The online world was up in arms last week after Twitter announced they would be complying with local speech laws around the world. The service would be taking down tweets that the local government deemed illegal. Obviously the chorus of “Censorship!” was deafening. The short-form social media network has been ground-zero for a range of popular uprisings from Iran to the “Arab Spring,” used to organize protests and disseminate breaking news stopped by official censors.

So, it comes as no surprise that a wide range of players, especially in the countries most affected by draconian suppression of free speech, have been vocal about the announcement.

Twitter founder Biz Stone came out with a clarification this week, stating that the blog post was poorly worded and that the company is fully committed to free speech across the globe. To wit, they most likely have a legal obligation to comply with local laws in countries in which they operate . With that, they will only be removing “offending” tweets in that specific country using Geo-filtering.

For instance, it is illegal to post anything pro-Nazi in France. If French authorities see a tweet praising the Third Reich, they would request Twitter remove it. It will then be removed and be replaced with a Tweet mentioning the removal, but only in France. The original would still be visible around the world. This removal also would not take into account retweets, which would continue on their merry way.

While this may have some affect on the organizing of local protests, the main added value of Twitter, in this case, remains.

That brings us to exactly what it is that makes Twitter such a wonderful tool for the modern age. It is the ultimate disintermediation of information. Without the need for the traditional gatekeepers of news, it now can flow directly from observers on-site to all corners of the world.  With approximately 300 million subscriber accounts producing  over a billion tweets every four days, the amount of information flowing through the system is mind boggling. While much of it is banal at best, the unregulated nature of it is perfectly suited for the democratization of information.

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In the wake of the Komen fiasco, Daily Kos has now fixed its sights on another private charity — Paul’s Pantry of Green Bay, Wisconsin. The leftist website is hurling expletives and encouraging readers to go after the food program for allegedly refusing to send their truck to a Planned Parenthood location to pick up donated food.

Image credit: Corey Wilson, Green Bay Press-Gazette

Let’s shower this POS with our calls. I have left a message. So should all of you. Maybe this is a distraction, but much is at stake-a woman’s right to choose. And not to mention the poor and their hunger are being used as political chips by the callous right. Pro-life. Bullshit.

The Planned Parenthood location posted an item on their Facebook page. A scroll down the page indicates they were very active in the campaign to intimidate Komen over Planned Parenthood funding.

Paul’s Pantry refused our food donations collected by our area health center to help combat local hunger. This level of extremism impeding individual access to essential health care and now food is outrageous and must be stopped.

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What Think Progress trumpets as an “exclusive” has turned into a “retraction required.” The Soros-funded blog claims that Republican Ari Fleischer was “secretly” involved with the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision on Planned Parenthood:

Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for George W. Bush and prominent right-wing pundit, was secretly involved in the Komen Foundation’s strategy regarding Planned Parenthood. Fleischer personally interviewed candidates for the position of “Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations” at Komen last December. According to a source with first-hand knowledge, Fleischer drilled prospective candidates during their interviews on how they would handle the controversy about Komen’s relationship with Planned Parenthood.

Fleischer’s relationship with Komen and the Planned Parenthood controversy was previously undisclosed.

A slick move, to blame the other team for your side’s transgressions in order to deflect. Sources close to the Komen Foundation tell me Fleischer wasn’t involved in any way with Komen’s Planned Parenthood strategy. The person Komen did bring in to lead the effort is none other than Brendan Daly, Nancy Pelosi’s former press secretary, who is heading a team from Ogilvy PR. While Fleischer was assisting Komen CEO Nancy Brinker in finding a qualified PR person, Fleischer wasn’t directing decisions in the resulting Komen/Planned Parenthood debacle; it was Daly.

So Think Progress is accusing Ari Fleischer for Brendan Daly’s decisions. Don’t they have an editor fact-checking such things over there?

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Two weeks ago Big Government reported that Facebook and Politico created a new partnership to reveal users’ public private messages–if and when they relate to their feelings about a political candidate–will be fed through a ‘sentiment analysis tool’ and potentially reported on Politico.

Conservatives should understandably have concerns about Politico’s upcoming reporting since most Facebook users are young and supportive of Barack Obama–in fact Facebook’s own CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been rumored to be an Obama fan, too.

