Senators propose granting president emergency Internet power

CNet

A new U.S. Senate bill would grant the president far-reaching emergency powers to seize control of or even shut down portions of the Internet.

The legislation announced Thursday says that companies such as broadband providers, search engines, or software firms that the government selects “shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by the Department of Homeland Security. Anyone failing to comply would be fined.

That emergency authority would allow the federal government to “preserve those networks and assets and our country and protect our people,” Joe Lieberman, the primary sponsor of the measure and the chairman of the Homeland Security committee, told reporters on Thursday. Lieberman is an independent senator from Connecticut who caucuses with the Democrats.

Alinskys in Action

The American Spectator

As Congress considers the Democrats’ unprecedented legislative assault on Wall Street, radical leftists say the bad economy gives them new opportunities to push America even farther down the road to socialism.

“The banking crisis is the next big thing,” said George Goehl, executive director of the Chicago-based group National People’s Action.

National People’s Action has been participating in a nationwide campaign with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Jobs With Justice, Americans for Financial Reform, and other groups called the “Showdown in America,” which consists largely of loud street protests. NPA and SEIU have also been using angry mobs to invade banks and terrorize bank executives in their homes.

“The banking crisis is the way to build a big economic justice movement in this country,” Goehl said during a panel discussion this week at the left-wing “America’s Future Now” conference in Washington, D.C. The confab was hosted by the Campaign for America’s Future and its sister organization, the Institute for America’s Future.

Senate surrenders to the EPA

Washington Examiner

Fifty three of the Senate’s 59 Democrats gave unelected, overpaid bureaucrats at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a green light yesterday to do pretty much whatever they choose in their quixotic crusade against global warming. All 41 Republicans and six brave Democrats voted for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution nullifying the EPA’s recent usurpation of authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the U.S. economy to combat greenhouse gases. Thankfully, this craven surrender of congressional authority isn’t the last word on the issue, assuming that the November elections produce a Senate with enough backbone to reassert the legislature’s rightful power.

In the meantime, it’s vital to understand how bureaucracies function. Whatever else they may do, leading bureaucrats always do two things, regardless of which party controls the White House or Congress: They limit choices available to the rest of us by imposing regulations that increase government power and thus justify expanding their budgets and staffs; and they protect themselves and their turf by suppressing internal dissent, often at any costs.