Up until now, Google has been able to avoid being hoisted by its own Net Neutrality due to the fact that the firm has not been directly involved as an ISP, but rather has been a partner of ISPs such as T-Mobile. We can point out all we want how they have more money and more market power than any ISP, but until they started providing the services that ISPs provide, we could only get so far.

But now, the day comes that Google gets further into the ISP business. Google is launching its own public DNS server. Ignore the misleading Register header, but read the content. The Google Public DNS is a direct launch of a service that ISPs provide, and that puts Google even further into the role of a gatekeeper. They can already make a site disappear from the Internet from the perspective of their searchers, with no transparency in the process whatsoever. Now they can make a site entirely inaccessible to its users because without a DNS lookup, your webpage, your email, your everything will create error messages instead of connectivity.

So here’s the question: Will Google obey its own Google/Obama/Genachowski Net Neutrality principles, or will Google Public DNS be as non-neutral and non-transparent as every single other service Google provides? Will Google deny DNS forwarding for any domain they deem a ’spammer’ and deny ‘Pagerank’ to?

The world awaits an answer.

I’ve said before that Google was treading dangerously near to hypocrisy in the contrast between its promoted public policy and its own internal policy, but now the large, wealthy firm has gone well over the line.

Google is a widely outspoken proponent of the Obama administration’s Net Neutrality plan. At the core of this plan are two “principles” outlined by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. First is the principle of neutrality that “would prevent Internet access providers from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management,” as Genachowski has said. The second is the principle of transparency that “would ensure that Internet access providers are transparent about the network management practices they implement.”

Conveniently, the same two principles Google wants private ISPs to meet, Google itself flagrantly ignores, even though Google’s market power gives their actions more effect than the actions of any ISP. Take the case of Studio Briefing to see Google ignoring both principles of the Net Neutrality push.

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Today, Dana Milbank has an article up on the Washington Post’s Washington Sketch blog where he basically skewers a number of Senate Republicans for employing the filibuster against President Obama’s Lefty fringe judicial picks.

The story goes something like this; given the GOP’s attempt (the so-called “Nuclear Option”) to end the filibuster for Presidential nominations during the leadership of the hapless Frist, certain GOP Senators, like Alabama’s Jeff Sessions and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell are being hypocritical by voting against cloture on President Obama’s nomination of the Left-Wing extremist and disciple of result-oriented jurisprudence that is David Hamilton to 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Of course, this is using that special self-serving Leftard definition of hypocrisy that seeks to apply standards to others that they would never apply to themselves.

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I’m a conservative, so I have no problem with anyone using their rights to enter the public discourse, and I’m not allergic to corporations. So I when I call the latest from Google “astroturf”, I’m saying it purely to illustrate the hypocrisy of the left, because by their standard Google is becoming quite an installer of the fake grass roots.

I find it entirely unfair that the left gets to try to shout down our side while theirs goes entirely unnoticed. If we don’t at least speak up, then the left’s arguments might get some traction.

So let’s watch carefully. Google has hired Frannie Wellings, the telecommuniations advisor to Senator Byron Dorgan, North Dakota Democrat. Sounds boring, but dig deeper. Dorgan was the author and sponsor of the Senate’s Net Neutrality bill in 2007. Is Google buying access? That’s what the left would say if the parties were reversed.

They’d especially say that when the job that Wellings is taking was just created. She is to be Google’s “federal policy outreach manager.” In other words, she’s going to run Google’s lobbying operations in Washington. Which means either she or people accountable to her are going to be going right back into Dorgan’s office.

Further, before taking the job with Dorgan, Wellings worked at… yup, Free Press, the special interest group that founded and runs Save the Internet.

What a coincidence it is that Google, Save the Internet, and a Democrat Politican are linked like this! Free Press and Google must justify this if they are to continue their shameless attacks on our side, instead of arguing with facts and logic about the benefits and disadvantages of their goal: aggressive regulation of the Internet, centered on an FCC picking winners and losers in private network policy disputes.

Promoted from diaries. - Moe Lane.

