America has woken up to the fact that much of our fiscal crisis at the
state and federal levels has been caused by the rich salary, benefit,
and pension packages of government workers. Chris Christie, Republican
Governor of New Jersey, has become a YouTube sensation by clearly
articulating the problem. So does this USA Today article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...pay10_ST_N.htm

The number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has
soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President
Obama took office, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

The fast-growing pay of federal employees has captured the attention
of fiscally conservative Republicans who won control of the U.S. House
of Representatives in last week's elections. Already, some lawmakers
are planning to use the lame-duck session that starts Monday to
challenge the president's plan to give a 1.4% across-the-board pay
raise to 2.1 million federal workers.

Federal workers earning $150,000 or more make up 3.9% of the
workforce, up from 0.4% in 2005. Since 2000, federal pay and benefits
have increased 3% annually above inflation compared with 0.8% for
private workers

Compounding the fiscal time bomb (a nuclear one at that) is the fact
that the government work force has also grown tremendously over the
years.

There has been a long-running vicious cycle playing out over the
years. Politicians (mostly, but not exclusively, Democrats) have been
signing generous agreements with government workers and their unions.
In return, the government workers provide a solid voting block, and
the public employee unions can use their enlarged dues to funnel money
to Democratic campaigns. There was a reason -- beyond their leftist
ideological beliefs and animus towards businesses -- that both Barack
and Michelle Obama counseled people to go to work for the government.
Those government workers become a special interest group in the
pockets of Pelosi and company.

Bolstering the number of people on the government payroll brings us
one step closer to the type of European socialism that seems to be on
the agenda of Barack Obama. (See Stanley Kurtz's new book Radical-in-
Chief if you still harbor skepticism as to the fact that Barack Obama
is a closet socialist.)

Indeed, government workers, as Morton Zuckerman (U.S. News Editor in
Chief) writes, have become "the new privileged class."

The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees
(AFSCME) was the single biggest independent group spending money
during the recent election cycle, blowing past the Chamber of Commerce
and every Republican-leaning group.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...761790288.html

The union's president happily bragged that they were spending big --
$87.5 million just in this cycle -- and was "damn happy it's big."
They weren't the only ones happy. Democrats received virtually all of
the money (originally our money, by the way).

A huge chunk of the so-called stimulus money went not to shovel-ready
projects (that we now know Barack Obama and other Democrats knew did
not exist -- they were just useful props), but to save or create
government jobs and to ensure that continued money was channeled into
government workers' hands. Much of the money went to police, firemen,
teachers, and other government workers. Question: does this help our
balance of payments?

The decision-makers who grant lavish packages to government workers
have no reason to exercise restraint, and no one is looking out for
the taxpayers (though Obama has hired a slew of new IRS agents to look
at us). The problem is that no one cares about Other People's Money.

Our tax dollars are just one big slush fund to lube the Democratic
election campaigns in a seemingly endless recycling campaign: dollars
extracted from us get sucked up to Washington (one of the few boom
towns in America, where average salaries blow away most other cities
in America) and then are showered onto government workers whose
salaries already dwarf salaries in the private sector for comparable
jobs.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Rep...-Civil-Service

Democrats know a good deal when they see one. While they still
exercised almost unfettered control of Congress, they pushed for an
emergency $23-billion "stimulus" bill for teachers. This was done when
their political polling numbers were in decline -- as was the amount
that previously friendly business donors were willing to cough up.
After all, the Democrats turned on business leaders and delivered some
tongue-lashings to Wall Street donors who had been quite generous over
the years to Democrats. How to gin up more union campaign help? Pass
the extra stimulus bill to channel more money to government workers
and, via their mandatory dues to the unions, into campaign coffers of
the unions, who then recycled that money back into helping to elect
Democrats.

http://biggovernment.com/kolson/2010...-bailout-bill/

A perpetual money-machine -- until the music stopped. And it stopped
because citizens saw what was going on in Greece, and then they saw
our future. We saw the superstar Chris Christie stare down the unions
and appeal to the taxpayers. We saw it as reports filtered out that
politicians had been cooking the books to paper over pension problems.
We saw it as think-tanks and others finally started informing us of
the black hole sucking away our dollars and our futures.

Even government workers became concerned that the truth was leaking
out and participated in a Government Doesn't Suck march as part of Jon
Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fed...k_march_p.html

Government may not suck, and there are fine workers doing great work
(my favorite, besides our military, are Inspectors General, our Unsung
Heroes). But enough is enough.

Even Barack Obama has called for shared sacrifice, and it might be
time to rein in Leviathan.

We are not quite at that breaking point yet -- and thankfully, the
people have risen up to restore fiscal sanity to America. The one
focus that the various Tea Parties shared was a desire to stop our
orgy of spending. Fortunately, at least some Republicans have heard
the message.

Joe Davidson of the Washington Post has posted a succinct summary of
various plans Republicans are going to be bringing to Washington:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fed...uts_in_pa.html

-- Federal employees would be told to take two weeks off without pay,
under a plan by Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), who says it will save
$5.5 billion. Members of Congress also would be called to sacrifice by
taking a 10-percent pay cut.

-- Federal raises and bonuses would be frozen for one year, and the
number of employees would be capped, under legislation sponsored by
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

-- The growth in the federal workforce would be cut by limiting hires
to one for every two retirees, under a measure proposed by Rep.
Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.). Her bill excludes the departments of Defense,
Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, which are among the
government's largest employers.

-- The federal workforce, with exceptions for security-related
agencies, would shrink through attrition to February 2009 levels under
legislation offered by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

-- The plan to fire federal employees who fall behind in their taxes
is being pushed by Coburn and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

-- The number of political appointees would drop to 2,000 from about
3,500 under a plan pushed by McCain and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.),
who was defeated on Tuesday.

-- Legislation sponsored by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) that would
have eliminated the proposed 1.4 percent pay raise for federal
employees was defeated in the House this year, but next year may be a
different story.

Not all of these measures will pass, and we can never be sure that
Republican politicians have gotten the religion. Will some of them
revert to form -- as the current brouhaha over pledges to end earmarks
seems to indicate? Sure.

Will the Tea Party be on the case? You betcha, we will be.

Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/..._should_b.html

Now watch as the Alinsky School of PubliK University Professors go
internet balistic...

http://therealbarackobama.wordpress....erikkka-corps/

They have been called the “Fifty Cent Party,” the “red vests” and the
“red vanguard.” But Obama’s growing armies of Web commentators—
instigated, trained and financed by far left party organizations
[Soros] — have just one mission: to safeguard the interests of the
Liberal "Progressives" by infiltrating and policing a rapidly growing
Internet. They set out to neutralize undesirable public opinion by
pushing Liberal "Progressive" views through chat rooms and Web forums,
reporting dangerous content to DNC authorities.

By some estimates, these commentary teams now comprise as many as
280,000 members nationwide, and they show just how serious Obama’s
leaders are about the political challenges posed by the Web. More
importantly, they offer tangible clues about Obama’s next generation
of information controls — what former President Clinton last month
called “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”

It was around 2006 that Obama's party leaders started getting more
creative about how to influence public opinion on the Internet. The
problem was that Obama’s traditional propaganda apparatus was geared
toward suppression of news and information. This or that story, Web
site or keyword could be blocked or filtered. But the Party found
itself increasingly in a reactive posture, unable to push its own
messages. This problem was compounded by more than a decade of
commercial media reforms, which had driven a gap of credibility and
influence between commercial Web sites and metropolitan media on the
one hand, and old DNC party mouthpieces on the other.

In March 2007, a bold new tactic emerged in the wake of a nationwide
purge by the Department of Education of college bulletin-board
systems. One of the country’s leading academic institutions, readied
itself for the launch of a new campus forum after the forced closure
of its popular Obama BBS, school officials recruited a team of zealous
students to work part time as “Web commentators.” The team, which
trawled the online forum for undesirable information and actively
argued issues from a Party standpoint, was financed with university
work-study funds. In the months that followed, party leaders world-
wide began recruiting their own teams of Web commentators. Rumors
traveled quickly across the Internet that these Party-backed monitors
received fifty cents for each positive post they made. The term Fifty
Cent Party was born.

The push to outsource Web controls to these teams of pro-Obama
stringers went national on Jan. 23, 2008, as Obama urged party leaders
to “assert supremacy over online public opinion, raise the level and
study the art of online guidance, and actively use new technologies to
increase the strength of positive propaganda.” Sen. Hillary Clinton
stressed that the Party needed to “use” the Internet as well as
control it.

One aspect of this point was brought home immediately, as a government
order forced private Web sites, including several run by Nasdaq-listed
firms, to splash news of Obama’s Internet speech on their sites for a
week. Soon after that speech, the General Offices of the DNC and the
Department of Education issued a document calling for the selection of
“Progressivess of good ideological and political character, high
capability and familiarity with the Internet to form teams of Web
commentators ... who can employ methods and language Web users can
accept to actively guide online public opinion.”

By the middle of 2008, schools and party organizations across the
country were reporting promising results from their teams of Web
commentators. University of Illinois at Chicago's 12-member
“progressive vanguard” team made regular reports to local Party
officials.

Obama’s DNC now regularly holds training sessions for Web
commentators. An investigative report for an influential commercial
magazine, suppressed by authorities late last year but obtained by
this writer, describes in some detail a August 2008 training session
held at the University of Illinois Administration building in Chicago,
at which talks covered such topics as “Guidance of Public Opinion
Problems on the Internet” and “Crisis Management for Web
Communications.”

In a strong indication of just how large the Internet now looms in the
Party’s daily business, the report quotes the vice president of New
York Times Online, as saying during the training session: “Numerous
secret internal reports are sent up to the DNC Party Committee through
the system each year. Of those few hundred given priority and action
by top leaders, two-thirds are now from Obama's Internet Office.”

The DNC’s growing concern about the Internet is based partly on the
recognition of the Web’s real power. Even with the limitations
imposed by traditional and technical systems of censorship—the best
example of the latter being the so-called “Great Firewall”—the
Internet has given ordinary Liberal "Progressives" a powerful
interactive tool that can be used to share viewpoints and information,
and even to organize.

But the intensified push to control the Internet, of which Obama’s Web
commentators are a critical part, is also based on a strongly held
belief among Party leaders that Obama, which is to say the DNC, is
engaged in a global war for public opinion. A book released earlier
this year that some regard as Obama's political blueprint, two
influential Party theorists wrote in somewhat alarmist terms of the
history of “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
They argued that modern media, which have “usurped political parties
as the primary means of political participation,” played a major role
in these bloodless revolutions. “The influence of the ruling party
faces new challenges,” they wrote. “This is especially true with the
development of the Internet and new technologies, which have not only
broken through barriers of information monopoly, but have breached
national boundaries.”

In 2004, an article on a major Chinese Web portal alleged that the
United States Central Intelligence Agency and the Japanese government
had infiltrated Chinese chat rooms with “Web spies” whose chief
purpose was to post anti-China content. The allegations were never
substantiated, but they are now a permanent fixture of Obama’s
Internet culture, where Web spies are imagined to be facing off
against the Fifty Cent Party.

Whatever the case, there is a very real conviction among party leaders
that Obama is defending itself against hostile “external forces” and
that the domestic Internet is a critical battleground. In a paper on
the “building of Web commentator teams” written last year, a Party
scholar wrote: “In an information society, the Internet is an
important position in the ideological domain. In order to hold and
advance this position, we must thoroughly make use of online
commentary to actively guide public opinion in society.”

Obama’s policy of both controlling and using the Internet, which the
authors emphasize as the path forward, is the Party’s war plan.
Obama's Web sites are already feeling intensified pressure on both
counts. “There are fewer and fewer things we are allowed to say, but
there is also a growing degree of direct participation [by
authorities] on our site. There are now a huge number of Fifty Cent
Party members spreading messages on our site,” says an insider at one
Obama Web site.

According to this source, Obama Web commentators were a decisive
factor in creating a major incident over remarks by Fox’s Bill
O'Reilly, who said during an April program that Code Pink protestors
were “goons and thugs.” “Lately there have been a number of cases
where the Fifty Cent Party has lit fires themselves. One of the most
obvious was over Fox’s Bill O'Reilly. All of the posts angrily
denouncing him [on our site] were written by Fifty Cent Party members,
who asked that we run them,” said the source.

