The tea party movement is kicking into gear again, buoyed by the success of Richard Mourdock in defeating longtime Sen. Richard Lugar in Indiana's GOP primary. They're intent on proving that the movement is not dead, as so many commentators have declared. To that end, the Tea Party Patriots (TPP), which claims to be one of the movement's largest national umbrella groups, is recruiting volunteers for phone banks and promising a massive outpouring of support for embattled Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. The tea party has already been active in the recall fight, but is preparing to go all out in the last few weeks before the election.

And that could be problematic. As a nonprofit group, TPP is banned from devoting the bulk of its resources to campaign activities—those resources are supposed to be devoted to promoting social welfare, not political candidates, according to tax regulations. Yet TPP has been openly publicizing the fact that it's supporting Walker in the election, and if it goes in for a big campaign in support of him, it may risk violating its tax-exempt status.*

The IRS recently announced its intention to crack down on nonprofit groups operating as thinly veiled political campaigns, and many of its recent targets have been tea party groups. 

Tea party favorite Rep. Allen West (R-FL) is denying that LGBT people face employment discrimination in the U.S.

On Thursday, Think Progress’ Scott Keyes asked West if he would be willing to support a law that bans hiring or firing of people based on their sexual orientation.

“That don’t happen out here in the United States of America,”

You don’t think people get fired because they’re gay?

“Well, I don’t see that as being a big issue with small businesses,” West replied. 

West may be right that the issue isn’t the top concern for business owners, but it is a real problem for the up to 43 percent of gay men and lesbians who have reported workplace discrimination or harassment.

 

 News has declared Richard Mourdock as the projected winner in the Indiana Senate primary. Mourdock defeated six-term Republican foreign policy elder statesman Sen. Richard Lugar.

Mourdock is backed by conservatives ranging from the National Rifle Association to local Tea Party activists to the Washington-based fiscal conservative group the Club for Growth.

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a Fox News contributor, tea party activist and personal friend of Sean Hannity’s said in a sermon recently published to YouTube that America’s greatest mistake was allowing women the right to vote, adding that back in “the good old days, men knew that women are crazy and they knew how to deal with them.”

In the video, published to YouTube in March, Peterson explains that he believes women simply can’t handle “anything,” and that in his experience, “You walk up to them with a issue, they freak out right away. They go nuts. They get mad. They get upset, just like that. They have no patience because it’s not in their nature. They don’t have love. They don’t have love.”

 

Six anti-tank grenades designed to be fired from a launcher were discovered on Wednesday at the scene of a horrific Arizona mass murder-suicide, which authorities said was carried out by well known white supremacist JT Ready.

Ready was a longtime neo-Nazi and border vigilante who authorities said walked into a house in a suburb east of Phoenix on Wednesday and killed four people, including his girlfriend and a 15-month-old baby, before turning the gun on himself.

Even after releasing his long-form birth certificate in April 2011, Obama is still being questioned about his birthplace, most recently by several Republican candidates in North Carolina.

Richard Hudson, a GOP candidate in the race to unseat Rep. Larry Kissell (D) in the 8th Congressional District, made headlinesin April when he told a Tea Party group “there’s no question President Obama is hiding something on his citizenship." TheCharlotte Observer reports one of his challengers, Dr. John Wheatly, recently called Obama's birth certificate a "poorly reproduced forgery."

 

Probably the most disturbing aspect of the multifarious effects of Fox News' right-wing propaganda machine and its Tea Party offspring is the way it has utterly taken over the lives of so many senior citizens, who lap up every word as the gospel truth and have become increasingly radicalized by talking heads like Glenn Beck.

Even as they project their own intentions onto the likes of the unions, the Fox acolytes and the Tea Partiers have effectively become a brownshirt corps of mean-spirited, vicious thugs. It's deeply disturbing to watch people in our parents' generation viciously attacking liberals with increasing venom and violence.

The latest example took place last weekend in the quiet little retirement town of Roseburg, Oregon. It's a pretty little burg on the I-5 corridor in western Oregon that is mostly populated with senior citizens of various stripes

 

The Obama campaign today released a video painting Mitt Romney as “extreme” onwomen’s issues.

“Mitt Romney’s run to the right may be winning him Tea Party voters, but American women are realizing they cannot trust Romney to stand up for them,”

 

While loud and raucous rallies are still a part of the tea party toolbox, the movement, which came to life over dissatisfaction with big government and anger over government bailouts and President Barack Obama's health care reform, is evolving.

With many activists still lukewarm to presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, many in the movement say they will focus intensely on flipping the Senate into Republican hands.

Rallying the troops is part of the movement's agenda. On Friday, the Tea Party Express kicked off its sixth national bus tour, weaving its way through Pennsylvania and Ohio then heading to Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Texas, all states with contested Senate races.

But leaders in the movement described other tactics they're using -- some long-tried, some new that are designed to train and mobilize tea party and conservative activists for political warfare.

An African-American Congresswoman from New York was forced to call the police on Thursday after she says an edited video posted on Glenn Beck’s website incited threats of violence against her.

“That clip that was originally on the Prospect Heights Democrats for Reform site was edited and was posted up on TheBlaze.com, and that of course is Glenn Beck’s website,” she continued. “That was edited down and what people were taking away from it was that the congresswoman was saying that all tea party members are crazy and all tea party individuals show the ugly side of the United States.”

