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Obama's Plan to Regulate the Internet is 332 Pages. The Public Can't Read It!

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The FCC comes to decisions wholly independent of presidential involvement. It could, and would have told the president to pound sand if he did anything you suggested.

How can you possibly know that?

The president cannot order Wheeler to do anything, similarly to how he can write briefs and publicly advocate for supreme court justices to decide in his favor, yet cannot do anything concretely to make it so.

The President does not have the legal authority to force Wheeler to issue those regulations, but that is a completely separate issue from whether the President has the ability to heavily influence him, and how willing Wheeler is to follow the President's wishes. All that requires is the completely reasonable assumption that Wheeler is a loyal supporter of Obama. And that's not really much of an "assumption" at all....

Tom Wheeler, a well-regarded venture capitalist and former cable and wireless industry lobbyist, is the frontrunner to be the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, according to top telecom analysts and D.C. policy sources. Wheeler, who is currently managing director at D.C.-based firm Core Capital Partners, is a longtime Obama loyalist. During Obama’s first presidential campaign, he and his wife Carol spent six weeks in Iowa, where they worked the phones and knocked on doors for the candidate. Wheeler also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Obama’s two presidential campaigns, according to the Center For Responsive Politics.

http://business.time.com/2013/04/16...t-and-obama-loyalist-seen-as-fcc-frontrunner/

The idea that Wheeler is some non-partisan, middle of the road, completely independent guy who would tell Obama to "pound sand" if he indicated a preference for particular policies is naïve in the extreme.

And just to add, I'd be equally skeptical of a Republican claim that the President was not involved if a recent appointee who was a staunch supporter of that President issued a controversial regulation.

 
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Yeah, clearly ex-military guy is the ignorant one in here because he's a conspiracy theorist. Again, you can be #2 shot when it all goes down.

They have been conditioned to mock all conspiracies. Their government is benevolent with only their best interests in mind. That's what their teachers told them, that's what their TV tells them. It's like a hypnotist snapping his fingers. When they hear a conspiracy they don't even think, just react with anger. Our rulers have done a superb job of it. And more often than not the conspiracies are true, which they then dismiss.
 
The White House has no authority to do anything that you suggested.

Oh i agree completely! That's my point if it wasn't clear.


The FCC comes to decisions wholly independent of presidential involvement.

I agree again, that is what is supposed to happen...that clearly didn't happen.


It could, and would have told the president to pound sand if he did anything you suggested.

I agree, Wheeler could have...but he didn't.


The president cannot order Wheeler to do anything, similarly to how he can write briefs and publicly advocate for supreme court justices to decide in his favor, yet cannot do anything concretely to make it so.

Semantics. Order, force, strong-arm...call it what you want. Wheeler flip-flopped because the White House told him to. End of story.
 
How can you possibly know that
I do not know what would have happened in an alternative timeline. Withdrawn.

The President does not have the legal authority to force Wheeler to issue those regulations, but that is a completely separate issue from whether the President has the ability to heavily influence him, and how willing Wheeler is to follow the President's wishes. All that requires is the completely reasonable assumption that Wheeler is a loyal supporter of Obama. And that's not really much of an "assumption" at all....

Tom Wheeler, a well-regarded venture capitalist and former cable and wireless industry lobbyist, is the frontrunner to be the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, according to top telecom analysts and D.C. policy sources. Wheeler, who is currently managing director at D.C.-based firm Core Capital Partners, is a longtime Obama loyalist. During Obama’s first presidential campaign, he and his wife Carol spent six weeks in Iowa, where they worked the phones and knocked on doors for the candidate. Wheeler also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Obama’s two presidential campaigns, according to the Center For Responsive Politics.

http://business.time.com/2013/04/16...t-and-obama-loyalist-seen-as-fcc-frontrunner/

The idea that Wheeler is some non-partisan, middle of the road, completely independent guy who would tell Obama to "pound sand" if he indicated a preference for particular policies is naïve in the extreme.
What does this have to do with what I was discussing with Maximus? He tried to claim some kind of hypocrisy on the president's part for the FCC process not being open based on his comments during the 2007 campaign. The president has no power over the FCC's deliberative process and has no ability to make them more or less transparent. Therefore, Maximus's claims are without factual basis.

Now addressing your point, if the FCC is so subject to the president's influence, why in the world did it take until 2015 for it to enact these rules when the president campaigned on them and appointed Julius Genachowski under the heavy assumption that he would enact these rules?
 
They have been conditioned to mock all conspiracies. Their government is benevolent with only their best interests in mind. That's what their teachers told them, that's what their TV tells them. It's like a hypnotist snapping his fingers. When they hear a conspiracy they don't even think, just react with anger. Our rulers have done a superb job of it. And more often than not the conspiracies are true, which they then dismiss.