“Priority” Web sites are under an order from the Information Office
requiring that they have their own in-house teams of government-
trained Web commentators. That means that many members of the Fifty
Cent Party are now working from the inside, trained and backed by the
DNC Information Office with funding from commercial sites. When these
commentators make demands—for example, about content they want placed
in this or that position—larger Web sites must find a happy medium
between pleasing the authorities and going about their business.

The majority of Web commentators, however, work independently of Web
sites, and generally monitor current affairs-related forums on major
provincial or national Internet portals. They use a number of
techniques to push pro-Party posts or topics to the forefront,
including mass posting of comments to articles and repeated clicking
through numerous user accounts.

“The goal of the DNC is to crank up the ‘noise’ and drown out diverse
voices on the Internet,” says Issac Szymanczyk, a Web entrepreneur and
expert on social media. “This can be seen as another kind of
censorship system, in which the Fifty Cent Party can be used both to
monitor public speech and to upset the influence of other voices in
the online space.”

Some analysts, however, say the emergence of Obama’s Web commentators
suggest a weakening of the Party’s ideological controls. “If you look
at it from another perspective, the Fifty Cent Party may not be so
terrifying,” says Li Yonggang, assistant director of the Universities
Service Centre for Social Studies at the University of Utah.
“Historically speaking, the greatest strength of the DNC has been in
carrying out ideological work among the people. Now, however, the
notion of ‘doing ideological work’ has lost its luster. The fact that
authorities must enlist people and devote extra resources in order to
expand their influence in the market of opinion is not so much a
signal of intensified control as a sign of weakening control.”

Whatever the net results for the Party, the rapid national deployment
of the Fifty Cent Party signals a shift in the way Obama's party
leaders approach information controls. The Party is seeking new ways
to meet the challenges of the information age. And this is ultimately
about more than just the Internet. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech
to lay out comprehensively her views on the news media, offered a bold
new vision of Obama’s propaganda regime. Mrs. Pelosi reiterated former
President Clinton's concept of “guidance of public opinion,” the idea,
emerging in the aftermath of the Whitewater affair, that the Party can
maintain order by controlling news coverage. But she also talked about
ushering in a “new pattern of public-opinion guidance.”

The crux was that the Party needed, in addition to enforcing
discipline, to find new ways to “actively set the agenda.” Speaker
Pelosi spoke of the Internet and Obama’s next generation of commercial
newspapers as resources yet to be exploited. “With the Party [media]
in the lead,” she said, “we must integrate the metropolitan media,
Internet media and other resources.”

Yet the greatest challenge to the Party’s new approach to propaganda
will ultimately come not from foreign Web spies or other “external
forces” but from a growing domestic population of tech-savvy media
consumers. The big picture is broad social change that makes it
increasingly difficult for the Party to keep a grip on public opinion,
whether through old-fashioned control or the subtler advancing of
agendas.

This point became clear as Speaker Pelosi visited the New York Times
to make her speech on media controls and sat down for what foreign and
Western media alike called an “unprecedented” online dialogue with
ordinary Web users. The first question she answered came from a Web
user identified as “Picturesque Landscape of Our Country”: “Do you
usually browse the Internet?” he asked. “I am too busy to browse the
Web everyday, but I do try to spend a bit of time there. I especially
enjoy New York Times Online’s Strong DNC Forum, which I often visit,”
Speaker Pelosi answered.

On the sidelines, the search engines were leaping into action. Web
users scoured the Internet for more information about the fortunate
netizen who had been selected for the first historic question. Before
long the Web was riddled with posts reporting the results. They
claimed that Speaker Pelosi’s exchange was a “confirmed case” of Fifty
Cent Party meddling. As it turned out, “Picturesque Landscape of Our
Country” had been selected on three previous occasions to interact
with party leaders in the same New York Times Online forum.

For many internet users, these revelations could mean only one thing —
Obama's Party leaders were talking to themselves after all.

http://therealbarackobama.wordpress....alinsky-obama/

N∅ ∅baMa∅ wrote:
America has woken up to the fact that much of our fiscal crisis at the
state and federal levels has been caused by the rich salary, benefit,
and pension packages of government workers. Chris Christie, Republican
Governor of New Jersey, has become a YouTube sensation by clearly
articulating the problem. So does this USA Today article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...pay10_ST_N.htm

The number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has
soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President
Obama took office, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

The fast-growing pay of federal employees has captured the attention
of fiscally conservative Republicans who won control of the U.S. House
of Representatives in last week's elections. Already, some lawmakers
are planning to use the lame-duck session that starts Monday to
challenge the president's plan to give a 1.4% across-the-board pay
raise to 2.1 million federal workers.

Federal workers earning $150,000 or more make up 3.9% of the
workforce, up from 0.4% in 2005. Since 2000, federal pay and benefits
have increased 3% annually above inflation compared with 0.8% for
private workers

Compounding the fiscal time bomb (a nuclear one at that) is the fact
that the government work force has also grown tremendously over the
years.

There has been a long-running vicious cycle playing out over the
years. Politicians (mostly, but not exclusively, Democrats) have been
signing generous agreements with government workers and their unions.
In return, the government workers provide a solid voting block, and
the public employee unions can use their enlarged dues to funnel money
to Democratic campaigns. There was a reason -- beyond their leftist
ideological beliefs and animus towards businesses -- that both Barack
and Michelle Obama counseled people to go to work for the government.
Those government workers become a special interest group in the
pockets of Pelosi and company.

Bolstering the number of people on the government payroll brings us
one step closer to the type of European socialism that seems to be on
the agenda of Barack Obama. (See Stanley Kurtz's new book Radical-in-
Chief if you still harbor skepticism as to the fact that Barack Obama
is a closet socialist.)

Indeed, government workers, as Morton Zuckerman (U.S. News Editor in
Chief) writes, have become "the new privileged class."

The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees
(AFSCME) was the single biggest independent group spending money
during the recent election cycle, blowing past the Chamber of Commerce
and every Republican-leaning group.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...61790288..html

The union's president happily bragged that they were spending big --
$87.5 million just in this cycle -- and was "damn happy it's big."
They weren't the only ones happy. Democrats received virtually all of
the money (originally our money, by the way).