Kargbo said there were a “range of calls” after the video was posted. While some were very respectful, one was “threatening in nature.”

“Something to the effect — I don’t have the exact words — of, ‘She thinks we’re crazy, that b-word has not seen nothing yet,’” she recalled.

Here is the latest installment of tea party reporter Susie Sampson asking regular folks on the street about how they feel about Mitt Romney and POTUS.

Enjoy!

 

What Tim Pawlenty is finding out--or maybe he already knew--is that the GOP has descended into a John Birch/John Galt party because of the FOXation of the party and some of its members reveling in racism.

During his recent swing through New Hampshire for CNN's presidential debate, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty courted more than a hundred Republicans at a house party.  But the Pawlenty campaign's choice of a host for the event, was nothing if not controversial. 

The party took place at the home of Ray Shakir, a local Republican activist and retired construction executive, who calls President Obama a "jungle alien," Hillary Clinton "Osama's dream girl," and once labeled certain disabled children "uneducatable" and thus undeserving of taxpayer-funded schooling.

Shakir called human-caused climate change "bull@!$%#" and accused liberals of "trying to destroy this country." "They're brainwashing people," he says

Shakir has a history of rhetorical flamethrowing. He's referred to President Obama as "Borat Hussein O'Bummer" and suggested he is "a radical, subversive, con-artist fraud."

There are still wingnut militia blogs out there trying to paint this guy as some sort of hero, and perpetrating the conspiracy theory that it’s all just a set up.
Dyer was convicted of raping his own daughter by a jury of his peers. The oath keeper youtube video blogger sickened the jury enough that they recommended a sentence of 30 years. Without this trial the evil miscreant would probably be a fixture at tea party rallies.

In the end, the antigovernment rhetoric that so energized his defense couldn’t save Charles Dyer, the former Marine and member of the antigovernment Oath Keepers organization accused of raping his own daughter. Late Thursday, after four hours of deliberation, a Duncan, Okla., jury convicted Dyer and recommended a 30-year sentence.

What is a humdrum routine for millions of students around the country — riding to and from school on a yellow bus — has become a thing of the past

The budget reductions that districts large and small have had to make have transformed school life in a host of ways — increasing class sizes, reducing services and supplies and thinning the ranks of teachers, custodians, librarians and others,

 superintendents have been cutting back on everything from paper to nurses and have had to become increasingly creative about generating revenue. They are selling advertising space on the sides of buses and on district Web sites, scaling back summer school, charging parents if their children take part in athletics or cheerleading and adding periods in the school day so fewer teachers can accommodate more students.

One Central Texas district, Dripping Springs, reduced its custodial staff and has relied on teachers to pick up the slack. Janitors now visit the classrooms every other day, leaving teachers to clean and sweep their rooms on the off days. Off day or on, teachers also must collect their trash and set it in the hallway, part of custodial changes aimed at saving the district $149,000.

In Hutto, a district with 5,600 students and one high school, administrators cut $4 million from this school year’s budget, eliminating 68 positions and taking the unusual step of temporarily shutting one of its elementary schools. The school, Veterans’ Hill Elementary, will stay closed for two years to save the district $1 million annually, and its 500 students, including two of the superintendent’s children, were sent to other schools. The only way to transfer the students was to take another unusual step: all fifth graders were moved out of elementary schools and into middle schools.

A group of conservative leaders met with Rick Santorum on Thursday to consider how to persuade Newt Gingrich to drop out of the Republican presidential nominating contest.

The conservative leaders met with Mr. Santorum and his top aides in northern Virginia as Mr. Santorum himself faces questions about the viability of his campaign. The conservative leaders sought the meeting, according to people familiar with it.

As the race narrows and Mitt Romney looks more and more like the inevitable nominee, several conservative leaders have said they still support Mr. Santorum. But Mr. Santorum has been losing some important states by small margins — in some cases, by the amount that Mr. Gingrich has been siphoning off.

 

They suggest Republicans are having a war on women," the man said. "And are also suggesting a war on immigrants. How will you persuade these important constituencies of women, Hispanics, etc. that issues like more jobs and less debt and smaller government are women's issues, Hispanics' issues, all Americans' issues?"

"This president can't run on his record," Romney explained. "So, he's going to try to divert to some other kind of attack and try and have people disqualify our nominee -- which will probably be me -- instead of talking about where we've been and where we're going as a nation."

"And I wish Ann were here, my wife were here, for a lot of reasons, I wish she were here. But I wish she were here to answer that question in particular

The candidate added: "We have work, we have work to do, to make sure we take our message to the women of America, so they understand how we’re going to get good jobs 

Rep. Michele Bachmann insisted this week that the reason 40 million Americans “choose” not to buy health care insurance has nothing to do with the cost.

It’s still an opportunity that some people choose to engage in, but 40 million people do not.”

She continued: “And the premise was made that people don’t buy insurance because they can’t afford it. That’s not true. There are people who just decide they want to roll the dice 

As justices were hearing oral arguments on Monday, the Minnesota Republican stood on the steps in front of the Supreme Court and told several tea party groups that “this is the day that we have been waiting for!”

Charles and David Koch are each worth about $25bn, which makes them the fourth richest Americans. When you combine their fortunes, they are the third wealthiest people in the world. Radical libertarians who use their money to oppose government and virtually all regulation as interference with the free market, the Kochs are in a class of their own as players on the American political stage. Their web of influence in the US stretches from state capitals to the halls of congress in Washington DC.