But now there’s new criticism coming from the left: Christopher Calabrese of the The American Civil Liberties Union’s  (ACLU) Legislative Office posted a blog on January 13th stressing their concerns:

Most troubling is Facebook’s willingness to search and collect users’ private political preferences and thoughts, preferences they may have shared only with their closest friend in a private email.

This raises at least three concerns. The first is that many users may not want to be part of any “sentiment analysis” or poll. For example, they may be a firm supporter of Mitt Romney but find Ron Paul’s ideas interesting. Are they now going to feel hesitant to talk about Paul’s ideas out of awareness that it might be registered as support or boost a candidate they don’t like? Second, we don’t see any mention of user consent anywhere in Facebook’s announcement. How has Facebook decided that users agreed that their personal communications can and should be used in this way?

Finally, what other uses might this information be put to in the future? Will it be used to serve users ads from politicians or manipulate voting preferences in some way? We can see the marketing materials from Facebook now: “Candidates, serve ads to secret supporters! No one knows about their preferences except their closest friends and us.”

The real question here is what are Facebook’s motives? In the wake of its first public offering of an IPO at $5 billion, analysts are saying that the social utility is worth a total of $85 to $100 billion–the biggest Silicon Valley IPO ever. Last year Facebook earned a revenue of $3.71 billion up 88 percent from 2010.

With such stunning financial success, why is such an invasive measure necessary?

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Just announced from Accuracy in Media:

WASHINGTON, February 1, 2012—Accuracy in Media will honor Dana Loesch and Sharyl Attkisson for their outstanding contributions to journalism in a ceremony taking place at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference. The Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award is named for AIM’s founder, who was America’s original media watchdog.

“Accuracy in Media could not be more excited about the 2012 Reed Irvine Awards,” Chairman Don Irvine said. “AIM continues to be impressed with the leadership Dana Loesch has shown to grassroots citizen journalists. Her fearless challenges to biased media narratives are fine examples of citizens rising up in the name of fairness and accuracy. Loesch represents the essence of our Grassroots Journalism Award.

“For much of her 30 year career as a news anchor and reporter, Sharyl Attkisson has offered a clear example of what an investigative journalist should be doing. She has flown in a B-52 on a combat mission over Kosovo, shed light on TARP, dared to report on Operation Fast and Furious and has recently exposed dubious green energy loans from the Obama Administration. We are honored to present her with the Investigative Journalism Award.”

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In December a Federal District Judge, Marco Hernandez, ruled against blogger Crystal Cox who was being sued for defamation by attorney Kevin Padrick, whom Cox accused of corruption on her blog. The ruling declared that as a blogger, Cox was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news. I happen to agree with his decision, but the case raises the question about what actually defines a journalist. Considering what the mainstream media represents today, the line between genuine reportage and political advocacy has been completely blurred.

In the past, many famous and well-respected journalists had no formal training but honed their craft on the job, in many cases beginning their careers as copy boys/copy girls. Walter Cronkite, once cited as the most trusted man in America, was a college dropout who had a series of newspaper jobs reporting news and sports. Eric Sevareid, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley started their careers as broadcast journalists but never had journalism degrees. Dan Rather did receive a degree in journalism, and we can see how well that turned out once he decided to switch to advocacy journalism instead of the traditional who, what, when, where and how protocol of traditional journalism.

Advocacy journalism intentionally and transparently adopts a non-objective viewpoint for either a political or social agenda and has morphed today into nothing less than media bias and propaganda. Today the mainstream media is predominantly composed of liberal democrats, and this bias has been quite evident since the 2008 presidential race. There is also a marked difference between opinion and reportage journalism.

I have a hard time claiming to be a member of the fourth estate, although I have been writing for newspapers since 1998 as an op-ed columnist. During that time, however, I have covered news events and press conferences and submitted non-opinion articles. I never attended Journalism College, nor have I even taken one writing course. I had to drop out of college to support my mother who had had a stroke. Mark Steyn, who is a brilliant writer, never attended college at all but can write reams around many inhabiting the elitist realm of the New York Times. (more…)

The gauzy puffery that the Old Media slathers upon the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped keep most Americans in the dark about how nasty, how violent, how outrageous, and even how incredibly lacking in integrity this movement is. On the conservative blogs the truth is well known, of course, but the fact that few Americans seem to know how bad the OWSers are shows that as conservatives we are not effectively getting our message out there.