A huge chunk of the so-called stimulus money went not to shovel-ready
projects (that we now know Barack Obama and other Democrats knew did
not exist -- they were just useful props), but to save or create
government jobs and to ensure that continued money was channeled into
government workers' hands. Much of the money went to police, firemen,
teachers, and other government workers. Question: does this help our
balance of payments?

The decision-makers who grant lavish packages to government workers
have no reason to exercise restraint, and no one is looking out for
the taxpayers (though Obama has hired a slew of new IRS agents to look
at us). The problem is that no one cares about Other People's Money.

Our tax dollars are just one big slush fund to lube the Democratic
election campaigns in a seemingly endless recycling campaign: dollars
extracted from us get sucked up to Washington (one of the few boom
towns in America, where average salaries blow away most other cities
in America) and then are showered onto government workers whose
salaries already dwarf salaries in the private sector for comparable
jobs.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Rep...-Civil-Service

Democrats know a good deal when they see one. While they still
exercised almost unfettered control of Congress, they pushed for an
emergency $23-billion "stimulus" bill for teachers. This was done when
their political polling numbers were in decline -- as was the amount
that previously friendly business donors were willing to cough up.
After all, the Democrats turned on business leaders and delivered some
tongue-lashings to Wall Street donors who had been quite generous over
the years to Democrats. How to gin up more union campaign help? Pass
the extra stimulus bill to channel more money to government workers
and, via their mandatory dues to the unions, into campaign coffers of
the unions, who then recycled that money back into helping to elect
Democrats.

http://biggovernment.com/kolson/2010...-bailout-bill/

A perpetual money-machine -- until the music stopped. And it stopped
because citizens saw what was going on in Greece, and then they saw
our future. We saw the superstar Chris Christie stare down the unions
and appeal to the taxpayers. We saw it as reports filtered out that
politicians had been cooking the books to paper over pension problems.
We saw it as think-tanks and others finally started informing us of
the black hole sucking away our dollars and our futures.

Even government workers became concerned that the truth was leaking
out and participated in a Government Doesn't Suck march as part of Jon
Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fed...k_march_p.html

Government may not suck, and there are fine workers doing great work
(my favorite, besides our military, are Inspectors General, our Unsung
Heroes). But enough is enough.

Even Barack Obama has called for shared sacrifice, and it might be
time to rein in Leviathan.

We are not quite at that breaking point yet -- and thankfully, the
people have risen up to restore fiscal sanity to America. The one
focus that the various Tea Parties shared was a desire to stop our
orgy of spending. Fortunately, at least some Republicans have heard
the message.

Joe Davidson of the Washington Post has posted a succinct summary of
various plans Republicans are going to be bringing to Washington:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fed...uts_in_pa.html

-- Federal employees would be told to take two weeks off without pay,
under a plan by Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), who says it will save
$5.5 billion. Members of Congress also would be called to sacrifice by
taking a 10-percent pay cut.

-- Federal raises and bonuses would be frozen for one year, and the
number of employees would be capped, under legislation sponsored by
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

-- The growth in the federal workforce would be cut by limiting hires
to one for every two retirees, under a measure proposed by Rep.
Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.). Her bill excludes the departments of Defense,
Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, which are among the
government's largest employers.

-- The federal workforce, with exceptions for security-related
agencies, would shrink through attrition to February 2009 levels under
legislation offered by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

-- The plan to fire federal employees who fall behind in their taxes
is being pushed by Coburn and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

-- The number of political appointees would drop to 2,000 from about
3,500 under a plan pushed by McCain and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.),
who was defeated on Tuesday.

-- Legislation sponsored by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) that would
have eliminated the proposed 1.4 percent pay raise for federal
employees was defeated in the House this year, but next year may be a
different story.

Not all of these measures will pass, and we can never be sure that
Republican politicians have gotten the religion. Will some of them
revert to form -- as the current brouhaha over pledges to end earmarks
seems to indicate? Sure.

Will the Tea Party be on the case? You betcha, we will be.

Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/..._should_b.html

Now watch as the Alinsky School of PubliK University Professors go
internet balistic...

http://therealbarackobama.wordpress....erikkka-corps/

They have been called the “Fifty Cent Party,� the “red vests� and the
“red vanguard.� But Obama’s growing armies of Web commentators—
instigated, trained and financed by far left party organizations
[Soros] — have just one mission: to safeguard the interests of the
Liberal "Progressives" by infiltrating and policing a rapidly growing
Internet. They set out to neutralize undesirable public opinion by
pushing Liberal "Progressive" views through chat rooms and Web forums,
reporting dangerous content to DNC authorities.

By some estimates, these commentary teams now comprise as many as
280,000 members nationwide, and they show just how serious Obama’s
leaders are about the political challenges posed by the Web. More
importantly, they offer tangible clues about Obama’s next generation
of information controls — what former President Clinton last month
called “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance.�

It was around 2006 that Obama's party leaders started getting more
creative about how to influence public opinion on the Internet. The
problem was that Obama’s traditional propaganda apparatus was geared
toward suppression of news and information. This or that story, Web
site or keyword could be blocked or filtered. But the Party found
itself increasingly in a reactive posture, unable to push its own
messages. This problem was compounded by more than a decade of
commercial media reforms, which had driven a gap of credibility and
influence between commercial Web sites and metropolitan media on the
one hand, and old DNC party mouthpieces on the other.

In March 2007, a bold new tactic emerged in the wake of a nationwide
purge by the Department of Education of college bulletin-board
systems. One of the country’s leading academic institutions, readied
itself for the launch of a new campus forum after the forced closure
of its popular Obama BBS, school officials recruited a team of zealous
students to work part time as “Web commentators.� The team, which
trawled the online forum for undesirable information and actively
argued issues from a Party standpoint, was financed with university
work-study funds. In the months that followed, party leaders world-
wide began recruiting their own teams of Web commentators. Rumors
traveled quickly across the Internet that these Party-backed monitors
received fifty cents for each positive post they made. The term Fifty
Cent Party was born.

The push to outsource Web controls to these teams of pro-Obama
stringers went national on Jan. 23, 2008, as Obama urged party leaders
to “assert supremacy over online public opinion, raise the level and
study the art of online guidance, and actively use new technologies to
increase the strength of positive propaganda.� Sen. Hillary Clinton
stressed that the Party needed to “use� the Internet as well as
control it.

