Lou Dobbs has some interesting points about illegal immigration. As I’ve said before, why should people get rewarded for illegal activity and be let to ahead of others who have waited for 10 years for a visa just because of their race?  That’s racist to say that Mexicans should be able to jump to the head of the line of people from say, India or China. But Dobbs has other points I haven’t thought of, like how we let more immigrants in each year than the rest of the world combined! And the misleading language used by the pro-illegal big business elites at some of the mainstream media:

The mainstream media report as if America would no longer be a welcoming nation if we stopped illegal immigration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Why do the national media conveniently and routinely neglect to report that the United States brings in more lawful immigrants than the countries of the rest of the world combined? Each year, we accept 2 million immigrants legally. We give a million legal immigrants permanent residency every year. We bestow citizenship on 700,000 people a year and provide almost half a million work-related visas a year.

Illegal immigration, in fact, has the potential to change the course of American history: Demographers at the Brookings Institution and the Population Reference Bureau paint a troubling picture of the future of our democracy. As more illegal aliens cross our borders and settle in large states like California, Texas and Florida, congressional seats will be redistributed to these bigger states following each decennial Census. States with low levels of immigration will ultimately lose seats as a result. Unfortunately for American citizens, this seismic shift in political representation will be decided by noncitizens that cannot vote.

Congress will soon take up so-called comprehensive immigration reform, and a bipartisan House bill would probably admit 400,000 guest workers a year. And since any plan calling for eventual legalization would include family members who live outside the United States, the legislation would open our borders to tens of millions of people. The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector estimated that the 2006 version of the McCain-Kennedy bill would have added an additional 66 million immigrants over the next 20 years. The bill may change, but that estimate has yet to be refuted.

There’s no question this type of mass immigration would have a calamitous effect on working citizens and their families. Professor Carol Swain, professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt University and author of “Debating Immigration,” would like to see more people speak up for the sectors of society most affected by illegal immigration.

“How many African-American leaders have you seen come out and address the impact that high levels of illegal immigration [are] having in the communities when it comes to jobs, when it comes to education, when it comes to health care?” she asked. “And often, these low-skilled, low-wage workers compete in the same sectors for jobs.”

Let’s have a vigorous open debate on illegal immigration in this country, and let’s begin with the facts. Estimates of illegal aliens in this country range from 12 million to 20 million people. Why doesn’t our government know how many there are?

Shouldn’t this Congress and this president at least recognize that the industries in which illegal aliens are employed in the greatest percentages also are suffering the largest wage declines? And shouldn’t there be an economic impact statement researched and delivered to this Congress, this president and the rest of us before any legislation granting amnesty is even considered?

Shouldn’t we first bring the facts of illegal immigration out of the shadows?

Read the entire article.

The New York Times reports:

50% Good News Is the Bad News in Russian Radio
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
MOSCOW, April 21 — At their first meeting with journalists since taking over Russia’s largest independent radio news network, the managers had startling news of their own: from now on, they said, at least 50 percent of the reports about Russia must be “positive.”

In addition, opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air and the United States was to be portrayed as an enemy, journalists employed by the network, Russian News Service, say they were told by the new managers, who are allies of the Kremlin.

How would they know what constituted positive news?

“When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive,” said one editor at the station who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. “If the stock market is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive.”

In a darkening media landscape, radio news had been a rare bright spot. Now, the implementation of the “50 percent positive” rule at the Russian News Service leaves an increasingly small number of news outlets that are not managed by the Kremlin, directly or through the state national gas company, Gazprom, a major owner of media assets.

The three national television networks are already state controlled, though small-circulation newspapers generally remain independent.

This month alone, a bank loyal to President Vladimir V. Putin tightened its control of an independent television station, Parliament passed a measure banning “extremism” in politics and prosecutors have gone after individuals who post critical comments on Web chat rooms.

Parliament is also considering extending state control to Internet sites that report news, reflecting the growing importance of Web news as the country becomes more affluent and growing numbers of middle-class Russians acquire computers.

On Tuesday, the police raided the Educated Media Foundation, a nongovernmental group sponsored by United States and European donors that helps foster an independent news media. The police carried away documents and computers that were used as servers for the Web sites of similar groups. That brought down a Web site run by the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a media rights group, which published bulletins on violations of press freedoms.

“Russia is dropping off the list of countries that respect press freedoms,” said Boris Timoshenko, a spokesman for the foundation. “We have propaganda, not information.”

Meanwhile, we’re considering letting them in our missile defense system? The Soviets are moving against press freedom, religious freedom, and freedom of association.  Sadly, they are turning back to their old evil ways.  We need to keep track of their aging arsenal of nuclear weapons so they don’t get into the hands of terrorists, and we also need to pressure them to respect freedoms.

Michelle Malkin points out the flawed policies of some journalism schools.  I’ll have a Master’s in Journalism and Media Studies in a few weeks and thank goodness the University of South Florida is a little more with it when it comes to tests.  That said, some, but not all, of the professors definitely have defended the “fake but accurate” scandal of the National Guard memos.

The American Pundit and Suitably Flip also weigh in.

