So, here is Twitter’s criteria for the “Top Tweets of 2011″ list it shared with ABC News.

Pay attention to the phrases in bold:

Over 100 million people around the world log in to Twitter every day to tweet about everything from their daily commutes to the meals they eat — but many have used the social networking tool this year for something much more important: share important events with people who could be thousands of miles away.

Every year, Twitter compiles a year-in-review to recap what the company believes were the most important tweets. They highlight the “best” according to the level of “impact, resonance, and relevance,” and take into account the big stories that first broke on Twitter — not by news agencies — but by people looking to share a photo, a thought, or a moment in time with people they may never meet.

Well. Ahem. That would certainly describe former Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner’s tweets and twitpics seen ’round the world.

But not a mention of Weinergate to be found.

Instead, the top 10 list includes tech entrepreneur Peter Shankman’s joke food order at tony Morton’s steakhouse and NBA player Kevin Durant’s whine about the lockout.

Maybe I’ll make my own list for the year. Send in your suggestions. Or tweet them to me at @michellemalkin.

There is perhaps no greater image of irony tonight than that of anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-materialist extremists of the Occupy Wall Street movement paying tribute to Steve Jobs — the co-founder, chairman and former chief executive of Apple Inc., who passed away this evening.

While the Kamp Alinsky Kids ditch school to moan about their massive student debt, parade around in zombie costumes, and whine about evil corporations while Tweeting, Facebook-ing, blogging, and Skype-ing their “revolution,” it’s the doers and producers and wealth creators like Jobs who change the world. They are the gifted 1 percent whom the #OWS “99 percent-ers” mob seeks to demonize, marginalize, and tax out of existence.

Inherent in the American success story of the iPhone/iMac/iPad is a powerful lesson about the fundamentals of capitalism. The Kamp Alinsky Kids scream “People over profit.” They call for “caring” over “corporations.”

But the pursuit of profits empowers people beyond the bounds of imagination.

I am blogging on an iMac. When I travel, I use my MacBook Pro. I Tweet news links from my iPhone. My kids are learning Photoshop and GarageBand on our Macs. I use metronome, dictation, video, and camera apps. I use Apple products for business, pleasure, social networking, raising awareness of the missing, finding recipes, and even tuning a ukulele.

None of the people involved in conceiving these products and bringing them to market “care” about me. They pursued their own self-interests. Through the spontaneous order of capitalism, they enriched themselves — and the world.

Eleven years ago, I wrote about one of my favorite economics essays: Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil.” He turned a mundane writing instrument into an elementary lesson about free-market capitalism. What goes for the pencil goes for any of the products Steve Jobs introduced to the world.

“I have a profound lesson to teach,” Read wrote in the voice of a lead pencil. “I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because–well, because I am seemingly so simple. Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”

Read traces the rich, deep genealogy of the metaphorical little pencil from the loggers who harvest its cedar wood grown in Oregon, to the millworkers in San Leandro, California, who cut the wood into thin slats, to the railroad employees who transport the wood across the country, to the graphite miners in Ceylon and refinery workers in Mississippi, to the farmers in the Dutch East Indies who produce an oil used to make erasers.

All these people, and many more at the periphery of the process, have special knowledge about their life’s work in their separate corners of the earth. But none by himself has the singular knowledge or ability to give birth to a pencil. Few will ever come in contact with the others who make the production of that pencil possible. It’s not because they “care about each other” that they cooperate to deliver any one good. It’s the result of self-interest, multiplied millions of times over.

As Read explains it: “Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me.” Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants.”

Read pushed the lesson of pencil further. “There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.”

This spontaneous “configuration of human energies” is repeated endlessly in our daily lives. Think of the countless and diverse people involved in producing a Slinky, jump rope, or baseball, a diaper, refrigerator, desktop computer, Boeing 747, or iPhone.

Appreciating this voluntary configuration of human energies, Read argued, is key to possessing “an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.”

Indeed. Without that faith, we are susceptible to the force of class-warfare mobs and the arrogance of master planners in Washington who believe the role of private American entrepreneurs, producers, and wealth generators is to “grow the economy” and who “think at some point you have made enough money.”