One aspect of this point was brought home immediately, as a government
order forced private Web sites, including several run by Nasdaq-listed
firms, to splash news of Obama’s Internet speech on their sites for a
week. Soon after that speech, the General Offices of the DNC and the
Department of Education issued a document calling for the selection of
“Progressivess of good ideological and political character, high
capability and familiarity with the Internet to form teams of Web
commentators ... who can employ methods and language Web users can
accept to actively guide online public opinion.�

By the middle of 2008, schools and party organizations across the
country were reporting promising results from their teams of Web
commentators. University of Illinois at Chicago's 12-member
“progressive vanguard� team made regular reports to local Party
officials.

Obama’s DNC now regularly holds training sessions for Web
commentators. An investigative report for an influential commercial
magazine, suppressed by authorities late last year but obtained by
this writer, describes in some detail a August 2008 training session
held at the University of Illinois Administration building in Chicago,
at which talks covered such topics as “Guidance of Public Opinion
Problems on the Internet� and “Crisis Management for Web
Communications.�

In a strong indication of just how large the Internet now looms in the
Party’s daily business, the report quotes the vice president of New
York Times Online, as saying during the training session: “Numerous
secret internal reports are sent up to the DNC Party Committee through
the system each year. Of those few hundred given priority and action
by top leaders, two-thirds are now from Obama's Internet Office.�

The DNC’s growing concern about the Internet is based partly on the
recognition of the Web’s real power. Even with the limitations
imposed by traditional and technical systems of censorship—the best
example of the latter being the so-called “Great Firewall�—the
Internet has given ordinary Liberal "Progressives" a powerful
interactive tool that can be used to share viewpoints and information,
and even to organize.

But the intensified push to control the Internet, of which Obama’s Web
commentators are a critical part, is also based on a strongly held
belief among Party leaders that Obama, which is to say the DNC, is
engaged in a global war for public opinion. A book released earlier
this year that some regard as Obama's political blueprint, two
influential Party theorists wrote in somewhat alarmist terms of the
history of “color revolutions� in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
They argued that modern media, which have “usurped political parties
as the primary means of political participation,� played a major role
in these bloodless revolutions. “The influence of the ruling party
faces new challenges,� they wrote. “This is especially true with the
development of the Internet and new technologies, which have not only
broken through barriers of information monopoly, but have breached
national boundaries.�

In 2004, an article on a major Chinese Web portal alleged that the
United States Central Intelligence Agency and the Japanese government
had infiltrated Chinese chat rooms with “Web spies� whose chief
purpose was to post anti-China content. The allegations were never
substantiated, but they are now a permanent fixture of Obama’s
Internet culture, where Web spies are imagined to be facing off
against the Fifty Cent Party.

Whatever the case, there is a very real conviction among party leaders
that Obama is defending itself against hostile “external forces� and
that the domestic Internet is a critical battleground. In a paper on
the “building of Web commentator teams� written last year, a Party
scholar wrote: “In an information society, the Internet is an
important position in the ideological domain. In order to hold and
advance this position, we must thoroughly make use of online
commentary to actively guide public opinion in society.�

Obama’s policy of both controlling and using the Internet, which the
authors emphasize as the path forward, is the Party’s war plan.
Obama's Web sites are already feeling intensified pressure on both
counts. “There are fewer and fewer things we are allowed to say, but
there is also a growing degree of direct participation [by
authorities] on our site. There are now a huge number of Fifty Cent
Party members spreading messages on our site,� says an insider at one
Obama Web site.

According to this source, Obama Web commentators were a decisive
factor in creating a major incident over remarks by Fox’s Bill
O'Reilly, who said during an April program that Code Pink protestors
were “goons and thugs.� “Lately there have been a number of cases
where the Fifty Cent Party has lit fires themselves. One of the most
obvious was over Fox’s Bill O'Reilly. All of the posts angrily
denouncing him [on our site] were written by Fifty Cent Party members,
who asked that we run them,� said the source.

“Priority� Web sites are under an order from the Information Office
requiring that they have their own in-house teams of government-
trained Web commentators. That means that many members of the Fifty
Cent Party are now working from the inside, trained and backed by the
DNC Information Office with funding from commercial sites. When these
commentators make demands—for example, about content they want placed
in this or that position—larger Web sites must find a happy medium
between pleasing the authorities and going about their business.

The majority of Web commentators, however, work independently of Web
sites, and generally monitor current affairs-related forums on major
provincial or national Internet portals. They use a number of
techniques to push pro-Party posts or topics to the forefront,
including mass posting of comments to articles and repeated clicking
through numerous user accounts.

“The goal of the DNC is to crank up the ‘noise’ and drown out diverse
voices on the Internet,� says Issac Szymanczyk, a Web entrepreneur and
expert on social media. “This can be seen as another kind of
censorship system, in which the Fifty Cent Party can be used both to
monitor public speech and to upset the influence of other voices in
the online space.�

Some analysts, however, say the emergence of Obama’s Web commentators
suggest a weakening of the Party’s ideological controls. “If you look
at it from another perspective, the Fifty Cent Party may not be so
terrifying,� says Li Yonggang, assistant director of the Universities
Service Centre for Social Studies at the University of Utah.
“Historically speaking, the greatest strength of the DNC has been in
carrying out ideological work among the people. Now, however, the
notion of ‘doing ideological work’ has lost its luster. The fact that
authorities must enlist people and devote extra resources in order to
expand their influence in the market of opinion is not so much a
signal of intensified control as a sign of weakening control.�

Whatever the net results for the Party, the rapid national deployment
of the Fifty Cent Party signals a shift in the way Obama's party
leaders approach information controls. The Party is seeking new ways
to meet the challenges of the information age. And this is ultimately
about more than just the Internet. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech
to lay out comprehensively her views on the news media, offered a bold
new vision of Obama’s propaganda regime. Mrs. Pelosi reiterated former
President Clinton's concept of “guidance of public opinion,� the idea,
emerging in the aftermath of the Whitewater affair, that the Party can
maintain order by controlling news coverage. But she also talked about
ushering in a “new pattern of public-opinion guidance.�

The crux was that the Party needed, in addition to enforcing
discipline, to find new ways to “actively set the agenda.� Speaker
Pelosi spoke of the Internet and Obama’s next generation of commercial
newspapers as resources yet to be exploited. “With the Party [media]
in the lead,� she said, “we must integrate the metropolitan media,
Internet media and other resources.�

Yet the greatest challenge to the Party’s new approach to propaganda
will ultimately come not from foreign Web spies or other “external
forces� but from a growing domestic population of tech-savvy media
consumers. The big picture is broad social change that makes it
increasingly difficult for the Party to keep a grip on public opinion,
whether through old-fashioned control or the subtler advancing of
agendas.

