72 Democrats Sell Out Public on Net Neutrality-They Side w/ AT&T

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Seventy-Two Democrats Abandon Public on Net Neutrality
By Megan Tady, October 16, 2009

Seventy-two Democrats – count ‘em – just backstabbed you. This afternoon, they sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission asking them to walk away from their plans to protect Net Neutrality.

They also defected from their own party, abandoning President Obama’s tech agenda that supports a free and open Internet, where competition and innovation can flourish. 
Wish I could say this is a joke, but the letter hit my desk an hour ago, 72 signatures included.

It’s outrageous: Dozens of the lawmakers we’ve elected to look out for us in Washington are saying they’d rather hand the Internet over to a few powerful corporations than safeguard it for the public.

And the cause of this congressional panic? A progressive proposal that the FCC just wants to circulate for public comment. 

In September, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced that the commission would expand rules to protect Net Neutrality, the principle that stops Internet service providers from blocking and controlling online content. On Thursday, the FCC will vote on a notice of proposed rulemaking to establish Net Neutrality rules, which is the first step in the regulatory process.

But the deep-pocketed telco lobby on the Hill is doing everything it can to derail protections for an open Internet. And it appears to be working. After all, the Dems’ letter parrots telco talking points – they had to come from somewhere, and it certainly wasn’t from the more than 1.6 million people who have signed a petition in support of Net Neutrality.
How is it that a handful of corporations are co-opting the debate, even as hundreds of thousands of people say, “Enough is enough”? This is a clear example of “special interests” vs. “real Americans.” Corporations don’t want any rules that prohibit them from acting as Internet gatekeepers – they don’t even want the FCC to consider them. And they’ve got the influence and power to convince lawmakers to act against our interests and reject an open Internet.

But we’re powerful, too, and we’ve got to show it. Now’s not the time to be timid. We want two million people shouting for Net Neutrality to send a resounding message to the FCC that the public supports them.

Add your name to the petition for an open Internet right now. Then Tweet it. Facebook it. Ask your friends to do it. The fight for Net Neutrality is very real, and it’s getting nasty.
 
 
 
Megan Tady
Campaign Coordinator
Free Press :: www.freepress.net
413.585.1533 ext. 216
 
reform media. transform democracy.

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Remembering Rappers Delight-30 Years Ago It Was Born

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Remembering Rappers Delight-30 years Ago It Was Born

by Davey D

Sugar Hill Gang came to life 30 years ago

With all the sudden deaths that have affected us this year-from Michael Jackson to Roc Raida to Mr Magic to local KPOO radio legend Clarence ‘Swig’ Swiggins its been hard to sit back, catch a breath and notice some of the landmark dates that have impacted our culture. My boy Bruce Banter from playahata.com hit me up to remind me that today was the 30th anniversary of Rapper’s Delight by the Sugar Hill Gang.. Wow that’s a long time…

I’m not sure of the exact date if it was October 13th 1979, but I do recall when I first heard the song it was definitely in the fall of 1979.  I think almost everyone who was around at that time has a ‘This is how Sugar Hill Gang’ impacted me story. 

I fondly recall, that Rapper’s Delight re-energized what appeared to be a dwindling culture at least as far as the emceeing/rap aspect was concerned. Prior to SHG, I recall going to parties and cats would be on the mic rapping and rapping and rapping all night long. Some groups had nice routines. Others tried to put structure into what they were doing, but for the most part, many of those parties had dissolved into cats just having massive freestyle sessions on the mic to the point that it was overkill. The block parties as I recall were dying out and many of the more established acts had moved to the clubs. If you went to a jam, gone were cats flowing on the mic nonstop all night long. Groups would do a set and although they didn’t have records, each act, whether it was the Cold Crush Brothers, the  Crash Crew or Funky 4 Plus 1 More all had signature routines that folks went to go see.