Koch industries, the second largest privately-held company in the US, is an oil refining, chemical, paper products and financial services company with revenues of a $100bn a year. Virtually every American household has some Koch product - from paper towels and lumber, to Stainmaster carpet and Lycra in sports clothes, to gasoline for cars. The Koch’s political philosophy of rolling back environmental and financial regulations is also beneficial to their business interests.

The Kochs rarely talk to the press, and conduct their affairs behind closed doors. But at a secret meeting of conservative activists and funders the Kochs held in Vail, Colorado this past summer, someone made undercover recordings. One caught Charles Koch urging participants to dig deep into their pockets to defeat Obama. "This is the mother of all wars we've got in the next 18 months," he says, "for the life or death of this country." He called out the names of 31 people at the Vail meeting who each contributed more than $1m over the past 12 months.

 

The House approved a 2013 budget resolution from Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Ohio) on Thursday by a 228-191 vote, and suffered just 10 GOP defections compared to four last year.

This year's vote was by a narrower margin than the 2011 vote that passed Ryan's budget 235-193. This year and last, all Democrats voted "no."

An increase in Republican "no" votes was expected this year, as many have grown frustrated with their inability to achieve more aggressive budget savings, due in large part to opposition in the Democratic-led Senate and the White House.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) seemed to address that frustration indirectly on Thursday as he praised Ryan for putting forward a budget that represents a "real vision of what we were to do if we get more control here in this town."

 

Rick Santorum would consider being vice president to Mitt Romney, a man he's consistently attacked during the campaign, he told the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody on Monday.

"Would you even consider it?" Brody asked Santorum, after suggesting he might laugh off the question.

Former Sen. Santorum (R-Pa.) responded that "of course" he would think about it because of the magnitude of the election, calling it the "most important race in our country's history."

"I'll do whatever is necessary to help our country," he said.

If Romney becomes the GOP nominee, it seems unlikely that he would pick Santorum, given the vitriolic attacks the two have exchanged. Last week, Santorum said Romney and the president were so similar on health care that "we might as well stay with what we have," which the Romney campaign claimed was an implication that he would "rather have Barack Obama as president than a Republican

 

While attacking the Affordable Care Act along with the rest of the wingnut teabaggers that attended during this weekend's rally on Capitol Hill, hoping that the Supreme Court will repeal the health care law, the Media Research Center's Brent Bozell took his turn in the round of right wing pundits, 

Brent Bozell has told this lie before, and while railing against the Affordable Care Act at this weekend's rally and the hope that the Supreme Court over turns it, told this whopper again over the weekend:

BOZELL: I'm speaking here as a Catholic and as an American. This president came out with a mandate and he ordered me as an employer to fund somebody's abortifacient, to fund somebody's abortion. Or as an employee, to put up the money for it.

Mr. President, I'll get around that stupid law, but if I can't get around that stupid law, here I am, bring out the hand cuffs, because you're going to have to arrest me.

Ladies and gentlemen, destroy this bill! Destroy this law! Thank you.

We've been down this road already with the likes of Peter Johnson on Fox pretending emergency contraception is an abortion drug. And with Karl Rove pushing the same line.

Rep. Paul Ryan left the door wide open Sunday when asked whether he'd consider joining the Republican presidential ticket as the running mate of the eventual nominee. 

Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman whose budget proposals are rocking Capitol Hill for the second year in a row, months ago had ruled out running for president to focus on his work in Congress. 

Asked Sunday whether he'd accept an invitation from the GOP nominee to run for vice president, Ryan would not douse the thought. 

"I would have to consider it," Ryan told "Fox News Sunday." 

The Wisconsin Republican repeatedly stressed he hasn't made a decision, and might not even be asked -- considering the nomination battle may be months from completion. 

White House senior adviser David Plouffe was already melding GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney and Ryan together into one entity. 

Plouffe claimed that Ryan's latest budget plan would be "rubber-stamped" by Romney should he win the nomination and the White House. 

"This is really the Romney-Ryan plan," Plouffe said. 

Though Ryan's plan has deliberately avoided explaining how the tax numbers add up, in order to pay for the massive tax cuts at the top, everyone else would have to pay more. It's likely that a middle-class family with two kids making about $70,000 a year would pay about $1,150 more in income tax, according to calculations made by the Center for American Progress. That's an 80% increase over what they pay now, while millionaires will pay less. That same family currently receives about $5,500 worth of federal support from K-12 education, transportation, health and science research, consumer safety, natural resource protections and federal law enforcement. The GOP budget would cut these "nondefense discretionary spending" by about 25%, taking away a typical family's services and protections by about $1,400 per year. To borrow a phrase from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, these budget priorities are truly "of the 1%, by the 1% and for the 1%."

Ezra Klein writes this today about Paul Ryan's budget roadmap:

I don't think Paul Ryan intended to write a budget that concentrated its cuts on the poorest Americans. Similarly, I don't think Mitt Romney intended to write a budget that concentrated its cuts on the poorest Americans. But there's a reason their budgets turned out so similar....

Really, let's just stop right there. Ryan's budget didn't spring forth immaculately from the forehead of Zeus. It's pretty much the same as his 2011 budget. Which in turn is pretty much the same as his 2010 budget. Which in turn is just a nicely formatted version of everything he's been saying for the past decade.