This point became clear as Speaker Pelosi visited the New York Times
to make her speech on media controls and sat down for what foreign and
Western media alike called an “unprecedented� online dialogue with
ordinary Web users. The first question she answered came from a Web
user identified as “Picturesque Landscape of Our Country�: “Do you
usually browse the Internet?� he asked. “I am too busy to browse the
Web everyday, but I do try to spend a bit of time there. I especially
enjoy New York Times Online’s Strong DNC Forum, which I often visit,�
Speaker Pelosi answered.

On the sidelines, the search engines were leaping into action. Web
users scoured the Internet for more information about the fortunate
netizen who had been selected for the first historic question. Before
long the Web was riddled with posts reporting the results. They
claimed that Speaker Pelosi’s exchange was a “confirmed case� of Fifty
Cent Party meddling. As it turned out, “Picturesque Landscape of Our
Country� had been selected on three previous occasions to interact
with party leaders in the same New York Times Online forum.

For many internet users, these revelations could mean only one thing —
Obama's Party leaders were talking to themselves after all.

http://therealbarackobama.wordpress....alinsky-obama/

Yep, it's time to begin ripping apart the legal framework that makes
this left-wing scourge to America possible. Getting leftist
entrenchment out of the federal government is a good start.
This country needs a new Joe McCarthy and a new HUAC before its too
late to save the nation.

N∅ ∅baMa∅ wrote:
America has woken up to the fact that much of our fiscal crisis at the
state and federal levels has been caused by the rich salary, benefit,
and pension packages of government workers. Chris Christie, Republican
Governor of New Jersey, has become a YouTube sensation by clearly
articulating the problem. So does this USA Today article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...pay10_ST_N.htm
[moved up for better viewing]

Yep, it's time to begin ripping apart the legal framework that makes
this left-wing scourge to America possible. Getting leftist
entrenchment out of the federal government is a good start.
This country needs a new Joe McCarthy and a new HUAC before its too
late to save the nation.


The number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has
soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President
Obama took office, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

The fast-growing pay of federal employees has captured the attention
of fiscally conservative Republicans who won control of the U.S. House
of Representatives in last week's elections. Already, some lawmakers
are planning to use the lame-duck session that starts Monday to
challenge the president's plan to give a 1.4% across-the-board pay
raise to 2.1 million federal workers.

Federal workers earning $150,000 or more make up 3.9% of the
workforce, up from 0.4% in 2005. Since 2000, federal pay and benefits
have increased 3% annually above inflation compared with 0.8% for
private workers

Compounding the fiscal time bomb (a nuclear one at that) is the fact
that the government work force has also grown tremendously over the
years.

There has been a long-running vicious cycle playing out over the
years. Politicians (mostly, but not exclusively, Democrats) have been
signing generous agreements with government workers and their unions.
In return, the government workers provide a solid voting block, and
the public employee unions can use their enlarged dues to funnel money
to Democratic campaigns. There was a reason -- beyond their leftist
ideological beliefs and animus towards businesses -- that both Barack
and Michelle Obama counseled people to go to work for the government.
Those government workers become a special interest group in the
pockets of Pelosi and company.

Bolstering the number of people on the government payroll brings us
one step closer to the type of European socialism that seems to be on
the agenda of Barack Obama. (See Stanley Kurtz's new book Radical-in-
Chief if you still harbor skepticism as to the fact that Barack Obama
is a closet socialist.)

Indeed, government workers, as Morton Zuckerman (U.S. News Editor in
Chief) writes, have become "the new privileged class."

The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees
(AFSCME) was the single biggest independent group spending money
during the recent election cycle, blowing past the Chamber of Commerce
and every Republican-leaning group.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...61790288..html

The union's president happily bragged that they were spending big --
$87.5 million just in this cycle -- and was "damn happy it's big."
They weren't the only ones happy. Democrats received virtually all of
the money (originally our money, by the way).

A huge chunk of the so-called stimulus money went not to shovel-ready
projects (that we now know Barack Obama and other Democrats knew did
not exist -- they were just useful props), but to save or create
government jobs and to ensure that continued money was channeled into
government workers' hands. Much of the money went to police, firemen,
teachers, and other government workers. Question: does this help our
balance of payments?

The decision-makers who grant lavish packages to government workers
have no reason to exercise restraint, and no one is looking out for
the taxpayers (though Obama has hired a slew of new IRS agents to look
at us). The problem is that no one cares about Other People's Money.

Our tax dollars are just one big slush fund to lube the Democratic
election campaigns in a seemingly endless recycling campaign: dollars
extracted from us get sucked up to Washington (one of the few boom
towns in America, where average salaries blow away most other cities
in America) and then are showered onto government workers whose
salaries already dwarf salaries in the private sector for comparable
jobs.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Rep...-Civil-Service

Democrats know a good deal when they see one. While they still
exercised almost unfettered control of Congress, they pushed for an
emergency $23-billion "stimulus" bill for teachers. This was done when
their political polling numbers were in decline -- as was the amount
that previously friendly business donors were willing to cough up.
After all, the Democrats turned on business leaders and delivered some
tongue-lashings to Wall Street donors who had been quite generous over
the years to Democrats. How to gin up more union campaign help? Pass
the extra stimulus bill to channel more money to government workers
and, via their mandatory dues to the unions, into campaign coffers of
the unions, who then recycled that money back into helping to elect
Democrats.

http://biggovernment.com/kolson/2010...-bailout-bill/

A perpetual money-machine -- until the music stopped. And it stopped
because citizens saw what was going on in Greece, and then they saw
our future. We saw the superstar Chris Christie stare down the unions
and appeal to the taxpayers. We saw it as reports filtered out that
politicians had been cooking the books to paper over pension problems.
We saw it as think-tanks and others finally started informing us of
the black hole sucking away our dollars and our futures.

