Over at Powerline, an interview with Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch (!) on the state’s government shutdown.

At the StoneZone, veteran political operative and bon vivant Roger Stone says don’t believe the Cuomo for VP hype.

Shake, Rattle and DOOM! over at Ace of Spades HQ

Forgetting the Talking Points: Rhode Island DEMOCRATS Pass Voter ID Law at JammieWearingFool.

Good advice for a new blogger from Doug Ross

Vote for the best conservative books at TheBrowser

Big Peace Worldview, July 6th: Moody’s Cuts Portugal’s Debt Rating to Junk Status

Hope: More Fast Food Restaurants are serving beer

Change: Obama ‘recovery’ is worst since Great Depression

New World Order: Google Track Record Raises Questions, at RebelPundit

John Stossel on the college scam at RealClearPolitics

“I hope he [Weiner] comes after me. Look up my IP. Nothing to hide here. I’d voluntarily hand anything they want over. Check me and my IP. Anything. I did not post that tweet.”

Twitter user Dan Wolfe (known as @patriotusa76) has clarified several details concerning his involvement in the “Weinergate” scandal, insisting that a thorough investigation of the tweets in question will prove he did not compromise the verified Twitter account of Congressman Anthony Weiner (D, NY-9). In a series of direct messages on Twitter, Wolfe explains how he found the offensive image sent from Weiner’s Twitter account, his previous tweets about accounts followed by the Congressman, and his desire for law enforcement to investigate his online activity that night.

Asked whether he followed Congressman Weiner or the recipient of the controversial tweet, Wolfe states he “wasn’t following either of them ever.” He named several other twitter uses who he regularly communicates with, explaining, “Our twitter group mentions him a lot because he appears in media a lot and says things we hate a lot. If he wasn’t saying anything, we wouldn’t comment.” Wolfe claims that on May 27th, the date the tweet went public, he navigated to the @RepWeiner account by clicking on Weiner’s username on a retweet in his Twitter stream. The tweet in question was the much-discussed one where Weiner announced the time of his upcoming appearance on the Rachel Maddow show with the hashtag #Thats545InSeattleIThink. “I found the 5:45 tweet weird,” Wolfe says.

Describing his discovery of the lewd yfrog-image tweet, Wolfe states, “It was after [Maddow's] show and after the [Seattle] tweet that I had clicked on there– on his page, and he tweeted the pic to [redacted] and I clicked on it. I was shocked. I capped [screen captured] it. Capped the tweet, everything. That’s all. Then I RT [retweeted].” His retweet of Weiner’s account includes the same yfrog URL in screen captures and the TweetCongress archive of the original message. If Wolfe was not following both accounts, he would not have seen the tweet in his primary timeline, but if he was viewing Weiner’s profile, he would have seen the account’s latest tweets–even ones addressed to users Wolfe did not follow. By his admission of not following either account, Wolfe’s claim rests on a coincidence–that he was at the right place at the right time.

Several websites have deemed this coincidence suspicious in light of Wolfe’s mentions of Weiner before the “Weinergate” incident. Daily Kos blogger “Stef,” in a “smoking gun” update to a post claiming the tweet from Weiner’s account was a “Twitter Hoax” involving Andrew Breitbart, sardonically notes that Wolfe predicted a sex scandal involving Weiner and explicit pictures on May 11th, over two weeks before Big Government and Big Journalism first reported “Weinergate.” The author does not accuse Wolfe of hijacking Weiner’s account to post the photo, but she does point out the coincidence that Wolfe was the only real-time witness and retweeter of the alleged lewd message when, weeks earlier, he spread that rumor and asserted “@RepWeiner loves young girls.” Gawker author Max Read stated that the recipient of the “Weinergate” tweet, through her statement to the New York Daily News, “would seem to corroborate” Stef’s “theories,” adding that Wolfe “may be the person responsible for the Congressman’s errant Tweet.”

In response, Wolfe again cites his circle of like-minded Twitter contacts. “It’s not just me–see my regular buddies here [redacted] [redacted], etc. We talk about him because he is always around.” In Stef’s screenshot of Wolfe’s May 12th tweets, his linked screenshots of young women allegedly followed by Weiner belong to the yfrog account of one of the Twitter users he privately disclosed. Wolfe continues, “People noticed a pattern on him and our group, all of us–you can see ALL our timelines–not just me–we saw the pattern too.”

Contrary to Stef’s report, Wolfe first tweeted about Congressman Weiner and a sex scandal on May 5th, citing a friend’s report of a right-wing blog rumor. The rumor vaguely claimed that a high-profile, northeast-region Democrat was involved in a sex scandal with photo evidence. Wolfe speculated that the politicians who fit that profile were Charles Rangel, Anthony Weiner, or Barney Frank, and he asked Weiner and Rangel one after the other multiple times if they were involved in the scandal. One of Wolfe’s final tweets on the subject on May 11th said it was his “hope” Weiner was the politician in question “if [the] rumor is true.”

As for the insinuation that he hacked into Weiner’s Twitter account, Wolfe understands that it’s his word against the Congressman’s, and he is eager for law enforcement to investigate his online activity. Citing “tons of threats wishing me dead, murdered, etc.” in the wake of Daily Kos’s and Gawker’s articles, he states, “I wonder if I can call the authorities myself and ask for an investigation. It would clear me in minutes.” Wolfe also remarked to blogger Ace of Spades, “I hope he [Weiner] comes after me. Look up my IP. Nothing to hide here. I’d voluntarily hand anything they want over. Check me and my IP. Anything. I did not post that tweet.”

