Glenn Beck acts as if he's a prisoner of the Commie/Socialist Obama administration, and that's why he plays the courageous, "populist" rebel, throwing shit against the walls of his cell in protest.

But Beck's merely a monkey in a zoo, throwing shit around just for the sake of it. It's earned him attention, but he's a phony. It's not that I disagree with him, which I do. He's a phony because he doesn't speak from conviction or to raise hell but just to pander for his own celebrity.

The best satire yet of Beck's bullshit comes from a video "discovered" by Internet pioneer Lauren Weinstein (click above).

Net neutrality is a major big-business, privacy, and freedom-of-speech issue over continued open access to the Internet. The outcome of this fight will govern how we will use the Web for decades to come — and whether we will be able to use it unfettered. Beck calls net neutrality an Obama-endorsed "Marxist takeover" of the Internet.

Actually, plenty of right-wingers (including the Christian Coalition and Gun Owners of America) strongly support net neutrality, because they're rightly worried that ISPs (Internet service providers) will exert enormous control over what we do online unless there is net neutrality.

See the Christian Coalition's argument that net neutrality "is extremely important to America's grassroots organizations and to those Americans who want to ensure the cable and phone companies controlling access to the Internet will not discriminate based on content."

In fact, the Christian Coalition's argument is one of the most well-reasoned and concise explanations of net neutrality. Beck is ludicrously accusing the Christian Coalition and many other right-wing groups of a "Marxist plot."

Here's Beck's smear of shit against net neutrality. Not clever enough to be a self-parody, it's typically hysterical monkey business by the cynical Beck.

All that bullshit you've tweeted on Twitter about yourself, your interests, your habits, every mundane detail of your desperate life — it's all about to finally pay off. Not for you, but for Twitter.

Biz Stone and his crew are getting ready to roll out "commercial accounts that will entice business users to pay for premium services like detailed analytics." Seems like a smart plan, and of course Twitter's been working on this for a while, and Biz Stone has of course been itching to get rolling on the moolah front. This new development from Twitter itself is not particularly good news for CoTweet, which is already helping businesses navigate through the tweet dreck.

Twitter's "pro accounts" would seem to make a lot more sense for advertisers and marketers than hoping that people will see their ads amid all the billions of posts. And it's better, in a way, for Twitter users because you won't see such plastered ads. What you will feel, however, is penetration into your own personal business by advertisers.

Wait till they get their hands on all that detailed info you've given them for free.

Maybe you don't mind behavioral targeting — you may even embrace the idea of someone taking all your social networking on Twitter and Facebook and detailed records of your Google search activity and turning it over to advertisers, the government, et al., so that various entities can check up on you, pander to you, or manipulate you.

As to the power of Twitter, here's just the latest tidbit: AdAge's "Could Twitter Destroy Hollywood's Marketing Magic?" It concerns the impact of "commenter culture" (ugh, what a phrase) on who goes to which movie.

Google's formal unveiling of its anticipated web-based Chrome operating system that poses a real danger to Microsoft is not just a dark cloud spoiling Bill Gates's Vista or any other proprietary OS his engineers can dream up.

The "do not evil" folks at Google announced it in a typically warm and friendly post. But Google's friendliness can be more than a little unsettling. Chrome also opens up what will be the biggest battleground yet for the new-age war between profits and privacy. It's also great news for governments that always want to snoop into your lives.

There are some great things about Google's planned Chrome OS. It will be absolutely free to users, unlike Microsoft's OS. And Chrome will be open-source, meaning that, like Mozilla's increasingly popular Firefox browser, Chrome's innards will be available to web developers, and that promises a flood of likewise free and extremely useful extensions and applications.

But your privacy? That's history — history that will be stored on some giant company's computer, available not only to marketers and other businesses but to the government.

Senator Chuck Schumer, one of the most powerful Democrats in D.C., called yesterday for a national biometric ID card.

This is part of the Democrats' drumbeat: Trying to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants by launching a bigger invasion: a far-reaching assault on Americans' privacy and civil liberties.

At least Schumer, who chairs the Senate's primary immigration subcommittee and, more importantly, is a primary caretaker of Democratic Party campaign cash, acknowledged the civil-liberties aspect of this. But as far as he's concerned, it's already a done deal. Apparently, President Barack Obama is already on board, too.

Leave it to liberals. This isn't the first time that they've sacrificed civil liberties in their attempts to solve problems. During World War II, Democrats, supposedly bent on suppressing Nazi sympathizers, passed the Smith Act (formally the Alien Registration Act). Used mostly against right-wingers at first, it was heavily used after the war to suppress lefties. In 1957, the Supreme Court finally threw out prosecutions under the Smith Act as unconstitutional, but the law remains on the books.

The Japanese internment camps — that's a whole other story, including the fact that even civil libertarians like William O. Douglas OK'd them (in the Korematsu case).

Today's Washington Post story carries the blandest of all headlines: "Senate Democrats Address Immigration." But right in the first paragraph, the story says that the Democrats' plan includes "a requirement that all U.S. workers verify their identity through fingerprints or an eye scan." The story continues:

As respected Internet pioneer and privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein said in his PRIVACY forum alert late last night about Schumer's quote:

Track Weinstein on Twitter, and check out his lively PRIVACY Forum, widely read by top geeks.

Obama's probably not a regular reader of Weinstein. The White House seems to have already embraced the Dark Side. As the Post story says:

It goes without saying — and the Post story doesn't say one word about it — that a national ID, especially a biometric one, would create an unprecedented database that not only will rest in the government's hands but also will eventually wind up in the grasp of marketers and advertisers as a key part of "behavioral marketing." Coupled with the personal data already being compiled by the growing web of social media and other ways of tracking people's "preferences," Americans' lives will increasingly become open books available for inspection. Consumers will increasingly be targeted — and kept track of. That may very well be OK with most people. But is this the kind of face book that you want?