CNN is running a story titled, “7 ‘undocumented immigrants’ pulled out of storm drain” even though later they correctly refer to the illegal immigrants as illegal immigrants. This reminds me of a study on media bias against the truth by the left wing press.

Here’s a good link for contacting your legislator regarding an untiered Internet: ItsOurNet.org.

Related: Net Neutrality: Save the Internet

You think Colbert’s not funny?� Watch out!� The crazy e-mailers are at it again.� Richard Cohen finally knows what it’s like to�be attacked for straying from the leftist lockstep orthodoxy:�

Two weeks ago I wrote about Al Gore’s new movie on global warming. I liked the film. In response, I instantly got more than 1,000 e-mails, most of them praising Gore, some calling him the usual names and some concluding there was no such thing as global warming, if only because Gore said there was. I put the messages aside for a slow day, when I would answer them. Then I wrote about Stephen Colbert and his unfunny performance at the White House correspondents’ dinner.

Kapow! Within a day, I got more than 2,000 e-mails. A day later, I got 1,000 more. By the fourth day, the number had reached 3,499 — a figure that does not include the usual offers of nubile Russian women or loot from African dictators. The Colbert messages began with Patrick Manley (”You wouldn’t know funny if it slapped you in the face”) and ended with Ron (”Colbert ROCKS, you MURDER”) who was so proud of his thought that he copied countless others. Ron, you’re a genius.

I’ve experienced similiar knee-jerk reactions in some classes while obtaining my Journalism Master’s.� For example, one student who never could complete a sentence without staring into space (LSD much?) decided to do her story on ghosts in an alleged haunted house.� No one criticized her, since she was just wanting to write about ghosts.� The only person that did was a more-tolerant liberal who pointed out that people pretend to see “glowing orbs” in photographs.�

Another student decided to write her story about a�stripper who had had two abortions and was about to have another but decided against it, became a Christian, got a steady man in her life, and now volunteers at a crisis pregnancy center.� The ghost-story�student loudly said, “This isn’t going to be a Jesus saves story is it!”� When I said I might write my story about the faith-based prison initiative in Florida, the same student yelled, “Uh!� That is such crap!”� This same woman believes in shamans and Taoism.

If you are pro-life, or even have problems with late-term abortions, against killing of the disabled newborns (or any newborns for that matter), against gay marriage, for traditional values, against porn (or even just extreme porn), for a strong national defense, against illegal immigration, then watch out:� leftists can’t argue against you using reason, so they will rely on fallacies and name-calling.

HotAir links and so does Michelle Malkin with “Welcome to Our World“

I saw United 93 the other day with my girlfriend. I had to walk out during a large segment of it. The camera shook a lot, even when filming the air traffic control tower and other transportation organization shots, to create the “documentary” feel. It worked, but that combined with the stress of watching these evil terrorists sitting next to their future victims made me sick. How can anyone sit there and live beside people, and then board a plane with the intention of killing themselves as well as all of these innocent people? Pure evil, that’s what. These terrorists thought they were going to paradise; boy were they wrong. They did not hijack the planes because of economic disparity (though we should fight hunger), they did not kill those innocent human beings because of some racial prejudice. No, they mass murdered thousands of people because they thought that they would go to paradise for killing people that disagree with them: people that are not Muslim.

George Will also has some commentary on the film, which he quotes “The Soldier’s Faith,” an 1895 speech:

“In this snug, over-safe corner of the world . . . we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous untamed streaming of the world, and in order that we may be ready for danger. . . . Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism.”

The message of the movie is: We are all potential soldiers. And we all may be, at any moment, at the war’s front, because in this war the front can be anywhere.

Go see the movie. And remember why we are tracking down terrorists and trying to secure weapons of mass destruction.

According to Michael Meckler over at the Columbus Dispatch, conservatives read a wider range of blogs than liberals do, with a higher concentration of popular blogs on the left than the popular blogs on the right, which are more evenly distributed:

Unlike the most popular conservative blogs, whose readership is evenly distributed among a variety of sites, Moulitsas� Daily Kos dominates the liberal blogosphere, with more than three quarters of a million visits each day, or nearly five times the readership of the next most popular progressive blog, Eschaton. According to recent statistics from SiteMeter, the 10 th-most-popular political blog on the left attracts roughly 20,000 daily visits, while the 10 thmost-popular political blog on the right has roughly 25,000 daily visits. This drop-off in visits among lesserread blogs continues to be more severe on the left than on the right, indicating that many progressives tend to visit the same small set of sites, giving those blogs much greater influence among Democratic activists than conservative blogs have among Republicans.

Besides hosting considerations, most web sites are able to be accessed at a fairly fast speed. A person can create a blog or web site and that can be accessed by people from around the world. That soon may change. Cable and phone companies are proposing changes to the way the Internet works, where they would charge money for faster access to web sites. So the big corporations’ web sites would load faster if they decided to pay this “protection money” to the telecom giants who currently have a virtual (and sometimes?very real) monopoly on the telephone and cable lines that the Internet runs through.? But citizens, groups, some politicans and even the guy who invented the Web have come out in support of protecting smaller web sites and Net Neutrality. PC World has a good article about the Net Neutrality debate:

Your favorite Web sites may be relegated to the Internet’s slow lane if the companies that run its backbone network have their way. Proposed services from telecommunications and cable companies would let ISPs and other Web businesses pay extra to receive preferential treatment for their data packets carrying everything from video to music to text over the Internet. Such packet prioritization would deliver a more responsive Web to those sites’ visitors–a valuable perk for high-bandwidth services like streaming video.