The progressives who want to bring down “Wall Street” will snipe that Steve Jobs was one of “theirs,” not “ours.”

He belonged to no one. He was transcendently committed to excellence and beauty and innovation. And yes, he made gobs of money pursuing it all while benefiting hundreds of millions of people around the world whom he never met, but who shed a deep river of tears upon learning of his death tonight.

Such is the everlasting miracle of the spontaneous configuration of human energies. Teach your children well.

***

Via ZoeyalaMode, a very related and relevant September 2011 reflection from Mises.org:

What made Jobs’s tenure at Apple great is that he wedded profits with aesthetic loveliness. Not every businessperson can or should do this. Even the entrepreneurs who provided the masses with tacky things are just as deserving of our admiration and praise, for they too do their part to lift us all out of the poverty and squalor that is the state of nature.

And aside from the prettiness of certain products or the elegance of the smartphone, there is another overarching beauty that we find in the market: a lovely, orderly, productive global matrix of cooperative exchange that leads to human flourishing for everyone, even in the absence of a global dictator. This is as beautiful a system as any product Steve Jobs ever made.

R.I.P.

From Apple CEO Tim Cook:

Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife Laurene and his children during this difficult time.”

I’ve been so preoccupied with family matters that I’ve neglected to tell you that our tech wizard Ed Burns of BlogRescue has written a super-cool iPhone/iPad app for the blog.

You can now get it at the App Store.

Click here for more info and be sure to tell your Apple-using friends and family.

***

Reminder: The app for Android users is here.

Internet access is not a “civil right”
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

When bureaucrats talk about increasing your “access” to X, Y, or Z, what they’re really talking about is increasing their control over your lives exponentially. As it is with the government health care takeover, so it is with the newly-approved government plan to “increase” Internet “access.” Call it Webcare.

By a vote of 3-2, the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday adopted a controversial scheme to ensure “net neutrality” by turning unaccountable Democrat appointees into meddling online traffic cops. The panel will devise convoluted rules governing Internet service providers, bandwidth use, content, prices, and even disclosure details on Internet speeds. The “neutrality” is brazenly undermined by preferential treatment toward wireless broadband networks. Moreover, the FCC’s scheme is widely opposed by Congress – and has already been rejected once in the courts. Demonized industry critics have warned that the regulations will stifle innovation and result in less access, not more.

Sound familiar?

The parallels with health care are striking. The architects of Obamacare promised to provide Americans more access to health insurance – and cast their agenda as a fundamental universal entitlement. In fact, it was a pretext for creating a gargantuan federal bureaucracy with the power to tax, redistribute, and regulate
the private health insurance market to death – and replace it with a centrally-planned government system overseen by politically-driven code enforcers dictating everything from annual coverage limits, to administrative expenditures, to the make-up of the medical workforce. The costly, onerous, and selectively-applied law has resulted in less access, not more.

Undaunted promoters of Obama FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s “open Internet” plan to expand regulatory authority over the Internet have couched their online power grab in the rhetoric of civil rights. On Monday, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps proclaimed: “Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right…[though] not many people have talked about it that way.” Opposing the government Internet takeover blueprint, in other words, is tantamount to supporting segregation. Cunning propaganda, that.

“Broadband is becoming a basic necessity,” civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks added. And earlier this month, fellow FCC panelist Mignon Clyburn, daughter of Congressional Black Caucus leader and Number Three House Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina, declared that free (read: taxpayer-subsidized) access to the Internet is not only a civil right for every “nappy-headed child” in America, but essential to their self-esteem. Every minority child, she said, “deserves to be not only connected, but to be proud of who he or she is.”

Calling them “nappy-headed” is a rather questionable way of boosting their pride, but never mind that.

Face it: A high-speed connection is no more an essential civil right than 3G cell phone service or a Netflix account. Increasing competition and restoring academic excellence in abysmal public schools is far more of an imperative to minority children than handing them iPads. Once again, Democrats are using children as human shields who provide useful cover for not-so-noble political goals.

