Just a few weeks ago, the ongoing debate over proposed net neutrality rules under consideration by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) appeared to have taken a turn for the worse. At least as far as net neutrality proponents were concerned. But, with President Obama’s left flank increasingly uneasy with the direction he is taking as the midterm election approaches, observers say he may be aiming to shore up his base by tilting leftwards on the issue, one that flies below the radar of most Americans.

Specifically, as Obama seeks to strike a more centrist tone on items like the deficit, taxes and education, tech and telecoms policy observers say he appears to be going out of his way to curry favor with the online left— which political experts say has been in a state of near-revolt for months now—by reaffirming his strong commitment to net neutrality. One tech policy expert that Big Government consulted described the proposed policy as “one of the top items on the American Left’s wish-list,” and one of those guaranteed to “fire up” the online left like the Iraq War did in years past—with the fringe benefit for Obama that most Americans have no idea what net neutrality means, either in theory or in practice.

In an interview filmed after last week’s the State of the Union address, a clip of which is currently being promoted by hard-left media reform group Free Press, Obama is captured on camera underlining that both he and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski are major supporters of net neutrality:

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The Tea Party folks keep getting mad at me for saying that in the end they might prove ineffective in races at levels higher than local because they aren’t organized enough. They puff up their chests proudly proclaiming that they intend to resist being organized and they claim that being organized is precisely what they are fighting against. I understand the feeling, even sympathize quite a lot, but there is a problem with this obstinacy. It means they won’t win on a statewide ballot very often. The Illinois primary just proved me correct, too.

Let’s take the race for Senate in Illinois as exhibit “A.” Of course the good old boys in the state party went with Mark Kirk, the center left candidate from a northern suburb of Chicago. He was the he-can-win candidate and the establishment choice. Not one Tea Party group, though, wants Kirk and for good reason — and I heartily concur with them, as it happens. So who was the “Tea Party candidate,” the one meant to beat out Kirk, the one backed by the newly found power of the Tea Party movement? There wasn’t one. There were three.

Sadly, the Tea Partiers in Illinois split their vote all up. Some Tea Party Groups went with Don Lowery and some went with Patrick Hughes. A few even went with John Arrington. Hughes, of course, was the only one that had even a remote chance as far as voter polls were concerned. Hughes at least registered in the polls, Lowery and Arrington barely showed up at all.

Now, I like Mr. Lowery to be sure. He is a great fellow and has some fantastic principles. I can see why Tea Party groups are attracted to him. I feel the same way about Mr. Arrington. On the other hand, the same can be said of Hughes (disclosure, I endorsed Hughes). The problem is not that one or the other Tea Party group chose the wrong candidate, it’s that they didn’t choose the same candidate. They petered away their votes by choosing three candidates allowing Mark Kirk to run away with it.

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The Scott Brown revolution is alive and well in Massachusetts.

Tuesday night, January 26th at 7:00 when most people would like to be home relaxing after work, almost 500 average citizens from Massachusetts packed a convention hall in the Boston suburb of Braintree. They shared some common interests. They’re either running for office or helping someone else run for office. Some of them are running for federal or state offices, some for seats in local towns and cities and some for school boards. The one sentiment they share is clear: They’ve had enough.

A capacity crowd!

The event they showed up for was a “candidate school” offered by Boston talk radio host Michael Graham of 96.9 WTKK, a man the Boston Phoenix dubbed “Boston’s maestro of conservative controversies.” In between his tenure at WTKK and a career in stand-up comedy, Graham ran political campaigns. Today, he is sharing his knowledge with the citizens of the Bay State and encouraging them to participate in the system.

Attendees included people like Francis McLaughlin, a retired Boston fire fighter and registered Republican since 1975. McLaughlin is running for the Massachusetts House of Representatives for specific reasons:

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Never mind money laundering or violating the Mann Act. Never mind illegal campaign contributions and the subsequent lies about the true source of the money. Never mind using the New York State Police to spy on his political opponent and then trying to cover-it up Nixon style. Never mind that the Spitzer of today rails for the AIG e-mails when he blocked release of his own e-mails in the Troopergate matter. Eliot Spitzer’s real crime, above all, was having sex with calf length black socks on.

And now, sadly, he’s lying about it. In an amazingly candid and obtuse interview in Bigthink.com, Spitzer denied he wore black hosiery to do the wild thang. But there are at least three independent confirmations of this weird predilection.

Lying is not new to Eliot Milhous Spitzer. He lied about the illegal loans from his father that financed his election as Attorney General until the NY Daily News exposed his lies. He lied about his involvement in efforts to have the New York State Police spy on his political opponents as e-mails released after his resignation prove. I believe he ‘rolled on” Manhattan Madam Kristin Davis to avoid charges in the hooker scandal that brought him down.

