A video clip featuring some of Beck’s words was uploaded Monday by the Santorum campaign:

The campaign also offered the following transcript of Beck:

I don’t endorse candidates, I don’t get involved in politics, I don’t make donations to any politician. Rick Santorum is a friend of mine, but I choose my friends carefully and I would never tell you someone was a friend of mine if I didn’t have great respect for them. I will tell you this. People ask me all the time, ‘who is out there?’ I tell them the same thing, I don’t trust any of them, but if I had to trust the reins of power with one person that is currently in this field and, because I think the next president has got to be Abraham Lincoln, he has got to be somebody who knows exactly who he is, knows exactly where he stands and is willing to, in the end, turn those reins of power back over. The temptation and the pressure is going to be absolutely enormous. If there is one guy out there that is the next George Washington, the only guy that I could think of is Rick Santorum. I would ask that you would take a look at him.

To place the Santorum-promoted piece in context, visit The Right Scoop blog, where a nearly 17 minute clip has been posted of the same exchange.

“We think all of the candidates suck,” Beck said after Santorum joined him by phone.

Beck added that there are only two candidates, in his opinion, that don’t have “scary policies.” Those two being Santorum and U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann.

“So, what do we need to do to get you and Michele Bachmann to be the president? Vice-president? I don’t care — you can switch chairs whenever you want. You can work it out. What do we do?” asked Beck.

Santorum’s response was his website address and a request for campaign donations.

Source: A still of Sen. Amy Klobuchar from the ad.

In ads that will run on cable throughout the week, digital rights activist groups criticize Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar for support of the Commercial Felony Streaming Act, which they say would throttle internet freedom to protect profits for entertainment companies.

On its website, Demand Progress, a progressive group, says they have one goal for the ad: “We need to embarrass a key lawmaker to set an example for others, and make it clear that it’s not okay to shill for the entertainment industry.”

The ad targets the Commercial Felony Streaming Act, which would “makes unauthorized web streaming of copyrighted content a felony with a possible penalty of up to 5 years in prison,” according to Open Congress.

The ad is named “Bieber is Right” in reference to teen pop star Justin Bieber’s comments criticizing Klobuchar for the bill. It asks: “Why is Sen. Klobuchar’s top legislative priority an internet censorship bill that would risk putting ordinary internet users and even Justin Bieber behind bars?”

It’s also paid for by Fight for the Future, a technology rights group, and contains much footage from Occupy Wall Street rallies in Minnesota. Many other groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, have opposed the legislation.

The act is supported by a host of entertainment and media companies, many of which gave generously to Democratic candidates, according to Open Congress.

Crossroads GPS, a conservative policy and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., is targeting Iowa voters with TV ads in the state’s largest media market.

Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, which has ties to former White House deputy chief Karl Rove, has spent $85,125 so far at KCCI, the local CBS affiliate in Des Moines and the state’s largest network TV station. The group has run ads since late June, and recently spent $13,472 for ads running between Oct. 25 and Nov. 3. At least a portion of the ads being run in Iowa target Democratic U.S. Rep. Leonard Boswell.

According to OpenSecrets.org, the 501(c)(4) “outside spending” group spent $15.1 million against Democrats in the 2009-10 cycle and $479,619 for Republicans. It spent another $1.1 million on electioneering communications. The group doesn’t disclose its donors.

American Crossroads, a related “super PAC,” raised $26.5 million in 2010 and spent $21.5 million. It raised and spent the most out of any independent expenditure-only committees in 2010.

The super PAC, which must disclose its donors, has raised $6.6 million so far this cycle.

Crossroads GPS focuses on seven issues, according to its website: lower taxes, less government spending, building the private sector, reducing government worker pay, shutting down the borders, reworking health care reform, pushing for American energy development.

The group’s latest offering against Boswell was uploaded to YouTube Monday and is embedded below.

The lawsuit describes Andy as taking “a ‘special interest’ in Plaintiffs Dean and YCR because he is a secularist and/or atheist and gay activist with a politically left ideology who despises people of faith.” However, Andy’s award-winning coverage of YCR has received wide praise, including the Society of Professional Journalist’s (SPJ) first prize for Best Continuing Coverage. SPJ stated that Andy took “an even-handed approach into a weighty subject sure to provoke controversy from various standpoints.”

We read your comments, tweets, Facebook messages and emails and know you agree that Andy’s coverage along with the rest of the reporting by The American Independent News Network, is excellent. You can help ensure that our work continues by making a donation today to support The American Independent News Network and our Legal Defense Fund.