The “net neutrality” mob – funded by billionaire George Soros and other left-wing think tanks and non-profits — has openly advertised its radical, speech-squelching agenda to crusade for “media justice.” Social justice is the redistribution of wealth and economic “rights.” Media justice is the redistribution of speech and First Amendment rights. The meetings of the universal broadband set are littered with Marxist-tinged rants about “disenfranchisement” and “empowerment.” They’ve targeted conservative opponents on talk radio, cable TV, and on the web as purveyors of “hate” who need to be managed or censored. Democrat FCC panelists’ have dutifully echoed their concerns about concentration of corporate media power. As the Ford Foundation-funded Media Justice Fund, which lobbied for universal broadband, put it: This is a movement “grounded in the belief that social and economic justice will not be realized without the equitable redistribution and control of media and communication technologies.”

For progressives who cloak their ambitions in the mantle of “fairness,” it’s all about control. It’s always about control.

For those of you who use Twitter, be advised to stay off Twitter.com and stick to third-party apps like Tweetdeck or Twhirl.

Twitter’s website has been hacked. Visitors will contract a malicious “mouse-over” bug that causes pop-up windows to open merely by pointing your cursor over infected links. Do not be a silly looky-loo. Stay away from the site and avoid mousing over Javascript-embedded tweets from your friends.

More info here.

And here.

***

Update: As of 9:35am, Twitter safety folks say they’ve “identified and are patching” the attack.

Update: The security patch has reportedly been fully patched.

If you have a smartphone with a barcode scanner, here you go:

Related tech story: Android Phones Overtake iPhone Sales

“Nyet to ‘Net Neutrality.’”

Your refresher course via ReasonTV (more background here):

Adam Bitely’s right. The speech redistributors may have lost this battle, but they won’t give up on the war. It ain’t over ’til it’s over:

Don’t expect progressives to give up on Net Neutrality now because of a court ruling. At this time, more than ever before, we should be keeping a watchful eye on what they do next to sneak these Internet regulations through. Progressives never take no for answer.

***

More on the Left’s ‘net control alliance.

I had the pleasure last year of attending the 2009 Sammies Awards ceremony in Chicago held by the Sam Adams Alliance. The awards honor the country’s finest in citizen leadership and political activism — and I met some amazing grass-roots leaders, entrepreneurs, creative artists and whistleblowers. The group has just announced the 2010 winners, including our friend and Tea Party foremother Keli Carender. More info on tickets for the awards ceremony on April 16 here. Congrats to all the winners!

The Sammies are awarded in six categories and include cash prizes totaling $20,000. The categories include Blogger, Watchdog, Video, Town Hall, Tea Party and the premier award, Modern-Day Sam Adams.

Ed Osborne of Wilmington, Del. won the $5,000 Modern Day Sam Adams award for his vigorous defense of property rights against eminent domain in Delaware. Osborne gained notoriety as an activist when he and 61 other Wilmington business owners received notification that their businesses were on the city’s property acquisition list. Osborne resisted government offers for his land, and instead went on to lead a three-year battle in the Delaware General Assembly for legislation against eminent domain abuse. Despite heavy opposition and a gubernatorial veto, the legislation eventually passed, and transformed Delaware’s once-vulnerable property rights environment into one that protects private ownership.

Reader Monica e-mails about how my governor, Colorado Democrat Bill Ritter, is squeezing folks who make money online through the Amazon affiliates program. Politicians don’t want to make tough spending cuts, so they’re targeting Internet commerce. First, some background:

The enduring skirmish in Colorado between Amazon.com and lawmakers over collecting online sales taxes has become the new front in a larger national war with billions of potential tax dollars at stake.

For years, it has pitted the anti-tax online giants, armed with a favorable 1992 U.S. Supreme Court decision, against public officials and brick- and-mortar retailers that say it is time for Amazon and others to pay their fair share.

Now, Colorado legislative leaders’ political scrap with Amazon is being watched across the country by lawmakers and online-industry experts who say it’s yet another example of how confusion still reigns nationally without strong intervention from Congress.

This week, Amazon fired thousands of affiliates in Colorado, saying it refused to be forced to collect taxes under a new state law. Those affiliates were online partners that routed sales to Amazon.

