Crimes Against Liberty (29 page)

Given the Justice Department’s duty to enforce the laws of the land
impartially
, as opposed to campaigning for the administration’s agenda, the Blog Squad is an outrage. It is chilling that a government charged with protecting its citizens instead conceals its identity and surreptitiously trolls among those citizens on the Internet, attempting to sway public opinion by stealth. On
National Review Online
, Hans von Spakovsky wrote, “I doubt that the Office of Public Affairs (OPA) has received an ethics opinion from Justice’s Professional Responsibility Advisory Office (PRAO) saying that it is acceptable for OPA employees to be harassing critics of the department through postings that deliberately hide their DOJ affiliation (a practice that is not very ‘open’ or ‘transparent’). DOJ lawyers,” continued Spakovsky, should be “aware of” ABA ethical rules that specify as professional misconduct, a lawyer’s engagement “in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation. If the report [about the Blog Squad] is correct, tax dollars are being used directly for such dishonest, deceitful behavior.”
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Meanwhile, the White House continued to use its blog as a cudgel against ObamaCare opponents. When Congressman Henry Waxman’s heavy-handed tactics failed to intimidate companies from accurately reporting the cost increases associated with ObamaCare, Obama’s electronic storm troopers sprung into action. Commerce secretary Gary Locke posted an entry on the White House blog ridiculing the companies and implying they didn’t know what they were talking about. He parroted White House disinformation that ObamaCare “will bend the health care cost curve” and “reduce premiums and increase business competitiveness in the U.S.”
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The
Business Insider
observed, “We listened to the CEO of one of the biggest healthcare companies say unequivocally on NPR that Obamacare would make premiums go up. He made it sound like the height of obviousness—and it was so obvious that the interviewer didn’t even follow up on it.” So, it was “hardly startling news,” said the
Insider
, that companies were warning their shareholders and employees about it. “Could it be that the Democrats are only now discovering that Obamacare
won’t
actually provide more healthcare for less? Or is it just that they’re angry that everyone else has noticed?”
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Locke later appeared on CNBC to intensify his attack on dissenters, suggesting they were acting irresponsibly and prematurely.

The
New York Daily News
reported in April 2010 that the White House had also employed “Twitter and other social media outlets” to speak “directly to the people.” “Twitter is the rage at the White House,” but is “only one weapon in its communications arsenal. It also liberally employs an interactive Web site, Facebook, YouTube, chat rooms, its own blog, videotaped press releases, Flickr photos and a still growing 13-million-member campaign email list.” All on the public dime, no doubt.

The article confirmed the obvious: the White House doesn’t just use these outlets to augment its communications, but as tools to carefully control its messages through top-down, organized communiqués. Obama is not about transparency; the
Daily News
noted he hadn’t held a wide-ranging press conference in nine months and “rarely talks to the small press pool following him around.” His aides even admit that this is because “they don’t want to craft ‘message events,’ only to have the press ask about something else that makes news and steps on their spin.”

Obama has gone so far as to bypass conventional media routes and deliver information concerning important events directly through Twitter, such as his decision to forego his trip to Indonesia and Australia to remain in Washington for the final push on ObamaCare. This is some way to show gratitude to the fawning mainstream media! But when some reporters complained, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs arrogantly replied that the whiners should join the 55,000 people who follow Gibbs’s tweets.
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Conservatives also spoke out against another potential invasion of privacy spawned by Democrats. The ObamaCare bill reportedly created a new office under the FDA’s umbrella, the National Medical Device Registry, with authority to engage in “postmarket device surveillance activities on implantable medical devices,” including those with radio-frequency identification. The
Washington Times
noted “postmarket surveillance” is a term of art in the medical community and that the monitoring in this case is ostensibly to ensure the medical devices are functioning properly. But privacy concerns are nevertheless justified, said the
Times
, because the White House has publicly supported using innovative techniques to track people. Indeed, the Justice Department argued government agents should be allowed to track citizens by cell phone triangulation without search warrants because citizens have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” when it comes to their “personal communications devices.” The
Times
argued it’s “not a great leap to believe the same rule would apply to an implanted radio chip,” given the administration’s “incessant drive to expand government power over Americans’ lives.”
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“OBAMA TURNS HIS BACK ON THE PRESS”

At a presser in May 2010, reporter Les Kinsolving asked Gibbs a question that elicited applause from his fellow reporters: why hadn’t Obama held a press conference since July 2009? Instead of answering the question directly, Gibbs made rude, snide, and condescending comments purporting to define what a press conference is.
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About a week later, CBS’s Chip Reid tried to ask the elusive Obama a question immediately following his signing of the Freedom of Press Act. Obama haughtily declared, “I’m not doing a press conference today, but we’ll be seeing you guys during the course of the week.” Reid said the irony of asking Obama a question just as he signed the Freedom of Press Act was too rich to resist, describing it as a way of “expressing frustration from the press corps because Obama does so little in the way of press conferences and answering questions from us.”
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Two days later, as Obama held a so-called “news conference” in the Rose Garden with the president of Mexico, Chip Reid assumed Obama might finally field some questions. But he took only one from the U.S. news media. When Reid shouted a question about the recent election loss of Senator Arlen Specter, Obama ignored him. The
New York Times
story reporting the incident was aptly titled, “Obama Turns His Back On the Press.”
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Obama treated other media representatives with the same disdain, especially when they pressed him on controversial issues such as the lingering allegation by Pennsylvania Democratic congressman Joe Sestak that the administration offered him a job if he would agree not to go after Arlen Specter’s Senate seat. ABC’s Jake Tapper asked Gibbs to elaborate on conversations Gibbs said occurred in the White House about the charge. Tapper noted, “You never really explained what the conversation was.” Gibbs characteristically snapped back, “Then I don’t have anything to add today.”