The recipient of Weiner’s controversial tweet has returned to Twitter and refutes any claim that she has accused Wolfe of hijacking the @RepWeiner account.  She also laments her continuing media attention: “I’m pretty sure it’s been 15 minutes; I’d like to fade back into oblivion now.” In the conflicting accounts and interpretations of the weekend’s events, one thing is clear: this mystery will be solved and the suffering of these two private citizens will cease most quickly with an official investigation of what IP address sent the controversial tweet from Congressman Weiner’s account.

It just so happened that Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin and Barack Obama’s former green jobs czar and self-admitted communist Van Jones stopped by to show their support for the 14 Wisconsin State Senators who fled as well as the unions and teachers taking fake sick notes from doctors to stay out and protest.

At one point, Van Jones claims that the Tea Party turned off the television after the word ‘liberty’ and missed the ‘and justice for all’ part. These people can never get a sentence out without mentioning the Tea Party. Perhaps maybe, just maybe, they’re actually frightened of the Tea Party and the power they posses. Not only that, Tea Party rallies are actually attended by people. Jealousy may also play a factor.

Also, here’s a fantastic sample of that new tone Democrats have been calling for. I personally have no idea why abortion was an issue at a union rally. Then again, out of about the 500 people there it seemed as if they were protesting 128 different things.

Yes, that sign actually reads “Keep your laws off my body, and I’ll keep my hands off your throat.” How nice. Civility at it’s finest.

I didn’t take many pictures since I was there getting video, but for more signs from the union/pro-choice/socialist/Egypt/Koch Brothers protest in DC, check out this great compilation by Gabriel Malor over at Ace of Spades HQ.

Follow Eyeblast TV on Twitter or Facebook.

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

– Thomas Paine, The Crisis, December 23, 1776

For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?”

– Esther 4:14

These are interesting times. Under President Obama and the most liberal Congress since 1965, the United States government is expected to borrow a trillion dollars per year for the next decade while the size and power of our federal government will grow at the expense of our liberties. 

In this environment, Democrats in Congress are working on a bill to give President Obama emergency control of the Internet (S.773) which would permit the President to seize control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.  Meanwhile, the President has appointed Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor, to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  Prof. Sunstein support controls on free speech on the Internet.  He views the Web as a Wild Wild West that needs taming and wants new laws to corral wayward bloggers. His book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (not to be confused with Noodge) urges employing the force of government to make us all better persons (“New Soviet Man” anyone?).  In his latest work, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, the Harvard professor, now top Information apparatchik, worries about “…institutions (being) harmed by the rapid spread of damaging falsehoods via the Internet.” 

Of course, one man’s “falsehoods” might be another man’s facts.  Czar Sunstein’s extreme concern likely grows out of his acute understanding that our postmodern President simply speaks reality into existence; words are reality in the Obama White House.

Into this breach come the bloggers.  There are about 120 million blogs today.  Many of them are political, most are not.  

America’s political bloggers trace their heritage, their place in the body politic, to the Colonial era.  Most of today’s political bloggers would have been quite comfortable defying the British Stamp Act of 1765, were they around 244 years ago.  The Stamp Act was designed to impose government content control on the then 23 newspapers which served about two million Colonialists.  Not one Colonial newspaper bought the properly stamped paper.  In fact, the political content of the papers increased, to the alarm of the British authorities. On the eve of the Revolution, there were 31 papers in the Colonies, by the time of the Constitution’s ratification, there were 92, and by 1835, there were 1,200 newspapers serving 15 million Americans. 

Political bloggers became a force to be reckoned with in 2002 with Sen. Trent Lott’s comments on Sen. Strom Thurmond and again in 2004, when Little Green Footballs took down Dan Rather and Mary Mapes (ironically, Mapes writes for the Huffington Post now) over CBS’ airing of forged Air National Guard documents purporting to show that President George W. Bush avoided service in Vietnam.

With many blogs attracting more readers than daily newspapers while newspaper circulation plummets and experienced journalists are being laid off, we can see why Professor Czar Sunstein is worried – no longer do like-minded liberals in the major media have a lock on what passes for truth in the news. (This brings to mind the cynical critique of the former Soviet Union’s main papers, Tass (News) and Pravda (Truth) “Ni pravda Tass. Ni tass Pravda.” “There is no truth in Tass and there is no news in Pravda.”)

There’s a certain urgency in today’s blogosphere – an understanding that we are at a critical juncture in our nation’s history.  Conservative bloggers, mostly unpaid – concerned moms, talented lawyers, activist students – are acting as a potent counterforce against the attempted rapid remaking of America under Pres. Obama’s direction.  As such, today’s bloggers are the most visible manifestation of the Conservative Movement.  And this, as the Republican Party largely tracks aimlessly in opposition to President Obama, but without any apparent objective, other than to regain power for power’s sake in numb repetition of the errors of 2006 and 2008.

Were Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton (Publius) around today, they would surely be blogging right alongside the likes of the paid and unpaid authors of NRO’s The Corner, Michelle Malkin, RedState, Hot Air, Big Government, Big Hollywood, Flopping Aces, Infidels are Cool, Riehl World View, Red County, Ace of Spades HQ, Flashreport, Right Wing News, and many others.

Let the blogs bloom, for they have come for such a time as this.