The summer leading up to the release of Rappers Delight was interesting because, I recall hearing stories about how icons like Grandmaster Flash had moved on to ‘blending’ records and playing at discos versus being at parties cutting breaks and beats.  Chic’s Good Times which is what helped propel Rappers Delight was a massive hit and anyone who even thought about rapping loved flowing over the long Niles Rodgers bass laden break.

Also that summer I recall the Fatback Band’s joint ‘King Tem III Personality Jock. It was a cool novelty record, but dude sounded nothing like the emcees who you heard on tapes or saw at the early jams. He sounded like a radio disc jockey. Years later, we found out that the rap was a throwback to the rapping and rhyming that was around before Hip Hop as we know it.  Black radio DJs always rhymed-People like Jocko henderson and DaddyO are a couple that come to mind.  Many of these jocks did so as they would introduce songs.  So while King Tem III struck a chord, it didn’t shake things up the way Rapper’s Delight did  a few months later.

In my mind Hip Hop was kind of dying until Rappers Delight emerged and then all hell broke loose. The possibility of being able to make a name for yourself and reach the stars via recording a record got everyone back to writing rhymes and taking a renwed interest in emceeing. 

The other thing I remember was that hardly anyone had ever heard of the Sugar Hill Gang. There was initial confusion because we all knew Sugar Hill was a section in Harlem,  but one of the rappers in the song Big Bank Hank was calling himself Casanova Fly. There were only two people who used that name Casanova. One was Grandmaster Caz  of the Cold Crush and the other was a ‘hardrock’ cat named Tiny who headed the Casanova Crew over on Webster Ave in the Bronx.. A lot of cats thought it was him rapping , which caused confusion  because why use the name Sugar Hill when he was up in the Bx and not Harlem. ?  It was just a matter of time before we all found out that SHG was a crew that was put together and the Casanova references was due to Hank borrowing Caz’s rhyme books.  I will post up the interview we did with Caz where he breaks all this down.. Its an interesting situation. All this lead to a couple of other questions

1-Why them and not use some of the more established, better known crews like Flash or Cold Crush or Theodore and Fanstatic Romantic 5?

2-Why use the word ‘rap’? Prior to the release of ‘Rapper’s Delight’, what became known as rap was emceeing or rhyming. Rap was what you did when you were hollaring at a female.

In anycase Rappers Delight was the song that let the world know what was occuring in New York and subsequently people all over the planet jumped in the fray and added their own seasoning to the mix…. At the same time it also represents the beginning of a culture being diluted and overtly influenced by a music industry which was dying at the time.  Folks forget the music industry had raped a soulful music expression that was popular in the clubs and completely watered it down to a commercialized ‘disco form’.  In 1979 while Rappers Delight was blowing up..you also had alot of people running around and tagging on walls ‘Disco Sucks’.  The industry needed somethinfg to help it bounce back. Rappers Delight wasn’t the answer in 79, the person who saved the industry was a cat named Michael Jackson, but thats another story.

Happy birthday Sugar Hill Gang and Rappers Delight.

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Far Right Wing Nuts Protest an Elementary School where Kids Sung Song About Obama During Black History Month

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Anti-Obama Song Rally At School

BURLINGTON TOWNSHIP, N.J. – Conservative groups plan to rally Monday near a New Jersey school where students performed a song celebrating President Barack Obama.

And that has district officials planning to beef up security at the B. Bernice Young School in Burlington Township, which houses kindergartners through second-graders.

The song drew national attention last month after a video of the performance, which occurred during a Black History Month assembly in February, was posted on YouTube. Conservatives say it shows how schoolchildren are being indoctrinated to idolize Obama, allegations school officials deny.

Citing concerns for the safety of students and staff, Superintendent Christopher Manno has asked organizers to reconsider the protest because classes will be held that day. Manno said protesters will not be allowed on school property and additional district staffers will be on hand.

You can peep video story here…

http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/local_news/new_jersey/091012_anti_obama_song_rally_at_school

  

BURLINGTON TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) – A school for kindergartners through second-graders in a comfortable Philadelphia suburb has become the latest target of accusations by conservatives that schoolchildren are being indoctrinated to idolize President Barack Obama.