“Everyone should be playing by the same tax rules,” said Craig Shearman, government-affairs spokesman for the National Retail Foundation, who says economically devastated government budgets need a shot of revenue.

…Online retailers often cite a 1992 Supreme Court decision to bolster their case against taxation. It effectively barred states from requiring online merchants to collect sales tax on their behalf, except where they have a physical presence.

But the court also suggested that Congress could give that power to states if it wanted to.

Monica shares her story:

I think it is important to know what is going on.

I got the letter yesterday and had my affiliate account closed. While it wasn’t a lot of money, it was some income for my family.

I wrote to our state legislators and the Governor last night. Doesn’t make sense to me how cutting off money to the state in the form of people’s income is helping to stimulate the economy. And they are blaming Amazon, but they are just a business, doing what they need to do to stay in business. The legislators were warned this would happen and did it anyways. No cutting of spending, no balancing the budget…just trying to use those of us who work hard to do their work for them.

The Democrats are going after the little businesses now. Something to be aware of.

P.S. Below is the letter I sent to the Governor and a copy to my representative and my senator last night. I really doubt they care.

Dear Gov. Ritter,

Up until today, I have been an associate in Amazon.com’s affiliate program. Because of the recent actions of you and the state legislature, I no longer will receive any income from Amazon when visitors to my websites click on an Amazon link. I have lost this income. Therefore, I will not be paying state income tax on this income. I also will not have this income available to spend in the state. I fail to see how this is helping the state of Colorado or our economy. You can continue to blame Amazon.com for this; but, Governor, we are not stupid. We can see who is to blame for this. It is the decision of our legislators and you, who signed this bill. You were informed that this would occur and decided to sacrifice small business owners in the state in order to continue irresponsible spending and a lack of resolve in cutting the budget.

As long as you continue to hurt those of us who work hard and do contribute to the state’s coffers, you and the legislators who voted for this will continue to face a budget crisis and will face an election crisis come next election.

I ask that you work to rescind this damaging legislation as quickly as possible to mitigate the damage to thousands of small business owners in Colorado.

Sincerely,
Monica Mayhak

***

The fallout, via Complete Colorado:

A move by Amazon to sever all ties with affiliates in Colorado already has some Fort Collins companies looking to move their businesses to other states.

Monday, Luke Knowles, CEO of Kinoli Inc., a Fort Collins-based interactive design and development Web site that has thousands of affiliates, received an e-mail from Amazon indicating it would no longer pay him advertising fees because of a new state law aimed at collecting sales tax on online purchases.

The loss of Amazon, one of his top grossing merchants, will hurt his bottom line as other affiliates who rely on Amazon also are cutting ties with his company, Knowles said.

The end result is that he is strongly considering moving the company to Montana because it does not have a general sales tax.

Heckuva job, Gov. Ritter!

***

Update: Diana Hsieh e-mails about a new movement to repeal the Amazon tax. Go here! More info:

Colorado is killing its own businesses with unfair, onerous taxes… yet again.

The Colorado legislature and governor recently passed a terrible new tax law (HB 1193). The law saddles out-of-state online retailers and their customers with crazy patchwork of state and local taxes, plus a costly mess red tape and stiff penalties for non-compliance. However, Colorado can only tax out-of-state companies if those companies have some kind of presence in Colorado. To avoid this unfair tax burden, Amazon.com terminated the accounts of its Colorado “Associates,” i.e. the people who earn commissions by advertising Amazon products on their blogs and web sites.

Amazon warned the Colorado Democrats that this would happen… but they passed the law anyway.

Particularly in light of the sorry state of the economy, this economic blow to thousands of people across the state is simply repugnant. Personally, speaking as a long-time Colorado Amazon Affiliate, the new law meant that so much of my past work was wasted and so many future plans were derailed — all in an instant.

Right now, the left is frantically blaming Amazon. Yet Amazon is the primary victim of the law: they’ll lose more revenue than any single affiliate. Amazon did not act capriciously: it was forced to defend itself by the heedless tax-and-spend Colorado legislature and governor. Once again, the statists blame business for the sins of government.