Make no mistake: This suit is a direct attack not only on us but on the very idea of a free and independent press, as well as an attempt to silence journalists like Andy who expose the views of people like Bradlee Dean. In short, this is a frivolous and blatant attempt to chill free speech. They think that because we are a small, non-profit organization we will be forced to back down; they think by threatening us with a lawsuit, we will stop. They are wrong. We stand behind Andy and our coverage completely, and know you do too.

The American Independent News Network fully intends to fight this suit and to continue our reporting.  You can help us do both by making a donation to our Legal Defense Fund today.

By making a donation you are helping to provide us with the resources to withstand such challenges and to continue our work of advancing and protecting the common good.  Your donation can help take a stand for freedom of the press and against the suppression of dissent through dubious legal means. You can also donate through PayPal.

Hanaa Rifaey is the publisher of The American Independent News Network, the parent organization of The Minnesota Independent.

Source: Flickr, Titanus

The 2011 merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal created one of the largest media conglomerates in American history, which critics warn could limit the variety of voices heard by the public and threaten the internet’s role as a forum for free exchange of information.

While many corporations seek to influence the decisions made by the government with the double whammy of campaign donations and lobbyists, Comcast pursued this strategy on what one consumer advocate described as a “grander scale.”

“Comcast did a sophisticated, well-designed, expensive lobbying campaign and it touched all the right buttons. It played its hands very well—I give them credit for using their political clout effectively,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior vice president of the Media Access Project, which campaigned against the merger. ”But the real scandal about the political process is what is legal; it’s that Comcast didn’t have to break any laws in order to get its way.”

Birth of one of the world’s largest media conglomerates
The likelihood of a Comcast and NBC-Universal merger was first reported in September 2009. It drew outrage from a spate of public advocates, including Minnesota U.S. Sen. Al Franken, who said the merger would lead to fewer options for the public.

“I am convinced that without significant changes to protect consumers, merging a company who provides programming and one who provides the pipes that carry said programming would be a raw deal for Minnesotans and independent content producers alike,” Franken wrote on his blog in February 2010.

Franken also rightly predicted that pressure would come from private interests over the merger deal.

“Fights like this one are more than worth having, they’re essential to preserving the fabric of our democracy,” Franken wrote. “I know full well that by taking positions like this, I’m inviting special interest groups to spend a lot of money to defeat me down the road. That’s OK by me—because corporations getting their way isn’t some bad medicine Americans need to swallow—we can stand, fight and win if we work together.”

A spokesperson for Comcast declined to answer answer any questions related to the company’s political activity.

But according to the company’s statement on political and trade activity, Comcast uses public policy advocacy, lobbying, political contributions and involvement in third party organizations to act on public policy issues of concern to the company: ”The political and trade association activities of the Company are directed to influencing the wide variety of public policy issues that impact the company’s business.”

That sort of activity can be expensive. Comcast has dumped tens of millions of dollars into the political system in the last decade, according to Federal Election Commission documents. Comcast has pumped more money into its political and lobbyist spending every year since 2001.

“There’s always an element of risk and gambling involved when it comes to influence peddling on Capitol Hill, what lobbyists and special interest groups and corporations do is make the odds the best they can in their favor,” said Craig Holman of Public Citizen. ”It’s all designed to buy influence and it usually does work. But not always.”

Pulling the strings of those who pull the strings
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was responsible for considering the Comcast and NBC-Universal merger.

Putting pressure on an appointed group of commissioners like the FCC isn’t actually that different from pressuring Congress.

“As a matter of fact, it can be harder for the public to trace,” Holman said. “It’s quite difficult to analyze, much of the lobbying activity for instance when it comes to working with FCC commissioners or others like that doesn’t get reported, it very frequently is not disclosed as lobbying activity.”

Comcast spent more than $75 million on federal lobbyists alone in the last ten years, with much of that sum coming in recent years, according to Federal Election Commission records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Last year alone, during which much of the merger process took place, the company employed 109 federal lobbyists and lobbied both houses of Congress and the FCC.

The money a company spends on lobbying is important, Holman said, but even more important is the amount of money they can stuff into political campaigns.

“Besides direct campaign contributions, which are traceable from PACs, they will do bundling activity, which is very difficult to trace, and in many cases untraceable,” Holman said. “They will also now with Citizens United do direct corporate expenditures through third party groups, which are entirely untraceable, but their lobbyists will be on the Hill letting the lawmakers know what they’re doing with their money.”

While waiting on FCC approval of the merger in the 2010 election cycle, Comcast upped the amount of money they were directly donating through their political action committee, spending $3.5 million on political campaigns (favoring Democrats).

