Remember Jeff Larson? He was a Coleman fundraiser who was caught giving Norm Coleman a shady deal on a DC apartment, among other transgressions. Well, he’s back, and he’s seeking revenge on Franken in the form of an ethics complaint:

Coleman strategist Jeff Larson, who heads the direct marketing company FLS Connect, filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee Thursday accusing Franken of soliciting campaign funds from his appearance at a recent Minneapolis hearing on how the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should govern the Internet.

Am I wrong to think that Larson is specifically after Franken? Well, you never know. But Larson seems to have created a new independent group for the specific purpose of filing a complaint against Franken:

The complaint was filed in the name of Senate Accountability Watch, an independent group Larson said he formed a month ago “to help hold senators accountable for their actions, words and deeds.”

It is the group’s only ethics complaint thus far.

I guess that by “Senators,” he means “Al Franken.” We’ll see if Senate Accountability Watch ever files an ethics complaint against anyone other than Franken.

Today, the FCC is holding a hearing in Minneapolis about Net Neutrality — a common-sense effort to regulate the Internet to keep it open and fair. The concept of Net Neutrality is simple: Bits are bits. No data should be prioritized — or de-prioritized — based on its type, its source, or its location. I have a tough time imagining why anybody could oppose this.

But somehow, many Republicans do. Michele Bachmann, bizarrely, calls it censorship. And it’s not just Bachmann — it includes, ironically, Republican bloggers who could be seriously hurt by a closed, proprietary Internet.

Just imagine a system where Comcast decides it doesn’t agree with Rush Limbaugh — or any media personality — and won’t allocate the bandwidth to allow people to get audio or video from his website. Without Net Neutrality, that would be allowed. I don’t want to see Internet choosing to allow certain content and block others.

Net Neutrality has nothing to do with censorship, and nothing to do with the government “taking over” the Internet. It simply tells Internet providers that they can choose to run their businesses as they see fit, but they must treat all data with the same priority.

Al Franken puts it well. Watch Al talking about Net Neutrality below the break. You can also sign Franken’s petition to save Net Neutrality.

While discussing filibuster reform with Think Progress, Al Franken discussed how the GOP has worked to prevent any forward progress. He says the GOP has tried to slow the Senate’s work to a halt so that they can blame Democrats, and he also suggests that they don’t want the economy to improve until after the election:

And Republicans sort of take this stance that the best thing we can do is slow everything down so as little can happen as possible, so that we can both blame Democrats for not having stuff happen, like jobs bills and stuff like that. And so that, you know, I mean sometimes it’d be a legitimate difference of opinion on something, but sometimes it’s been ridiculous. But I do think that this whole approach of slowing everything down, in many ways I think it’s so that, they don’t want a jobs bill because they don’t want people to get jobs before the election. It’s a harsh thing to say, and I don’t want to impugn the motives of my colleagues, but I don’t get what they’re doing otherwise. [Emphasis mine]

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