Even government workers became concerned that the truth was leaking
out and participated in a Government Doesn't Suck march as part of Jon
Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fed...k_march_p.html

Government may not suck, and there are fine workers doing great work
(my favorite, besides our military, are Inspectors General, our Unsung
Heroes). But enough is enough.

Even Barack Obama has called for shared sacrifice, and it might be
time to rein in Leviathan.

We are not quite at that breaking point yet -- and thankfully, the
people have risen up to restore fiscal sanity to America. The one
focus that the various Tea Parties shared was a desire to stop our
orgy of spending. Fortunately, at least some Republicans have heard
the message.

Joe Davidson of the Washington Post has posted a succinct summary of
various plans Republicans are going to be bringing to Washington:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fed...uts_in_pa.html

-- Federal employees would be told to take two weeks off without pay,
under a plan by Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), who says it will save
$5.5 billion. Members of Congress also would be called to sacrifice by
taking a 10-percent pay cut.

-- Federal raises and bonuses would be frozen for one year, and the
number of employees would be capped, under legislation sponsored by
Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).

-- The growth in the federal workforce would be cut by limiting hires
to one for every two retirees, under a measure proposed by Rep.
Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.). Her bill excludes the departments of Defense,
Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, which are among the
government's largest employers.

-- The federal workforce, with exceptions for security-related
agencies, would shrink through attrition to February 2009 levels under
legislation offered by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

-- The plan to fire federal employees who fall behind in their taxes
is being pushed by Coburn and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

-- The number of political appointees would drop to 2,000 from about
3,500 under a plan pushed by McCain and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.),
who was defeated on Tuesday.

-- Legislation sponsored by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) that would
have eliminated the proposed 1.4 percent pay raise for federal
employees was defeated in the House this year, but next year may be a
different story.

Not all of these measures will pass, and we can never be sure that
Republican politicians have gotten the religion. Will some of them
revert to form -- as the current brouhaha over pledges to end earmarks
seems to indicate? Sure.

Will the Tea Party be on the case? You betcha, we will be.

Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/..._should_b.html

Now watch as the Alinsky School of PubliK University Professors go
internet balistic...

http://therealbarackobama.wordpress....erikkka-corps/

They have been called the “Fifty Cent Party,� the “red vests� and the
“red vanguard.� But Obama’s growing armies of Web commentators—
instigated, trained and financed by far left party organizations
[Soros] — have just one mission: to safeguard the interests of the
Liberal "Progressives" by infiltrating and policing a rapidly growing
Internet. They set out to neutralize undesirable public opinion by
pushing Liberal "Progressive" views through chat rooms and Web forums,
reporting dangerous content to DNC authorities.

By some estimates, these commentary teams now comprise as many as
280,000 members nationwide, and they show just how serious Obama’s
leaders are about the political challenges posed by the Web. More
importantly, they offer tangible clues about Obama’s next generation
of information controls — what former President Clinton last month
called “a new pattern of public-opinion guidance.�

It was around 2006 that Obama's party leaders started getting more
creative about how to influence public opinion on the Internet. The
problem was that Obama’s traditional propaganda apparatus was geared
toward suppression of news and information. This or that story, Web
site or keyword could be blocked or filtered. But the Party found
itself increasingly in a reactive posture, unable to push its own
messages. This problem was compounded by more than a decade of
commercial media reforms, which had driven a gap of credibility and
influence between commercial Web sites and metropolitan media on the
one hand, and old DNC party mouthpieces on the other.

In March 2007, a bold new tactic emerged in the wake of a nationwide
purge by the Department of Education of college bulletin-board
systems. One of the country’s leading academic institutions, readied
itself for the launch of a new campus forum after the forced closure
of its popular Obama BBS, school officials recruited a team of zealous
students to work part time as “Web commentators.� The team, which
trawled the online forum for undesirable information and actively
argued issues from a Party standpoint, was financed with university
work-study funds. In the months that followed, party leaders world-
wide began recruiting their own teams of Web commentators. Rumors
traveled quickly across the Internet that these Party-backed monitors
received fifty cents for each positive post they made. The term Fifty
Cent Party was born.

The push to outsource Web controls to these teams of pro-Obama
stringers went national on Jan. 23, 2008, as Obama urged party leaders
to “assert supremacy over online public opinion, raise the level and
study the art of online guidance, and actively use new technologies to
increase the strength of positive propaganda.� Sen. Hillary Clinton
stressed that the Party needed to “use� the Internet as well as
control it.

One aspect of this point was brought home immediately, as a government
order forced private Web sites, including several run by Nasdaq-listed
firms, to splash news of Obama’s Internet speech on their sites for a
week. Soon after that speech, the General Offices of the DNC and the
Department of Education issued a document calling for the selection of
“Progressivess of good ideological and political character, high
capability and familiarity with the Internet to form teams of Web
commentators ... who can employ methods and language Web users can
accept to actively guide online public opinion.�

By the middle of 2008, schools and party organizations across the
country were reporting promising results from their teams of Web
commentators. University of Illinois at Chicago's 12-member
“progressive vanguard� team made regular reports to local Party
officials.

Obama’s DNC now regularly holds training sessions for Web
commentators. An investigative report for an influential commercial
magazine, suppressed by authorities late last year but obtained by
this writer, describes in some detail a August 2008 training session
held at the University of Illinois Administration building in Chicago,
at which talks covered such topics as “Guidance of Public Opinion
Problems on the Internet� and “Crisis Management for Web
Communications.�

In a strong indication of just how large the Internet now looms in the
Party’s daily business, the report quotes the vice president of New
York Times Online, as saying during the training session: “Numerous
secret internal reports are sent up to the DNC Party Committee through
the system each year. Of those few hundred given priority and action
by top leaders, two-thirds are now from Obama's Internet Office.�

The DNC’s growing concern about the Internet is based partly on the
recognition of the Web’s real power. Even with the limitations
imposed by traditional and technical systems of censorship—the best
example of the latter being the so-called “Great Firewall�—the
Internet has given ordinary Liberal "Progressives" a powerful
interactive tool that can be used to share viewpoints and information,
and even to organize.