We're sure this Occupy Oakland protester isn't vandalizing this building, rather he accidentally fell into this window with a hammer. Repeatedly.

For the initial two years of its existence the Old Media spent its every waking moment destroying, maligning, and out right lying about the tea party movement. Even today you’ll see an occasional swipe at the tea partiers made by some lefty hater and the Old Media is happy to “report” the slander, naturally.

You might remember when Obama operative Anna Park tried to start a counter movement that she prosaically called “the Coffee Party” during the heyday of the tea party. You may also recall that those Old Media mavens, while daily lying and lambasting the tea partiers, fell all over themselves to play up the silly and quickly failed and forgotten “Coffee Party” effort.

Similarly, when the Occupiers hit the scene, the Old Media went into paroxysms of ecstasy over the whole thing. Even today, after conservatives have so effortlessly ripped away the veneer from the absurdity and essential anti-Americanness of the OWSers, the Old Media is still slathering OWS with unearned and illicit praise.

Most Americans are unaware that real communists and socialists and other anti-American groups form the core of OWS. Few Americans understand that these people are drug addicts and criminals that have indulged every imaginable crime at these events. From property destruction to child abandonment to rape to gun crimes, just about every crime imaginable from small to large have been committed at these events. People have even died at these things!

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If you’re a Twitter user, you might start getting notifications just like this from Twitter in the very near future if you tweet something that some foreign governments don’t like.

On Thursday, the social media company announced on its blog that, effective immediately, it has implemented the ability to withhold specific content from certain geographical regions in order to respond to government censoring without affecting its entire base of users.

Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects to share this new page, http://chillingeffects.org/twitter, which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter.

According to PC Magazine, Twitter will determine which content to withhold in much the same way it does DMCA notices, albeit proactively. (more…)

Real Clear Politics (RCP) soothes me. Just clicking over to their homepage, which I do a few times a day, isn’t just about getting an information fix on the latest polls and headlines, it’s about reaffirming my belief that objective journalism isn’t dead.

The RCP front page epitomizes what the front page of any objective news outlet should look like.  There’s no narrative, no code that can be cracked. There’s only information and facts, and the original reporting they do is some of the best you’ll find on the Web.

Yes, Virginia, there is a journalistic ideal and it lives here.

Unfortunately, if this article was voice-over for a film, you would insert the record scratch here.

My opinion about this new wave of fact-checking we’re seeing in the MSM is clearly on record, and it would be hypocritical of me not to point it out everywhere, even when the outlet doing the fact-checking is one I respect. Yes, some things are simply black and white, but in the world of partisan politics, especially with respect to the politics surrounding what will be a bitterly fought presidential election, the nuance and shadings and contextual challenges are too murky and vast for anyone to get their arms around. Good faith, and I have no doubt RCP has plenty of that, just isn’t enough to overcome the insurmountable.

Proof of that, unfortunately, can be found in a piece published at RCP yesterday, titled “The True State of the Union.” It’s a fact-check analysis of the state of our union under President Obama, which is broken up into five chapters. The introduction into those chapters ends with this claim: “Here is a nonpartisan snapshot of where the nation is in five areas.”

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Thursday the Drudge Report had no less than 13 anti-Gingrich links scattered across the page with somewhere around five “above the fold.” The same day, National Review Online, the American Spectator, and pundit Ann Coulter all published missives railing against the former House Speaker. Drudge compiled all the content on his site late Wednesday night. They, along with Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, have been cheerleading for a Romney candidacy since there were still eight candidates in the running. Conservative media has clearly cast their lot, and not all for the same candidate.

It’s clear that after the blowout in South Carolina and the Gingrich momentum in Florida, Team Romney called for help.

Sites such as Red State have clearly been anti-Romney, but more non-Romney than for a particular candidate, after Perry left the race. Rush Limbaugh hasn’t officially taken a side, but his criticism of Romney as “not a conservative” is definitely noticeable. He also defended Gingrich’s defense of Reagan from the onslaught of oppo published Thursday, as has Dan Riehl, along with Jeffrey Lord.