“There can also be the direct campaign contributor factor to any lawmakers, they can pull the strings of members of Congress and get members of Congress to apply pressure on FCC commissioners to vote a certain way on various issues, and they do,” Holman said. “The agency regulations are every bit as important as lawmaking, every lobbyist worth his or her salt knows that.”

Members of the Federal Communications Commission are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate. But Congress isn’t completely powerless in regards to the FCC, as recent Republican Senate disapproval of the FCC’s stance on net neutrality shows.

In a January letter to the FCC about the Comcast merger, Reps. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Lee Terry (R-Neb.) condemned the “heavy-handed tactics of an overreaching FCC” and threatened that they will be “examining whether changes in the FCC’s transaction review process are needed as we exercise congressional oversight in the weeks to come.”

In fact, 88 of 97 members of Congress who sent a January letter urging immediate passage of the Comcast merger had received money from Comcast’s political action committee, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

In through the revolving door
By law, there’s never more than three members of one political party on the FCC, which can lead to partisanship around close issues.

“Even though FCC commissioners are not elected officials, many of them are exceedingly loyal to the elected officials who appointed them or who are responsible for them getting their appointments, they tend to be very partisan,” Holman said. “They’re made very aware as to who the big players are on Capitol Hill.”

The FCC voted 4-1 in January 2011 to approve the Comcast and NBC-Universal merger with some conditions, eliciting an outraged reaction from Franken: ”The Commission is supposed to protect the public interest, not corporate interests. But what we see today is an effort by the FCC to appease the very companies it’s charged with regulating.”

It was only a few months after the decision to approve the merger that Comcast hired FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who supported the merger, was hired as the new Comcast vice president for government affairs, what’s known in Capitol circles as the “revolving door.”

“It had the appearance of something that was problematic, but I don’t have any evidence,” Schwartzman said. ”You just don’t know the impact this kind of lobbying actually has or not, but the cumulative effect is pretty clear.”

Although the company pumped millions of dollars into the political system around the time the merger was being considered, the new Comcast saw a total revenue of $14.3 billion in just the second financial quarter of 2011.

Amid a furor over its recent redesign, and with privacy concerns tailing its every move, Facebook has filed paperwork to start its own political action committee.

PAC’s are used to distribute money to individual candidates, and observers see it as a sign that social media companies have an increasing stake in the political landscape,reported The Hill.

“FB PAC will give our employees a way to make their voice heard in the political process by supporting candidates who share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy,” a spokesman said, “while giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”

Legislative debates about patents, monopolies and privacy have been been the main preserve of Microsoft and Google, two large tech companies that both have PACs.

Facebook has four registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and spent $550,000 in lobbying fees in fiscal year 2011. This is a big jump from the $350,000 it spent in 2010. In fact, in the second quarter this year, Facebook spent more than it ever has before on lobbying.

According to Open Secrets, the majority of Facebook’s money is directed at copyright, patent and trademark issues and media information and publishing sectors, but it also has a stake in natural resources and trade.

Most recently, it lobbied on the America Invests Act, which enacted the most significant change to U.S. patent law since 1952, changing it from a “first to invent” to a “first to file” system.

Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan group that focuses on privacy issues, told The New York Times that he was not surprised  Facebook is looking to step up its lobbying efforts.

“Facebook is monetizing its platform,” Court said. “This is all about how much it is going to be able to push the envelope with consumers and not have the government require it to change.”

News of former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s endorsement of Mitt Romney for the GOP presidential nomination rippled all the way to Comedy Central’s Colbert Report Monday.

“Just weeks ago these two men were bitter rivals, opposite in every way. And look at them now, it’s like Miracle Whip endorsing mayonnaise,” Stephen Colbert said.

Romney also had Pawlenty backstage as his guest at last night’s CNN and tea party debate, which Colbert said was fitting: ”Plus one, also the number of votes his endorsement has brought to the Romney campaign.”

Pawlenty appeared on Colbert’s show last week, where Pawlenty joked that he considered shooting sparks out of his butt to add campaign excitement.

The Minnesota Independent’s parent nonprofit, the American Independent News Network, was accepted into the Association of Alternative Newsmedia as the group’s first web-only news outlet following a vote of approval during its annual membership meeting held in New Orleans last month. ANN, formerly the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, includes papers like City Pages and the Village Voice among its members.

“We are thrilled to welcome the American Independent News Network as our first online-only member,” Tiffany Shackelford, the executive director of AAN, said in a statement. “Its independent voice is an excellent example of the tireless and compelling journalism other online news organizations should aspire to replicate.”

Shackelford added: “We look forward to accepting more online-only news outlets.”

