force that had become “uniformed bandits”. Drug testing and identity checks shrank the force to a handful, but it is now at 80 per cent strength and relatively clean. There is corruption of course, but it’s a question of degree.

History will perhaps record that the British held the line in Afghanistan’s most violent province while we waited for American reinforcements to arrive from Iraq. So how did we fare in the eyes of the Americans, some of whom, the WikiLeaks cables tell us, were bluntly critical? Lt Gen Richard Mills, the US Marine in overall command of Helmand, told me this: “You will have Americans today who are 18 years old who will go back and live in the United States for 60 years and will tell their friends who have never been to England, I fought with the Brits and they are damn good soldiers.”

But despite the advances, there is still a nagging insecurity that the whole campaign could unravel as a result of political failures, on the part of the Afghans or the West. As I left Helmand, a casual discussion with a Para sergeant gave rise to this prescient comment: “If we don’t succeed in Afghanistan, then other countries like Somalia or Yemen won’t allow us in. We’ll be seen as failures.”

Get Better Acquainted with the Loony Leftist Gays Teaching at Your Neighborhood College and University

This article is from  the Sunday March 28, 1999 Variety section of the Mpls. StarTribune:

“Mary Daly is a world-recognized theologian and radical feminist philosopher.  Some hail her as a prophet.  Even those who do not nod to her linguistic inventiveness.

But do not for a minute think that Daly, 70 who has six graduate degrees and has taught at Boston College for more than three decades, let all that education get in the way of her point.

On men:  “They have nothing to offer but doodoo.”

On herself:  “I’m a positively revolting hag.”

On Boston College: “My employer is stupid.  It’s the same old thing they’ve been doing all along, oppressing women.”

On federal law that may bar her from excluding men from her classes:  “Nerdy-turdy little legalism.”

On that last one, Daly’s future now teeters precariously.  After a quarter century of wary wrangling over Daly’s insistence on a women-only classroom, Boston College told her this year that she must admit men or retire.  But if school administrators thought the old radical would slip quietly into the dark of a conservative night, they were wrong.

“Title IX was meant to give equality to women.  To reverse it into this caricature now, to try and give equality to men in a white male-dominated society, is absured,” fumes Daly, referring to the act that prohibits sexual discrimination at schools that receive federal funds.

Daly, however, is not exactly laughing.  She may have been a vaunted heroine of the 1970s with her blatant lesbianism and her book “Gyn/Ecology,” in which she describes atrocities committed by men against women and prescribes a pure state of female being.  She may be lionized by those who admire her intellectual force and originality, if not her authoritarian manner.

But times have changed, and Daly’s practice of excluding men may now be found to be illegal.

The battle of principle is a fitting finale to a career that has sought no less than to alter the course of world civilization.  Daly has rejected a retirement package and is uncertain what to do next.  but on one thing she is clear.

“I am going to be myself,” exclaims Daly.  I’m tough.  I’m strong.”

AN ORIGINAL

But she is not polite.  Daly recently agreed to talk about her dispute  with Boston College, but dismissed questions about Title IX as “boring,” her employer “stupid”.

What she wanted to talk about were her books, her philosophy, and the post-Christian feminism she first articulated in her book, “Beyond God the Father”, in 1973.  She wants to talk about her work as a “Pirate, Righteously Plundering and Smuggling back to women the gems which have been stolen from us by the patriarchal thieves,” as she wrote in her 1992 autobiography, “Outercourse:  The Be-Dazzling Voyage.”  She wants to talk about the theological voyage that took her from her birth in the year Oh, as she calls it, and away not just from the Catholic Church but Christianity and the “necrophilia of patriarchy.”

If it were not for the Boston College affair, she would be writing a sequel to her last book, “Quintessence….Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto.”

Instead, this daughter of Schenectady, N.Y., only child of a traveling salesman and a telephone operator, product of 26 years of Catholic schooling, was explaining  why it is so important that her female students have a classroom of their own.