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If you want a case of clear bias, the Washington D.C. affiliate of CBS will surely fill the bill for its bias against pro-life supporters. On January 23 the DC affiliate featured on its website a photo slide show of pictures taken at the March for Life rally held annually at the nation’s capitol. Curiously, though, there wasn’t a single photo of any pro-lifers. Instead, the photo essay featured only photos of abortion-supporting protesters who stood on the sidelines taunting the pro-life marchers.

The photo slide show initially featured seven photos of abortion supporters, such as one of marchers holding signs saying “Family Planning Saves Lives Worldwide,” one featuring women holding signs saying that abortion should be kept legal, and another showing a woman sporting an abortion on demand sticker.

Upwards of 50,000 pro-life supporters turned out in the DC cold to participate in the March for Life, yet apparently CBS could only find the small handful of pro-abortion supporters to photograph.

Pro-life advocates like Jill Stanek were incredulous, and it wasn’t long before the comments section on the CBS website exploded with pro-lifers crying foul. Dozens of unhappy commenters remarked how badly the bias of CBS galled them.

Finally, a day or so later, CBS altered its slide show and added some photos of some of the actual participants of the pro-life march. The slide show now features seven photos of pro-lifers and an equal amount of pro-abortion supporters.

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Tablet magazine, the new online Jewish-themed publication that focuses on a broad range of current affairs topics, has taken Media Matters for America (MMfA) and the Center for American Progress (CAP) to task for using antisemitic language in criticizing Israel.

Illustration from Tablet: Daniel Hertzberg

In two separate articles, Tablet takes on the organizations that are the core of the Democrats’ media and policy strategy, joining a debate in which the defenders of MMfA and CAP have resorted to the worn-out fallacy that their critics are trying to silence debate on Israel.

One article by Spencer Ackerman–whose blog was once hosted by CAP–addresses “fellow progressives” and insists that while criticism of Israel is sometimes appropriate, those who use anti-Jewish tropes–like specious charges of dual loyalty and “Israel first”–undermine the case they are trying to make. He singles out Media Matters, CAP, and the radical pro-Palestinian lobby J Street, among others, for their rhetorical record of bigotry:

Some on the left have recently taken to using the term “Israel Firster” and similar rhetoric to suggest that some conservative American Jewish reporters, pundits, and policymakers are more concerned with the interests of the Jewish state than those of the United States….

“Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. And yet [Media Matters' M.J.] Rosenberg and others actually claim they’re using it to stimulate “debate,” rather than effectively mirroring the tactics of some of the people they criticize….

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Yesterday Elliot Abrams was part of a calculated effort against one of the GOP primary candidates whose last name wasn’t “Romney.” It’s typical in any primary, but what wasn’t typical was that in this republican primary, the information was misconstrued and presented a false narrative to readers. Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator takes Abrams to task for his piece and says it is “not worthy” of its author:

Abrams

A piece like the one Abrams wrote depends for its success in garnering headlines — which it did — by assuming no one will bother to get into the weeds and do the homework. Usually a safe assumption when dealing with the mainstream media, particularly a mainstream media that, as one with Establishment Republicans, hates Newt Gingrich.

Not so fast.

Due to the diligence of one Chris Scheve of a group called Aqua Terra Strategies in Washington, Mr. Abrams has been caught red-handed in lending himself to this attempted Romney hit job.

Mr. Scheve, you see, is himself a former foreign policy aide to none other than Speaker Newt Gingrich in his days as Speaker. While now out on his own and not working for Gingrich, Scheve is considerably conversant with the Gingrich foreign policy record.

Uh-oh.

That’s right. Mr. Scheve, incensed at what he felt was a deliberate misrepresentation of his old boss by Abrams and the Romney forces, specifically of Gingrich’s long ago March 21, 1986 “Special Order” speech on the floor of the House, and aware “that most of his [Abrams'] comments had to have been selectively taken from the special order” — Scheve started digging. Since the Congressional Record for 1986 was difficult to obtain electronically, Scheve trekked to the George Mason Library to physically track down the March 21, 1986 edition of the Congressional Record. Locating it, copying and scanning, he was kind enough to send to me …

… I can only say that what Elliott Abrams wrote in NRO about Newt Gingrich based on this long ago speech is not worthy of Elliott Abrams.

