Over at the Daily Dish, Conor Friedersdorf highlights the irony of the US Senate contemplating giving the president the power to pull the plug on the internet (with no judicial oversight) while Hosni Mubarak did just that in an attempt to quell protests against his government.
We laugh at Tea Party-types that call parts of the Obama agenda dictatorial, but this is exactly the type of power that our founders wanted to keep out of government hands when they wrote the Constitution (or would have, if they could have known that the internet would exist).
Check that last statement: the Tea Party cries tyrannical wolf and makes legitimate debate over the real encroachment of government on personal liberty appear hyperbolic. And that includes warrantless wiretapping, the indefinite detention of US citizens as terrorists, and the use of torture.
Civil Minded 