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Politics is a game of addition – successful politics anyway.  Great leaders, when faced with a divided electorate, not to mention difficult economic times, use a limited agenda to forge consensus out of broken paradigms.  Once they achieve an initial success, they seek a broader consensus.  In the 1980’s Reagan faced a divided Republican Party and a fractured and dispirited nation.  Concentrating on the prosperity issue and our national prestige, Reagan first brought Republicans together and then independents and even many Democrats.  Indeed, so successful was Reagan at bringing people together, that in time he could rely on a group of Reagan Democrats.  Few other Presidents have had such success at building consensus let alone are able to claim a voting block from the other party in their name.

There is little doubt that Obama faced a divided electorate when he first took office and a difficult economic climate.  Rather than start with a limited agenda designed to build consensus, Obama did the opposite.  Obama chased too many rabbits at once and preferred ideological fights over practical solutions.  As a result, the Country is more divided than ever – not less.

The most recent manifestation of that divisive M.O. is the White House’s amazing decision to insist on a terror trial in New York.   Of course, it remains a jarring ideological decision to treat KSM as a “criminal” versus the warring “terrorist” that he is.  As I wrote, in my article Internment, CSI and Eric Holder’s Disarming of America, that decision will have profound negative consequences for decades to come.  To the point of this article, Obama is compounding his initial divisive decision (treating him as a criminal) by fighting with New York over the place of the trial.  It is a political fight which he cannot win regardless of the outcome of the trial.

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From the fine folks at CATO Institute comes this chart, detailing the allocation of federal spending:

From NPR’s “All Things Considered”:

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Conservative Blogger Faces Criticism Over Protege, by DAVID FOLKENFLIK

The conservative online news entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart is, for the moment, doing little to dispel stereotypes about bloggers. During a recent visit to his home on the west side of Los Angeles, Breitbart, 41, is working from his own basement. Barefoot. At the beck and call of his own kids.

But that basement is light and airy, with a decent view of the city. A young assistant works there with Breitbart to help funnel wire service stories to Breitbart.com, his main news aggregation site. And his reach, thanks to a brawling rhetorical style and a protege who taped the undercover ACORN videos last year, is only expanding.

Over the past year, Breitbart has hired editors to run a new network of conservative blogs called BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com and BigJournalism.com. No matter the focus, the media are a prime target throughout. (more…)

This afternoon on Secure Freedom Radio we announced a breaking news story concerning the Administration’s ongoing cover-up of AIG financial wrong-doing.  In an interview with David Yerushalmi, senior litigator on the Murray v. Geithner et al lawsuit, we expose possible fraud, money-laundering and criminal activity.

As Yerushalmi says in the interview, “So here’s what we find out in the midst of discovery when we depose the Treasury Department’s deponent and the Fed and get documents, here’s what we’ve learned: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the time that it structured the debt that it was going to give AIG insisted that not only did it get the debt, not only would it get principal and interest payments and collateral for that, it wanted 80% of AIG, precisely 77.9% of the shares and the voting rights.  But the Federal Reserve Bank and Geithner knew that it was illegal for the Fed system whether there’s a Fed or the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to own that, so what did they do….”

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Polls have closed in Illinois, where voters will decide a number of hotly contested primaries in both parties. Democrats have tight races for Governor and U.S. Senate. GOP has a close race for Governor and a less competitive race for U.S. Senate. There are a number of other competitive races across the ballot. Turnout seems at an almost historic low, so almost anything could happen.

Uncommon Knowledge host, Peter Robinson, sat down recently with Dr. Thomas Sowell to discuss the impact of intellectuals on society.

As reported in a previous article, Senator Harkin clearly contradicted President Obama when he stated:

Labor leaders had announced an agreement with White House and congressional representatives over an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans on the Thursday before the special election.

Harkin said “we had an agreement, with the House, the White House and the Senate. We sent it to [the Congressional Budget Office] to get scored and then Tuesday happened and we didn’t get it back.” He said negotiators had an agreement in hand on Friday, Jan. 15.

Harkin made clear that negotiators had reached a final deal on the entire bill, not just the excise plans, which had been reported the previous day, Jan. 14.

Harkin said the deal covered the prescription-drug “donut hole,” the level of federal insurance subsidies, national insurance exchanges and federal Medicaid assistance to states.

Senator Harkin would know if a deal was done as he was in the marathon meeting at the White House on January 13, 2010. On the same day, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid put out a brief joint statement:

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For all the phony talk coming out of the White House this past year about transparency and accountability, there actually is an institution outside of the executive branch which does a pretty darn good job at this most of the time: the Inspector General system. In fact, IG’s may do too good of a job by producing lengthy and meticulously detailed reports, difficult even for politically-attuned readers to digest, and which usually do not contain the types of partisan zingers that attract a lot of media attention.