Specifically, Abrams implies that Newt Gingrich was spewing mindless vitriol about Reagan on the House floor. Not only not so, it was quite to the contrary.

Read the whole thing. Ben Shapiro has the full text of Gingrich’s remarks.

Such hits on candidates is expected in primaries, but a heated primary is no excuse for conservatives in media to forget their principles and assume the characteristics of progressive media. Lord is right on this. Let the purposeful inaccuracies stop.

The Chicago Sun Times has received your message loud and clear, dear readers. As much as admitting that they are biased and they know it, the long-time Windy City staple has decided that hence forth it will no longer endorse candidates for political office.

In a Sunday editorial, the 71-year-old paper announced its new policy amusingly touting the Old Media’s party line that it engages in “unbiased news coverage” and that newspapers today wish to “appeal to the widest possible readership.”

“They want to inform you, not spin you,” the editorial avers. Yet, the editorial goes on to admit that it has heard from readers who seriously doubt that dedication to unbiased news coverage. And when you note that over the last several decades few national news papers have endorsed a Republican for President — most especially the left-leaning Chicago Sun-Times — it is easy to doubt that purported dedication to just-the-facts reporting.

The Sun-Times is so dedicated to helping Democrats get elected, it even endorsed disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for reelection. Yes, even after his troubles were well known by even the most uninformed Illinois voter. After reelection Governor Blagojevich ended up being convicted on several counts of fraud and influence peddling when he tried to sell the Senate seat that Obama gave up to become president. Blago will begin serving a 14-year sentence in a federal prison this February.

Yet, even before Blago’s convictions for selling the Senate seat he was involved in numerous scandals and still the Times endorsed him any way saying. “There’s no denying the cloud of scandal over his administration,” the Times then wrote. Going on, the Times said, “We’ve chosen to give him the benefit of the doubt and endorse him for a number of reasons.”

It is a bit hard to escape the feeling that the “number of reasons” the Times endorsed the corrupt Blago was spelled D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T!

One has to doubt the commitment to vetting candidates, anyway. All too often the editorial board’s entire decision rests solely on the candidate questionnaires as opposed to any deeper study of candidate’s records or campaigns. Worse, when it comes to judges the Sun-Times most especially would just rely on the left-wing endorsements of the Chicago Bar Association, a horribly biased source for information on judges.

The Times did make an interesting point in its announcement, but only by accident, it appears.

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The March For Life took place yesterday in Washington, DC despite the cold, dreary weather. But unless you tuned into C-SPAN2 for a few hours this morning or EWTN (the Catholic station) all day you wouldn’t have known it happened. Other stations, including FOX News, glossed over this march while it happened.

Credit Elizabeth Avis @Beth_Avis

Before the march Michelle Malkin wrote a post about the media’s lack of attention. It got me interested and I decided to tune into DirecTV News Mix and the C-SPAN coverage all afternoon. Some people on Twitter, especially Sharon Cabana, helped me out by keeping an eye on CNN and MSNBC. There were a a few seconds of coverage on FOX News & MSNBC, but didn’t see anything on CNN. I’m not shocked, but it doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed. The Old Media was on hand to cover OWS at all times. They knew this was happening and yet no one on stand by. It’s awful how these peaceful, clean, and civilized people were completely ignored by the Old Media while the disgusting and uncivilized people of Occupy Wall Street received so much attention.

Thank goodness for social media like Twitter. Since I knew I wasn’t going to receive anything from the Old Media I knew I had to use the New Media. I reached out to people on the #MarchForLife hash tag and people have been tweeting me pictures. Here are a few:

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On Monday evening, the political blogosphere was rocked by the unprecedented publishing of a 200-page opposition research book on Mitt Romney written by the John McCain campaign for the 2008 GOP presidential primary. Who decided to release this information to the public? It wasn’t ThinkProgress; it wasn’t Newsweek or the Washington Post or Mother Jones. It was by a website which currently features the headlines “Martial Artist Kicks Down Banana Tree,” “Baby Flummoxed By New Sound,” and “Jessica Simpson Wearing A Giant Deformed Penis Mask.” I kid you not.