When other media tried to follow up, Gibbs became “noticeably irritated”
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—even though he was the one being evasive. The Department of Justice, in a letter to Republican congressman Darrell Issa, rejected a Republican request to appoint a special counsel to investigate the allegations, insisting nothing inappropriate had happened. Issa said the DOJ’s refusal was highly improper, commenting, “You have a sitting U.S. congressman who has made a very specific allegation numerous times that someone inside the Obama White House offered him what amounts to a bribe in order to manipulate the Pennsylvania Senate primary. The attorney general’s refusal to take action in the face of such felonious allegations undermines any claim to transparency and integrity that this administration asserts.”
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Despite Obama’s aggressive use of the new media virtually as a propaganda ministry, he still complains when his plebian subjects dare to avail themselves of the same technology. He is uncomfortable when he isn’t in total control of the message. Just as he told congressional Republicans they shouldn’t be paying too much attention to Rush Limbaugh or FOX News, he decried the new tools of the information age, apparently because they make it more difficult for him to act covertly. He whined, “Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter. With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations, information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment. All of this is not putting new pressures on you; it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.”
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Only a true Alinskyite could talk about a “tool of empowerment” and view the proliferation of information throughout the population as a threat to democracy.

REMAKING THE BROADCAST WORLD

The Obama administration hasn’t tried to hide its intention of using all means at its disposal to shut down conservative talk radio, whether through the Fairness Doctrine, local content, or diversity regulations. If they can’t muzzle Rush Limbaugh through public ridicule, or wedge FOX News out of the White House press pool, or marginalize tea party protestors, they’ll explore other avenues to suppress speech from political opponents, including regulating the Internet through “net neutrality rules,” which some have argued constitute a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet.

Net neutrality rules would prohibit Internet operators from treating some online traffic differently than others. Many conservatives and libertarians fear regulators would exploit these rules to get their foot in the door under the seductive pretense that they are protecting all Internet users. Once in, they would seek to impose their content-based regulations.

In 2009, the FCC issued rules to force Internet service providers to conform to net neutrality principles, but when Comcast challenged the rules, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit unanimously decided the FCC didn’t have the power to enforce its rules against the firm. But this was just a temporary setback for liberal regulators, whose congressional backers have vowed to look at legislation to further expand FCC regulating powers. Predictably, Gibbs said Obama was still committed to net neutrality, despite the court’s ruling.
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Obama’s FCC also has a “National Broadband Plan,” which includes such gems as taxpayer-funded broadband as well as a plan for the FCC to recapture almost half the radio spectrum currently being used by 1,600 TV stations and rededicate it to broadband services. Some speculate the FCC really aims to end all broadcasting and move all news, information, and entertainment to the Internet. From there the government could regulate content beyond that contemplated by the administration’s proposed “net neutrality” rules. As Mark Hyman, commentator for Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. wrote, “It would be much easier for a president to shut down the Internet than to turn-off 1,600 individual television transmitters and whose content is much more cumbersome to monitor.” Hyman’s warning seemed eerily prescient in June 2010, when the technology website CNET reported that “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.”
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The administration’s overreaching has not gone unnoticed by major broadband providers. When the FCC voted to continue considering broadband regulations that would grant it greater authority to regulate the Internet and classify it as a telecommunications service, AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon “lashed out” at the administration. AT&T senior executive vice president Jim Cicconi said, “This is impossible to justify on either a policy or legal basis, and we remain confident that if the FCC persists in its course—and we truly hope it does not—the courts will surely overturn their action.”
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According to Mark Hyman, the administration’s plans don’t end with the National Broadband Plan and its “net neutrality” initiative. The FCC, says Hyman, “has dived headlong into another topic: manipulating news and information.”
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A major player in administration efforts to manipulate news is Mark Lloyd, the FCC’s Chief Diversity Officer, known as the “diversity czar.” This Obama appointee has a frightening view of free speech, arguing that “the purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance.” Like a good totalitarian, he believes the First Amendment can impede the greater societal goals that only government can bring about. Lloyd greatly admires Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and has written favorably of his two-year war against the private media, in which Chavez closed most of those outlets down in order to suppress criticism of the government. Obama’s appointment of Lloyd is a truly ominous sign, especially from a president who laments the proliferation of information enabled by new technology.

Then there’s Obama’s new Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, who has also shown the radical’s proper approach to free speech, remarking, “If there is an ‘overabundance’ of an idea in the absence of direct governmental action—which there well might be when compared with some ideal state of public debate—then action disfavoring that idea might ‘un-skew’, rather than skew, public discourse.”
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