“If a man were in the class, he would be very likely to say, ‘Oh no.  I am oppressed too’……He would say, ‘I can’t cry.  I’m not allowed to express myself, wah, wah,” Daly explained, feigning tears.  “OK. Let them go talk among themselves and complain.  Not everything is about you, you, you.

“I’m not being mean,” added Daly.  “I’m trying  to be good to my female students and give them what they are longing for and they cannot find in the whole big monstrous insitution.”

And a lot of people agree with her.  Daly, who joined Boston College in 1966, taught only men until women were admitted in 1970 and began teaching men and women separately in 1974.  Since then Daly has offered to teach males privately and has done so, she says, in about a dozen cases.  And that’s just the way some female students like it.

“Her class was the most engaging amazing personal experience I have had at this school,” said BC senior Kelly Matthews, one of 14 students who recently sent a letter to college adminsitrators supporting Daly.  “I generally do not feel uncomfortable voicing my opi9non when men are in a class, but I absolutely prefer all-woman space to discuss women’t topics.  It is a vastly different environment.”

And it is an environment that some prominent scholars say is necessary.   Harvey Cox, professor at Harvard Divinity School, says that women talk differently about things when men are not present, “and that’s  simply a fact of life.  So while it’s important to have inclusive education, I am still aware of the fact we haven’t moved beyond patriarchy.  If and when we ever do, all education, without exception, could be coed.  But we aren’t there yet.”

Boston College would like to differ.  Administrators insist that barring men from the classroom is a form of sexual discrimination prohibited by both Title IX and school policy.  What’s more, they say, they’ve been telling Daly that for 25 years.  Jack Dunn, a college spokesman, says that Daly has been reprimanded several times in connection with eight male students who have objected to  being excluded over the years.  In most cases, the male students dropped the matter, or Daly took one of many leaves of absence.  This time, BC says, Daly risks losing her job.

NOTHING PERSONAL

And so it was that one day last fall senior Duane Naquin showed up in her classroom.  Naquin, 22, wanted to take her course on feminist ethics.  But when he sat down on the first day of class, Daly took him out to the hall  and, according to Naquin, “she said, ‘I do not allow men in my class.’  She added, ‘It’s nothing personal; it’s just because you’re a man.’  I found that very offensive, completely irrelevant of who I was, I was literally awestruck.”

Although Daly offered to teach Naquin individually, Naquin said he wasn’t interested and went to school officials.  He also got a lawyer at the Center for Individual Rights, a conservative law firm in Washington D.C., that has successfully challenged race-based admissions in Texas.  In a fund raising letter, the group identifies one of its priorities as “the increasingly urgent task of confronting radical feminist doctrines and ideology.

Daly and her lawyer argue that she was only reprimanded once in 1989 and that otherwise Boston College never objected to her practice of teaching men privately.  That they are doing so now, she contends is because they know it’s a hard time for all “deviants”.

“They’re doing something ethically wrong,”  Daly declares.  “And all this stuff about legalism, this is nerdy-turdy little legalism, legalist fundamentalism.  It’s just like religious fundamentalism.  Deadly.  Nonintellectual.  Stifling.  It’s not about fairness.  It’s just evil.”

She adds:  “I am calling upon Boston College and other universities not to succumb to right-wing pressure.  To realize this is not about discrimination.  It is about dumbing down and creating a white male monoculture.”

It is hardly the first time she has called for action.  In a way, she’s been doing that throughout her career, ever since BC denied her tenure in 1969 and then, astoundingly, reversed itself after 1,500 students – all men, as women were not admitted at the time — marched in protest.  Daly was denied full professorship, however, and remains an associate professor.

That fact is seen by some as a measure of her unrelenting commitment to her cause.  “I regard Mary Daly as a prophet,” declares Jim Carroll, a writer and former Catholic priest.  “She is right, and religious establishments of almost all kinds are wrong.  Just by staying at BC all these years, by refusing to allow herself  to be changed, she has helped keep alive a broader hope that even those of us who are not radical on the subject can cling to.  If there were no Mary Daly, all of us would be impoverished.”

