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House Votes to Kill Net Neutrality

Mon, 04/11/2011 - 09:25 — Dave Culver
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  • House GOP sides with 'haves' on net neutrality

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  • Take Action Now

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Timothy Karr, FreePress.net

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of readers like you. Thank you!

Moments ago (April 8), the House leadership passed the "Resolution of Disapproval" (see below). It's now en route to the Senate.

In their desperation to score political points, members of Congress are handing companies like AT&T and Comcast unlimited power to block popular websites and services, and interfere with our ability to connect with others.

President Obama has vowed to veto this resolution, but let's make sure it doesn't get that far. Please sign this letter to tell both your senators to "Save Free Speech Online."
After you've signed, please share this action via Facebook and Twitter. Thanks – Tim

Yesterday (April 7), the House voted to block the FCC from protecting our right to access an open Internet. If successful, the move would give phone and cable companies absolute, unrestricted power over the Internet.

In the Senate, Republicans have introduced a "resolution of disapproval" that would strip the FCC of its authority to protect our right to free speech online.(1) Both of these moves come at a time when phone and cable giants are already restricting our ability to connect with others and share information. (2)

We can stop the resolution in the Senate by getting 51 members to stand with us for online freedom:

Tell Your Senators: Defend Our Right to Free Speech Online

A House vote is on the books. It's now up to the Senate. If it doesn't stop this resolution, the FCC would be barred from enforcing its already weak Net Neutrality rule, and from acting in any way to protect Internet users against corporate abuses by AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.

This is not a symbolic congressional exercise — it's a scorched-earth campaign that leaves Americans at the mercy of a corporate cartel.
Imagine a world where these companies are allowed to do anything they want, ban any speech they don't like, charge anything they can get away with, and hold innovation hostage to their profit margins. If this resolution passes, there's nothing anyone could do about it.

The resolution is filibuster-proof. We need at least 51 senators to beat it. Will your senators stand with us?

Sign this letter to demand that your senators protect free speech online. We will deliver it to their offices in Washington and provide you with tools to spread the word.

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Thanks for all you can do.

1. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and John Ensign (R-Nevada) introduced the “resolution of disapproval” on Wednesday (April 6). It already has 39 Republican cosponsors. In the House, Reps. Fred Upton (R-Michigan) and Greg Walden (R-Oregon) are pushing a similar measure.
2. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps outlined the recent history of “real threats” to Internet openness during his opening remarks Wednesday (April 6) before the House Commerce Committee (pdf).

Related:

House GOP sides with 'haves' on net neutrality, Ryan Blethen, Seattle Times | WA
In passing a resolution against modest regulation of the Internet, House Republicans sided with large service providers and against consumers.

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Dana Summers | Reading the "Paper" in the Bathroom / content.cartoonbox.slate.com

Wed, 04/06/2011 - 12:41 — Dave Culver

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Intellectual Prostitution and the Myth of Objectivity

Wed, 04/06/2011 - 12:35 — Dave Culver
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  • Whence the delusional obsession with “objectivity” in the journalism schools and the pages of the Gray Lady et al.?

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  • The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread.

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Christopher Ketcham, TruthDig

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fotologic (CC-BY)

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In this rotten business of freelance magazine writing there’s almost no assignment in which the issue of objectivity fails to rise up like the miasma it is. Any writer who puts his mind on the matter knows that no human being is objective, which is the reason writers sit down at the page in the first place. The writer, an inherently subjective force, will not be divorced from the writing, though God knows there are quacks in the news business who are trying. Computers might achieve this end. Also, certain types of house cats are objective: They know exactly what the truth is, and it is them.

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So whence the delusional obsession with “objectivity” in the journalism schools and the pages of the Gray Lady et al.? The pretense and veneer of objectivity is the goal. This renders idiot mistakes and outright falsities so much easier to sell to the public. After all, the marketer of the junk is presented as the all-seeing eye, an authority no less unerring than the babblers at Delphi, no less the product of superstition. Whether we like it or not—whether we recognize it or not—the culture credits “objectivity” in the journalistic establishment as the product of powers greater than known. The news-clown jabbers on screen, says this or that is so ... and, lo, it is so. More likely it’s “All the News That’s Shit to Print.”

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KDWB's apology for Hmong parody not enough

Tue, 04/05/2011 - 11:59 — Dave Culver

After an incident on its morning show, the stations must make amends -- and progress.

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Kao Kalia Yang, Minneapolis Star Tribune | MN

This article is made possible with the generous contributions of readers like you. Thank you!

It is with a heavy heart I write.

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When I hear about poverty and people living in horrid conditions; or words against women, with assessments of their worth dwindled down to babies and age; or when I hear laughter in the background because one person's suffering is funny to another, I am disheartened and I am appalled.

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I am a young writer who grew up on the east side of St. Paul. I am a fan of popular music, and I understood KDWB Radio (101.3 FM) to be for the audience of which I stubbornly insist I am a part.

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It saddens me to know the lack of regard the "Dave Ryan in the Morning Show" has for those who are poor, for those who are women, for those who are Hmong.

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Mainstream media journalists flunk high school physics when reporting on radiation

Mon, 04/04/2011 - 16:37 — Dave Culver

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  • So if the Associated Press doesn't understand radiation, and they're the news source feeding "canned news" to most of the mainstream media websites that are heavily favored by Google News, did you ever wonder why the masses are so misinformed? It's obvious: Most of the mainstream news is canned, copied and wildly inaccurate, written by poorly educated people who don't understand the laws of physics, or economics, or even cause and effect for that matter.

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  • The Mainstream Media Is Now Obsolete

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Mike Adams, NaturalNews.com

If you like reading this article, consider contributing a cuppa jove to Evergreene Digest--using the donation button above—so we can bring you more just like it.

I've seen a lot of lousy, inaccurate reporting from the mainstream media over the years, but some of the reporting we're seeing now on the Fukushima catastrophe is just astonishing in its ignorance of basic physics. Today (Apr 2), the Boston Globe published a story containing this whopper:

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Nuclear safety spokesman Hidehiko Nishiyama says the air above the leak contains 1,000 millisiverts of radioactivity.

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For starters, even the unit is spelled incorrectly. It's not "millisiverts" but rather "millisieverts." But that's a small issue compared to the bigger one.

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Related:

The Mainstream Media Is Now Obsolete, Giordano Bruno, Pakalert Press

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  • If we need anything at this point in history, it is the citizen journalist. We need not one corporately sponsored message, but millions of independent voices all searching for the truth in their own unique way. Only then can we retrieve our American identity, and achieve a legitimate sense of justice in this country. Great changes begin with a revolution of ideas, an individual will, and a multitude of open eyes. The internet is a catalyst for such an event, the kind that occurs perhaps once in a millennium. We cannot allow it to be vilified by swindlers or dominated by tyrants under any circumstance, otherwise, we will lose our initiative, and along with it, our voice.

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  • The American Media Misdiagnosis

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Clay Bennett | No Lie Zone / content.cartoonbox.slate.com

Wed, 03/30/2011 - 09:07 — Dave Culver

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