Given these , I have to wonder whether our local bloggers are also applauding the White House attempt to impose its own restrictions on the press pool for network news : Thursday, CNN, NBC/MSNBC, ABC and CBS all refused to go along with an attempt to toss Fox from a media pool that was supposed to conduct interviews with White House pay czar Kenneth Feinberg, who was unveiling restrictions on pay for executives of companies that accepted bailout money from the government. Under an arrangement designed to save the networks money, a crew from one network shoots some White House events for all five outlets. The pool camera was supposed to shoot each network’s separate interview with Feinberg, but the networks were notified that Fox, which has been part of the pool arrangement since 1997, would not be allowed to question him. The Obama administration relented after the other networks, in a gesture of solidarity, said they would take a pass on interviewing Feinberg if Fox was kept out of th...

I have blogged before about the fact that--as a purely political issue--it is a mistake for the Obama administration to elevate any news outlet within the US to the level of an enemy , even rhetorically. But it also seems that the Obama/Holder Department of Justice has notched up this strategy another level, with government employees in the DOJ being assigned to surf opposition blogs, record information, and even plant troll comments. From a compilation of current blog reports [h/t Libertarian Republican ]: Are you a conservative or libertarian blogger? Do you take issue with and write pieces that don't mesh with Obama's policies? If you do, Eric Holder, United States Attorney General, is possibly getting feedback on what you've been blogging about. Warner Todd Huston, a freelance writer who has written for Newsbusters.org and Human Events, has discovered that Mr. Holder has hired a whole team of Democratic campaign bloggers to troll the internet looking for anti-Obama ar...

... which is what , which is what Congressmen Gus Bilirakus (R-FL) and Joseph Crowley (D-NY) apparently have in mind with proposed legislation that would make it illegal for satellite carriers in the US to allow the broadcast of Al-Manar, Al-Aqsa, and other radical Muslim channels. In fact, the bill would legally define those satellite carriers as terrorist organizations if they broadcast these channels. Don't get me wrong: I am not a lover of programming inciting people to kill Americans or Jews, or soliciting money for Hamas, but.... 1) In this broadband world you are nuts to believe that this action will do anything to prevent their message spread, since you can see their programming on the web virtually any time. 2) This legislation, if passed, would then allow the government to move in the direction of making satellite carriers legally liable for the content of every single channel they carry. If experience is any guide, this will eventually lead to them becoming more and mo...

Some of our friends continue to try to move the bar to redefine certain political topics as extremism, connect them with violent actors, and call for government surveillance of ... quite frankly, some pretty ordinary citizens with different political views. The most recent example comes in a post that labels concerns over recent homeland security reports as Last week’s manufactured outrage over the DHS Threat Assessments deserves abit more information — especially as the remarkable dishonesty around all of this is being used to not just work the refs but to also try to normalize the violent rhetoric that they so like bullying people with. But the truly interesting part arrives in a comment (#5) by one of the multiple bloggers at the site [in other words, not a passerby]: In addition to violent rhetoric, the right wing nut bags are fond of “military” sounding jargon. Take a look at the email I got just this morning: SCCOR Member - Do you have an interest in helping the Resistance? Is t...

For all of our friends who placed so much immediate stock in the hopelessly flawed DHS report on Rightwing extremism , maybe it would be a cautionary suggestion to take a look at where else DHS and our Federally supported fusion centers are seeing potential domestic terrorism. The ACLU reports the following : A May 7, 2008 report entitled “Universal Adversary Dynamic Threat Assessment” authored by a private contractor that labeled environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, the Humane Society and the Audubon Society as “mainstream organizations with known or possible links to eco-terrorism” ; A potential abuse of authority by DHS officials who improperly monitored and disseminated the communications of peace activists affiliated with the DC Anti-War Network (DAWN) ; A report produced on February 19, 2009 by the North Central Texas Fusion System entitled “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” which described a purported conspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying gro...

From ClassicallyLiberal : Australia announced that they were going to have nation-wide Internet censorship to help control child porn. That’s a smart move. Use the child porn fear to scare people and then move on with the true agenda. Now it appears that the blacklist of banned websites has been leaked prior to the ban going into effect. And guess what? Most of the banned sites have nothing to do with child porn. Anyone surprised? A document that was recently leaked showed that various sites are being banned including poker sites, some YouTube links, regular erotica sites, sites about euthanasia, fringe religious groups, some Christian sites, a tour operator and, for some reason, a Queensland dentist. The Australian government, anxious to catch up with the police state mentality of Mother England, intends to make Internet filtering mandatory for the entire country and has said they intend to ban access to 10,000 different websites. In fact, Wikileaks was added to the banned list beca...

I really hate to keep following this issue, but it's not going to die by itself. Some of our blogger friends have become--not to put too fine a point on it--somewhat unhinged by the idea of nefarious sleeper cells of gun-owning, bible-toting, constitution-quoting social conservatives organizing to oppose the current administration. Words like un-American , treason and sedition are getting thrown around in some places with great abandon, by people who are in turn feeling so threatened by Glenn Beck/Chuck Norris groupies that they're beginning to think that somebody ought to be doing something about these nuts ... Well, apparently somebody is. From PrisonPlanet : Alex Jones has received a secret report distributed by the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) entitled “The Modern Militia Movement” and dated February 20, 2009. A footer on the document indicates it is “unclassified” but “law enforcement sensitive,” in other words not for public consumption. A copy of the re...

... especially if it's not good news. Three months ago, I made ten predictions about the first two years of an Obama administration. Here's the first one: 1. We will not see the repeal or roll-back of any of the Constitutional invasions of the past eight years. The Obama Administration is not going to dismantle surveillance laws or even major portions of the Patriot Act, because they will decide that these are useful tools for the war on terror and law enforcement, and perfectly justifiable in the correct hands. After all, we now have a Department of Justice we can trust, don't we? So what have you got to hide? Here's the stance of Obama Attorney General nominee Eric Holder on keeping a key provision of the Patriot Act: President-elect Barack Obama's nominee for attorney general has endorsed an extension of the law that allows federal agents to demand Americans' library and bookstore records as part of terrorism probes, dismaying a national group of independen...

From Classically Liberal : Alan McEwan was charged, tried and convicted of owning child pornography in his native Australia. But, before you jump to conclusions, the alleged porn he owned was a satirical cartoon of the characters from the Simpsons. Now, I must admit it never occurred to me that anyone could consider sexual images of the Simpsons to appeal to anyone's "prurient" interests. It would seem most people would find the cartoons silly while some would find them amusing. But the courts in Australia ruled that these rude cartoons qualify as child porn because some of the characters, such as Bart and Lisa are under the age of consent. Are you getting this? That these characters are entirely imaginary doesn't matter. The judge ruled that under the law "person" includes "fictional or imaginary characters." He also said that just because "the figure depicted departed from a realistic representation in some respects of human being did not m...