I debated posting this video, because it is a child. If I had found a transcript, I would have used it instead. But, I’m hoping people will be mindful that it is a child, mourning for his Grandpa. The fact that he is being exploited to spout policy promotion that he likely doesn’t even understand is on the Adults, not on him.

I post it only to show the hypocrisy and the gross opportunism prevalent on the left and on vile display during this entire week filled with nauseating Kennedy hagiography.

What Would Jesus Do? We are to believe that he would wink away negligent homicide in favor of Obamacare, evidently. Homicide? No big whoop; the REAL danger is tonsil poaching and feet pilfering by evil profiteering doctors. Profits are the true sin, you know.

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Updated at the bottom.

Attention leftists: hypocrisy is not a failure to live up to one’s own ideals. Hypocrisy is a willful professing of a belief, that one that does not truly believe. An outspoken Christian who commits adultery is not a hypocrite. An outspoken atheist who prays is a hypocrite. In today’s extended lesson Google must either accept that it is undermining the Internet, or be a hypocrite.

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Noted energy expert, environmental Luddite and hypocrite Robert Kennedy, Jr., aims to stymie natural gas drilling in New York State by hyping unrealistic and irrational fears of environmental contamination. At issue is the method used to stimulate production in gas wells known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”. Truth be told, Kennedy and the greenies would find something objectionable in anything an energy company would propose.

The Kennedy family fortune has its roots in the ethanol-importing business, although the ethanol in question was potable and not fuel-grade. Robert Kennedy, Jr. is a Harvard-educated environmental lawyer (law degrees from UVA and Pace) and general counsel of an environmental watchdog organization called Riverkeeper. His association with Riverkeeper began in 1983 as a result of 1,500 hours of community service that was suggested to him by a Federal judge.

Ironically, Kennedy derives income from the Arctic Royalty Limited Partnership, a trust created from two family-owned oil companies in order to minimize tax liability. Robert has also opposed the Cape Wind Project, a commercial proposal to build a large wind farm in Nantucket Sound, near the family compound in Hyannisport.

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‘Truth’ is precisely what the Democrats don’t want right now.

Senate Democratic leaders oppose the immediate establishment of a “Truth Commission” to probe harsh interrogation tactics as they face pressure to reveal what they knew of practices the Obama administration has since labeled “torture.”

While nearly all Democrats this week backed the creation of a special commission to probe the causes of the financial crisis, and while the party previously supported the independent 9/11 Commission, its leaders on Thursday balked at the idea of taking a similar approach to unearthing answers about the controversial interrogation methods approved by the Bush administration.

There’s actually a fairly significant difference between investigating ‘the causes of the financial crisis’ and investigating ‘controversial interrogation methods’: no, not the fact that Democrats were only up to their eyeballs in one or the other. They were, of course, heavily involved in both. No, the difference is that in the case of the financial crisis there is actually a national consensus that the end result was bad. The same consensus does not agree on the interrogation methods*.

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Via Hot Air, I see that notorious, bloodthirsty polar bear-murderer Al Gore is up to his usual environmental violations - take that any way you like - in the pursuit of his destructive lifestyle:

Drew Johnson, president of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research —the same organization that also found Gore’s home consumes 20 times more electricity than the average household — told Yeas & Nays that Gore’s Belle Meade-section mansion did not go dark during the global campaign’s designated hour between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m.

Johnson did admit that although it wasn’t as bright as can be, Gore did have on “a dozen or so” floodlights on his trees, a light shining on his address number, and a noticeable “bluish glow” from his powered-on televisions and computers coming from inside his house.

That bluish glow was probably actually Cerenkov radiation: Gore’s just the sort of Gaia-denying hypocrite to have a secret nuclear reactor in his basement. After all, a man who’d have a kill rating of four millibears a year from his personal lifestyle alone can’t be trusted at all.  Besides, as the photo to the side shows, he’s not even willing to turn off the light that shows his street address.  As if any one in the area could miss it, what with the unholy glow of his profligate energy potlach obscuring the clean, night-time Tennessee sky.

