Bartlett Cleland, Director of the Texas-based Institute for Policy Innovation wrote this week about how countries like Venezuela are reassured by the FCC’s recent regulations, which they can now use to justify greater controls over their own communications systems.

Just days before the FCC made its ruling, the Venezuelan Parliament changed its laws in order to give President Hugo Chavez the power to regulate Internet content by implementing heavy regulations on Venezuelan-based service providers.  Specifically the country’s ISPs are now required to block broad categories of material that, for instance, “fosters unrest among the citizenship or disturb[s] public order,” and “refuses to recognize the government’s authority.”

In other words, the Venezuelan government has found a way of regulating all content. As Cleland concludes, “Venezuela needed little provocation for its continued oppression, especially from the U.S.” Nevertheless, Chavez can relax “knowing that the U.S. has joined Venezuela in the company of governments who regulate the Internet.”

That’s the adage that always comes to mind when I pass the syrup impersonators at the grocery store. I suppose it’s because when I first got married, I made the mistake of bringing home Aunt Jemima syrup from the grocery store instead of real maple syrup. My husband was aghast – in part, because I had spent four years at a college in Vermont.

In seven years of marriage, I haven’t repeated that mistake, and I’ve become a bit of Vermont maple syrup snob.  That’s why I can sympathize with regulators at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, whose job it is to protect the “maple” brand.

Fast food giant McDonald’s recently released a new breakfast option – fruit and maple oatmeal – and as a result have found themselves in a bit of a sticky situation. While they describe the oatmeal as “sweet harmony,” the new product hasn’t gone over so well with Henry Marckres, consumer protection section chief of the VAA.

According to Marckres, “We have a set of laws and regulations, and in maple law, it has to come from the sap of the maple tree or syrup.” The problem? McDonald’s advertises its new food as containing “natural maple flavor;” yet, there is nothing truly maple in the oatmeal, making it illegal to use the phrase in Vermont.

Kelly Loftus, the public information officer at the Vermont agriculture agency is concerned with making it clear to the public that McDonald’s is not using Vermont maple syrup in its oatmeal, and the state claims it’s their goal to work with McDonalds to meet all regulations.

Anyone who has worked on a branding campaign before can tell you, a single word can forever define a product: Xerox, Kleenex, Coke.  So it’s hard to know if this is a struggle to protect the purity of maple or the next step in the war against fast food.

Apparently, in addition to the nation’s near-10 percent unemployment, Americans are really angry about loud TV commercials. To be fair, many of those annoying ads do transmit at much higher volumes than the shows they interrupt – in some cases as much as twice the volume.

It’s been well known for years that TV advertisers compete for viewers’ attention by pumping up the volume.  (A strategy that’s been less effective in the age of mute buttons and DVR technology.) That’s why it’s not surprising that the television industry has been largely supportive of the new regulations. More and more they realize they will have to communicate their message in more creative ways.

The FCC will be given a year to determine their operations and the television providers will have another year to comply with the law.

That’s exactly what some proponents of “net-neutrality” did at a public hearing on Tuesday night in New Mexico, co-hosted by the (Un)Free Press.

According to a report in The Hill newspaper, activists made their voices heard through verse: “And if you saw my Comcast bill you’d see, it’s as reasonable as a robbery.”  You can read more of the poetry here.

Of course, while these activists might be finding creative ways to communicate, it’s worth noting that the organization hosting the event yesterday is headed by the self-identified neo-Marxist Robert McChesney.  Despite what the protesters might believe about the debate over net-neutrality, Free Press has been working closely with the Obama administration to call for greater regulations and taxes on the Internet, which will ultimately lead to greater control of the media by the government.

Slam poetry might be a communications slam dunk, but not if it’s a losing message.

New research considers how debates over controversial science move opinion and found that more talking does not create consensus.  In fact, the researchers found that the more talking, the harder it is to reach an agreement.

The primary author of the study, North Carolina State assistant professor of communication Andrew Binder, explains that there’s “almost this deterministic notion that if you build it, they will come; if you give them the information, their eyes will be open and they’ll see it for all its glory, which doesn’t seem to be the case.”

Of course, political scientists have been saying this for years.  John Zaller, the father of public opinion research, explains in his pivotal work The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinions that elite communication is the lifeblood of mass public opinion.  And public opinion moves in response to the consistency and intensity of elite messages.  So when elites are divided – whether it’s related to health care or climate change – the public follows suit based on varying levels of political awareness and values.

So now that we know that more talking doesn’t actually change opinion, what should we do?  Binder suggests reframing the issue. If repeating the same debate over and over again doesn’t achieve the desired outcome, policy experts and opinion makers need to figure out how to make old issues new again.

“David, what have I done to David?” Ed Miliband asked his campaign manager after he had learned that he had just beaten his brother to win the Labour Party leadership election on Saturday. Profuse expressions of fraternal love from both brothers followed.

Then in his main speech on Tuesday, the new Labour leader gave his real answer by denouncing the Iraq war. It was an easy position for the younger Miliband to take as he only entered parliament in 2005, so hadn’t been put in the awkward position of having to vote for it before he was against it. The elder brother’s face froze. Not only had David voted for it, whatever private qualms he might have had about the original decision, as foreign secretary for three and a half years, it was his job to defend it. Having beaten David to the leadership of their party, younger brother Ed was now driving him out of front-line politics altogether.

But now that he’s won the leadership, Ed Miliband faces a handicap. He declared himself the candidate of change—he made the point six times in his short acceptance speech on Saturday—but won as the candidate of continuity, appealing to Labour members who saw the Blair years as some kind of aberration.

Whereas David Cameron and Tony Blair defined their leadership bids as challenges to their parties’ settled beliefs, Mr. Miliband used the route previously taken by Harold Wilson in the 1960s and Neil Kinnock in the 1980s, of appealing to the Left to become Labour leader. With his brother having the support of leading Blairites, he had little choice if he was serious about winning. His victory was not, the press was told, a lurch to the Left. But pictures of Neil Kinnock unable to contain his joy and the quiet satisfaction of the trade union dinosaurs who had given Mr. Miliband his margin of victory told a different story.

For most of the voters whose support Labour needs to win, the unions are relics from a bygone era. Having shown ruthlessness, Mr. Miliband now needs to display some courage. On Wednesday he began to put a little distance, one might say a milimeter, between himself and the trade unions bosses, saying he would not support “irresponsible” strikes but in the next breath condemned businesses that don’t pay what he called a “living wage” while paying their bosses too much. “The happiest societies are the most equal societies,” Labour’s new leader added.

Mr. Miliband acknowledged that Labour had to regain the fiscal credibility it had lost, but he didn’t tell his party the scale of that task. In Britain, government spending under Labour rose more than in any other OECD country, jumping, as a proportion of GDP, by 15.9 percentage points between 2000 and 2010. That exceeds the pace in percentage points of government-spending growth in Ireland (15.5), Portugal (7.9), Spain (6.6) or Greece (2.1). Britain even outpaced the U.S. under Presidents Bush and Obama, where government spending as a percentage of GDP rose only by 7.7 percentage points in the last decade.

Labour politicians’ denial of their fiscal irresponsibility runs deep. Ed Balls, another leadership contender who had worked for Gordon Brown in the Treasury, said in a widely praised speech that the deficit was not Labour’s fault. Yes, Labour borrowed to invest over the last decade, Mr. Balls admitted, only going on to claim that there had not been any significant structural deficit until tax revenues from financial services collapsed in 2008. In fact in his last budget in 2007, Mr. Brown was running a 2.5% deficit at the very top of the cycle before the banking crisis struck when there should have been surpluses.

Labour ran out of steam when it ran out of money. But Mr. Miliband has sought to fashion a narrative explaining Labour’s May election defeat—the worst ever suffered by a governing party—in terms of losing trust and becoming the party of the establishment. All this has given a boost to the new governing coalition. The need to reduce the deficit unites its Conservative and Liberal Democrat partners and is accepted by the public for the time being. It is fortunate for Labour that the coalition agreement precludes Mr. Cameron from calling a snap election.

If the coalition runs to its full term, in 2015 the electorate will most likely make its judgment on the state of the economy rather than on Mr. Miliband’s abandonment of Blairite centrism. The political need for New Labour has gone. New Labour was created in reaction to Conservative election victories that were based on making tax cuts a clear dividing line between Left and Right. But when last week a senior politician attacked capitalism for taking no prisoners and markets for being irrational, it was not a Labour politician but Vince Cable, the coalition’s business secretary. The dividing lines have all but disappeared, making it harder to define someone like Ed Miliband as way to the left of the mainstream.

In 1970, after a more successful stewardship of the economy than the Blair/Brown government—the Labour chancellor at the time, Roy Jenkins, left with the budget in surplus—Labour lurched to the left in opposition. This didn’t prevent Labour coming back to power in 1974 after the Heath government lost control of the economy.

Britain’s governing coalition today is tied to the mast of its plans to cut government spending, which have yet to be decided let alone implemented. But pledges to preserve spending on health care and overseas aid increase the risk that the cuts won’t be delivered in full because it would mean very severe squeezes on spending by other ministries.

Monetary policy is also flashing danger signs. Near-zero interest rates, negative real interest rates, and inflation chronically above target indicate the depth of the Bank of England’s concerns about economic prospects which a capitalist economy cannot sustain indefinitely. No one knows what the state of the economy will be in four years’ time. But there is one hard conclusion that can be drawn from Mr. Miliband’s win: The center of gravity of British politics has shifted leftward.

Mr. Darwall’s book, “Global Warming: A Short History,” is being published by Quartet Books next year.

As the catharsis of electoral rejection gives way to the long march of opposition, Republicans might reflect on the experience of Britain’s Conservative party, which in 1997 suffered its worst poll defeat since 1832. Two further defeats followed. By the next election, due by June 2010, the Conservatives will have been out of office longer than they have been at any time since the middle of the 19th century.

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At the conclusion Thursday of the last party conference season before next year’s general election, David Cameron, leader of Britain’s Conservative party, had every right to be encouraged. The media are treating Mr. Cameron as the prime minister-elect and Labour’s conference confirmed that the party is stuck with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Labour’s biggest electoral liability.

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Rarely has the Atlantic seemed as wide as when America’s health-care debate provoked a near unanimous response from British politicians boasting of the superiority of their country’s National Health Service. Prime Minister Gordon Brown used Twitter to tell the world that the NHS can mean the difference between life and death. His wife added, “we love the NHS.” Opposition leader David Cameron tweeted back that his plans to outspend Labour showed the Conservatives were more committed to the NHS than Labour.

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