The Democrat coalition may be fracturing more visibly along abortion lines in the Obamacare debate, but that’s not the only popcorn-friendly battle going on right now. ‘Minority’ groups are going after Net Neutrality now, and nobody is sparing the ‘race card.’

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Listen to Carly Fiorina yourself, if you don’t believe my repeated posts describing how wrong a candidate she is for this party at this moment of conservative mobilization. Is this the time to nominate a candidate who wants to sign a globowarmo treaty with China? Who wants to withhold water from California farmers? Who can say, without gagging, the words “Regulation can play a very important role in bringing about change?” Who blames under regulation for the financial crisis?

Don’t take me at my word. Listen to her. Does she sound like someone who will take this country somewhere different from where Barbara Boxer wants to take us?

They haven’t passed the Net Neutrality regulations, phase one of the push for Single Payer Internet, but the FCC is already plotting phase two: a National Broadband Plan. Call it what you will: a socialist Five Year Plan, fascist-inspired industrial policy, what have you. It’s a frightening step by this administration.

It’s so frightening, in fact, that Senate Democrats think the FCC needs to be more plain spoken about their plans, currently being hidden in overly-fancy language. It’s not impossible to speak about Internet policy in plain language. It’s just not possible to plan fascist takeovers of industries in plain language without scaring voters, is all. Which is why they don’t do it.

Meanwhile, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel refutes Net Neutrality proponents who claim that the practices NN is meant to oppose, are not theoretical:

Net-neutrality advocates raise the specter of providers censoring websites by slowing or cutting off access to them in the absence of new rules. Yet they cite only three isolated instances of this in the past five years. Each was quickly resolved.

Once again, we get more evidence that Net Neutrality is really just the crisis that progressives are using to grow government. We have to stop them.

You may remember when Carly Fiorina insinuated that anyone who opposes extensive government regulation of the Internet, is covering for child rapists. I was confident that DeVore would get back to me with a record contradicting that slimy attack, but also offered the Fiorina people an opportunity to get an airing of their candidate’s record on pro-life issues.

I received nothing from Fiorina. However DeVore’s campaign sent me DeVore’s 2006 fight for “Jessica’s Law”, a large expansion of legal protections of society against the sexual predators and killers of children. DeVore stood up against Democrats looking to be lenient, or to use a phrase Democrats use against us all the time, “putting dollars ahead of childrens’ lives.”

DeVore also fought to expand California’s predation laws, making it a crime for an adult to lure a 13 or 14 year old youth away from home, and expanding forfeiture of the tools (presumably computers and other telecommunications devices) used by criminals to accomplish that. This provides protection when a minor is lured away but not (yet) attacked.

Carly Fiorina truly is panicked. The NRSC has been spooked by the Scozzafava/Hoffman/Owens race, and is more or less going to leave Fiorina out to dry. And while she got the support of conservative favorite Tom Coburn to match Chuck DeVore’s Jim DeMint, the rest of her supporters paint a different picture. Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Olympia Snowe, Lisa Murkowski: to many of us, these are what is wrong with the Republican Senate caucus.

So now she’s launched prematurely, shot the wad of endorsements she has in the middle of a week, rushed to pander to the right by appearing in the OC Register, but even that’s not enough. Now she’s making outrageous attacks on Chuck DeVore and the rest of us who favor an Internet free of burdensome government regulation.

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The last time a Democrat was in the White House we got the Communications Decency Act (since thrown out by the Supreme Court) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (still a weight on the neck of American innovators). This time we’re not only seeing “Net Neutrality” being used as cover for sweeping proposed regulation of the Internet like never before seen in this country, but we’re also due to expand copyright further.

The best thing about the DMCA is that its long arm can’t extend offshore, so Americans have been able to bypass it when needed by working with non-Americans who retain their rights to such technically-critical activities as reverse engineering.

But now the Obama administration is looking to promote an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a trojan horse for a Global DMCA. Or worse actually, because the DMCA only requires ISPs to act on specific copyrightholder requests to shut down accused infringers. Says Cory Doctorow, the ACTA would require ISPs to be active nannies policing copyright, and would outright kill Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, and probably Twitter. Further, your complete access to the Internet could be shut down, without warning, just because you are accused of being a copyright infringer.

Elections have consequences. How’s teaching the Republicans a lesson working out, libertarians?

We won the big statewide races yesterday, and now it’s back to work trying to win some more. The California Senate primary may not be until June, but when we’re faced with an entrenched incumbent like Barbara Boxer, we need all the lead time we can get.

Up until now, the DC types have all been supporting Carly Fiorina in our primary, even though she had not yet declared her candidacy, and had yet shown either an inability or an unwillingness to campaign to the Republican voters of this state. Thus, that early support had failed to move any dials as Assemblyman Chuck DeVore has raised money well, gained loyal grass roots support, and ran ahead of Fiorina against Boxer in polls. But now, with the fallout of Dede Scozzafava’s blowup spreading nationwide, events are moving more quickly.

