Glenn Beck acts as if he's a prisoner of the Commie/Socialist Obama administration, and that's why he plays the courageous, "populist" rebel, throwing shit against the walls of his cell in protest.

But Beck's merely a monkey in a zoo, throwing shit around just for the sake of it. It's earned him attention, but he's a phony. It's not that I disagree with him, which I do. He's a phony because he doesn't speak from conviction or to raise hell but just to pander for his own celebrity.

The best satire yet of Beck's bullshit comes from a video "discovered" by Internet pioneer Lauren Weinstein (click above).

Net neutrality is a major big-business, privacy, and freedom-of-speech issue over continued open access to the Internet. The outcome of this fight will govern how we will use the Web for decades to come — and whether we will be able to use it unfettered. Beck calls net neutrality an Obama-endorsed "Marxist takeover" of the Internet.

Actually, plenty of right-wingers (including the Christian Coalition and Gun Owners of America) strongly support net neutrality, because they're rightly worried that ISPs (Internet service providers) will exert enormous control over what we do online unless there is net neutrality.

See the Christian Coalition's argument that net neutrality "is extremely important to America's grassroots organizations and to those Americans who want to ensure the cable and phone companies controlling access to the Internet will not discriminate based on content."

In fact, the Christian Coalition's argument is one of the most well-reasoned and concise explanations of net neutrality. Beck is ludicrously accusing the Christian Coalition and many other right-wing groups of a "Marxist plot."

Here's Beck's smear of shit against net neutrality. Not clever enough to be a self-parody, it's typically hysterical monkey business by the cynical Beck.

All the squawking in the world and all the pretty little anchorwomen trying to add spice to shouters and wankers like Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow aren't helping CNBC. The business network's audience is dropping faster than last year's stock market. Its October audience is down 50 percent compared with last October, according to Nielsen.

Is it time for another Rick Santelli rant? (Click above for a rerun.) Kiss-ass "biographies" of businesses and people with "passion" (like Sam Walton) aren't working.

Of course, just about every channel is down from last October's panic that drove everyone to subject themselves to cable 24/7 no matter how bad it was for their brains. (See the ratings roundup here.)

Unsurprising bad news for Barack Obama's futile and childish war against Fox News: The channel is still No. 1 by a way huge amount.

Cisco's $2.96 billion purchase of Norwegian tech giant Tandberg "expands its lineup of videoconferencing products." Sorry to bring that development to staffers worldwide who will have to set up even more of those dog-and-pony shows. Tandberg's the world's largest maker of videoconferencing equipment.

Above, a video story about one of George W. Bush's rehearsals for a 2007 videoconference. Unfortunately, I can't locate the infamous October 2005 staged videoconference starring one of the Defense Department's flacks as a phony grunt lobbing a carefully rehearsed softball question to the president from Iraq — the identity of the flack was a fact that I revealed back then.

The multicultural collision of Ikea, indie actors,"reality" shows, and web-only vanity projects is a big step in marketing, but what about the shit it's leaving on our shoes?

Call it advertainment, though the ad industry calls these things branded webisodes. It's kinda the opposite of product placement: In this case, the stars — Illeana Douglas, Keanu Reeves, Jeff Goldblum, Justine Bateman, and other Ikeans — are products that are placed inside other products. Like those Russian or Ukrainian nesting dolls.

Under Pressure, Obama Defends Health-Care Plan (WSJ)

Teabaggers outside, friendly folks inside. Too friendly and too respectful inside, reminiscent of the carefully screened audiences at the "town halls" that Dick Cheney and George W. Bush conducted. Best quote from a teabagger outside: ""Adolf Hitler was for exterminating the weak, not just the Jews and stuff, and socialism — that's what's going to happen." "Jews and stuff" — sounds like a chain of Bar Mitzvah-themed gift shops.

G.M. Puts Electric Car's City Mileage in Triple Digits (NYT)

It took a fucking bankruptcy to make GM get on the stick and finally roll out a fucking electric car.

U.S. economy has bottomed: George Soros (Reuters)

He should know. He's one of the world's most aggressive, barebacking tops.

A brilliant piece of reporting and writing by the guys at The Smoking Gun outed notorious Pranknet, whose fools have destroyed businesses and people's appetites all over North America.

Why the mainstream press hasn't really picked up on the TSG scoop is beyond me.

Read the TSG expose of the cheesy prankster crew (one of them a convicted child molester) — "Outing An Online Outlaw: A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality" — and the followup story (revealing yet another child molester in the crew) here.

In the contest of scandalized governors, Mark Sanford has a clear edge over Eliot Spitzer. South Carolina's governor really had a thing going on that went beyond the physical: His Argentine lover, Maria, suggested in one of her emails that Marky Mark read Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence.

A girlfriend who takes a Greenspan autobiography to read on the beach — what's better than that?! It's clear that Mark and Maria had more scintillating conversations than New York governor Spitzer's negotiations with his hookers about the price of a blowjob.

But maybe Sanford should have read the Greenspan memoir before he started sparkin' with the woman since identified as Maria Belen Chapur.

At the very least, Sanford should have recalled that Greenspan famously raised the question of "irrational exuberance" way back in 1996. (Read about it in Gideon Haigh's excellent 2007 review of the Greenspan memoir here.)

