Solid Principles recently made this You Tube video titled ‘Black-Eyed Democracy’ It highlights awareness on the increasing presence of Facebook Attack Ads, the next step in Political Attack Media leading up to the 2012 Presidential Race.

Further Reading: ‘Behind The ‘Attactivism’ Facebook Curtain‘

While Jane Cunningham’s decision to bypass a chance at Missouri’s open 2nd Congressional District makes the race less entertaining, the contrast in the GOP primary between Ed Martin and Ann Wagner will still make for a fascinating intraparty battle.

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By: Rachel Weiner

The surprise resignation of Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) has major implications for another Nevada Republican: former assemblywoman Sharron Angle.

Angle, who lost last fall to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, was planning to run for Rep. Dean Heller’s seat when the Republican congressman ran for Senate next year. Now that Ensign is stepping down, Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) is likely to appoint Heller to the Senate. That means a special election for his House seat. Depending on how the election law is interpreted, things look better or worse for Angle.

If Sandoval appoints Heller, he must call for a special election in 180 days. The law could be used to call for a free-for-all election in which candidates from all parties compete. That favors Angle, who has wide name recognition and who carried the district in her Senate campaign. However, it could also be used to call for a party nomination process followed by an election. If party committees pick the candidates, Angle has far less of a chance.

“I would urge all players involved in setting up the election to be fair, transparent, and not to manipulate the process for their favored candidates. There is a long recent history across the country of voter backlash resulting from bias by establishment leaders,” said John Yob, a consultant to Angle’s Senate campaign. “Regardless of the system, Sharron Angle will have a clear path to success.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix

By JENNIFER EPSTEIN

Sen. Scott Brown has thrown his tea party supporters “under the bus” with his recent critiques of some Republican budget cut proposals, a movement leader said Friday.

Brown, a Massachusetts Republican, on Thursday denounced GOP suggestions to cut social and cultural programs as “irresponsible,” and Judson Phillips, a leader of Tea Party Nation, is steamed.

“Brown is a politician, and that is meant in the worst sense of the word politician,” Phillips wrote on his blog. “Scott Brown used the Tea Party to get elected. Now he no longer needs this movement and we are tossed under the bus.”

In a Thursday floor speech and in a letter to Senate leaders, Brown said that while cuts “reducing and eliminating needless spending and programs are appropriate … a wholesale reduction in spending, without considering economic, cultural, and social impacts is simply irresponsible.”

Republican proposals, he said, “establish the wrong priorities that would disproportionately affect low-income families and seniors.”

Brown has downplayed his connection to the movement, saying in February that he is “a Republican, period” and that while he respects the tea party, he isn’t part of it.

There are vows from Massachusetts tea party members to launch a primary challenge against Brown next year.

Brown’s remarks came just hours after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praised the tea party movement in a floor speech. And they hit squarely at the movement that helped get him elected, Phillips said. “In his latest sell out of those who put him in” office, Brown has “repeat[ed] the tired old liberal line that the budget cuts the GOP is pushing, disproportionately hurt ‘low income families and seniors.’”

And Brown’s latest stance is all about winning a full six-year term in 2012, Phillips said.

“He knows self-preservation and self-promotion. He has aligned himself with the RINO crowd, which has no beliefs, other than getting reelected and appeasing whatever base he thinks will help him get reelected. From a crass point of view, that is working.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/52391.html#ixzz1IOAQAGGm

By Jonathan S. Tobin

The shooting in Arizona is the sort of thing that obligates all sides in political debates to call a timeout. Right now our collective prayers are with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her family as she struggles for life, as well as with the families of those who were murdered in this senseless evil attack. But acting in the spirit of Rahm Emanuel’s belief that a crisis shouldn’t go to waste, some on the left are determined to exploit this tragedy to advance their own partisan interests.

One example is a post by the New Yorker’s George Packer, who writes today that “It doesn’t matter why he did it.” The “he” is the alleged Arizona murderer Jared Loughner, a mentally unstable creature who thinks that the government is imposing “mind control” on the public via “grammar.”

Packer concedes that Loughner is not an advocate of any coherent ideology or movement that has any real link to anything that is part of contemporary political debates, including the Tea Party activists. But to him that is irrelevant, because conservative activists and pundits have spent the last two years criticizing President Obama and his policies, making violence inevitable.

It is true that a few people on the margins have indulged in rhetoric that can be termed attempts at the “delegitimization” of Obama, including those who have irrationally focused on myths about the president’s birthplace and religion. But on the left it has become a piece of conventional wisdom that all conservatives are somehow guilty of rhetoric that crosses the bounds of decency. Indeed, so sensitive are Packer and those who think like him that even the public reading of the Constitution this past week by members of Congress (an exercise that included Rep. Giffords, who proudly read the First Amendment) is “an assault on the legitimacy of the Democratic Administration and Congress.”

Speaking in the same spirit, the National Jewish Democratic Council asserted: “It is fair to say — in today’s political climate, and given today’s political rhetoric — that many have contributed to the building levels of vitriol in our political discourse that have surely contributed to the atmosphere in which this event transpired.”

Both Packer’s post and the NJDC statement reflect the liberal talking point of the last two years that has sought to maintain the pretense that the Tea Party and other fervent critics of Obama were nothing more than hate-filled nut cases rather than merely citizens who were asserting their constitutional right of dissent. But as the election in November proved, the Tea Party turned out in many respects to be more representative of mainstream America than the media and other elites who branded them as extremists.

It is true that the political debate in this country over the last two years has been heated, with President Obama and congressional Democrats being subjected to some particularly tough rhetoric. But the level of nastiness directed at Obama was no greater than the vicious attacks that had been leveled at President Bush, who along with Dick Cheney and other administration figures was regularly vilified not only by demonstrators but also by mainstream liberal politicians. Indeed, Packer acts as though left-wing talk-show hosts like Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz, who repeatedly seek to delegitimize Republicans and conservatives, didn’t exist. And it is not as if Republicans receive no threats; some, like Rep. Eric Cantor, the new House majority leader, have also been subjected to this sort of indecent behavior.

Despite all this, Packer and the NJDC are determined to use the tragedy in Arizona to resurrect this failed effort to besmirch conservatives and other Obama critics as violent haters. There is, after all, a precedent for this sort of thing. In 1995, President Clinton used the Oklahoma City bombing to strike back at his critics, including radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, even though Limbaugh and others critical of Clinton had nothing to do with the lunatics who perpetrated that crime.

Calls for civil debate are always appropriate, but those who wish to use this terrible crime to attempt to silence their opponents or to stifle legitimate public debate or activism are the ones who are crossing the bounds of decency today.

Read more at CommentaryMagazine.com