The NRSC is conceding its positions in primaries, pulling a crutch out from under Fiorina’s already-limping campaign. Conservative DC types are taking advantage of the new neutrality, too, starting with Senator Jim DeMint endorsing DeVore, while Fiorina has the backing of South Carolina’s other Senator, Lindsey Graham.

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What do you get when you combine an ISP active in Internet filtering with a left-wing group that is essentially the online ACLU? You get the broad, bipartisan opposition to the FCC’s plans for Internet regulation that are being sold as Net Neutrality.

It was remarkable enough when Governors left and right all wrote to the FCC against Net Neutrality. But now when Comcast is on the same side of a dispute as the Electronic Froniter Foundation, that’s a sign that nobody who is aware of the technical issues wants any part of what Barack Obama and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski are planning.

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It’s the little things that illustrate the big problems with the common evidence that the Earth is heating up rapidly. Take this picture I took yesterday afternoon, as I hiked on out to Wal-Mart to check on after-Halloween cheap candy*:

I always get a kick out of seeing these little guys running around. You see, when I first set foot in Moreno Valley almost a quarter century ago**, I didn’t see this kind of wildlife running around. We’re at the edge of the desert, and as the town was first being developed, the only things I saw were the big old tumbleweeds rolling down the street on every windy day. Brown, dry, and prickly, they weren’t very friendly to little guys like in that picture above.

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…plotting to pass Net Neutrality.

I’ve written in this space for a while about who the real Astroturfers are in the Net Neutrality fight. Google – and its puppets like Free Press – are promoting this idea that it’s a struggle between big telecommunications firms, and the little guys. Except the little guys are actually bigger Internet firms. The corporations pressing for Net Neutrality are Fortune 500 and even Dow Jones Industrial Average firms, with billions in cash ready to be spent on Net Neutrality, trying to defeat Proposition 8, or even promoting Barack Obama.

That last one makes the FCC’s rush to regulate look bad, given all the placements of Google people within the Obama administration as well as the nearly one million dollars that Google employees gave to the Obama-Biden campaign. How do we know that the secretive Obama White House isn’t directing the FCC to pay off Google?

After all, we know he’s giving donors special treatment. In fact, it has come out that FCC Chairman Genachowski himself was a major fundraiser for Obama, pulling in over a half million for the campaign. Why shouldn’t we believe that this is all a big circle of back scratching in the Obama adminstration, when he refuses to release the kinds of information we need to determine otherwise?

The President has played political games with information all along. He dangles his birth certificate on a string in order to distract the right. He’s keeping as little of the Obamacare agenda in writing as possible, because he knows if we read it and expose his plans, we can win the fight, so we end up with ridiculous spectacles like a Senate committee voting on a bill that hasn’t been written yet. And now he’s playing footsie with donors in secret.

We must encourage and join Senator McCain and Representative Blackburn in their fresh legislative efforts to stop the Google/Obama Net Neutrality scheme. We cannot allow this kind of quid pro quo to go unchallenged.

As most of us watch the special election in New York, we still have a Senate primary in California to deal with. It’s the same old story, though. There are two kinds of Republicans.

One kind celebrates big government and progressive control over America. Carly Fiorina, like Dede Scozzafava, is one of those:

While some of us are fighting hard against the Obama push to nationalize the Internet, Fiorina goes behind our backs and joins them, just as Scozzafava will work with ACORN and Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Chuck DeVore knows the score and endorses Doug Hoffman.

There are two kinds of Republicans. Some are on our side. Some are more interested in the left. I know which I prefer to represent our party.

As we have covered before in this space, the far left does anything possible to avoid having a straight-up, honest debate over ideas. Much like the old Communists and Fascists on the streets of Weimar-era Berlin, they’d rather use muscle than ideas to get a victory.

As we’re all aware, one of the current targets is Glenn Beck. In particular, Free Press wants to make him out as a paranoid McCarthyite.

Supposedly he’s seeing socialists, Marxists, and communists everywhere. Even though Senator McCarthy was right, and Communists had infiltrated our government all the way up to Alger Hiss, we’re supposed to think badly of Red hunting. But let’s look at the people themselves at Free Press, leading special interest promoter of the Fairness Doctrine, ownership diversity rules, and of course Net Neturality. Are they as socialist as Beck thinks?

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The time is coming that the left is going to begin its drive for Single Payer Internet, and so the time has come for us to fight back. Finland is gradually nationalizing the Internet and declaring use of other people’s Internet hardware a “right,” and the left is cheering. Obama’s “Internet Czar” does not hide the left’s hopes for an end to freedom and markets for Internet service.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama, and the rest of the radical left want to use the Net Neutrality movement as the crisis that gives cover to sweeping big government action, allowing the FCC to pick winners and losers and dictate to private individuals and firms how their private property must be run, putting government bureaucrats in charge of the Internet.

The dangers of the administration’s Net Neutrality plans are not theoretical:

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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.