AINN, with its eight state and national affiliates, enters the AAN fold after it received the two-thirds votes necessary to gain admission into the alternative press trade group formerly known as the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. The organization approved the name change the same day it accepted AINN. Only 30 percent of news outlets that apply for membership with AAN are selected.

Comprising 130 publications that report in every major metropolitan area of the United States, AAN maintains a combined weekly circulation of over 6.5 million as well as an active readership of nearly 17 million in the U.S. and Canada.

Several members of the AINN editorial team are alumnae of AAN publications, including its executive editor, Blake de Pastino, who reported for publications in the New Times network.

The Minnesota Independent and seven other local sites were included in The Fix‘s annual list of best political blogs.

The Fix, which is run by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, relied on nominations from readers to compile the list.

Minnesota came out for special acclaim for its “very active political blog culture”; only Florida had more sites mentioned.

The following Minnesota blogs also won a place on the list: Bluestem Prairie, Capitol View, Dump Bachmann, Hot Dish Politics, MinnPotus, Smart Politics and True North.

Our sister site, the Iowa Independent, also made the list for Iowa.

Marcus Bachmann, husband of presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and proprietor of Bachmann & Associates, told the Star Tribune on Thursday that audio of him comparing gays and lesbians to barbarians was doctored. The audio clip was used extensively in the media following reports that Dr. Bachmann’s clinic performed therapy aimed at “curing” gays and lesbians of homosexuality.

In the clip, Point of View radio host Penna Dexter asked Dr. Bachmann what parents should do if a teenager tells them they might be gay.

Bachmann said parents should tell them what the Christian Bible says about homosexuality.

Here’s a transcript of his full remarks:

Dexter: Today The Wall Street Journal came out with an article, “What do you say when your teenager is gay?” What do you say to Christian parents who come up with this?

Bachmann: Well, I think you clearly say, what is the understanding of God’s word on homosexuality. And I think that this is no mystery that a child or pre-adolescent, particularly adolescents, will question and wonder about sexuality. That’s nothing new under the sun since the beginning of time. But I don’t think we should take that as, because we wonder or we think or we question, does that take us down the road of homosexuality —

Dexter: Could you add the word experiment to that?

Bachmann: Well, certainly, there’s that curiosity. But again, we, like, you know, it is as if we have to understand: Barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined. And just because someone feels it or thinks it, doesn’t mean that we’re supposed to go down that road. That’s what’s called the sinful nature. And we have a responsibility as parents and as authority figures not to encourage such thoughts and feelings from moving into the action steps.

Let’s face it what’s our culture doing today? What is our public school system doing today? They are giving full wide open doors to children not only giving encouragement to think it, but to encourage actions steps. That’s why when we understand the percentage of homosexuals in this country is small but by these open doors we can see it is starting to increase.

He told the Star Tribune that he wasn’t talking about gays and lesbians.

“I was talking in reference to children. Nothing, nothing to do with homosexuality. That’s not my mindset. That’s not my belief system. That’s not the way I would talk,” Bachmann said.

Radio host Dexter backed Bachmann up. “It was an endearing term, in a way, that made sense to me and to our audience,” Dexter told the Minneapolis paper. “We believe that children are born with a nature that inclines them to challenge and break rules, and that it is thus the parents’ responsibility to guide their children along good and productive paths.”

Whether or not Bachmann was referring to children or gays and lesbians, based on the interview, it is clear that Dr. Bachmann does not view being gay or lesbian as a good and productive path.

In addition to suggesting his intent was misunderstood, Bachmann also told the Star Tribune that someone must have doctored the audio. That’s similar to what a staff person at Bachmann’s clinic told Truth Wins Out, the group that went undercover to determine whether or not the clinic was conducting “ex-gay” therapy.

“It sounds like… something that someone just did. It doesn’t sound accurate,” the staff person said.

When I listened to the original audio in 2010, which was linked in an article the Minnesota Independent published on Bachmann & Associates’ contracts with the state of Minnesota, it was identical to the recording captured by Dump Bachmann, a blog that follows Michele Bachmann’s career with a sharply critical eye.

That audio was altered for brevity but not the section where Bachmann is speaking about homosexuality: Dr. Bachmann speaks for a full two minutes — uninterrupted by editing — answering the radio host’s question of what to do when a child tells a parent that they may think they are gay.

New York Magazine talked to Ken Avidor of Dump Bachmann, who captured the audio.

“Flat out, I didn’t doctor a damn thing,” said Avidor. “If I did doctor it, why would I have a link to the original podcast, which is no longer up? Marcus could get a hold of that original podcast. Just call up his friends at the station.”

Here’s Avidor’s audio of Bachmann: