Mr. Profitt, You have asked that I apologize to you. Perhaps this is not the apology that you are looking for, but I do have some things to say.

I have been called a progressive, a liberal, a professional agitator. You have been called a conservative, a Republican, a member of the Tea Party movement. Fundamentally and most importantly, you and I are both human beings. We are also both American citizens. These two facts, to me, are far more meaningful than the multitude of labels that we carry. And if these two facts are true then it means we are on the same team.

I have not been for one moment angry with you and your actions. Instead I feel thoroughly devastated. It is evident that your physical assault on me is symptomatic of the crisis that this country is struggling through. And it seems that I will heal from my injuries long before this country can work through our separation. Only when we decide let go of our hate, our violence and our aggression will we be able to communicate to each other about the issues that divide us. Right now, we are not communicating, we are stomping on each other. No one can ever win, no one can ever be heard, with violence.

You and I, as fellow citizens, and we, as a country, have a choice. Either we choose to continue the cycle of inflicting violence upon each other, screaming at each other, insulting each other and putting one another down or we and find a way to sit down and start listening to each other. We’ll see how far we get. We are all viciously and vociferously feeding a fire that will only burn us down together. We must reach inside ourselves and make space for each other. We must forgive each other. We must believe in our capacity for transformation. The moment we choose compassion and reconciliation is the moment that we will begin to move toward freedom. There is no other way.

I believe that you should be held accountable for your actions but I also recognize the incredibly negative impact that the consequences must be having on your life, and I wish you all the best as you yourself heal from this. Violence hurts everyone.

I have known for a while that right wing violence would increase just by the extremist rhetoric, claiming that left wing violence was sure to come by political blow hards such as Glenn Beck. Extremist always justify their extremism by claiming their opponents are worse. Right Wing Violence has been at all time high with progressive bloggers and activist being attacked at various conservative  meetings. I thought these were the liberty, free speech people?  Weren’t these the people who flooded into town hall meetings chanting, yelling and doing anything to disrupt the meetings? Now they receive some opposition and this is how they respond?

What does Tim Profitt want Lauren Valle to apology for? Having her head in the way of his stomping motion?

What if it is an entire political party?

“Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.” – Ronald Reagan

Information is the Oxygen of the Modern Age.

Long before there was Google, Twitter, Facebook, Napster, a dot com bubble and even Al Gore claiming to have created the Internet, there were a couple of smart guys with a crazy idea of connecting a few computers, which at the time were the size of an average-sized living room. The first data packets were sent from UCLA to Stanford Research Institute on Oct. 29, 1969, and voilà – the Internet was born! Unfortunately, it wasn’t user friendly and it took years of headache and development to come up with the Internet we all know and love today. Even my parents, who have about a 3.5-second attention span when I talk internet jargon, could feasibly create their own blog with pictures of their grandchildren in less than an hour. Never in the history of mankind have people had such power at their finger tips.

During the Internets early development, its backbone was funded by the government and largely used by various government organizations, along with educational and research institutions. Commercial uses on that backbone were mostly prohibited, with a few rare exceptions. But the free market couldn’t be held back and eventually commercial servers and Internet Service Providers (ISP) sprung up, leading to the dot com bubble. During that time, anyone with a few dollars and a good idea could have become a millionaire over night.

It is hard for me to remember life without Internet. I have become more and more reliant on the Internet as my sole source of news, entertainment and much of my communication over the years. I eventually got rid of my Directv altogether and the only thing I really miss is the History Channel.

I say all this to warn of a pending storm that could jeopardize the Internet we have come to depend on. We as a society could potentially lose Net Neutrality, a concept that has been a part of the Internet from its inception. Net Neutrality means all data flowing through the internet is equal. This means a person’s e-mail or online banking gets the same network bandwidth and priority as the most ridiculous forwarded viral internet video. The computers and networks that run the Internet do not show bandwidth preferential treatment for a site like CNN.com while throttling down bandwidth on my parents’ blog of their grandchildren.

After Comcast allegedly began to hinder Internet telephone or Voice Over IP (VOIP) services like Skype and Vonage, the company, according to an article in The Register, attempted to curb file sharing by initiating a download limit that could result in a customer losing his or her internet subscription [*]. The FCC stepped in to protect the rights of the consumers and initiate regulations to insure all consumers to have access to an unhindered Internet. This is important for Internet users since the top five Internet providers control almost 60 percent of Internet subscribers’ accounts in the United States. Four of those five are public-utility companies that have a vested interest in hindering services like Hulu and Skype, which are free internet alternatives to services they provide.