The left is at it again. They know that in a straight-up battle of ideas, their socialist perversion of Net Neutrality could never win out. Nobody but the most blindly partisan supporters of Barack Obama wants a government takeover of the Internet, because everybody knows that when government takes something over, freedom in it tends to die.

That is why Save The Internet is resorting to dishonest smear campaigns in an attempt to shout down and discredit their opponents. They want to win by driving all opposition off the field, turning this debate into the Internet equivalent of the streets of Berlin in Weimar Germany. They must not get away with it.

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Does Carly Fiorina care what Republicans think at all? The very day after rejecting the option of taking day trips or making video addresses to Republicans gathered for the state party convention in Indian Wells, Carly Fiorina has begun making day trips to raise money. While this is a natural step for somebody who refuses to reach into her own deep pockets to fund her campaign, this does represent yet another stumble for a campaign that can’t seem to go a day without making a mistake.

It’s no wonder that polls show her running against Barbara Boxer no better than Chuck DeVore, despite Fiorina’s wide reputation of being a pro-abortion “social moderate.” One would think that a candidate who, in the public eye, neutralizes Boxer’s key issue of abortion would do better in the polling, but Fiorina’s failure to achieve anything in the polls is a testament to her failure to campaign effectively and to reach out to the Republican base. Republicans would be critical to her fight against the united front of the Democrat party, the unions, and the press. If she can’t get us on her side, she can’t win.

So why, then, does she snub us and instead turn to the deep pockets? Does she intend to run as a Schwarzenegger-ite “post-partisan?” Does she even have a plan for victory? Even Meg Whitman showed up to Indian Wells, made good speeches, and earned respect even from supporters of other candidates. She put pressure on her opponents, and Steve Poizner did not impress when he replied.

Senator Boxer will have to make a mistake if a Republican is going to beat her in 2010. I doubt Carly Fiorina is capable of applying the pressure to Boxer it will take to make that happen.

Nate Silver once was a respected mathematical analyst. His baseball-related work, such as that at Baseball Prospectus and on PECOTA, showed that he has the ability to make solid, reasoned arguments using mathematical tools.

But now, he’s flushed his own reputation into the toilet with his campaign against Strategic Vision. The pretend math, and lack of serious analysis and justification, in his series of posts against the company is so bad, I expect him any day now to start ranting about how he hasn’t seen a given poll, but he still thinks that Obama has the consistency to pull it out just like the Reds used to. Nate Silver has become the Joe Morgan of politics.

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I am in danger of becoming a broken record on the issue of Net Neutrality in this space, but as aggressively as the Democrats are pushing the issue, it is a danger we all will have to live with. Once again, I will summarize the issue with a minimum of technological impediments to understanding:

Net Neutrality started out as a broad-based movement on the Internet. It wasn’t a left-wing thing at all, but rather was something most of us could support, because it was merely a movement to ensure (usually government franchise-backed) ISP firms could not abuse their monopoly or oligopoly power to coerce their customers to use other services by the firm, such as phone service in the case of AT&T or television service in the case of Comcast. I believe this is a reasonable request. It doesn’t prevent investors in Internet technology from profiting, but rather merely prevents them from abusing government-granted market power to benefit other businesses.

However on Monday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski went beyond that when he outlined his six principles of Net Neutrality in a speech to the Brookings Institution. What he proposes is an intrusive, never-ending government hand in the growth and management of the Internet, one that is clearly aimed at the Socialist goal of “single-payer Internet,” run with the same agile reactiveness as the DMV or the TSA.

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Recently I and others have questioned Carly Fiorina’s commitment to the race to defeat Barbara Boxer in 2010. She won’t fund her own race with her deep pockets, which was supposed to be a key reason to nominate her. She also won’t show up to the California Republican Party meeting in Indian Wells this month (starting today, in fact)*. Her candidacy so far has been characterized as “amateurish”.

Fiorina now says cancer treatment is the reason for her evasiveness so far. And while nobody wishes she would skimp on her cancer treatment, or hope for anything less than a full recovery for her, I join Pejman Yousefzadeh in being skeptical of this explanation.

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There are two candidates who have a chance to win the Republican nomination for Senate in June 2010. One is Chuck DeVore. One of our Fighting Four candidates this primary season, he announced last November his candidacy to defeat Senator Barbara Boxer. Term-limited from his state Assembly seat, he’s committed to victory.

The other is Carly Fiorina. A political novice, never having run for office before, she doesn’t even know if she’s running for this office yet. In big, black letters her own, brand-new website asks “Coming Soon?” It’s no wonder she won’t even fund her own campaign. Why spend that money when she might not even run?

Chuck DeVore is on Facebook. Chuck DeVore is on Twitter, and he’s active on both. Carly Fiorina’s webpage has placeholder, non-functional links to both services. She may, or may not, show up to engage Republicans, and will do so only when it’s convenient for her.

We have two choices in June, but only one candidate is there for us and committed to fighting Barbara Boxer, the dumbest member of the US Senate. The clear choice is Chuck DeVore. I hope we can give to him and good conservatives like him to help him fight for us and win.