Carroll, however, admits that he stopped reading Daly’s books long ago, finding them too “exclusivist.”  And there are those who find Daly’s provocative, sometimes self righteous manner alienating.

“I have great admiration for her, but I don’t want to get too near her, frankly,”  said Sarah Coakley, a professor at Harvard Divinity School. “I find her absolutely infuriating.”

And so, suggests Coakley, do many younger women who recoil at the notion of feminism, much less separatism.  “Mary Daly looks like a bag lady who has been rejected by society and does not represent the glamour and consumer succcess which by and large they want.  She may be a historic figure, but she is not for them a desirable model.  They precisely do not want to be like her.”

On the Boston College campus, Daly has had a less polarizing impact.  While faculty members have keen opinions about her writings, many have never met or even seen her, given that Daly has spent 14 of her 33 years a Boston College on leave.

“She has definitely been underappreciated as a scholar at Boston College,” said theology professor Lisa Sowle Cahill.  “But her refusal  to allow men into her class I do not find defensible.  If we as a university are committed to inclusion in the classroom, then to exclude men or women is not defensible.”

But if there is a prevailing perception of Daly as man-hater, a few say it is flat-out wrong.  John McDargh, an associate theology  professor at Boston College for 18 years, says that Daly has gone out of her way to work with some male students.  Now, McCargh thinks, Daly has become a target for antifeminist backlash.

“I feel real sorrow at the way in which this woman whose scholarly contributions, whatever you think about them, have been unquestionably transformative of the way in which we think about religion and gender, is coming to the end of her career  in a way that feels demeaning and insulting,” said McDargh.

“There is no defeating this woman at this point,” said Carroll.  “She has made her point very powerfully.  She has forced Boston College to deal with her right from the beginning, and to Boston College’s credit they have.  So she changed Boston College, surely.  She changed us all.”

Comment:   Please reread this article and review it’s realities or lack of them.   This is a real cuckoo’s  nest……Mary Daly, Boston College,  Harvard Divinity School….Mr. Carroll, Mr. McDargh….Title IX.

Mary Daly is or was  a magnificent specimen of an embittered  leftist cripple, not of a scholar.   She should be interviewed, of course.   But, what in hell was she doing at Boston College all of those years?   She should never have risen above student status.   What citizens have we been creating with all of these Mary Dalys honored as “a world recognized theologian”.

You wonder why our government and culture are  so screwed up today?  Keep in mind that thosands upon thousands of Mary Dalys have matriculated and are  matriculating  through American colleges and universities by way of  their departments or Colleges of Women’ Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and Black Studies every year.  

Do you think their hates have been tended too?      Should they be?   We are supposed to tolerate the  Mary Daly deep thinkers who   preach that  ‘men have nothing to offer but doo-doo’, but then why do women and their lefty allies, fizz into a faint if the same might be said at university, by a tenured professor that the human female has ” nothing to offer but doo-doo?’…..and, by the way,  history rather clearly indicates that the truer of the statements is the latter……if Mary Daly’s statement  were ever of any real  matter.  

I would never have contaminated my university with a Mary Daly.   The purpose of the university is to seek truth and teach as close to what is truth as one and society can.   Should porn and degradation be taught because it exists in society?…..Should one offer ‘Murder 101’  at you corner college  especially one called St. Margaret’s?

Such issues should NEVER be left solely in the hands of  administrators of so-called institutions of higher learning.   They can participateand recommend,  but never should dictate.   It is time for review of what they do do at your today’s American  places of ‘learning’.

Not only do these people become teachers, they become Democrats,

Obama Mouthpiece, Hack Thomas Friedman Writes Again

New York Times hacks, Frank Rich, Nicholas Kristoff,  Paul Krugman move over!   Make room for another rump on your benches, the bottom of  Thomas Friedman……like Al Franken a product of suburban Twin Cities of Minnesota ‘nice’.

