I’ve been busy watching the Alaska recount.

The other recounts are over; Patty Murray won in Washington and Pat Quinn prevailed in Illinois. Alaska’s, tragically, is the only race left that’s of note, and C-SPAN 12 is streaming live as every write-in vote is scrutinized to see how every voter spelled Murkowski. It’s better than my favorite movie on repeat.

Obama and Webb Are Next!!!

I swear what I’m about to say is the truth: I was planning to take a break from covering electoral politics after the fading to black of the Murkowski Recount Movie, but the Virginia Republican Party tells me here I’ve got another think coming. Click the link above to see what I mean.

At this site, which went up yesterday, we learn that Senator Webb is a huge Muslim Communoterrorist like our president. Now, it’s true that in this space I’ve assailed both Jim Webb and Barack Obama for their equivocation on gay rights, but this site assails them for stuff like standing next to one another on a stage and waving to crowds. It says Webb “voted for the failed stimulus packages” that kept our economy from collapse and also “voted for [the] Obama Care” that has destroyed our health and freedom by not even going into effect until 2014.

Senator Webb is also said here to have “voted in favor of a Value Added Tax.” Anyone who has traveled to Western Europe in the last few generations can see the horror in a Value Added Tax, which is twice as fearsome when its name is capitalized as when it’s lowercase. Scary stuff all around, for sure, but it’s hurting my heart to be writing about the 2012 election just three days after 2010’s.

95 candidates who pledged support for net neutrality lost on Tuesday

Thousands of races for national, state, and local elections were decided this week, with results that ranged from uplifting to upsetting. But no statistic from Tuesday comes close to being as disheartening as this one:

According to Talking Points Memo, “The Progressive Change Campaign Committee has had a list of 95 candidates, all Democrats, listed on netneutralityprotectors.com/ as pledged supporters of Net Neutrality. But, as CNN Money reports, all of them lost.”

That’s right: all 95 candidates for the House who signed a statement by Net Neutrality Protectors in support of Net Neutrality lost their elections.

How the net works matters. Obvi.

Here’s the statement those 95 candidates signed, for what it’s worth: “I believe in protecting Net Neutrality—the First Amendment of the Internet. The open Internet is a vital engine for free speech, economic opportunity, and civic participation in the 21st century. I stand with millions of working families and small businesses against any attempt by big corporations to control the Internet and eliminate the Internet’s level playing field. In Congress, I’ll fight to protect Net Neutrality for the entire Internet—wired and wireless—and make sure big corporations aren’t allowed to take control of free speech online. Mark me down as a 21st century Internet champion!”

Maybe Americans hate net neutrality. Maybe net neutrality exhibits aspects of both Stalinism and Nazism, those opposite totalitarian ideologies that Obama is impossibly but commonly said to espouse at the same time. But I think a lot of voters just don’t understand yet what net neutrality means or how important it is.

It was a lie when I said my heart hurt from writing already about 2012. It’s not hurting. Two dozen political blogs and news digests are abbreviated in two-letter names on my Firefox favorites bar so that I can click across from left to right and then start over the moment I reach the end. In case I’m away from my computer, most of those sites have iPhone apps, including The Hill, which covers Congressional politics.

At the bottom of my Hill iPhone app these days, there’s an AT&T banner ad in which the AT&T logo asks in an orange speech balloon, “Has the net neutrality dogma jumped the shark?” Although I’d noticed this ad previously, I encountered it last night mere hours after I read the news that 95 candidates lost in part for supporting net neutrality. So I clicked it.

It took me to the AT&T Public Policy Blog, which AT&T maintains in the hope that we’ll all be informed about public policy. To wit: “Given the unique ways in which wireless networks are being taxed by new applications, it is absolutely critical that the Commission not apply net neutrality requirements to any spectrum.” Also, “[neutrality] could have adverse consequences.” Not to mention that “Everyone agrees that wireless users deserve choice and freedom.”

It’s sweet of AT&T—newly vested as it is with corporate personhood—to spend money to see that I’m well informed. And if corporations have the same rights as people, they’re as likely as I am to operate in good faith—which means they never operate in good faith. They’re out for themselves. Of course AT&T hates net neutrality. It would limit to billions the possible trillions they and their competitors buddies will someday make off a partitioned internet.

Progressives, libertarians, and anyone else who purports to care about free speech is or should be in favor of net neutrality. But those groups have all done a pitiful job so far of explaining to the voters what net neutrality is or why it’s important. I was saying so myself last night in conversation when one of my friends asked, “Well, then, what is net neutrality?”

I presented a lame analogy in which the end of net neutrality would mean Cox could accept big bucks from, say, CNN, so that www.cnn.com could load on our browsers lightning-fast while AltDaily, which is too poor to pay for those pricy speeds, would load at speeds circa 1995. And this would be happening a decade down the road, in 2020, even after ten more years of exponential growth of processing speeds, and even after net neutrality is long dead thanks to AT&T.

With flat-toned sarcasm, my friend replied, “So net neutrality would be bad because we won’t be able to load AltDaily as quickly?”

Touché: there are worse fates, it’s true. And I suppose my disclaimer for bias here is built into my account of my own argument last night. But a better analogy would be as follows: without net neutrality, AltDaily could never have gotten off the ground in the first place. The cable and phone companies’ control of communication channels would be total. Maybe these days the cable companies are regional (or at least that’s how they make it seem), but those regional players would keep combining into larger conglomerates until the internet was as dead a zone as FM radio in this endless Clear Channel era.

In other words, even if you don’t mind AltDaily’s demise, you’ll mind the demise of some website, somewhere, that runs on no money yet improves your life. Meanwhile the web will be taken over by the folks who seven years ago were already its most powerful operators. The rest of us will be shut out.

Scott Rigell is against net neutrality. Eric Cantor is against net neutrality. Robert Hurt is against net neutrality. Morgan Griffith is against net neutrality. Randy Forbes is against net neutrality. Bob Goodlatte is against net neutrality. Frank Wolf is against net neutrality. Robert Wittman is against net neutrality.

That’s every newly elected or reelected Republican representative in the Commonwealth.

The paragraph before last wasn’t fact-checked, because we don’t have the money a corporation would have to employ a fact-checker for If You Read the Paper. It also wasn’t fact-checked because it didn’t need to be. See, Republicans as a whole hate net neutrality. There’s no good reason for their position, just as there’s no good reason why they stand against gay rights. They just do. You could say it’s how they roll. If you can correct me below regarding the position of one or more Congressmen or Congressmen-elect whom I named, I’ll be thrilled to be proven wrong.

This issue is more important than most of us realize. I wish the people who support net neutrality were as good at setting talking points as the people corporations who work against it. That’s why I write these words: in the hope that the number represented by “the people who support net neutrality” increases by at least one.

Rainy day fund constitutional amendment only barely passes

Speaking of talking points, whoever was behind this ballot measure could have done a better job at promoting it. Most people I know in Virginia went to the polls without realizing it even existed. They therefore had never read it until they were standing in the voting booth on Tuesday. As a result, some of them had difficulty understanding what it was for. I myself knew about it only because I write this weekly news analysis. If I hadn’t been scouring the Pilot pre-election for stories on which to comment, I’d have been completely ignorant of it.

Five questions from Virginia’s 2010 election results

This blog piece in the Post this morning is the sort of MSM blathering I love to hate—full of obvious tautological questions, driven by outdated understanding of strategy—yet I can’t keep from reading to the end. As I said, I’m part of the problem.

Local races helped drive turnout in Hampton Roads

Local turnout for a midterm election was historically high this year, with the city of Poquoson leading the Hampton Roads region at 53% turnout.

Downtown Tunnel tube could be closed 10 days

As long as one tube of the Downtown Tunnel is closed anyway, it’s a perfect location for our next round of zombie tag. What could go wrong, and how can there be any good reason for VDOT’s answer to this idea to be no?

I ask not only because Downtown Tunnel zombie tag would be a lot of fun, but also because support for Downtown Tunnel zombie tag would give our election victors an opportunity to prove they really do want smaller government. Yes, here is my vow: the day I get to sign up for Downtown Tunnel zombie tag is the day I register as a member of the Tea Party, thanks to its tireless advocacy for getting big government out of our daily lives.