The controversy grows out of a school assembly during Black History Month in February, when gripes about the freshly inaugurated president were still mostly hushed.

That month, a group of smiley and fidgety students at B. Bernice Young School sang a medley of two short songs praising the president.

The first song begins, “Mmm, mmm, mmm, Barack Hussein Obama/He said that all must lend a hand/To make this country strong again.”

The second one was set to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and included the refrain, “Hooray, Mr. President.”

While the performance is seven months old, the outrage is new and came about because of the discovery of a YouTube video.

It’s been fodder for conservative opinion leaders such as columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin and Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck.

The notion that schoolchildren are being subjected to partisan politics rather than taught civics emerged earlier this month before an Obama speech to students was played in thousands of schools.

By then, unlike February, there was broader mistrust of Obama, particularly over his health insurance overhaul plans. Concerns that he would use his speech to students as a political tool grew partly because the White House initially released a lesson plan encouraging students to “help the president.”

The plan was revised and the message to students was not overtly political.

News about the song brought a quick response from New Jersey’s Department of Education. Spokeswoman Beth Auerswald said the department wants “to ensure students can celebrate the achievements of African Americans during Black History Month without inappropriate partisan politics in the classroom.”

Auerswald said the state would also look into whether posting the video online violated the privacy of students.

Superintendent Christopher Manno defended the performance in Friday’s editions of the Burlington County Times.

“There was no intention to indoctrinate children,” he said. “The teacher’s intention was to engage the children in an activity to recognize famous and accomplished African Americans.”

He said he would not identify the teacher who led the song. State education officials said she retired at the end of the last school year.

The source of the video is not entirely clear. In Malkin’s column, she said it was posted in June on the YouTube channel of author Charisse Carney-Nunes, who wrote the children’s book “I Am Barack Obama.”

The song medley was presented to Carney-Nunes, who had been invited to the school, as a demonstration of a project the children had put together, her public relations firm said in a statement.

“Charisse feels it is unfortunate that an event put together with sincere intentions to encourage literacy while celebrating the contributions of African Americans to our great nation has become political fodder and hopes cooler heads will prevail,” the hoverFly media statement said.

The video was ubiquitous online Friday but was not listed under Carney-Nunes’ feed.

Officials at the Burlington Township Board of Education did not return calls Friday to discuss the incident or how much public response it received, and the district’s Web site was not available.

Leslie Gibson, the mother of a kindergartner and a second-grader, said the incident was not addressed in Thursday evening’s back-to-school assembly.

Gibson said that while parents had different views about how problematic the song may have been, one thing was unanimous: They don’t like having television trucks and reporters camped out on the streets near the school.

Friday afternoon, there were two police cars posted outside the building.

There wasn’t much protest, though. One man, Chris Concannon, from nearby Magnolia, was outside hoping to speak with school officials about what happened.

“It’s just like the Hitler Youth all over again,” said Concannon, an unemployed 26-year-old former National Guardsman. “They should be learning history, but instead they’re being taught to worship the president.”

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Wash. Times and Fox News now unleashing mobs on private citizens (including kids)

September 29, 2009 7:23 am ET

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200909290001

by Eric Bolhert

Last week, a Washington Times blogger posted a call to arms, beseeching readers to help the newspaper dig up more information regarding a long list of arts organization representatives who took part in a conference call with the White House on August 10. The call was part of a National Endowment for the Arts initiative, and it’s a conference call that was secretly taped and has been wildly overhyped in conservative media circles as some sort of linchpin in a larger criminal enterprise being run out of the White House to politicize the arts. (There’s no evidence the August 10 conference call broke any laws.)

Still, the Times was asking for help. It wanted readers to search through a spreadsheet it posted that included names of the arts representatives who participated in the NEA conference call. The Times wanted readers to snoop around online — doing some crowdsourcing — and find out everything they could about the arts reps.

