Here are a few political cartoons for January 31, 2010. To see more great ones, check out: Flopping Aces. They pull together some of the best political cartoons every Sunday.

I wanted to weigh-in briefly on reports that the director of the undercover anti-Acorn videos that racked up record hits and record ratings in August, James O’Keefe, was arrested after some kind of unauthorized activity at the offices of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu. Andy Brietbart, whose BigGovernment.com site published the vidoes,weighed-in earlier by sprinting to distance himself as quickly as possible from the situation.

It’s important when you engage in activism to avoid using people and being used for political ends. A lot of people, particularly young people, who have strong political beliefs or ambitions end up making sacrifices or choices they should never have made because they believe strongly in a certain matter of public concern and believe they are acting with the approval of authority figures they respect and admire. The Left’s activism during the last 50 or 60 years has been scarred by violence, lawlessness, and the shattered lives and reputations of more than a few true believers.

William Ayers may not have personally put a pipe bomb under some police officer’s car in San Francisco, but if he had a hand in writing the manifesto that convinced someone to sacrifice their conscious and someone else’s life in order to “make the world a better place,” he should feel complicit. In conservative circles, I usually see more subtle forms of ill-advised sacrifices — for example, people putting promising careers on hold in order to spend their time opening mail for the local congressman or students sacrificing their GPA in order to publicly spar with a liberal professor in a battle of words that will be finished only when grades are handed out. However, in the last year or so, subtlety has gone out the window and last night I double-checked to make sure that my writings in the past did not encourage conservative activists to sacrifice their integrity, honor, or freedom. Here’s an excerpt from my previous comments on O’Keefe and Giles that I wanted to clarify given the recent news about the O’Keefe arrest:

“… It is not entirely uncommon for investigative reporters to break the law in preparing their reports. Some legal scholars have theorized that the failure of prosecutors to file against these investigative reporters along with a handful of outlier judicial opinions has created some kind of journalistic privilege to break the law in getting their hands on a story. We’re not convinced. We acknowledge that the application of certain laws in the context of preparing news reports and documentaries can create a kind of tension with the First Amendment, but we just don’t believe that journalists, bloggers, or Boy Scouts are accomplishing any end so important as to give them a free pass to disregard the law in the pursuit of getting the job done.

So, in theory, if the state of Maryland prohibits people from recording others without their permission or knowledge before publicly distributing said recording, John and Hannah should probably have used a different approach in Baltimore or obtained written consent before using the footage in their videos. The statute was probably enacted to protect the very class of people who were publicly humiliated in this case…

However, those are questions for a judge and a jury to decide. The question for us is whether loyalty compels us to support John and Hannah. We think it does. John and Hannah are movement conservatives who were trained in conservative organizations. They created videos that document and communicate what we have long believed about ACORN, but have been unable to show. They are now under attack as a result of their efforts by an organized Left that is seeking to end their young careers in the stigma of a civil judgment and probably bankruptcy. We can argue over the ethics of their approach, but seasoned investigative reporters do the same thing regularly and their colleagues and compatriots in the organized Left rush to defend and embrace them.

Especially among young Americans there is a political and cultural war being waged. By and large, the Right is losing that war because we do not recognize it for the tribal conflict that it is. We believe that conservatives should send a strong message to young people everywhere by supporting the legal defense funds for John and Hannah. The message is that the Right is a community that nurtures, protects, and stands up for its own when they are under attack because of their allegiance to the community. A movement that sends this message may ultimately have an even greater positive impact than the anti-Acorn videos, which created the controversy…”

I think I made it much more clear than other conservative websites that, while I supported John and Hannah, I was concerned about the means through which they accomplished their goals. To clarify, I want to take it one step further today: We need to support the John and Hannah’s of the world by working with them to accomplish their ends without ending up with civil or criminal judgments haunting them. After they’ve made a mistake, we can defend them, but we should do so with the understanding that we aren’t condoning that kind of self-sacrifice. To be a contributor and even a hero in our modern liberty movement, no one has to sacrifice their future… particularly not young children like John and Hannah who may not truly understand the nature of the sacrifice they are contemplating.

Not only is loss of integrity almost always unnecessary to accomplish our goals, we aren’t going to get any stronger in the long run if our leaders ruin their reputations or brand themselves as fringe outcasts, anyway. To be clear, John, I’d much rather work to get you on a podium accepting an Academy Award for beating out Michael Moore someday than to feed your legal defense fund for invading a federal office.

See more great political cartoons at Flopping Aces: Sunday Funnies.

For more such political cartoons, check out Flopping Aces.

So, you all probably suspected it there was some kind of campaign on the Left to turn off your tweets. Erik Erikson of Red State recently posted a link to a TwitLonger message posted yesterday by liberal online organizer Eileen Left. The message reads:

“Please do us all a favor & go to #tcot #iamthemob #rs & other neo-con, ignorant streams & block all of their members, they are spying on us and attempting to counter all the hard work we are doing. They are sadly misinformed and being led by the nose by the corporate interests who want to stop real health care reform and screw the American people by enlisting millions more customers, without having to change the way they treat the people. THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT!!! We MUST stop them from spying on us and countering all of our hard work. Or we will all end up paying a ton more money for health insurance, greedy Insurance companies will make mega millions, and small businesses, labor, the entire population of this country will be slaves to the GREED of the Insurance companies, but will not get the health care we pay for.
PLEASE BLOCK THEM ALL and report all of them who change our tweets to fit their greedy ignorant agendas and attacking us to @spam and @twitter. Thanks!!!!”

For those liberals concerned about spying on Twitter, we recommend you limit your private conservations to direct messages (DM) or setup Basecamp or Google Wave accounts. Twitter is a mass communication tool and it was probably never intended to be useful as a tool for secrecy. To make things simple for you, it’s kind of like you are trying to whisper with a bullhorn. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. The fact that some conservative or ally of Erik Erikson’s found your message above should be proof and motivation to move to a more appropriate venue for scheming.

More importantly, we caution you out of respect for fairness to be very judicious in forwarding tweets to @spam and @twitter. After all, you wouldn’t want conservatives to get twitter slapped and silenced just for expressing opinions that differ from yours. Right?

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Lee Doren

We used to love thumbing through Bartlett’s Quotations when we were younger. So, it’s is a little ironic that we’re going to highlight Bartlett D. Cleland of the Institute for Policy Innovation for having the quote-of-the-day.

Regular readers may remember that a day or two ago, we called on mobsters everywhere to focus not only on health care, but also the growing threat to internet freedom. In his latest Techbytes post, Bartlett manages to do just that. In fact, he argues that these two areas of concern aren’t necessarily unrelated:

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