 

Will constitutional-law professors replace community organizers and the French as the right's latest bugbear?

Mitt Romney, reading off a teleprompter, opened up a new line of attack against Barack Obama in his Illinois victory speech Tuesday night, aiming at the president's old job teaching the Constitution to budding lawyers at the University of Chicago. That background, said Romney, left Obama unable to understand “what it is that makes our American system so powerful.”

Remember George W. Bush? It doesn’t seem all that long ago that he was the revered leader of the Republican Party: a paragon of courage, scourge of terrorists, champion of neglected schoolkids. But now GOP candidates seem to be running against him almost as aggressively as they’re running against his Democratic successor. They reject his brand of “compassionate” conservatism and vow to shrink a government that became bloated on his watch. Bush ran the country for eight tumultuous years, but his tenure is being treated like a bender from which the party is still hung over.

When Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, AKA "Joe the Plumber," won a Republican nomination for Congress, Sarah Palin's transformation of the Republican electoral base was complete. What has happened to the GOP, much to the consternation of the elite party establishment, is that it has become a party of paranoid conspiracy freaks, religious kooks, bigots, the marginally insane, and amateur grifters like Joe the Plumber. If Palin were running in the primary election for president, there is no doubt that she would be winning it, probably handily. This, in a nutshell, is why Mitt Romney, the only plausibly qualified candidate running for president in the GOP, is having such a hard time winning what should be a cakewalk primary. This party is no longer the party of the country club or even of Ronald Reagan. This is a party unhinged from reality. This is the party of Palin.

Gary Weiss, the Wall Street writer who was ahead of his time with his comprehensive chronicle of Wall Street corruption in 2006 (Wall Street Versus America) charts a bold new course this week with the release ofAyn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul.

Thanks to the trail paved in Weiss’ book, we did some further digging into the money cartel financing this “spontaneous” outpouring of campus and Tea Party interest in Rand, whose work is regularly considered by top academics to be mediocre and simpleminded.

This cartel has a striking similarity to the network of university economists set up by Big Tobacco in a money for hire scheme from 1983 to the mid 90s to blanket Congress and the media with bogus OpEds and research papers.

While it has been well known that the oil billionaire, Charles Koch, has been funneling tens of millions of dollars through his foundation into economic programs at public universities and mandating approval of faculty and curriculum in some instances, it has not heretofore been reported that a sweeping partnership in these programs has sprung up between Koch and the southern banking giant, BB&T, the latter corporation mandating that Ayn Rand’s bookAtlas Shrugged is taught  and distributed to students.

 Far be it for me to offer unsolicited advice to Sarah Palin. She's built a very successful career out of going rogue and certainly doesn't need any tips from me.

And, as an occasional pundit, a political influencer and a private citizen, she's free to throw her weight behind anyone she wants.

But I just have to say it: Newt Gingrich? Really?

Of all the remaining candidates, in fact, the one that makes the least sense is Newt. Mitt Romney I could see, if she wanted to bring the party together. Rick Santorum I could see for his social conservatism, strong Christian faith and similar family stories. I could even see Ron Paul for his "throw the bums out" and "end the Fed" rogue-isms. But Newt?

 

Republican voters know all about the disappointing ending; they have flipped to the last page of the book — Mitt Romney somehow becomes the party’s candidate for president. It’s all over but the fighting. But tell that to fuming GOP primary voters who are far from finished with their seven stages of grief. Those crafting new chapters for the story are making it colorful, climactic, lengthy, expensive and ugly.

. He proved once again on Super Tuesday he can’t win in the South, and struggles to attract very conservative voters, strong Tea Party supporters, evangelical voters and blue-collar voters. Santorum, having backed off his campaign against contraception, college and Camelot,

The event is tomorrow at 1 p.m. Mountain Standard Time in Phoenix, 3 p.m. Eastern, and will be live-streamed by WND.

The topic of discussion will be an investigation by Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse into concerns about Obama’s eligibility. It’s the first time an official law enforcement report has addressed many of the allegations about the presumptive 2012 Democratic nominee for president.

The issues include Obama’s eligibility under the U.S. Constitution’s requirements, questions about his use of a Connecticut Social Security number and the image of his purported birth certificate from Hawaii.

 

Top national media organizations have indicated their plans to attend, and bookings for radio and television reports are in the works. Expected are reporters from the Associated Press, Reuters, Univision, the Washington Times and NBC, CBS and ABC affiliates, as well statewide radio networks, among many others.

 

Tomorrow Mitt Romney will speak at the Michigan Prosperity Forum, alongside Tea Party icons like Andrew Breitbart and Michelle Malkin. The event is sponsored by the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, which receives the bulk of its funding from the Koch brothers, whom the Romney campaign has described as “the financial engine of the Tea Party.”

The Koch brothers have been major supporters of Romney.

Romney’s estate tax plan alone could save the Kochs billions of dollars. His advocacy of the oil, gas and coal industries would also be a major boon to the Koch brothers’ many energy interests.

President Obama's campaign  “Tomorrow Mitt Romney is hanging out with the billionaire Koch brothers at a Tea Party forum. I imagine they’ll get along.”

 

I just received a new mailer from BarackObama.com.  Even before the primaries are finished, Obama is apparently kicking off the campaign against his now-inevitable opponent: the Koch brothers.