Yesterday the Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) released their Quarterly Report to Congress for the period ending 12/31/2009. The executive summary tells us all we need to know about their assessment of the TARP initiatives over the past year. This whole segment is a MUST READ (it’s not a pretty picture):

The substantial costs of TARP — in money, moral hazard effects on the market, and Government credibility — will have been for naught if we do nothing to correct the fundamental problems in our financial system and end up in a similar or even greater crisis in two, or five, or ten years’ time. It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the system have been addressed to date.

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James O’Keefe, along with Hannah Giles, broke one of the biggest investigative news stories since Watergate on the systemic corruption of radical left governmental organizations. It was, for new media, a defining moment. And while the historic implications of the O’Keefe/Giles expose are not yet fully understood, the media landscape was forever changed.

Despite this seismic shift in modern journalism, the mainstream media scornfully ignored the biggest story of the Obama administration. ACORN, Obama’s personal community organizing group, funded with taxpayer dollars, was shown to be a criminal, rapacious, and predatory organization. In clip after clip from O’Keefe and Giles, ACORN’s indecency became more obvious and outrageous, and the little remaining trust that the American people had in government/community service organizations morphed into outright contempt.

And the mainstream media yawned.

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Card check is looking dead at the ballot box because politicians know it makes for terrible politics. But President Obama’s administration is turning to clever, quiet regulatory efforts to push through Big Labor’s agenda — and the first item on the agenda is today’s hearing for the man who would impose card check by fiat.

What can you do? Call your Senator now (202-224-3121) to oppose Craig Becker for the National Labor Relations Board.

Why: Today’s hearing is for Craig Becker, a top SEIU and AFL-CIO lawyer who hates that employers can talk to their employees about little things … like union dues, unions punishing employees who don’t picket, things like that. BG blogger Rick Manning has noted previously:

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Sources in Washington say Sen. Frank Lautenberg is drafting a new version of his Kids Safe Chemicals Act, which stalled out in 2008 after environmentalists complained the bill was toothless and didn’t grant the EPA enough power to regulate chemicals used to make products. Lautenberg’s new version of the bill is likely to increase the EPA’s authority to limit – or even ban – the use of common chemicals.

As the EPA’s carbon “endangerment finding” in December has demonstrated, it might not be such a good idea to vest virtually unlimited power in a single government agency, especially one that has become as politicized as the EPA.

And like the global warming hysteria the “endangerment finding” was supposed to address, the argument in favor of this aggressive power grab is thin, based on emotional, not scientific appeals, and fairly obviously designed to encroach on the free market. One organization advocating for the EPA power grab, “Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families,” is actually sponsoring a virtual Million Baby Crawl on Washington. Expect the stunts to get more ridiculous after Lautenberg’s bill drops.

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From Canada’s National Post:

Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams

Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams will undergo heart surgery later this week in the United States.

Deputy premier Kathy Dunderdale confirmed the treatment at a news conference Tuesday, but would not reveal the location of the operation or how it would be paid for.

“He has gone to a renowned expert in the procedure that he needs to have done,” said Ms. Dunderdale, who will become acting premier while Mr. Williams is away for three to 12 weeks.

“In consultation with his own doctors, he’s decided to go that route.”

Mr. Williams’ decision to leave Canada for the surgery has raised eyebrows over his apparent shunning of Canada’s health-care system.

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George Orwell defined doublethink as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

When it comes to war, spending, and more, President Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address showed that doublethink is alive and well in Washington, D.C.

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Last week, Nobel Laureate, Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, and former president of Poland, Lech Walesa, traveled to Chicago to endorse a political candidate for governor of Illinois.

Who he endorsed doesn’t matter.  The fact that he is here endorsing anyone at all should be considered newsworthy.

Unfortunately for Chicago residents, and the Polish community specifically, if you get your news from the city’s local television stations, you might not have even known that he was in town, let alone that he attended a Tea Party, and endorsed Adam Andrzejewski for governor.

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When the Christmas Day panty bomber was arrested for trying to blow up himself and the plane he rode in on, he was questioned for approximately 50 minutes before an attorney was brought in to advise him.  What happened next?  Mister Burning Briefs clammed up.

Contrast that with James O’Keefe, American citizen, who was denied an attorney for 28 hours after he was arrested and accused of trying to tamper with the phones of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu.  During that time, the FBI issued a press release on the arrest and leaked the criminal complaint.  The mainstream media salivated, while ACORN’s Bertha Lewis scambled to appear before TV cameras.

The Christmas Day bomber was given Constitutional rights and Miranda’d within an hour of his arrest but a U.S. citizen was not given a lawyer until more than a day had passed?

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