 In theory, of course, online dirt-digging and sleuthing makes perfect sense and represents a new era of participatory journalism embraced by the Internet. Josh Marshall and his reporting team at Talking Points Memo, for instance, famously used crowdsourcing to track policy positions of members of Congress during the debate over Social Security in 2005. Readers also chipped in and helped rifle through thousands of pages of memos that the Bush White House dumped at a time when the U.S. attorney scandal was widening. Thanks to Marshall’s readers, TPM was able to tease out all sorts of interesting news leads.

 Note, however, who the targets of TPM’s crowdsourcing were: members of Congress and other major players in the federal government. Marshall urged his readers to monitor politicians and to read through government documents while focusing on people in power who are expected to be held publicly accountable.

But The Washington Times‘ disturbing call to arms? The paper wanted its readers to find out all they could about private citizens who work at little-known arts organizations and whose only connection to the spotlight was that they were invited to dial in to a conference call.

Times blogger Kerry Picket assured readers, “The people on the call didn’t necessarily do anything controversial or wrong.” Yet look at the kind of dirt Times readers were urged to dig up about the arts reps. Had they:

• Been active in Democratic politics?

• Made any campaign donations recently?

• Blogged for The Huffington Post?

• Believed in the 9-11 “Truther” conspiracy theory?

The obvious odor of Red Scare-era snitching that hung over the Times‘ wrongheaded project was too much to take even for some loyal conservative readers. Wrote one Times reader in the comments section:

As a Republican, this story makes me sick to my stomach. What is this? A witch hunt? McCarthy is back? As someone who lived through that, I am saddened to see the Washington Times engage in this type of behavior. STOP ACTING LIKE THIS. They are private citizens. I am a VERY proud Republican, but this is not who we are.

But increasingly, this is who conservatives have become. They’ve become a mindless mob, and the right-wing media, more and more often, are sending their overeager foot soldiers out on seek-and-destroy missions involving private citizens. They’re even targeting innocent schoolchildren, like the group of second-graders in New Jersey that became a right-wing (mob) object of disgust last week after an old YouTube clip surfaced that showed the students singing a song in honor of the president of the United States. (You’re supposed to recoil in horror at the mere suggestion of such a thing happening in America.)

The reason the Times‘ crowdsourcing bulletin was so misguided, and possibly even dangerous, was that the people the newspaper was urging to go digging for dirt were, by and large, the same type of people who are packing pistols at anti-Obama rallies, parading around with Hitler posters, and claiming the POTUS wasn’t born in America. Meaning the right-wing mob, which suddenly decided last week that the NEA represented all that is evil in the world, is not all that stable and should not be setting its crooked sights on private citizens.

Again, original research and citizen journalism are both laudable pursuits. But in the hands of right-wing radicals who exhibit very little common sense and even less common decency, the witch hunts of peripheral players, including now-regular attempts to target children, no longer represent journalism in any recognizable sense. Instead, they’re just unsettling — and dangerous — attempts at mob rule. They’re a way to send a signal that anybody who is even marginally involved in public discourse can suddenly become a target of the mob. And then, all bets are off.

This trend of targeting private citizens is not new. But it has become more pronounced in recent weeks and months, as collective Obama hatred has pushed the GOP Noise Machine to ignore the boundaries of fair play. (Like posting the possibly stolen contents of somebody’s Rolodex.)

The growing obsession with singling out children for mob ridicule is especially troubling. Recall in early August, it was an 11-year-old girl who became the object of right-wing taunts after she had the audacity to stand up at an Obama town hall and ask the president a question. Busted! The kid wasn’t participating in public democracy. Instead, the mob called her out as a shifty, “in-the-tank questioner.”

Fox News quickly channeled the blog attacks and posted this headline [emphasis added]:

White House Says Girl with Campaign Ties Chosen at ‘Random’ to Speak at Obama Town Hall

Campaign ties? The girl was in elementary school! How could she have had “campaign ties”? The only “tie” was that her mom was an Obama donor and supporter in 2008, a fact quickly discovered when right-wing bloggers began scouring Facebook photos and friends lists, as well as FEC filings, in search of info about the girl’s mother, a “political hack.” Why? To unmask the girl’s “campaign ties,” of course.

