Phil Kerpen

by Phil Kerpen

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn made it official: Illinois will have a special Senate election just for the lame duck session. Thus Illinois joins Delaware and West Virginia (both having special elections) as the three states whose winners on election day will—barring a disputed election result—be seated for a lame duck session in December. A fourth, Colorado, is less clear but may also be in play.

The lame duck session looks increasingly likely—and increasingly ambitious. Sen. Kerry continues to stress that cap-and-trade will be on the agenda, and Sen. Harry Reid (who may be a lame duck himself after Election Day) confirmed it to the Netroots Nation audience, saying: “We’re going to have to have a lame-duck session, so we’re not giving up.”

Read the rest on BigGovernment.com.

by Phil Kerpen

One of the more extreme proposals floated early in the national health care debate was the idea of taxing soda and other sugary beverages. That trial balloon was almost immediately shot down by the American public, but the Obama administration is attempting to achieve, by subterfuge, soda taxes and a lot of other ways to micromanage our lives in the name of public health—whether or not ObamaCare passes. The mechanism is buried in last year’s $862-billion-and-counting stimulus bill, and works by diverting hundreds of millions of dollars that should be promoting economic growth to instead pay lobbyists to push for higher taxes and nanny-state controls over our lives.

Read the rest at BigGovernment.com.

Listen to a related 2-minute KerpenCast.

by Phil Kerpen

For years we’ve repeatedly heard the falsehood that most Americans want government to regulate the Internet. We’ve also heard that the Left is supposedly miles ahead of the Right when it comes to online organizing and technological expertise. Well, late last week, both of those myths have been exposed.

The Federal Communications Commission asked the public to submit comments on its plan to implement so-called net neutrality regulations that would allow government bureaucrats to tinker with the Internet. The vaunted NetRoots expected to carry the day so much that they simply ignored the facts, claimed victory, and showed themselves to be fools.

Read the rest at BigGovernment.com.

by Phil Kerpen

Congress’s official investigation into the financial crisis, the so-called Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, will convene its first meeting today. Unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi’s handpicked chairman of the commission Phil Angelides, has deep ties to radical left-wing politics, including the Van Jones-connected Apollo Alliance, which he chairs, and ACORN, which is an Apollo member and endorsed and actively supported his gubernatorial campaign. His selection proves the commission will be a politicized attempt to advance a left-wing agenda through a revisionist history of the financial crisis. It also assures that ACORN and other community organizers who forced banks to make reckless loans in the name of affordable housing will be let off the hook.

Read the rest at BigGovernment.com.