Friend --

In just about 24 hours, Mitt Romney is headed to a hotel ballroom to give a speech sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a front group founded and funded by the Koch brothers.

Those are the same Koch brothers whose business model is to make millions by jacking up prices at the pump, and who have bankrolled Tea Party extremism and committed $200 million to try to destroy President Obama before Election Day.

Not that that will influence my vote, mind you.  I vote the issues.  Which is why I'm not proffering an endorsement until I know how the Kochs feel about soda taxes and those videos of animals being killed.  

Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. 

 I arrived at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, around 9:30 a.m. People snaked around turnstiles waiting to get their badges certifying they had paid the $195 adult entrance fee.

They had paid to see the stars of the conservative movement. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt, Marco Rubio, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, even Sarah Palin has come out of hibernation

t the beginning of the day, I started off at an event called "How to raise money... the easy way" put on by the Leadership Institute, a Republican training organization.

The speaker, Joel Mowbray, told the audience of mostly young men that "You make up a lot of ground with one $10,000 donation."

He said that there's no such thing as altruism and when a big donor cuts a big check the donor is looking for access.

"Asking for money bestows a level of credibility onto the campaign," said Mowbry, "It says I believe in my campaign." He told the audience the only two things a candidate should be doing is asking for money or asking for votes. Noted.

Howard Fineman says Republican insiders are suddenly seeing the hot air leaking out of Newt’s balloon.

The primary reason: the Palin Factor.

 three days before the primary — that Gingrich stated he would offer former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin a “major role in the next administration if I’m president.” That one statement scared the accept-Newt, Republican-establishment types.

 

A trio of South Carolina evangelicals threw their support behind Rick Santorum

“Rick Santorum clearly sees homosexuality for what the Bible, Rome, Bob Jones University and even Salt Lake City have always regarded it, as a very serious form of sexual sin like adultery or incest

“In obedience to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, most South Carolinians and I have a sane and healthy homophobia, while Mitt Romney has a very bad case of homophilia,” Mills said. “The man very clearly endorses dangerous, unhealthy homosexual conduct.”

On Wednesday, blogger and sitcom writer Kelly Oxford sent a tweet about the Republican race for the presidency that got a lot of folks asking: Is this God’s idea of a joke?

Oxford, whose Twitter feed was named by TIME magazine one of the 140 best of 2011, wrote, “Cain, Perry, Bachmann all claimed God told them to run for President, and all are out of the race. God is hilarious.”

 

Well Rick Perry's new video really plays to Middle America and patriotism....or should I saw White Middle America, and White patriotism, because there are nothing but Caucasians in the video...in church...in the corn fields, in the rallies. only white faces.

I wonder if Rick Perry or his campaign staff believes that anyone else has gotten the vote yet?

 With a sense of history on the biggest political day -- to date -- of the 2012 cycle, Texas Gov. Rick Perry today compared the GOP's quest to defeat President Barack Obama to one of the deadliest battles of the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944.

"It is a powerful moment in Americans' history, and you are on the front lines," he added. "This is Concord. This is Omaha Beach. This is going up the hill realizing that the battle is worth winning."

Rick Santorum mocked Rick Perry for not being familiar with the anti-sodomy Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas during a campaign stop Thursday night.

"Rulings like Lawrence v. Texas would be a good thing to know if you are running for president,

Michele Bachmann seemed to have picked a theme for theRepublican presidential debate last night: lie, lie, and then lie some more. And if you think that's bad but easy enough to explain with an "aww, gee, I was misinformed," get ready to change your tune. There's ample evidence today that theMinnesota Congresswoman knew she was lying!

In a state where the Tea Party may hold greater influence than in any other early primary contest, Mitt Romney told reporters in South Carolina today he could be the “ideal” candidate to earn Tea Party support.

 “I believe on the issues as well, that I line up with [Tea Party supporters]: a smaller government, a less intrusive government, regulations being pared back, holding down the tax rates of the American people, maintaining a strong defense – and so many Tea Party folks are going to find me, I believe, to be the ideal candidate,”

 

I suppose there’s some logic behind Herman Cain’s campaign launching a “Women for Cain” initiative. The Republican candidate has been accused of repeatedly sexually harassing women in the workplace, as well as having carried on a lengthy adulterous affair, so it stands to reason the campaign would start taking steps to address the candidate’s apparent problem.

But what campaign operative thought this was a good idea?

 

Yahoo! News recounts an uncomfortable moment from the campaign trail with Herman Cain, in which the Republican presidential candidate tells of expressing relief that a physician with an Arab name turned out to be a Christian:

    He did have a slight worry at one point during the chemotherapy process when he discovered that one of the surgeon's name was "Dr. Abdallah."
  
    "I said to his physician assistant, I said, 'That sounds foreign—not that I had anything against foreign doctors—but it sounded too foreign," Cain tells the audience. "She said, 'He's from Lebanon.' Oh, Lebanon! My mind immediately started thinking, wait a minute, maybe his religious persuasion is different than mine! She could see the look on my face and she said, 'Don't worry, Mr. Cain, he's a Christian from Lebanon.'"

    "Hallelujah!" Cain says. "Thank God!"

