The lobbyist-funded teabag wing of the Republican party machinery is working in close consultation with telecom companies and organizations like the American Cable Association, AT&T, Comcast, and the US Telecom Association to stop the FCC’s planned protection of net neutrality, which was announced last week.

Having lost the insider lobbyist battle within the FCC – Chairman Genechowski announced he would move forward after a recent court case invalidated the FCC’s authority to protect net neutrality and roll out broadband access for millions of Americans by reclassifying broadband Internet service, allowing the FCC to protect the Internet – the opposition has gone reactionary. Funded by millions by big corporations, teabag front groups like Americans for Prosperity and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform are getting involved, hurling charges of marxism, socialism, and the laundry list of laughable right-wing complaints.

Five are dead in Washington; 29 in West Virginia. Work site explosions killed them. Both employers, a refinery and a mining company, have been cited for safety violations. America must introduce new factors into the corporate profit computation to protect the lives and limbs of workers. One factor is larger safety violation penalties – fines and shutdowns costly enough to outstrip profitability. And when corporations consider fines just another cost of doing business, another crucial factor is the ability to charge CEOs with criminal negligence when their corporations flagrantly violate safety regulations – an ability that other countries have written into law.

Five are dead in Washington; 25 in West Virginia. Work site explosions killed them. Both employers, a refinery and a mining company, have been cited for safety violations. America must introduce new factors into the corporate profit computation to protect the lives and limbs of workers. One factor is larger safety violation penalties – fines and shutdowns costly enough to outstrip profitability. And when corporations consider fines just another cost of doing business, another crucial factor is the ability to charge CEOs with criminal negligence when their corporations flagrantly violate safety regulations – an ability that other countries have written into law.

Scott Horton, Harpers.org legal affairs contributing editor, asks six questions of Will Bunch, Philadelphia Daily News‘s award-winning senior writer, regarding Bunch’s new book: Tear Down This Myth: The Right Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy, now out in paperback.

Last night Sen Diane Feinstein (D-Billionaires) announced her last minute secret deal to revoke Federal environmental law and a century of Western water law so that we taxpayers can subsidize a few hundred deadbeat welfare millionaires and one billionaire in California’s Central Valley.

In keeping with her visceral contempt for representative democracy and the citizens she purports to represent, Lord DiFi plans to push through her multi-billion dollar giveaway as a rider on the fast track Senate jobs bill.

Is DiFi’s multibillion scheme to give away thirty billion people’s water to a few hundred deadbeat welfare millionaire and one billionaire OK with Senate Majority Leader and President Obama?

Call them, and find out. But better call soon: the jobs bill – like DiFi’s obscenely wealthy pals – is on a fast track.

Or you can simply roll over, do nothing, and repeat the mantra: “Forget it Jake. It’s the Delta.”

In a brief and unpleasant conversation, an acquaintance called me a hypocrite for holding both rather libertarian and liberal views. Our dialogue caused me to think about why this seemed such a conundrum to him, and apparently, to the Tea Partiers on the national stage who feel that the Left is composed of fasco-communist, communitarians and that government is the sole enemy of liberty.

There is a tendency in political arguments to take things to their logical, yet absurd conclusion and then argue about that being a bad idea. This is called reductio ad absurdum. It tends to be a bad way to argue, since most of the time things do not get to their absurd and logical conclusion in real life. However, in Colorado Springs we have a real life example of things going to the level of the absurd.

For those who don’t live in Colorado or don’t follow the whole “Tax Payers Bill of Rights” (TABOR) movement I need to set the stage a little bit. There is a this very conservative fellow by the name of Douglas Bruce. Old Dougie is more than a bit of a nutter about taxes. He and Grover Norquist have the same idea,namely, that the government never spends money well and should always be starved of all the money possible, at every turn

TABOR being passed, first in Colorado Springs, then state-wide in Colorado. One of the provisions of TABOR is that tax revenue cannot be increased except by the popular vote of the people, beyond the rate of inflation plus the rate of population growth. Beyond that limit the State or the City has to return any revenue they have collected.

That would be bad enough, but TABOR is based on the previous year, so if we have a recession like the one we are in, and revenues fall, then the next year the City or the State has to start from that lower limit. They can’t stay where they were the previous year and to raise anymore revenue requires a popular vote.

Cenk Uygur: “On the substance, Jane Hamsher and Grover Norquist are right.” He illustrates why a left-right alliance is necessary to get the attention of the Obama Administration, and how this alliance affects Rahm Emanuel on a very personal level. “They do make very legitimate points, and Rahm has to answer them.”

Jane Hamsher continues to demonstrate that building coalitions to move the political issue is more important than partisan or personal animosity.

GBCW, so long FDL