It seems he’s paid to  share  his thoughts and woes in the New York Times  and  on television with  the ugly,  the  Bill Maher bunch.

His today’s grunt in the Times  is titled:  “Cut here.  Invest there”.  He has a heavy chest. 

He moans, “As I’m about to start a four-month book leave, I need to get a few things off my chest: President Obama understood, rightly, that our economy needed more stimulus, so, given the G.O.P.’s insistence on extending the Bush tax cuts for all, he struck the best deal he could. The country, we are told, is now in a better mood, seeing our two parties work together. I, alas, am not in a better mood.”

Comment:  Where did he get the idea the country is in a better mood?    Who could possibly buy his book?

TF: “I’ll be in a better mood when I see our two parties cooperating to do something hard. Borrowing billions more from China to give ourselves more tax cuts does not qualify. Make no mistake, President Obama has enacted an enormous amount in two years. It’s impressive. But the really hard stuff lies ahead: taking things away. We are leaving an era where to be a mayor, governor, senator or president was, on balance, to give things away to people. And we are entering an era where to be a leader will mean, on balance, to take things away from people. It is the only way we’ll get our fiscal house in order before the market, brutally, does it for us.”

Comment:   Cooperating among lefties occurs only when Marxist opponents totally capitulate.   “Borrowing billions more from China” isn’t to pay for tax cuts…..there weren’t any tax cuts to pay for. Congress voted to continue present tax rates!……The gamble is to pray the economy will recove some from Obamagifts to federal programs in order to increase employment and avoid national bankruptcy.   

Toadie Friedman makes no mention about his worries that his favorite political  states California, New York, and Illinois, et alia, on the brink of financial disaster because of Leftwing financial malfeasance fishing for leftwing votes from government workers’ unions.    We didn’t give anyone a tax cut this December.     

TF:  “In my book, the leaders who will deserve praise in this new era are those who develop a hybrid politics that persuades a majority of voters to cut where we must so we can invest where we must. To survive in the 21st century, America can no longer afford a politics of irresponsible profligacy. But to thrive in the 21st century — to invest in education, infrastructure and innovation — America cannot afford a politics of mindless austerity either.”

Comment:   “Politics of irrespnsible profligacy”….thy name is BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA…..thy PARTY is the Democrat Party throughout the entire nation!   And the voters are supposed “to cut where we must”.   (How about reducing unemployment by investing in free enterprise……the age-old remedy for increasing  gross national product and its incumbent increase in employment.

TF:  “The politicians we need are what I’d call “pay-as-you-go progressives” — those who combine fiscal prudence with growth initiatives to make their cities, their states or our country great again. Everyone knows the first rule of holes: When you’re in one, stop digging. But people often forget the second rule of holes: You can only grow your way out. You can’t borrow your way out.”

Comment:   There never in history has been such an animal as “PAY-AS-YOU-GO-PROGRESSIVES!” …..neither in Washington, in Sacramento, in St. Paul, Minnesota…wherever Democrats wander and roam.

TF: “One of the best of this new breed of leaders is Atlanta’s inspiring mayor, 41-year-old Kasim Reed. A former Georgia state senator, Reed won Atlanta’s mayoral race in December 2009 by 714 votes. The day he took office, Atlanta had $7.4 million in reserves, an out-of-control budget and was laying off so many firefighters there were only three personnel on a truck, below national standards. A year later, it has $58 million in reserves, and Reed has a 70 percent approval rating — which he earned the hard way.

Reed started his reforms by enlisting two professionals, not cronies, to help run the city: Peter Aman, a partner at Bain & Company, a consultancy, to be his chief operating officer; and John Mellott, a former publisher of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, to lead a pension review panel. Atlanta has 7,000 city employees, but today, says Reed, “you can’t hire a receptionist” without it “personally being approved by Aman.”

Then Reed tackled the city’s biggest problem: runaway pensions, which were eating up 20 percent of tax revenues and are rising. In the early 2000s, the police, fire and municipal workers’ unions persuaded the city to raise all their pensions — and make it retroactive. So, between 2001 and 2009, Atlanta’s unfunded pension obligations grew from $321 million to $1.484 billion. Yikes.”

Comment:  I wonder, yes, I wonder who it was and what Party “it” was from that unfunded pension obligations grew from $321 million to $1.484 billion. Yikes?”   ……..and why it was done!

TF:  “Reed couldn’t cut existing pensions without lawsuits, but he cut back pensions for all new employees to pre-2000 levels and raised the vesting period to 15 years from 10. When union picketers swarmed city hall to protest, Reed invited them all into his office — in shifts — where he patiently explained, with charts, that without pension reform everyone’s pensions would go bust.”

Comment:   I wonder which Party politically owns the American Bar Associations tribes, or more accurately, is owned by these Lawyer tribes whose financing of the Party keeps America paralyzed by tort corruption.

TF:  “By getting the city’s budget under control, Reed then had some money to invest in more police officers and, what he wanted most, to reopen the 16 recreation centers and swimming pools in the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, which had been shuttered for lack of money. “People were shooting dice in the empty pools,” he said. Local businesses have now offered to finance after-school job-skills programs in the reopened centers. Cut here. Invest there.”

Comment:   Again, when, oh ever when, has a non-red state Democrat ever kept any budget under control?   Blue state Minnesota would be among the most bankrupt states if it did not have a constitutional requirement to maintain a balanced budget.  

TF:  “Reed combines a soft touch with a hard head. I like how he talks about both Atlanta and America: “We are not going to be what we have been for the last 50 years if we don’t change, and everybody in a position to have more than two people listening to them needs to be saying that, because the time we have to make the adjustments is running out. We need to get on with it. Whether it’s the deficit, education or investing in young people or immigration — we are not tackling [them] in the fundamental ways required. We’re just doing it piecemeal. We’re just playing and surviving. And we need to be very clear where just surviving takes you: it takes you to a lifestyle of just survival.”

Comment:  (Oh such sweet talk.   One would think he is Paul Ryan’s identical twin with such sweetness.)

TF: “In a recent address, Reed elaborated: “The bottom line is that for the country to do and to be what we have been … there must be a generation tough enough to stick out its chin and take the hit. … It is time to begin having the types of mature and honest conversations necessary to deal effectively with the new economic realities we are facing as a nation. We simply cannot keep kicking the can down the road.”

Comment:  Mr. Reed sounds like a conservative to me.  How about you, dear reader….What do you think?    Pensions seem to have become a problem in Atlanta…..just as they are a problem in Sacramento and in Trenton, New Jersey, New York and in every blue state of these United States of America.  Do you think Tom Friedman recognizes Mr. Reed’s conservatism?   I honestly am not sure.  He seems  too bigotted within his Marxist religion….too programmed. 

  I value Mr. Friedman’s opinion as I value the squeal of a sleezy rat, for the damage his writing and its ‘content’  burdens America .   And, I am sorry to say, he is a dime a dozen among the opinionizers in our schools, universities, city newspapers, whereever the Lefties perch.   They LIE and DECEIVE…..just as this Thomas Friedman does everytime his shares his squeals at the New York Times and performing on  the Bill Maher show.

YET, READING THE THOMAS FRIEDMAN’S IS A MUST.  You have to understand the tricks of America’s left wing enemies of  representative democracy.   Marxism cannot be defended before a free-loving peoples through honest discussion and debate.   Mr. Friedman is no more or less evil than party members, Adolph Eichmann or Fidel Castro before they committed their heinous acts of Marxist enforcement.   He makes money selling his wares.

It is the New York Times which perpetuates the evil.  It has a right to do so in a free society.   Mr. Friedman’s idiocies must be permitted to be heard.  Hopefully, an educated citizenry will always be able to recognize the sqeal of varmints who pay no attention to seeking truth in order to advance truth.

I might be wrong in my assessments of Mr. Friedman.  Only through you knowledge will you know if I am or not.

President Obama’s Communist Connections to ‘Marxify’ the Internet

Val Jones and Anita Dunn have come and gone.  Obama associate, anti-American terrorist, Bill Ayers is no longer claimed as an associate and friend, but Mr. Obama claims or disclaims whichever is more convenient. 

  Saul Alinsky is long dead, but not in Barack Obama’s world.  And there are other Marxists in this Obama adminsitration.   It is  difficult to describe the politics and actions of Erik Holder, America’s ‘policeman-in-chief’, but he acts, speaks and writes as if he is in the same neighborhood; the same crowd.

Now we have Robert McChesneyfattening up this  list of ‘knowns”.

In the long history of tyranny, especially  Marxist tyranny,   the two  sectors of public life which must be controlled first and foremost are education and communication…..what is taught and what is circulated for public consumption.

Already Marxism is the religion of the vast majority of  the social science departments of American universities.   This ‘Marxist Love’ phenomenon predates Obama.  However he seems to have become its leading gardener  and planter  in today’s political landscape.  

Mr. Obama is today’s primary adversary to  American democracy.  He will attempt to enjoy eating Republican fish for the next two years.   These edibles have been propagated by the same social science departments which have created the  fanatics now running the Democrat Party led by George Soros and his financings. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if most of these Republicans can even spell Communism, they have been so thoroughly programmed to believe it has never been a threat to Western traditions.

Progressives demand progress!  They progress toward Marxism/Communism……..choose your term….for the condition is the same, the Rule of the State in Micromanaging citizen life.   They are sculpted at the great cathedrals of Marxist religion today, the nation’s schools, colleges and universities.

Many of  the tyrants preaching Marxism/Communism….choose your term…..are cooked up in the Schools and Departments of Black Studies, Women Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies, by the Savanarola children of our times.

These lefties have already confined speech to meet the requirements of “Political Correctness” language, propagated at these university, college and school  temples and spread hither and thither by their graduates over the past 30 years reaching and conquering  even the communication of  Big Business and Big Religion as well.

Marxist/Communist, Robert McChesney, has entered the Obama-American scene.   His interest is to ‘Marxify’ the internet.

The following article, “Net Neutrality Coup,” was written by John Fund at the Wall Street Journal:

“The Federal Communications Commission’s new “net neutrality” rules, passed on a partisan 3-2 vote yesterday, represent a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility.

There’s little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.

Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn’t have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he’s had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.

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.”

For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski’s press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.

Free Press has been funded by a network of liberal foundations that helped the lobby invent the purported problem that net neutrality is supposed to solve. They then fashioned a political strategy similar to the one employed by activists behind the political speech restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill. The methods of that earlier campaign were discussed in 2004 by Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a talk at the University of Southern California. Far from being the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, Mr. Treglia noted, the campaign-finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by foundations like Pew.

“The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot,” he told his audience. He noted that “If Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it’d be worthless.” A study by the Political Money Line, a nonpartisan website dealing with issues of campaign funding, found that of the $140 million spent to directly promote campaign-finance reform in the last decade, $123 million came from eight liberal foundations.

After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to “media reform”—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct “Fairness Doctrine” that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and “said let’s get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making.” Together the two founded Free Press.

Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers’s Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) Free Press today has 40 staffers and an annual budget of $4 million.

These wealthy funders pay for more than publicity and conferences. In 2009, Free Press commissioned a poll, released by the Harmony Institute, on net neutrality. Harmony reported that “more than 50% of the public argued that, as a private resource, the Internet should not be regulated by the federal government.” The poll went on to say that since “currently the public likes the way the Internet works . . . messaging should target supporters by asking them to act vigilantly” to prevent a “centrally controlled Internet.”