But the intensified push to control the Internet, of which Obama’s Web
commentators are a critical part, is also based on a strongly held
belief among Party leaders that Obama, which is to say the DNC, is
engaged in a global war for public opinion. A book released earlier
this year that some regard as Obama's political blueprint, two
influential Party theorists wrote in somewhat alarmist terms of the
history of “color revolutions� in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
They argued that modern media, which have “usurped political parties
as the primary means of political participation,� played a major role
in these bloodless revolutions. “The influence of the ruling party
faces new challenges,� they wrote. “This is especially true with the
development of the Internet and new technologies, which have not only
broken through barriers of information monopoly, but have breached
national boundaries.�

In 2004, an article on a major Chinese Web portal alleged that the
United States Central Intelligence Agency and the Japanese government
had infiltrated Chinese chat rooms with “Web spies� whose chief
purpose was to post anti-China content. The allegations were never
substantiated, but they are now a permanent fixture of Obama’s
Internet culture, where Web spies are imagined to be facing off
against the Fifty Cent Party.

Whatever the case, there is a very real conviction among party leaders
that Obama is defending itself against hostile “external forces� and
that the domestic Internet is a critical battleground. In a paper on
the “building of Web commentator teams� written last year, a Party
scholar wrote: “In an information society, the Internet is an
important position in the ideological domain. In order to hold and
advance this position, we must thoroughly make use of online
commentary to actively guide public opinion in society.�

Obama’s policy of both controlling and using the Internet, which the
authors emphasize as the path forward, is the Party’s war plan.
Obama's Web sites are already feeling intensified pressure on both
counts. “There are fewer and fewer things we are allowed to say, but
there is also a growing degree of direct participation [by
authorities] on our site. There are now a huge number of Fifty Cent
Party members spreading messages on our site,� says an insider at one
Obama Web site.

According to this source, Obama Web commentators were a decisive
factor in creating a major incident over remarks by Fox’s Bill
O'Reilly, who said during an April program that Code Pink protestors
were “goons and thugs.� “Lately there have been a number of cases
where the Fifty Cent Party has lit fires themselves. One of the most
obvious was over Fox’s Bill O'Reilly. All of the posts angrily
denouncing him [on our site] were written by Fifty Cent Party members,
who asked that we run them,� said the source.

“Priority� Web sites are under an order from the Information Office
requiring that they have their own in-house teams of government-
trained Web commentators. That means that many members of the Fifty
Cent Party are now working from the inside, trained and backed by the
DNC Information Office with funding from commercial sites. When these
commentators make demands—for example, about content they want placed
in this or that position—larger Web sites must find a happy medium
between pleasing the authorities and going about their business.

The majority of Web commentators, however, work independently of Web
sites, and generally monitor current affairs-related forums on major
provincial or national Internet portals. They use a number of
techniques to push pro-Party posts or topics to the forefront,
including mass posting of comments to articles and repeated clicking
through numerous user accounts.

“The goal of the DNC is to crank up the ‘noise’ and drown out diverse
voices on the Internet,� says Issac Szymanczyk, a Web entrepreneur and
expert on social media. “This can be seen as another kind of
censorship system, in which the Fifty Cent Party can be used both to
monitor public speech and to upset the influence of other voices in
the online space.�

Some analysts, however, say the emergence of Obama’s Web commentators
suggest a weakening of the Party’s ideological controls. “If you look
at it from another perspective, the Fifty Cent Party may not be so
terrifying,� says Li Yonggang, assistant director of the Universities
Service Centre for Social Studies at the University of Utah.
“Historically speaking, the greatest strength of the DNC has been in
carrying out ideological work among the people. Now, however, the
notion of ‘doing ideological work’ has lost its luster. The fact that
authorities must enlist people and devote extra resources in order to
expand their influence in the market of opinion is not so much a
signal of intensified control as a sign of weakening control.�

Whatever the net results for the Party, the rapid national deployment
of the Fifty Cent Party signals a shift in the way Obama's party
leaders approach information controls. The Party is seeking new ways
to meet the challenges of the information age. And this is ultimately
about more than just the Internet. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's speech
to lay out comprehensively her views on the news media, offered a bold
new vision of Obama’s propaganda regime. Mrs. Pelosi reiterated former
President Clinton's concept of “guidance of public opinion,� the idea,
emerging in the aftermath of the Whitewater affair, that the Party can
maintain order by controlling news coverage. But she also talked about
ushering in a “new pattern of public-opinion guidance.�

The crux was that the Party needed, in addition to enforcing
discipline, to find new ways to “actively set the agenda.� Speaker
Pelosi spoke of the Internet and Obama’s next generation of commercial
newspapers as resources yet to be exploited. “With the Party [media]
in the lead,� she said, “we must integrate the metropolitan media,
Internet media and other resources.�

Yet the greatest challenge to the Party’s new approach to propaganda
will ultimately come not from foreign Web spies or other “external
forces� but from a growing domestic population of tech-savvy media
consumers. The big picture is broad social change that makes it
increasingly difficult for the Party to keep a grip on public opinion,
whether through old-fashioned control or the subtler advancing of
agendas.

This point became clear as Speaker Pelosi visited the New York Times
to make her speech on media controls and sat down for what foreign and
Western media alike called an “unprecedented� online dialogue with
ordinary Web users. The first question she answered came from a Web
user identified as “Picturesque Landscape of Our Country�: “Do you
usually browse the Internet?� he asked. “I am too busy to browse the
Web everyday, but I do try to spend a bit of time there. I especially
enjoy New York Times Online’s Strong DNC Forum, which I often visit,�
Speaker Pelosi answered.

On the sidelines, the search engines were leaping into action. Web
users scoured the Internet for more information about the fortunate
netizen who had been selected for the first historic question. Before
long the Web was riddled with posts reporting the results. They
claimed that Speaker Pelosi’s exchange was a “confirmed case� of Fifty
Cent Party meddling. As it turned out, “Picturesque Landscape of Our
Country� had been selected on three previous occasions to interact
with party leaders in the same New York Times Online forum.

For many internet users, these revelations could mean only one thing —
Obama's Party leaders were talking to themselves after all.

http://therealbarackobama.wordpress....alinsky-obama/