In fairness, I've only been trained to mock conspiracies when they list Facebook and Wikipedia searches as actual sources.

In any case, keep doing the opposite in an effort to be against the mainstream while still bowing down to the sources and outlets promoting that different angle.

Let's just do us all a favor and not pretend your a far more independent thinker than the others. Not a great look for your crowd, honestly.
 
What does this have to do with what I was discussing with Maximus? He tried to claim some kind of hypocrisy on the president's part for the FCC process not being open based on his comments during the 2007 campaign. The president has no power over the FCC's deliberative process and has no ability to make them more or less transparent. Therefore, Maximus's claims are without factual basis.

Because if you accept my argument that Obama had a lot of influence over the loyal head of the FCC even if he could not issue legally enforceable orders, then your entire argument falls apart. Under my scenario, if Obama had said "you should release those regs ahead of time" Wheeler likely would have complied. Likewise, if he'd said "don't release them", Wheeler likely would have complied with that. After all, that's largely a political consideration in the first place.

Now addressing your point, if the FCC is so subject to the president's influence, why in the world did it take until 2015 for it to enact these rules when the president campaigned on them and appointed Julius Genachowski under the heavy assumption that he would enact these rules?

For the same reason Obama waited until now to issue executive orders on immigration that he could have issued years ago. He determined that the last two years of his Presidency was the best time to issue executive actions that might be highly controversial.
 
For the same reason Obama waited until now to issue executive orders on immigration that he could have issued years ago. He determined that the last two years of his Presidency was the best time to issue executive actions that might be highly controversial.

I know for a fact that this is false.

The President entered office with the hope that he could make inroads with Republican leadership. He tried for two years after the Democrats lost the House to appease the Republicans, and this is well documented. It is widely known that Barack Obama was not the cause of GOP intransigence, and that he was willing to compromise his own party platform to make legislative progress.

You can say a lot of things about the President, surely, but the bolded is just not one of them.

These recent acts of using (and potentially abusing) the executive order powers of the Presidency are a result, by his own admission, of a complete break down of the inner-workings of the federal government. The President and Congress must be able to work together, and for the past 4 years, Congress has simply refused any and all appeals to reason or compromise.
 
These recent acts of using (and potentially abusing) the executive order powers of the Presidency are a result, by his own admission, of a complete break down of the inner-workings of the federal government. The President and Congress must be able to work together, and for the past 4 years, Congress has simply refused any and all appeals to reason or compromise.

That is the reason Congress exists! If the job of the government was to "make progress", the Constitution would make it much easier and give the executive branch the authority to do it without troubling the representatives of the people and states.
 
That is the reason Congress exists!

Congress exists to represent the will of the people and the States (which are extensions of the people themselves); at present it is not fulfilling that role.

If the job of the government was to "make progress", the Constitution would make it much easier and give the executive branch the authority to do it without troubling the representatives of the people and states.

This is a strawman... not going to waste my time.
 
For the same reason Obama waited until now to issue executive orders on immigration that he could have issued years ago. He determined that the last two years of his Presidency was the best time to issue executive actions that might be highly controversial.

Exactly. I know for a fact that this is true. :)
 
I know for a fact that this is false.

You clearly do not understand the meaning of the word "fact". Unless you are a mind-reader, this is not something you can "know. You can apply deductive reasoning, make inferences, whatever, to try to discern his actual motive (which may be quite different than his stated motive), but ultimately, it is not a provable/knowable fact. But, your belief that you can somehow "know" that is...illuminating.

The President entered office with the hope that he could make inroads with Republican leadership. He tried for two years after the Democrats lost the House to appease the Republicans, and this is well documented. It is widely known that Barack Obama was not the cause of GOP intransigence, and that he was willing to compromise his own party platform to make legislative progress.

Any moderately astute political observer knew that Republicans were not going to give him what he wanted on either immigration or Net Neutrality. He certainly knew that no later than the beginning of 2014. And he also know in 2012 that he wasn't going to get what he wanted. So why didn't he issue his order after/before the 2012 election, or during 2014 prior to the election? Politics, in my opinion at least.

As to the GOP unwillingness to "compromise"....

If you ask me to give you one hundred dollars, and I say no because I don't want to give you any money, it is not a reasonable "compromise" for you to then say "how about $50", and then bitch because I refuse. That's essentially what happened. On most of those issues, the President and the GOP had completely different ideas on which direction the country should take. As a simplification, he wanted to go "left", and the GOP (rightly or wrongly)wanted to go "right". Going only halfway left is not a compromise.

Second, Congress can only write the legislation that is part of a deal/compromise. It must rely on the President to enforce/implement it. So, any potential for major compromise went out the window as soon as the President asserted the authority to selectively enforce/ignore particular elements of legislation -- and he did that with respect to the ACA long-before he did it with immigration. They had no reason to believe his word was good, no reason to trust him, and were right not to do any deals that required presidential good faith in the execution/enforcement/implementation of the laws.


