Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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2010: A Pretty Good Year

Rich Galen

Friday December 31, 2010

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There are a number of sites which will recount the month-by-month news for 2010. I'm not going to do that.

There is only one story for 2010 - and it was not Stephen Strasburg needing Tommy John surgery. That was number two.

The only story for this year was the uprising among American voters to produce a 63 seat turnover in the U.S. House plus major changes in the U.S. Senate, in Governors' mansions, in State Legislatures, county courthouses and city halls from one end of the nation to the other.

Here's the kind of year Obama had: It was considered to be a successful Christmas week because no one from a third world country attempted to set his junk on fire while flying on an airplane over Detroit.

High Fives in Hawaii!

It is true, that if the Tea Partiers had not gotten involved in some Senate races the GOP might have taken control of the Senate; but if those same Tea Partiers had not stuck their collective noses into the electoral process, Republicans would not have had the overwhelmingly positive results they did.

Ooooh! I only got 18 of the 20 Christmas presents I asked Santa to bring. What a disaster!

President Barack Obama is all about � President Barack Obama. I'm sure, given his druthers, he would have liked to go into the 112th Congress with Dems in control of the House and Senate again, but I am willing to bet an expensive lunch at The Palm that in the recesses of the White House, on the night of November 2, Obama's innermost circle shrugged and said "Hmm, too bad about that. Now, how are we going to protect the boss?"

While Obama was pretending to play nice with his new sand-box buddies on the Republican side of the aisle, he was continuing to pursue a policy which will produce the biggest Constitutional crisis since Watergate: Using the Executive Branch to create sweeping new laws under the guise of publishing new regulations.

The FCC's "net neutrality" rule which was adopted on a party-line vote without giving the hundreds of millions of Internet users the courtesy of letting us know what was actually in the rule before it was voted on.

Translation? The FCC is taking control of how the Internet operates in the United States.

On the heels of that, Obama had the EPA announce rules regarding greenhouse gases. In a release dated December 23, the agency announced that the EPA had

"issued its plan for establishing greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution standards under the Clean Air Act in 2011� The schedule issued in today's agreements provides a clear path forward for these sectors and is part of EPA's common-sense approach to addressing GHGs from the largest industrial pollution sources."

Translation? The EPA is taking control of how electricity is generated in the United States.

Common sense or not (hyphenated or not), the problem is: Republicans in the Congress think those sorts of massive policy decisions belong to the Legislative Branch, not the Executive Branch.

The biggest effect of the November 2 results were that Nancy Pelosi immediately disappeared from view. No one cared what she thought. No one cared what she said. Almost no one cared that she didn't show up at the White House for the signing ceremony for the tax rate/unemployment benefits extender bill.

I guarantee you that the Assistant to the President for Keeping Track of Who Has Dissed Obama noticed, and Mrs. Pelosi will pay a price for that slight.

Speaker-in-Waiting John Boehner (R-OH) will be, I think, a great Speaker of the House. He has been a back-bencher and in leadership in both the minority and the majority. Where Newt, with some justification, saw himself as a transformational figure, Boehner is more of a technician who understands how to make the complex machinery of the U.S. House of Representatives move in a coordinated fashion.

Boehner has the advantage of having been a member of the majority just four years ago. When Gingrich was sworn in as Speaker in 1995 no member of the Republican Conference had spent so much as a single day in the majority.

Boehner's top team: Eric Cantor (R-VA) as Majority Leader and Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as Majority Whip, are talented Congressmen who will, to borrow a phrase from "The Big Chill" keep the conversation lively.

I can't wait to see what 2011 has to offer.

On the Secret Decoder Ring today: Links to the EPA release and to the Big Chill. Also a very creepy Mullfoto and an interesting Catchy Caption of the Day.

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