If that happens — and many analysts say its a question of when, not if — it will plunge all of Europe into financial crisis. But that will have far reaching consequences around the globe, including in the United States, and it hasn’t widely sunk in that it could break our meager recovery and weigh heavily on Presidential politics next year.

• Google and Microsoft now dominate influence-peddling around Internet issues, each having spent $3.5 million on lobbying through the first half of 2011. Google’s total lobbyist count is now up to 93, the highest number the company has ever had in Washington (roughly one for every six members of Congress). The biggest thrust of Google’s lobbying push involves antitrust, patents, copyright, trade and China.
• The hiring spree isn’t limited to registered lobbyists. Another key form of influence comes from well-connected lawyers and lobbyists who do not register to lobby. Google, like many other companies, takes advantage of a lobbying disclosure loophole allowing lobbyists to skip registering if they spend less than 20 percent of their time contacting officials. This loophole is often used by former lawmakers who can’t register to lobby according to revolving door rules or who don’t want to show up on official registrations.
• Microsoft’s long dance with China has continued even after Gates ceded control of day-to-day operations in 2008 — when Hu returned to America this year for a state dinner, current Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer flew to meet him.
• With Bing hemorrhaging $2 billion a year and Google making tremendous inroads into the smartphone market, Microsoft has regrouped, teaming up with other corporate content kingpins on Capitol Hill to push for an extremely restrictive set of patent and copyright legislation — an intra-business battle being fought on ideological and political grounds.
• After buying the Motorola cell phone maker and its huge patent portfolio, Google quietly transferred nine key patents to HTC, which HTC immediately deployed in a lawsuit against Apple. After acquiring 17,000 patents from it’s Motorola merger, Google now has ample ammunition to retaliate against Microsoft.

Read the whole thing here…

** UPDATE **

FaceBook is in the game with it’s own PAC filing today…

The NYPD spying story: the NYPD, in cooperation with the CIA, ran a post-9/11 spying operation targeting Muslims that would “run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government.” The CIA can’t legally spy on U.S. citizens, but they appeared to help the NYPD do just that. NYPD officers, even without specific leads involving criminal activity, have collected information on people inside restaurants serving halal meat, Muslim student associations, Islamic schools, ethnic bookstores, hookah bars and mosques.

Read on…

Wasting taxpayer dollars-

SEC Chairman, millionaire Mary Schapiro who was paid $9,000,000.00 upon leaving her post as the head of FINRA, tapped Hu to help launch the new unit, designed to serve as the agency “think tank,” to look ahead at the fast-changing landscape of trading and financial instruments.

In an unusual move, first reported by Reuters in May, the SEC decided to offer him a compensation package that designated his hometown of Austin, Texas, as his “duty station, making him eligible to receive $120,000 to cover housing, meals and airfare through his tenure, in addition to $314,198.26 for his salary.

I guess when you have all that money, you really don’t get what the real world is like.

Why did President Obama hire this person to head the SEC?

Write him a note. Demand she be fired. This is absurd.

In the eyes of the National Rifle Association (NRA) executive vice president Wayne LaPierre, President Barack Obama’s decision not to pursue gun control legislation is a “massive conspiracy,” and just another reason not to give him a second term.

WTF ?!?

Read on…