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As a special assistant to President Johnson, Bill Moyers–who is celebrated by our friends on the other side of the partisan divide as an exemplary journalist and voice of the forgotten–did the following:

1. He sought to ferret out gay staff members in the Johnson Administration and tried to get J. Edgar Hoover to investigate whether there were gay staff members in Barry Goldwater’s campaign.
2. He played a part in eavesdropping on Martin Luther King, Jr.
3. He shamelessly sought to plant questions at White House press conferences–so many, that members of the press objected loudly and vociferously.

As a “journalist,” Moyers decries “scripted” Presidential press conferences, even though he once one of the most zealous scripters of Presidential press conferences in history. His accusations of “scripting” against the Bush Administration rest on a joke made by the former President that Moyers conveniently chooses to take oh-so-seriously, while never revealing to his audience that there was never anything facetious about his efforts to script press conferences. And of course, Moyers has nothing to say about the fact that Barack Obama also “scripts” his press conferences.

Jack Shafer’s piece is titled “The Intolerable Smugness of Bill Moyers.” Well put.

Not being content to embrace and expand a program of deniable third-party torture as a viable counter-terrorism tool, the Obama administration has apparently decided to try to mend relations with the nation of Uzbekistan (H/T: Instapundit):

Sources: US considers Uzbekistan as backup base

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is considering resuming military cooperation with hardline Uzbekistan as a potential backup plan given the uncertain future of a nearby air base that is a main artery for troops and supplies for the widening Afghanistan war, U.S. officials said Thursday.

Defense officials say they are examining options for supply routes through a semicircle of nations from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf that could be used in place of a strategic air base in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan.

This is, of course, in response to said air base being closed in response to Russian ‘encouragement’… which is in itself in response to the election of a new President of the United States. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, here.

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An enterprise is is financial trouble and instead of helping it save money, the leaders of that enterprise indulge themselves with creature comforts instead.

A tale from Wall Street? Nope. A tale from Washington:

A day after banning corporate executives from earning more than $500,000 a year via taxpayer bailouts, Mr. Obama on Thursday will head to a Democratic retreat that has burned through half a million dollars in taxpayer cash for annual retreats at luxury resorts.

While President Clinton’s first trip as president was to Detroit, where he held a town hall meeting with average Americans to talk about how to fix the economy, and President Bush flew to Fort Stewart, Ga., to visit soldiers in the 3rd Infantry Division, Mr. Obama’s first trip aboard Air Force One will take him to a luxury resort in Williamsburg.

“Well, I’d — you know, I’d — Williamsburg is — has a lofty place in our country’s history,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, when asked if there was any special significance to the president’s choice. “I don’t know that there’s any great symbolism in this one in particular,” he added at Wednesday’s briefing off the West Wing.

Mr. Obama will head to Kingsmill Resort and Spa in the historical Virginia city to start a three-day planning session. The resort boasts multiple championship golf courses, a full-service spa and six restaurants, noted the Hill newspaper, which broke the story about the Democratic retreats.

Democrats will ride together to the resort on a chartered Amtrak train at a cost to taxpayers of about $70,000, the Hill reported. Taxpayers will also foot the bill for security helicopters to fly above the train. The caucus will spend thousands: In 2003, for example, they spent $11,200 on food and $6,900 on entertainment, the paper said.

The trip comes after several Democratic lawmakers criticized American International Group Inc. executives for spending nearly $500,000 at a company retreat in California just days after the federal government bailed the company out with $85 billion in taxpayer funds. In addition, Wells Fargo & Co., which received $25 billion in taxpayer bailout money and recently announced a $2.3 billion loss for the last quarter of 2008, canceled its planned 12-night junket to expensive hotels in Las Vegas for events that included a luxurious four-day employee sales conference.

Really, the jokes write themselves at this point.

The rough economy is hard on everyone — on workers who want to hold onto their jobs, on homeowners who may be overextended on mortgage payments, and on banks who count on people paying their bills in order to stay solvent.  And while the Obama administration is stealthily preparing another TARP bill to help the banks, Democrat elected officials are making it harder for banks to survive by telling Americans to ignore foreclosures:

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