Rick Boucher points out in BusinessWeek Online in “Beware of a Two-Lane Internet” the problem and solution:

Some companies’ efforts may mean larger outfits with financial heft get faster-priority access on the Net. At stake is the very essence of the Web.

In the decade since Congress last rewrote the nation’s telecommunications laws, our open and accessible Internet has become a wellspring for innovation, producing the likes of Google (GOOG ), Yahoo (YHOO ), eBay (EBAY ), Amazon (AMZN ), and thousands of smaller successful e-commerce enterprises. Collectively, the services they sell at home and abroad, and the jobs they have created, are driving forces of the 21st-century economy.

Yet storm clouds are gathering, threatening to inhibit further progress. And as we prepare this year to refine our telecommunications rules once again, a measure to assure continued Internet openness and accessibility is now required.

Recently, executives at some telephone companies have indicated that their business model for providing broadband service will include not only charging customers for an Internet connection but also assessing a fee on Web sites to enable their customers to reach them more quickly.

Essentially, what these executives are proposing is the creation of a two-lane Internet where larger, more established Web sites with financial resources that pay for fast-lane access will be able to squeeze out smaller, emerging Web sites.

One must ask what will happen to the next Google or Yahoo struggling in a garage today, if new, innovative companies (that must often give away their services as they strive to become established) are stuck with inferior, slow-lane Internet access, simply because they lack the resources to pay the toll-booth keepers.

The solution…

…a firm principle of network neutrality is essential. With two simple new rules, and without hurting consumers or limiting innovation, telephone companies could launch an array of new services, including high-quality multichannel television.

Under the first requirement, broadband providers would be prohibited from blocking, interfering with, or impairing the ability of Internet users to access lawful content, applications, and services on the Internet. Under the second principle, the broadband operators would be prohibited from favoring themselves or their affiliates in the allocation, use, or quality of Internet access services.

…

Simply put, to foster the conditions that have contributed so much to our economy and our way of life, we need to avoid a two-lane Internet, controlled by incumbents manning toll booths. That’s the net on net neutrality.

Proponents of keeping the web free of bandwidth favoritism is not without its opponents. In a bit of doublespeak, Gerald Wesel, CEO of Ellacoya Networks, defended charging some web sites money for fast loading time:

The reality is that traffic must be managed in order to ensure fairness of service quality for all Internet users.

But cable and phone companies, like Verizon and Time Warner, already have a virtual monopoly on many markets. In many areas, there is only one cable provider. Opponents of Net Neutrality talk about the “free market” but a monopoly is not the free market. The phone and cable companies have a strangehold on the lines that connect the various computers. They should not abuse this to favor their own streaming videos or web sites that pay “protection money” so that their web sites load faster (kind of a like a broadband mob).

Some politicians have proposed a common sense idea to ban these companies from favoring one paying web site (a huge corporate web site) over others (smaller web sites that cannot pay protection fees). Although the vote was not completely partisan, mostly Republicans voted against saving the web about a month ago, although some Republicans have supported less regulatory ideas to combat favoring one content provider over itself or another.

I am for the free market and capitalism (with a safety net at the bottom for those that are poor, but not helping the people that are just lazy and refuse to work). But I am also for freedom of speech (besides the exceptions of copyright, actual malice, slander and the rare obsenity). A handful of companies should not be able to discriminate on the basis of paying protection money to them, just because they own the lines that connect the web. I feel the web is more important than even radio and television.

See also:

CNet’s Net Neutrality Showdown

Net neutrality fans lose on Capitol Hill

Without ‘Net neutrality,’ will consumers pay twice?

Should the Internet Play Favorites?

Don’t let phone giants ‘Ctrl’ what you get on the ‘Net?(USA Today)

When the Net Goes From Free to Fee?(Newsweek)

Do something!

Save the Internet

Common Cause’s?Hands of My Internet!?and Net Neutrality

Others blogging or writing about Net Neutrality:

Mia Culpa, Gici, DavensJournal, Rep. Ed Barkley, Jason Wong, Accomodatingly, Josh Silver, Washington Post (Internet Firms Want FCC to Enforce Net Neutrality), (The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet),

Local news stations often do deal with important issues, from government corruption and waste to “on your side” style news segments. But sometimes they focus on scare tactic–”your water may be killing you, find out why at 11″–or just fluff. Either way, they talk way too slow. And apparently this Alabama news station ran out of ideas, so they interviewed a bunch of people about “leprechaun sightings.” My favorite parts include when the guy talks about his pipe he plays, handed down to him from his Irish ancestors and the sketch of the possible “leprechaun.”

They’re after me lucky charms!