 

It’s a challenge but Rick Santorum has managed to get significantly to the rightof the current Israeli government on the question of the West Bank. Or arguably, it’s to the left. But Santorum is saying not only that all the West Bank is Israel (not a terribly controversial statement on the Israeli hard right) but that all the people living there are Israelis. Said Santorum: “If they want to negotiate with Israeli — with Israelis — all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians. There is no ‘Palestinian.’ This is Israeli land.”

Texas Governor Rick Perry is wasting no time in blaming the deficit super committee’s failure on President Obama. Even though the result is not quite yet official, the campaign has already released the following statement:

Ultimately, responsibility for this failure lays at President Obama's feet. The whole reason a supercommittee was created was because the President wasn't willing to lead, wasn't willing to even put on paper his plans for cutting spending. It's amazing to what lengths he will go to avoid making tough decisions. And who pays the price for Washington's failure? The American people and our military personnel, who will now be subjected to a half trillion dollars in national defense cuts? 

A joint analysis by iWatch News and the Center for Responsive Politics has found that the 15 freshmen members of the Tea Party Caucus have embraced many of the same special interests that have supported Republicans for years. The fifteen combined have received over $3,450,000 during the first three quarters of this year from almost 700 different PACs.

It's an impressive haul for a group of newly elected House members. But it shouldn't be surprising that these fresh faces found new friends in Washington

 

“That’s the problem today in foreign policy: You want the other nations to fear us,” Bachmann said, the Des Moines Register reports. “They don’t fear us today. They laugh at us. This is serious. The United States is being mocked at and laughed at. We’re the military super power of the world and we’re being mocked at and laughed at and being disrespected?”

After Bachmann further declared, “I will use absolutely everything in our arsenal against the Iranians, because they need to know that they should fear the United States,” a man in the audience interrupted and asked whether the U.S. should be feared — or respected?

“We want both,” Bachmann replied. “We want to be both feared and respected. Number one, you want respect. But when you’re respected you’re also feared.”

 

) – People attending a Rick Perry event in Manchester, New Hampshire on Wednesday were asked if they were U.S. citizens.

The austerity gang seeking cuts to Social Security and Medicare has been vigorously promoting the myth that the elderly are an especially affluent and privileged group. Their argument is that because of their relative affluence, cuts to the programs upon which they depend is a simple matter of fairness. There were two reports released last week that call this view into question.

 Using the official measure, the poverty rate for the elderly is somewhat lower than for the adult population as a whole, 9 percent for the elderly compared with 14 percent for the non-elderly adult population. However with the new measure, the poverty rate for the elderly jumps to 14 percent, compared with 13 percent for non-elderly adults.

By this higher measure, we have not been nearly as successful in reducing poverty among the elderly as we had believed. While Social Security has done much to ensure retirees an income above the poverty line, the rising cost of health care expenses not covered by Medicare has been an important force operating in the opposite direction.

 

Expanding on her statements during Saturday night’s foreign policy debate, GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann attacked President Obama for fully drawing down U.S. forces in Iraq, and claimed incorrectly that his war policies have left the country with a choice between releasing terrorists or killing them.

“President Obama was given a war that is won in Iraq, and he’s choosing to lose the peace,” Bachmann claimed on Meet the Press. “That’s a desecration of the memory of forty-four-hundred Americans that gave their lives to liberate Iraq.”

Bachmann also claimed that the country needs a jail for terrorists, we don’t have a place to put Al Qaeda when we pick them up. It’s either catch and release, which is a terrible idea, or we have to kill them.”

Michele Bachmann thinks America blew it by extending a safety net to millions of Americans under President Johnson’s “Great Society.” Her solution? Model the economy after communist China. 

“The ‘Great Society’ has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state,” she said. “If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security…They don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.”

 

Rick Perry denies he ever spoke in favor of the secession of Texas from the United States. But records show he not only spoke in favor of secession, Perry spoke at a rally attended by secessionist leaders and a top Perry aide met with secessionist leaders privately. Perry went on to push for legislation favored by secessionists and others. One of the groups he sought the support of, the Republic of Texas militia, has a long history of terrorism, including plots to assassinate a Republican governor (later president), a Democratic president, attempted attacks on a US Army base and federal building, and attempts to acquire missiles and biological weapons.

Herman Cain claims sexual harassment accusations threatening to derail his presidential campaign are a smear campaign. But friends and family of one accuser say she is a principled and dedicated professional who was only trying to right a wrong no woman should suffer in the workplace.

Karen Kraushaar, a 55-year-old former journalist and seasoned government spokeswoman who served on the front lines of the Elian Gonzalez custody battle, is a competitive equestrian and lover of golden retrievers. She has been married for more than two decades.

Charles and David Koch are each worth about $25bn, which makes them the fourth richest Americans. When you combine their fortunes, they are the third wealthiest people in the world. Radical libertarians who use their money to oppose government and virtually all regulation as interference with the free market, the Kochs are in a class of their own as players on the American political stage. Their web of influence in the US stretches from state capitals to the halls of congress in Washington DC.

The Koch brothers fueled the conservative Tea Party movement that vigorously opposes Barack Obama, the US president. They fund efforts to derail action on global warming, and support politicians who object to raising taxes on corporations or the wealthy to help fix America’s fiscal problems

 

 House Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that any bipartisan agreement reached by the congressional deficit-reduction supercommittee will need to include some new tax revenue.

