We really shouldn’t get angry with the media for being obstinately silent and/or willfully ignorant when it comes to - amongst many, MANY other things - Democrats and Leftists breaking the law.
It’s like getting upset with a six-month old for behaving badly in public. It’s what we get - we should not be vexed when we get it.
After all, one is immature and childish, existing only for itself and behaving accordingly.
And the other is a baby.
-----
There are times, however, when the media is so bad that even the most patient among us grows... un-patient.
So it is with the Barack Obama Administration’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) - and its rampant, recurrent breaking of all sorts of laws in their manic push to commandeer control of the Internet, so as to then impose the patently absurd Network Neutrality.
On all of this illegality - which myriad people have repeatedly pointed out all along the way - the media has for the most part said:
“__________.”
For starters, the FCC has zero authority over the Internet - something FCC Chairman (and Obama law school basketball buddy) Julius Genachowski readily admits.
A fact reinforced by the D.C. Circuit Court - which in April 2010 unanimously demolished as unauthorized the FCC’s first attempt to impose Net Neutrality.
So when the FCC on December 21st voted themselves Internet Overlords in 3-2 Democrat Party-line fashion - they and everyone else knew it was illegal.
But the media for the most part said:
“__________.”
We have just passed the six month anniversary of this power grab - and the FCC still has not yet filed the order with the Federal Register, which is where all new rules and regulations must go to begin their imposition.
What’s the holdup? There are several possibilities, some or all of which may be why the FCC is so thoroughly slow-playing it. (Please note that it took the FCC less than a month - April 7 to May 6 - to file their wireless data roaming Internet seizure - so they can get it done when they want to.
One possibility for the delay: Two wireless providers - Verizon and MetroPCS - had filed suit to undo FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s Net Neutrality order. Verizon had sought relief in the same U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that unanimously ruled in April 2010 that the FCC has no net neutrality authority.
The court dismissed the suit, saying the company couldn’t contest the rules until the agency published them. But the court’s docket is moving along, and the clock ticking. The longer the chairman drags his feet on the net neutrality order, the less likely it becomes that the court will be able to hear the case. By stalling, the chairman is callously venue-shopping - and ducking a court in which he knows he most likely will lose.
This is a rather obnoxious abuse of both the regulatory and legal processes.
About which the media has for the most part said:
“__________.”
When pressed on what was taking so long - by me, first in writing and then in person - the FCC stated the delay was a result of its now going through the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) process. But:
There’s (at least) one huge problem with this assertion: The FCC - and every federal department, agency and commission - is supposed to comply with the PRA before it votes to impose a new order, not after. To do so afterward defeats the point of the law....
The Act states: “With respect to the collection of information and the control of paperwork, each agency shall … assess the information collection burden of proposed legislation affecting the agency … for any proposed collection of information contained in a proposed rule (to be reviewed by the Director under section 3507(d)), provide notice and comment through the notice of proposed rule-making for the proposed rule.
In one sentence, the word “proposed” - not “passed” - is used four times with respect to the rule being examined.
But, yet again, the media has for the most part said:
“__________.”
-----
So here we have the Obama Administration’s FCC in chronic violation of major federal laws.
In fact there is a very real possibility that - with the Paperwork Reduction Act - a great many Obama Administration commissions, agencies and departments are incessant lawbreakers.
And, in conjuring up their non-existent authority over the Web, the FCC is making up law out of whole cloth - executive branch (as opposed to judicial) activism.
All so as to expropriate regulatory control of 1/6th of our national economy - the World Wide Web. The policy ends they want “justifying” all the unlawful means necessary to get there.
But the media through it all says... nothing. No examination, no analysis - no curiosity whatsoever.
They are, instead, myopically fixated on complete irrelevancies like the email heaps of Republican ex-governors who aren’t running for anything.
Which for the most part have all the journalistic payoff of a Geraldo Rivera Al Capone’s Vault special.
Proving once again one of life’s maxims:
Being Liberal means never having to say you’re sorry.
The media’s silent complicity with the FCC’s Net Neutrality power grab is at once annoying, offensive - and utterly predictable.