In other words, her mom did what a few million other Americans did last fall, yet in the eyes of Fox News, Michelle Malkin, and the mob leaders, that suddenly meant the woman’s daughter had “campaign ties”? And for right-wing bloggers, that meant the kid was fair game for ridicule? That meant that, of course, she deserved to be mocked as a “leftist plant.” (The caped crusaders online never unearthed a single fact suggesting that the young girl was coached on her question or that Obama knew what it would be before he called on her. By “plant,” the mob simply meant the schoolgirl was the daughter of a Democrat, as if that were news or even relevant.)

The right wing’s latest attack on children was even more astonishing. Fresh off her humiliating claim that 2 million people showed up at the September 12 anti-Obama rally in Washington, D.C., (she was only off by 1.9 million), Malkin urged readers to wallow in disgust over the fact that 18 New Jersey 7-year-olds sang a song in honor of the new president.

Directly and indirectly, the second-graders were attacked as being “creepy,” “Obama-worshipping drones” and cultish members of the “Hitler Youth.” Why? Because they sang a song during Black History Month that honored the accomplishments of America’s first black president. The whole thing was “sick,” the hate mob announced.

Why so sick? Because it was just like what Hitler did! (Again with the Hitler fetish from the far-right fever swamp?)

[W]hen those of us who study history see videos like the one below, it chills us to the bone. It is decidedly reminiscent of the indoctrination techniques that took place in 1930s Germany.

That’s right: A massive, mandatory, state-run indoctrination initiative implemented by a fascist German dictator was just like when a single school teacher in New Jersey independently, without the slightest involvement from the government, decided to teach second-graders a song about Obama. The comparison is almost too dumb for words. And am I the only one who thought the story would have worked as a pseudo-scandal only if the kids were videotaped singing the praise of another country’s president? But in the loopy world of right-wing media, it’s disgusting and disgraceful and cultish when kids today sing the praises of the president of the United States.

Welcome to Bizarro World, where patriotic schoolkids are now the enemy.

The whole senseless attack was painfully dumb and misdirected and represented a shocking invasion of the schoolchildren’s privacy. But the mob had selected its target, which meant that the conservative media had to play along and hype the tale as incredibly important and potentially dangerous. In a desperate attempt to attach some drama to the story about kids who sang nice things about the president, FoxNews.com posted this ominous headline and subhead:

Elementary School Students Reportedly Taught Songs Praising President Obama: Nearly 20 young children are captured in an online video as they sing songs that overflow with campaign slogans and praise for “Barack Hussein Obama,” as they repeatedly chant the president’s name and celebrate his accomplishments. [The original headline can be seen in the page’s URL.]

“Captured.” Like, the little elementary schoolkids were trying to pull a fast one, but the news hounds at Fox busted them good! The comedy was that by “captured,” Fox meant some parent or teacher taped the kids and put it on YouTube, like four months ago. But in the hands of Fox, the kids had been captured.

Mob rules, indeed.

But whenever the right wing ignites the crazies, it’s no laughing matter. And in the case of the “sick,” “creepy” second-graders signing up for duty in the “Hitler Youth,” predictably, after much breathless snooping, the name of the offending elementary school was indentified and its phone number was posted online. And just as predictably, threats of violence began to pour in.

According to a Fox News online report:

The tension at B. Bernice Young Elementary School escalated to such a degree Thursday that the school was placed temporarily on lockdown after its principal received death threats over a YouTube video that showed nearly 20 children being taught songs lauding the president, though back-to-school night events continuing as planned Thursday night at the school.

Ironically, the Fox report was quickly scrubbed, and any mention of looming right-wing mob violence was edited out of the news story. Editors at Fox News can erase all the unseemly mentions of death threats they want, but when right-wing mobs online are whipped into a frenzy and sent out to attack private citizens, they always leave a mark.

 

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