n2doc
n2doc's JournalWednesday Toon Roundup 2 - The Rest
Trumpers and GOP
Chrispie
Walker
Visit
ACA
Health
Bigots
DAPL
Flint
EPA
Press
FCC chair rails against net neutrality
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai railed against net neutrality on Tuesday, saying that the 2015 rules are “outdated” and are stifling the internet economy.
“The FCC decided to apply last-century, utility-style regulation to today’s broadband networks,” Pai said during a speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.
“Rules developed to tame a 1930s monopoly were imported into the 21st century to regulate the Internet. This reversal wasn’t necessary to solve any problem; we were not living in a digital dystopia.”
The new Republican chairman, speaking just two days after the two-year anniversary of the landmark Open Internet Order, pledged to approach regulation with a “light-touch” approach. He blamed the rules for stifling economic growth and investment in the broadband industry.
more
http://thehill.com/policy/technology/321563-fcc-chair-rails-against-net-neutrality
Asshole
Minnesota's budget surplus grows to $1.65 billion
By Erin Golden
Star Tribune
Minnesota’s economic outlook is ticking upward, with the state budget agency forecasting Tuesday a $1.65 billion budget surplus for Gov. Mark Dayton and state lawmakers to work with in the current legislative session.
That’s up from a December estimate of $1.4 billion. The projected surplus is the main measure by which Dayton and lawmakers will make decisions about state spending levels for the next two years.
Budget officials said that while the state’s economic situation has improved, “federal policy unknowns create significant risk” for the state’s finances. That’s a nod to uncertainty around the priorities and actions of the new Trump administration and Republican majorities in the U.S. Congress.
more
http://www.startribune.com/minnesota-s-budget-surplus-grows-to-1-65-billion/414982274/
Hear that cough (walker) cough (brownback) cough (branstad)?
The Reichstag Warning
by Timothy Snyder
On February 27, 1933 the German Parliament building burned, Adolf Hitler rejoiced, and the Nazi era began. Hitler, who had just been named head of a government that was legally formed after the democratic elections of the previous November, seized the opportunity to change the system. “There will be no mercy now,” he exulted. “Anyone standing in our way will be cut down.”
The next day, at Hitler’s advice and urging, the German president issued a decree “for the protection of the people and the state.” It deprived all German citizens of basic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly and made them subject to “preventative detention” by the police. A week later, the Nazi party, having claimed that the fire was the beginning of a major terror campaign by the Left, won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections. Nazi paramilitaries and the police then began to arrest political enemies and place them in concentration camps. Shortly thereafter, the new parliament passed an “enabling act” that allowed Hitler to rule by decree.
After 1933, the Nazi regime made use of a supposed threat of terrorism against Germans from an imaginary international Jewish conspiracy. After five years of repressing Jews, in 1938 the German state began to deport them. On October 27 of that year, the German police arrested about 17,000 Jews from Poland and deported them across the Polish border. A young man named Herschel Grynszpan, sent to Paris by his parents, received a desperate postcard from his sister after his family was forced across the Polish border. He bought a gun, went to the German embassy, and shot a German diplomat. He called this an act of revenge for the suffering of his family and his people. Nazi propagandists presented it as evidence of an international Jewish conspiracy preparing a terror campaign against the entire German people. Josef Goebbels used it as the pretext to organize the events we remember as Kristallnacht, a massive national pogrom of Jews that left hundreds dead.
The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime. There is nothing new, to be sure, in the politics of exception. The American Founding Fathers knew that the democracy they were creating was vulnerable to an aspiring tyrant who might seize upon some dramatic event as grounds for the suspension of our rights. As James Madison nicely put it, tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency.” What changed with the Reichstag fire was the use of terrorism as a catalyst for regime change. To this day, we do not know who set the Reichstag fire: the lone anarchist executed by the Nazis or, as new scholarship by Benjamin Hett suggests, the Nazis themselves. What we do know is that it created the occasion for a leader to eliminate all opposition.
more
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/02/26/reichstag-fire-manipulating-terror-to-end-democracy/
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