Most Congressional Republicans have signed a "taxpayer protection pledge" -- devised by the Grover Norquist-led group Americans for Tax Reform -- vowing not to raise taxes. When asked about Norquist on Thursday, Boehner dismissed him as "some random person in America" but later revised his comments to say that "Norquist, like millions of Americans, believes that raising taxes is not good for our economy."

 

Rick Perry repeatedly declared last night in his interview with Sean Hannity that he plans to “take a wrecking ball to Washington.”

Of course, lapdog Sean Hannity didn’t question why someone who has exhibited such contempt for our federal government wants to be president. He didn't even ask for details on the kind of destruction Perry wanted to wreak.

Are Americans really looking for a wrecking ball? I report, you decide!

 

Though most American youth continue to learn about sex most everywhere but in school, there is some good news:according to a recent report from the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States(SIECUS), the Obama administration and Congress in 2010 eliminated two thirds of federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage education, and, in a historic shift, allocated close to $190m for comprehensivesex education.

exas Governor Rick Perry, when asked by a reporter to cite research supporting his position (he presides over a state with the nation's fifth highest rate of teen pregnancy), would say only that "from my own personal life, abstinence works".

Governor George W Bush implemented abstinence-only in Texas, and after he moved to the White House, his successor, Perry, benefited from a big increase in federal abstinence-only funding. Texas, according to a recent story in the Austin Chronicle, has taken in $23.3m in federal abstinence-only funds in the past four years alone.

 

As pressure mounts on the congressional supercommittee to reach a debt-reduction deal, House leaders on Thursday appeared less than confident the panel would make its Thanksgiving deadline.

House Speaker John A. Boehner described the mood on Capitol Hill as “one of nervousness” and that both parties in both chambers of were feeling pressure to reach an agreement.

“If this was easy, these issues would have been dealt with in the last couple of decades,” said Ohio Republican during his weekly briefly with reporters at the Capitol. “This is hard, and everybody knows it’s hard

 

So now the Herman Cain scandal has become a game of Clue, with both Cain and his allies claiming they hold the winning formula to who loosed the sexual harassment story that’s threatening to derail Cain’s longshot campaign.

Cain’s implying Rick Perry did it through consultant Curt Anderson, who once worked for Cain when he ran for Senate and now works for a firm that consults for Perry. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh’s insinuating that Mitt Romney did it through a different person who also shares the surname “Anderson” - in this case former National Restaurant Association CEO Steven C. Anderson — now a Romney donor — who took the helm of the NRA after Cain’s contract ended in 1999.

Cain says his Anderson was privy to the information about the past sexual harassment allegations because he did a one-on-one interview with Cain about any skeletons in his closet in advance of his 1994 unsuccessful run for the Republican Senate nomination in Georgia

 

"You know, we have young people who are today occupying Wall Street, that there are some people out there that are making too much money," the Texas governor said at an education forum in Des Moines, Iowa. "And if somebody were to ask me what the best advice that I could give them? It would be that money is probably the most highly overrated thing in the world."

A potentially huge shoe is dropping in the Herman Cain harassment scandal: one of his accusers indicated through her lawyer on Tuesday that she wants to come forward and tell her side of the story.

Joel P. Bennett, an attorney to one of the two National Restaurant Association employees who allegedly accused Cain of sexual harassment, told the Washington Post on Tuesday that his client is currently barred from speaking by a mutual non-disparagement agreement with the organization. But he says that agreement is being violated by Cain already, who has taken to the press to slam the harassment claim as “baseless,” and that she now wants to come forward and reveal herself to set the record straight.

 

Virginia Republicans were in apology mode Monday over aHalloween-themed email that depicted a zombie-likePresident Obama with what appeared to be a gunshot wound to the head.

The northern Virginia-based Too Conservative blog first flagged the mailer from the local Republicans in Loudon County promoting a local holiday parade. 

"I am no fan of Barack Obama, but putting up a photo of him as a zombie with a bullet hole in his head?

Though everyone talks about money, few know how powerful it can be. One of the largest private corporations in the nation, Koch Industries, is run by Charles and David Koch

Their business talent is mixed with a vision that does not actually understand American capitalism at its best, the goal of which is fusing the profit motive with ethics. They obviously believe that free market means no more than making money as hard and as fast as one can. This has resulted in the Koch brothers losing many millions in court for breaking environmental protection laws, releasing carcinogens, fostering dangerous working conditions that lead to deaths and for breaking the laws against price-fixing and bribery, among many other transgressions

But the Koch brothers may well have overstepped themselves at this point by reportedly aiding and abetting the energetic and essentially empty Herman Cain in his run for the GOP presidential nomination through a group called Americans for Prosperity. I m very proud of the relationship I have with the Koch brothers, Cain has said.

Politico reporter Jonathan Martin, who co-wrote their article on Herman Cain, told MSNBC this morning that he just isn't "going to get into the details" of what Cain allegedly said, did or "gestured." Martin cites an incident that may or may not have happened where Cain may or may not have invited a woman up to his hotel room

"And also, what actually happened to these women as well, we want to be sensitive to that, too. It includes both verbal and physical gestures.  

Ann Coulter responds to a report from the "liberal publication" Politico that Herman Cain sexually harassed two women while he was the president of the National Restaurant Association.

"Liberals are terrified of Herman Cain. He is a strong conservative black man. Look at the way they go after Allen West and Michael Steele and they aren't even running against Obama. They are terrified of strong, conservative, black men," Coulter said.

