Politics makes strange bedfellows.  Witness the latest liaison, with Cellular South’s CEO, Hu Meena, and his new partnership with the NoTakeOver Project – a coalition of professional misanthropes that wants to stop the AT&T / T-Mobile merger at any cost.

Meena’s company is the nation’s largest privately-owned wireless carrier.  Meena testified with other NoTakeOver members at a Senate hearing last week, strenuously urging that the merger be killed by the FCC and DoJ.  Getting there, he had to paint a dire picture – that consumers would suffer, jobs would diminish, Internet innovation would end, and the wireless industry would tank – if the merger gets the official OK from regulators.

His relationship with NoTakeOver is particularly odd in that his new friends – especially those at New America Foundation, Public Knowledge and Media Access Project – want to crush companies like his with “light touch” Net Neutrality regulations recently imposed by the FCC.

From the moment those Internet regulations got announced last December, New America Foundation, Public Knowledge and Media Access Project started grumbling like petulant children who didn’t get exactly what they asked for on their birthday.  “Sure,” they huffed, “the rules are better than nothing.  But we demand more.  FCC, you’ve come up short!”

In their view, the only way to ensure that the Internet remains “open” is through 19^th Century rules that check the sure-to-be “evilness” of network providers…like Cellular South.

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On Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (example #12,567 that government’s solution to any problem is more government.) Appearing on a panel of self-appointed ‘consumer advocates’ was Anna Burger, political director for SEIU, a.k.a ACORN’s big brother.

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) used his question time to ask Ms. Burger about ACORN. She drops a stunner, “SEIU has cut all ties to ACORN.” Watch the video below:

Of course, don’t believe SEIU has actually ‘cut ties’ with ACORN. Their operations are simply too interwoven for that to be true. Still, you know ACORN’s in trouble when SEIU has to publically dissociate itself from them. Kind of like your big brother or sister saying, “Yeah, I grew up with him and he was a pretty good kid at times. But, I don’t talk to him now.”

Anyway you parse it…Ouch!