BuzzFeed, the name of the site in question, is the latest venture for Politico’s JournoList-er Ben Smith, as previously reported by John Nolte. Smith is heading up the “Politics” section of BuzzFeed, and while he claims objectivity, the case of this leaked document reveals exactly how he plans to use the site to hurt the GOP and aid Obama’s reelection campaign.

Screenshot of BuzzFeed’s politics page

The “About” page of BuzzFeed presents the site as nothing more than a place where readers can find interesting and viral Internet content:

We feature the kind of things you’d want to pass along to your friends: an outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame.

The site’s niche naturally extends to its political page, headed up by Smith. The political news cycle is chock full of bizarre and hilarious information that normally doesn’t end up on NPR–Mitt Romney sparring with pop group LMFAO, Herman Cain singing “Imagine” with pizza-themed lyrics, or Rick Perry blasting a coyote while jogging, for instance. Thus, a site to present this kind of offbeat content (the categories on BuzzFeed include “LOL,” “WTF,” and “Fail”) sounds like a great place to unwind, to set aside all the partisan bickering and just check out posts “for the lulz,” as we whippersnappers say.

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It seems the onetime political news website Politico is edging toward a Daily Kos-like experience. January 14th we see yet another step in Politico’s journey toward left-wing extremes with a fake poll that claims that no one in South Carolina likes the tea party movement. Did I mention it was a “Facebook poll?”

The headline ways it all, really: Facebook/POLITICO poll: South Carolina users cool to tea party. If the fact that this “poll” is just some posting on a Facebook page doesn’t make you laugh at its validity, the hilarity continues as Politico goes on to treat this silliness as real news.

“Almost two-thirds of adult Facebook users in South Carolina say they aren’t fans of the tea party, according to a Facebook poll conducted today with POLITICO,” the “news” website begins.

Come on. Does anyone imagine that Politico reached “almost two-thirds” of the Facebook uses in South Carolina? Does anyone even imagine that Politico reached even a representative number of Facebook users in South Carolina? Was there any scientific method at all to this or was it just some posting that a handful of South Carolinians saw on Facebook? Bet you can guess.

But let’s not let science get in the way of a good liberal meme, OK? Politico has decided that everyone in South Carolina hates the tea party movement and that is that, you see?

Sixty-two percent of those surveyed said they are “not at all supportive” of the tea party, compared with 20 percent who were “somewhat supportive” and 18 percent who were “very supportive.”

Of those surveyed, women were slightly less supportive of the tea party. Just 35 percent were either “somewhat” or “very” supportive of the movement, compared with 42 percent among men.

Politico does admit that this poll has some, er, limitations.

The results only represent the sentiment of South Carolina users on Facebook, not registered voters or likely GOP primary voters that tend to be more reliable barometers of primary elections. The Facebook poll, for instance, doesn’t exclude Democrats or independents.

How many Facebook respondents were Democrats? How many were white, black, or Asian? How many were actual voters? How many really lived in South Carolina? How do we quantify these results? Who needs scientific controls on a poll, anyway?

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If you were mad about Obamacare, if you were made about the Patriot Act, the DHS watch lists, the administration’s reach into your diets, then you’re already concerned about SOPA.

SOPA = Stop Online Piracy Act sounds benign, as almost all legislation does. The names of most bills are completely antithetical to what the bill would actually do. SOPA is no exception. You read the name. “Piracy is bad,” you think. “Respect for intellectual property is good,” you think. Both of these things are correct. SOPA survives on the assumption that this is all the bill entails. Piracy is a major problem, but SOPA, and its Senate companion PIPA (Protect IP Act), are the worst ways to go about solving it.

What is SOPA?

The bill would authorize the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of infringing on copyrights, or of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.^[4] After delivering a court order, the U.S. Attorney General could require US-directed Internet service providers, ad networks, and payment processors to suspend doing business with sites found to infringe on federal criminal intellectual property laws. The Attorney General could also bar search engines from displaying links to the sites.^[13]

If the Justice Department or a copyright holder believed a site was directing users to pirated content, they would go to court. Depending on who’s complaining, different remedies would come into play: In some instances a judge could order an Internet service provider like Verizon to cut off access to a site. In others, a search engine like Google could be directed to delete links to an infringing site. The idea is to starve the offending sites of the web traffic that keeps them in business.

Inconclusively, too.