Published In the Signal | March 13th

Unfortunately for us little guys, the public-utility companies aren’t taking this lying down. They began campaigning using disinformation and playing on public ignorance in an attempt to stir up knee-jerk reactions from scary words like “government regulation” or attributing net neutrality as some kind of socialist plot. They even got tech savvy John McCain to introduce a clever but misleadingly titled bill called “Freedom of Internet Act 2009,” which would give these hand full of big utility companies – which already enjoy many anti-trust exemptions – almost unchecked power to control consumer-internet use. Net neutrality is essential because it insures a company like Timewarner (owner of CNN) or Comcast (owner of MSNBC) can’t throttle back bandwidth to their competition… say Foxnews.com.

Net neutrality isn’t about government regulating the Internet but about regulating the large companies controlling our gateway to all the wonders of the World Wide Web. Don’t let the big utilities turn this into a Democrat vs. Republican issue, either. This should be a bipartisan no brainer. When has the National Organization of Woman (NOW) and the Christian Coalition of America ever been on the same page on any issue? They are on the same page when it comes to Net Neutrality. Whether you are a liberal feminist or a Christian homeschooling mother, net neutrality should matter to everyone. Let me encourage everyone to log on to savetheinternet.com and join the 1.7 million people who have already signed the petition to Congress saying we want to keep the internet free.

“America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.” – James Madison

The World has mistaken American Kindness as Weakness.

The United States is facing serious challenges that desperately need solving if our nation is to remain a thriving world leader. Few issues spark more passion than illegal immigration. The problems illegal immigration presents are not going to be solved with one single solution. Many people focus on the problem of our unsecured border and believe fixing this alone will fix the entire illegal immigration problem. While this is a major component, we can’t forget the American businesses that are hiring and exploiting the illegal labor. With unemployment at 10 percent or more, I think those jobs former President George W. Bush dismissed as not being wanted by Americans might look pretty appealing these days. This is a sticking point especially for conservatives who are typically against any regulations on businesses. Carole Lutness said it best at a recent City Council meeting: If we want to solve our ant problem, we need to get the open bag of sugar off the table. We must enforce the current laws in place and adopt higher fines that far outweigh the risk of hiring illegal labor.

It was a little over 15 years ago when the citizens of California saw the financial writing on the wall and passed Prop. 187 – an initiative that would have prohibited Illegal immigrants from benefiting from social services, health care and public education. Soon after its passing, a legal ping pong match began between the state of California and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which ended in a great victory for freeloaders everywhere when Justice Mariana R. Pfaelzer put a nail in the proverbial coffin of California’s fiscal future. An excerpt from the ruling reads, “California is powerless to enact its own legislative scheme to regulate immigration. It is likewise powerless to regulate alien access to public benefits. Proposition 187 is not constitutional on its face. We will not act in a way unbecoming to a sensible and humane people.” So tax-paying Californians like my mother and father, who worked their hands to the bone to put food on the table for my family, aren’t sensible or humane people? Justice Pfaelzer thought it was sensible to continue to allow illegal freeloaders to drain money and resources away from hard working Californians? Now a decade and half later, the state with the largest economy in the union can’t pay its own bills.

According to a 2009 Los Angeles Times article, the children of undocumented immigrants make up about 10 percent of California students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Crunch the California Department of Education’s numbers and we have roughly 600,000 illegal-immigrant students in California schools which cost an average of $8,594 per student in 2009, which comes out to a “sensible and humane” total of $5.1 billion dollars. And this amount doesn’t even cover social, health care or welfare services that would have also been denied to illegal immigrants under Prop. 187. I think I figured out where that $20 billion in budget gap went, Mr. Schwarzenegger. Oh that’s right, instead of cutting off the freeloaders, our “sensible and humane” state decided to raise the cost of tuition making it harder for Californians to get educated, producing less educated people, less high paying jobs, and less tax revenues to pay for all these illegal freeloaders. Bravo! If this problem can’t be solved by the state coming up with a “scheme,” according to Justice Pfaelzer, then our only course of action is for the public to demand our representation in Washington to solve it.

Published in Signal February 13th

Our country also must show some teeth when it comes to illegal-immigrant crime. According to a 2006 news release by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), an average of 12 Americans die every day at the hands of illegal immigrants and another 13 more are killed by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Illegal immigrants have a different reality in comparison to most Americans. They know that if they commit a violent crime, there is a good chance they will just be deported. Look at Adrian Guadalupe Arriano, the Illegal immigrant serial rapist who was deported twice before he was charged and convicted of 26 felonies. There needs to be more consistent consequences besides deportation for illegal immigrants. Illegal Immigrants should know if they commit a crime in the United States, they will face the consequences. No one likes paying to lock these violent illegal immigrants up, but what other choice do we have? The safety of American should be priority number one.

Ultimately, in order for any illegal immigration reform to succeed, it must come up with creative solutions to curb the above problems, as well as give a reasonable path to citizenship for those illegal immigrants who have something to add to our country.