To that end, Free Press and other groups helped manufacture “research” on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an “independent review of existing information” for the agency in order to “lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making.”

Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.

The Berkman Center’s FCC- commissioned report, “Next Generation Connectivity,” wound up being funded in large part by the Ford and MacArthur foundations. So some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.

The FCC’s “National Broadband Plan,” released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.

So the “media reform” movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That’s quite a coup.”

If the Internet Isn’t Broken, Why Do Democrats Want to “Fix” It? ………….. It’s Marxism Stupid!

“Perhaps you’ve noticed that the Internet is a real dud. No one much uses it as a medium of communication, it hasn’t added anything to mankind’s search for knowledge, and despite the government’s vast investment in the infrastructure of the Internet, myopic telecommunications companies have failed to find any commercial or economic value in it.

No, you hadn’t noticed? That’s because this narrative turns reality on its head. But it is precisely the kind of inversion of truth that three members of the Federal Communications Commission have used to justify an order to adopt rules — the details of which won’t be known until sometime in the future — to regulate the Internet.

You see, the Internet just hasn’t done very well without the guiding hand of Big Brother. Pingdom, an Internet monitoring firm, estimates that 1.7 billion worldwide users sent an average of 247 billion e-mails a day in 2009. This month, Google launched its Ngram Viewer, which puts the contents of 5,195,769 books spanning five centuries on the Internet in a searchable database. On Cyber Monday, Nov. 29, Americans racked up more than $1 billion in online sales.

The Internet began in the 1960s as a government project with an important yet limited purpose. The Defense Department’s ARPANET allowed scientists separated by large distances to collaborate on research projects. It wasn’t until the 1980s, however, when the Internet began to be commercialized, that it also started to have an impact beyond a limited community.

Since then, private capital and investment have created a robust Internet that has changed the way the world communicates, destroyed barriers to the sharing of information, expanded the frontiers of knowledge, created new modes of entertainment and commerce, and generated trillions of dollars in wealth.

So what’s wrong with the Internet? According to FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, “It may be dying because entrenched interests are positioning themselves to control the Internet’s choke points.” That was Copps’ prediction in 2003, one year before Facebook was launched, two years before some former employees of PayPal — another Internet success story — started YouTube, and three years before Amazon began offering cloud computing services.

If the last decade is an indication of what Internet necrosis and choke points look like, then by all means, let’s have more of them. Yet in his statement concurring with the decision to regulate the Internet, Copps, who is still an FCC commissioner, writes unashamedly that his 2003 warning was issued “somewhat dramatically perhaps — but not inaccurately.”

The Internet isn’t broken. So why are three Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission trying to fix it? They’re pursuing a vague progressive objective with the deceptive name of net neutrality.

Net neutrality is anything but neutral. It takes the operation of the Internet away from the heterogeneous and diversified interests of the private sector that has created it and concentrates it in the hands of an unelected and unaccountable board of political appointees atop a federal bureaucracy. Does that sound like a recipe for continued innovation?

The dire problems net neutrality activists cry wolf about either don’t exist or have already been resolved without the heavy hand of government influence. A federal court has ruled the FCC lacks the legal authority to regulate Internet service providers. So why try to do so?

Over the last two decades, millions of individuals have contributed to a remarkable expansion of freedom, creativity and commerce on the Internet that has benefited billions of people. For three FCC commissioners, that’s a problem. The power to regulate, after all, is the power to control. For control freaks, few things are more tempting than an unfettered Internet.”

Jonathan Gurwitz writes a column for the San Antonio Express-News.    This article was brought to my attention by friend and former teacher colleague, Mark Waldeland.  It was printed at Pioneer Press, TwinCities.

What is the Obama-Communist/Marxist connection beside the governmental intrusion reported above?

Answer:  The following is from John Fund’s article , “Net Neutrality Coup” at the Wall Street Journal:

‘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.”

For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski’s press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.”

Comment:   Mr. McChesney is a Communist/Marxist socialist, then.