Google and First Amendment scholars like Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe argue that SOPA would squelch free speech by giving private parties power to effectively cripple sites that allegedly — but not conclusively — steal copyrighted content. The simple filing of a complaint, they say, would exert huge pressure on the Internet ecosystem to blacklist an accused site. They also say it would give the feds dangerous new powers to go after sites for political reasons.

Gizmodo:

Perhaps the most galling thing about SOPA in its original construction is that it let IP owners take these actions without a single court appearance or judicial sign-off. All it required was a single letter claiming a “good faith belief” that the target site has infringed on its content. Once Google or PayPal or whoever received the quarantine notice, they would have five days to either abide or to challenge the claim in court. Rights holders still have the power to request that kind of blockade, but in the most recent version of the bill the five day window has softened, and companies now would need the court’s permission.

The language in SOPA implies that it’s aimed squarely at foreign offenders; that’s why it focuses on cutting off sources of funding and traffic (generally US-based) rather than directly attacking a targeted site (which is outside of US legal jurisdiction) directly. But that’s just part of it.

…to the point of potentially creating an “Internet Blacklist”…

Here’s the other thing: Payment processors or content providers like Visa or YouTube don’t even need a letter shut off a site’s resources. The bill’s “vigilante” provision gives broad immunity to any provider who proactively shutters sites it considers to be infringers. Which means the MPAA just needs to publicize one list of infringing sites to get those sites blacklisted from the internet.

Potential for abuse is rampant. As Public Knowledge points out, Google could easily take it upon itself to delist every viral video site on the internet with a “good faith belief” that they’re hosting copyrighted material. Leaving YouTube as the only major video portal. Comcast (an ISP) owns NBC (a content provider). Think they might have an interest in shuttering some rival domains? Under SOPA, they can do it without even asking for permission.

Who is behind it?

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Take note, South Carolina. We know that Mitt Romney has been on all sides of basically every issue, but the broader concern here is:  are conservatives tired of stressing about and being duped by northeastern so-called Republicans and their mostly liberal voting records–leading to political survival in Democrat states.  But, seriously, is anyone else tired of this? And again, I ask,  why is a government-run healthcare lover a GOP frontrunner? Name recognition, gaining independent voters, and anyone but Obama, I get that, but come on already. Romney? I’m not buying the media hype over who can beat Obama.

From Jonah Goldberg:

Romney, the son of a politician, has been running for office, holding office or thinking about running for office for more than two decades. “Just level with the American people,” Gingrich growled. “You’ve been running … at least since the 1990s.”

For some reason, Romney can’t do that. Or at least it seems like he can’t. His authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away. And it’s sapping enthusiasm from the rank and file.

Goldberg is right, but the underlying theme that voters need to be reminded of is that during so many important debates from healthcare, jobs, Wall Street Reform, confirmations, recess appointments, to taxes the culprits to invoke cloture or side with the Democrats typically are the same:  Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe,  and Scott Brown–the trifecta of RINOs. All from the northeast, too.  See where I’m going with this?

Frankly, Romney, who the mainstream liberal media would like to see win the nomination, has yet to unite the GOP base.  His used car salesman pitch simply rubs people the wrong way.  We’ve seen this over and over again–even John McCain pointed this out and won in 2007’s primary–and now supports him–that should speak volumes to my point.  Romney has always been dogged by this and this is why we have such a large ‘Not Romney’ camp on the right side of the aisle.

The GOP is also paying the bitter price for not having anyone in line to succeed GW Bush.  The party’s internal tug of war will be an historical teachable moment and prepare the party for future elections.  The one saving grace is that, while the Democrats have Hillary, they have no one to succeed her at this point in time.  I say Hillary because she seems to be the only power broker left untarnished by Obama–even though she is an Alinsky kinda girl.

Additionally, the GOP presidential candidate will have a two-pronged mission as the nominee:  to beat the MSM and Obama.  However, enlightened voters now know for sure the media is mostly state-controlled, Obama was never vetted, and that his radical leftist ideology drives his policies, appointments, and regulations out of the mainstream.

Furthermore, the MSM needs Romney to offset Obama.  The formula is quite simple: RomneyCare is to ObamaCare as Obama’s rhetoric is to Romney’s rhetoric all of which cancel each other out according to how the media sees it.

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