These recent acts of using (and potentially abusing) the executive order powers of the Presidency are a result, by his own admission, of a complete break down of the inner-workings of the federal government. The President and Congress must be able to work together, and for the past 4 years, Congress has simply refused any and all appeals to reason or compromise.

I find this to be an incredibly odd understanding of how our government is supposed to function. Nothing "broke-down." There was no agreement as to how the government should proceed on certain issues, and at their core, the two parties actually wanted to move in opposite directions. When members of Congress voted, they did not agree with the President's agenda, so they did not vote for it. That's how the system is supposed to work.

Had the Framers of the Constitution wanted our government to behave differently, and follow more easily the lead of the head of government, they'd have used a parliamentary model instead, which was clearly something with which they were very familiar. Instead, they chose a Presidential, bicameral system that required the agreement of three independently-elected branches of government to enact anything.

And as I said above, the GOP refusal to cut deals that required good-faith on the part of the President was a logical and predictable response to his actions. Something that even commentators on the left pointed out at the time it happened.
 
Congress exists to represent the will of the people and the States (which are extensions of the people themselves); at present it is not fulfilling that role.

Because you said so? So if the executive decides that the elected representatives are not representing the will of the people, he should unilaterally do it? Who determines the "will of the people"? Oh, the representatives they elected. So honestly, why waste time paying lip service to a Constitution when one man can claim to determine the "will of the people", regardless of what the officials they elected do? Why do we need to elect representatives then? Just let the president interpret the will of the people.

I'm telling you, burn the fucking thing. There is no limit to the federal government or any of it's branches. There is no Constitution. You are just deceiving innocent, brain dead, government educated idiots when you tell them such a document exists.
 
Because if you accept my argument that Obama had a lot of influence over the loyal head of the FCC even if he could not issue legally enforceable orders, then your entire argument falls apart. Under my scenario, if Obama had said "you should release those regs ahead of time" Wheeler likely would have complied. Likewise, if he'd said "don't release them", Wheeler likely would have complied with that. After all, that's largely a political consideration in the first place.

For the same reason Obama waited until now to issue executive orders on immigration that he could have issued years ago. He determined that the last two years of his Presidency was the best time to issue executive actions that might be highly controversial.
Much in the same way that you asked me earlier "how could you possibly know" this, I ask the same of you. My argument does not fall apart. I reject your assertions, which are simply fabrications.

Factually, the FCC is an independent organization and follows its own deliberative process. Now, if we take your position that the FCC are in effect just another subset of the Executive Branch due to the president's influence, then surely it would have taken these steps earlier in the president's term. So what happened?

"On his path to the White House, President Obama said again and again that he’s a firm believer in net neutrality, and that once he was elected to office he’d be sure to undo the years of regulatory slack inflicted by the Bush administration. He enlisted Julius Genachowski to chair the commission and carry out his vision. But somewhere between vocal Republican obstructionism and big money lobbying from telecom companies themselves, that vision got cloudy. Genashowski professed that the Internet should remain an open space for ideas, but that corporations had rights too."​

There goes your theory.

So you make up another ridiculous assertion, with no evidence, that the president waited until his second term to enact highly controversial actions (and, tried to imply that the FCC decision was an executive action, but I'll leave that alone). Really? The Affordable Care Act, stimulus, car company bailout, support for gay marriage, etc. weren't highly controversial?
 
Much in the same way that you asked me earlier "how could you possibly know" this, I ask the same of you. My argument does not fall apart. I reject your assertions, which are simply fabrications.

That's fine if you reject my assertions. But you asked me "what does this have to do with my argument with Maximus", so I told you how it was relevant.

Now, if we take your position that the FCC are in effect just another subset of the Executive Branch due to the president's influence, then surely it would have taken these steps earlier in the president's term. So what happened?

As I said, I believe "what happened" was that he wanted to avoid something this politically divisive until the point where the politics no longer mattered (for him, anyway). Feel free to reject that argument, but it is a logical explanation for why he might have wanted to wait.

So you make up another ridiculous assertion, with no evidence, that the president waited until his second term to enact highly controversial actions. Really? The Affordable Care Act, stimulus, car company bailout, support for gay marriage, etc. weren't highly controversial?

The Affordable Care Act, stimulus, and car company bailout all required Congressional action, and were not things he could have done at any time via executive action. So, he acted on those things when he had the required Congressional majority, because he had no guarantee as to how long he would have it.

He didn't choose the timing on gay marriage -- the Supreme Court did when it threw out the Defense of Marriage Act.

I would add that there is absolutely nothing preventing Obama from asking a potential FCC nominee for his views on Net Neutrality, and had he wanted to implement it earlier in his Presidency, he could have nominated someone who promised to do just that.
 

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