I refuse to roll over in face of this latest abuse of government power. Ari Armstrong and I are working, along with others, to repeal this “Amazon Tax.” We want to put the pressure on now — and keep it on — so that its repeal will be first on the legislative agenda after the November election. If it’s not repealed, such measures will surely be tried in other states.

You can read more about the law and its effects in my blog post:
“Colorado Screws Amazon and Its Affiliates”: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog/2010/03/colorado-screws-amazon-and-its.shtml

Ari Armstrong has a lengthy post here, including an excellent analysis of the law: “Stop the ‘Amazon Tax’!”: http://blog.ariarmstrong.com/2010/03/stop-amazon-tax.html

We’ve also put together a very rudimentary web site, to be expanded soon: Repeal the Amazon Tax: http://www.RepealTheAmazonTax.com/

If you want to help pressure the Colorado legislature to repeal this awful law, please join the low-volume e-mail list, NoAmazonTax: http://groups.google.com/group/noamazontax

Mostly though, I’d ask that you spread the word about this law and its effects on Colorado. Forward this message to free-market and pro-business groups, to family and friends, to co-workers. Blog about it; share it on FaceBook and Twitter.

GoDaddy.com, the domain registration giant, was founded by tech entrepreneur and decorated Vietnam veteran Bob Parsons.

The company pays tribute to Independence Day with a wonderful video celebration here. Isn’t it nice to see an Internet company embrace American patriotism?

More about Parsons here.

(Hat tip – reader Elyse at Eagles Up)

It’s a war the Luddite mullahs will lose:

Iran’s most powerful military force is warning online media of a crackdown over their coverage of the country’s election crisis.

The Revolutionary Guards, an elite body answering to the supreme leader, says Iranian Web sites and bloggers must remove any materials that “create tension” or face legal action.

Let’s hope it’s not the same person who ran the Obama campaign’s grossly insecure online credit card donation operations.

Today, there’s more whining from the tech companies that boosted Obama’s campaign and filled his coffers.

Calll the wahmbulance (hat tip – William Amos):

Carl Guardino usually comes across as an amenable, mild-mannered Silicon Valley executive. But not on Monday. Not when he watched President Obama promising to end overseas tax breaks for U.S. companies that “create a job in Bangalore, India, (rather than) one in Buffalo, N.Y.” Guardino, CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, angrily described Obama’s language as “not only discouraging, but divisive.” The president’s implication that companies such as Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard merely “ship jobs overseas,” and are being rewarded in the bargain, came as a shock to Guardino, who otherwise described the president as “brilliant and respected by so many in the tech sector who are counting on the administration as their ally.”

Indeed, Obama’s proposal to limit U.S. companies’ ability to defer paying U.S. taxes on offshore earnings does put Bay Area companies doing a lot of business overseas directly in the crosshairs. “It would adversely impact our ability to invest and grow our business in the (United States) and to compete against our foreign competitors,” said a spokesman for Cisco.

Google, whose CEO, Eric Schmidt, is supposed to be a close buddy of Obama’s, said it is “too early to evaluate the potential effect on Google’s operations, as there will likely be multiple proposals considered.”

…So, doth Guardino et. al. protest too much? Not according to Atulya Sarin, a professor of finance at Santa Clara University. “It’s a bad idea from the word go,” said Sarin, who has consulted with the Internal Revenue Service and with Fortune 100 companies on international tax issues. “Increasing these taxes will reduce after-tax profits, which will reduce incentives. Right now, the administration should be helping Silicon Valley maintain its competitive edge, not making it less so. I hope saner minds will prevail.”

Reap. Sow. Repeat.

Top Conservatives on Twitter have launched a new action project targeting the “three little piggies” — UAW President Ron Gettelfinger, GM CEO Rick Wagoner, and Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli. I know I’ve got a lot of fabulous Photoshoppers out there. This one sounds fun. So go and check out Operation Three Little Piggies here and here.

And if you haven’t opened a Twitter account (or haven’t figured it out yet), make sure to join TCOT.

You can find me on Twitter here.