In any case, the Guardian's Ewen MacAskill perfectly captured the tone of the Sanford affair (the affair about the affair) when he wrote that the "story has knocked the upheaval in Iran off the top news spot in the US, with the emails being read out by po-faced television anchors and political correspondents." ("Po-faced," derived from the French for toilet, means "piously or hypocritically solemn.")

Plenty of po-faced people swirling around this affair — Gawker's John Cook isn't one of them; he actually exhibits a sense of humor while charting the "million monkeys Googling" the name of Sanford's lover.

Sanford himself — an early critic of fellow horndog Bill Clinton's "moral legitimacy" — leads the po-faced parade, closely followed by 99 percent of all commentators and the remaining 1 percent of weak jokesters.

Sanford stood for the sanctity of hetero marriage, while abandoning his boys on Father's Day weekend so he could screw the pooch in Argentina. All Spitzer did was vigorously prosecute prostitutes while using them on the side. On the other hand, Spitzer dragged his wife on stage to try to spin his mortification. What's more po-faced than that?

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's grilling by a House panel today left him unsinged, especially because of the dumb-ass statements spouting from various House members. A Dow Jones story headlined with "Lawmakers Attack Fed For Being 'Shrouded In Secrecy'" sums it up well. (Live blog by the NYT here.)

The Fed is secretive? Well, yeah. I'm pretty unhappy that the sun rises in the east, too. But that's what it does, that's how it functions, that's reality, and in the Fed's case, some of that secrecy is essential when setting monetary policy -- and that's why the Fed should never be given any more regulatory authority than it has. At least Dennis Kucinich gets it.

It was New York's own Edolphus Towns, the new chair of House Oversight and Government Reform, who kept complaining, according to reports, that the Fed is "shrouded in secrecy." What a waste of time this hearing is.

Ed Towns is a very poor replacement for Henry Waxman, who kicked himself upstairs to chair House Energy and Commerce. Waxman was a tiger as the Gov't Reform chair. Towns is toothless and clueless. He's not even very good at being a ringmaster for these show-and-tell trials of administration officials.

Al Sharpton, the great healer, has naturally tried to interject himself into the state Senate mess that has paralyzed any legislative attempt to work on New York's economic crisis.

But the guy who was able to get James Brown to appear with him can't even get Governor David Paterson to a palaver.

Sharpton called a "summit" on the Senate mess. So far, no success.

Every state is hurting, but only New York has Al Sharpton. But Sharpton's lost his touch. Back in 1974, when he was only 19 and America's cities were either burning or smoldering, Sharpton horned in on one of James Brown's appearances on Soul Train. In the video above, host Don Cornelius introduces Sharpton, who presents the Godfather of Soul with a gold record and touts himself as a young black leader. (It was a gold record that Brown already had received, obviously, but it was repackaged so Sharpton could present it and thus garner some publicity. Which he did.)

In the current crisis in Albany, Sharpton has so far garnered just a modicum of publicity. How did the "summit" turn out? It didn't amount to much of anything. Sharpton did meet Saturday with erstwhile rebel senator Hiram Monserrate and others. They posed for pictures, said a few words, and then retired for a private meeting. Invited guest David Paterson was apparently a no-show.

Nevada Senator John Ensign, a prime GOP critic of Barack Obama's economic-stimulus plan, says he won't resign, despite the furor over his having regularly fucked one of his staffers.

The L.A. Times notes that the "silver-haired, telegenic conservative," who has been "a rising star in the Republican Party," was "grim-faced" as he apologized.

Ensign didn't identify the staffer, but she (or he) must be feeling pretty miffed that Ensign described their affair as "absolutely the worst thing I have ever done in my life."

True to form, Ensign noted that he and wife Darlene went into counseling and that their marriage is "stronger than ever."

Maybe eventually, no one will care whom he or other politicians fuck, as long as they do it on their own time and their own dime and aren't hypocritical about it.

Of course, popular butch broadcaster Rachel Maddow accurately points out that very hypocrisy: that before Ensign admitted cheating on his wife he had affirmed that he was an ardent believer in the "institution of marriage" and an adamant foe of gay marriages. Not to mention that he didn't carry on his affair on his own time: He was not only fucking one of his campaign staffers but she was married to one of his other staffers — a cuckold in his Senate office.

Anyway, Americans aren't as evolved as Europeans (who generally don't care who their politicans fuck), so this tiff over Ensign is is good news for Obama. The president's going to have a tough enough time getting his vaunted "overhaul" of the financial system through Congress. Now, a key foe of his stimulus plan has confessed to being overstimulated and has suffered a public embarrassment. Ensign is chair of the Republican Policy Committee and has been a frequent talking-head critic of Obama's economic package. He might have a tougher time getting people to take him seriously when he criticizes the other guy's package.

The senator says he won't resign, but he is thought to have quit his job as the latest driver of the GOP Pussy Wagon.

Some Nevada observers say the fuss won't hurt him locally because "he's the leading voice in Nevada and in the country for fiscal restraint." Physical restraint, however, is something else, at least when it comes to Ensign's keeping his dick in his pants.