Herman Cain's two top campaign aides ran a private Wisconsin-based corporation that helped the GOP presidential candidate get his fledgling campaign off the ground by originally footing the bill for tens of thousands of dollars in expenses for such items as iPads, chartered flights and travel to Iowa and Las Vegas - something that might breach federal tax and campaign law,

Prosperity USA was owned and run by Wisconsin political operatives Mark Block and Linda Hansen, Cain's current chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, respectively.

Election law experts say the transactions raise a host of questions for the private organization, which billed itself as a tax-exempt nonprofit

 recently, Block, 57, ran the state chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a nonprofit cofounded by the conservative Koch brothers that helped organize the tea party movement in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain is standing by his assertion that reproductive health care provider Planned Parenthood is carrying out the "planned genocide" of African Americans.

In a March speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation, Cain said the organization's mission was to "help kill black babies before they came into the world."

 

During Herman Cain’s tenure as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, at least two female employees complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain, ultimately leaving their jobs at the trade group, multiple sources confirm to POLITICO.

The women complained of sexually suggestive behavior by Cain that made them angry and uncomfortable, the sources said, and they signed agreements with the restaurant group that gave them financial payouts to leave the association. The agreements also included language that bars the women from talking about their departures.

Cain spokesman J.D. Gordon told POLITICO the candidate indicated to campaign officials that he was “vaguely familiar” with the charges and that the restaurant association’s general counsel had resolved the matter

“There’s nothing wrong with lower revenue,” the presidential candidate said of his flat tax’s lower returns. “I don’t want more revenue in Washington D.C.’s hands.”

Perry said, explains why he said he didn’t care if the rich got a bigger break under his plan.

Perry seemed unprepared for a question on his first campaign ad, in which he promised to create 2.5 million new jobs. Wallace pointed out that “with 2.5 million new jobs, the unemployment rate would increase,

“I don’t believe that for a minute,” Perry said. “That is just absolutely false on its face.” He said that if “you give this plan a chance... jobs will come back to this country,” and that no “intellectual discussion” could change that.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is a candidate for President and a tax attorney, as she is fond of saying. Her website describes her experience as “five years as a federal tax litigation attorney, working on hundreds of civil and criminal cases.” However, that fact didn’t seem to help her in on the campaign trail in Iowa on Saturday.

The Des Moines Register reports that Bachmann, speaking at a campaign appearance in Ottumwa, said “The average amount of taxes that the average family (paid) was 5 percent overall,” in 1950, as way of saying that the tax burden in America has gone through the roof.

There was only one problem with that argument: the overall tax rate in 1950 was five times that much, and that rate is only a little over three percent higher now.

 

Texas Governor Rick Perry may be sinking in the polls, but that doesn’t seem to be making him gloomy on the stump. Indeed, judging by a performance in Manchester, NH on Friday night, quite the opposite seems to be the case.

One unknown audience member cut the 25 minute speech into roughly 8 minutes of what the Huffington Post called “the giddiest and strangest moments.”

ndeed, judging by this, if Perry misses out on the presidency then he could probably have a pretty good career as a stand-up comedian.

The speech is full of the sort of tics, facial contortions, mimes and muggings that one would expect from a comic performer.

 

YOU HAVE TO WATCH THE VIDEO...IT LOOKS LIKE SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE....except it's his political speech.

At a campaign event in Davenport, Iowa Friday, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann used a question about teen bullying as an opportunity to call to abolish the Department of Education.

"I think that is an issue that needs to be handled at the local level,

 

There’s the top 1% of wealthy Americans (bankers, oil tycoons, hedge fund managers) and there’s the top 0.01% of wealthy Americans: the military contractor CEOs.

 What you may not know is that the huge amount of money these companies’ CEOs make off of war and your tax dollars places them squarely at the top of the gang of corrupt superrich choking our democracy. These CEOs want you to believe the massive war budget is about security — it’s not. The lobbying they’re doing to keep the war budget intact at the expense of the social safety net is purely about their greed.

Military Contractor CEO Pay in 2010

• Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush: $22.84 million.

• Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens: $21.89 million.

• Boeing CEO James McNerney: $19.4 million.

 

It’s become fashionable among some birthers to shift from calling for President Obama’s birth certificate to instead call for his school records.

As TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro put it this week, making digs about Obama’s grades “is a key component of a less-than-subtle birther conspiracy that Obama got into Harvard for reasons, you know, other than his intelligence.”

But where did this latest conspiracy theory come from? Tough to say for sure, but it seems likely that like most not-crazy ideas, this one came from a chain e-mail.

 

It is literally painful to watch Rick Perry as a candidate. The case could be made that Rick Perry is the worst debater to ever run for president.

As far as I know he can't even give a good speech. His appearance before the uber-right-winged Values Voters Summit was universally trashed.

Not only can he not give an interview, he can't even roll out his stupid flat tax plan. He steps all over it by saying, "Oh by the way, it's optional anyway." He has managed to couple the flat tax with the IRS bureaucracy in one sentence. Way to go Rick.

I'll be blunt with all you Perry supporters, it's time to butter your guy because he's toast. Every day it's a new dumb thing. From birtherism, to convoluted tax policy, to inarticulate attacks, to woeful ignorance and even stupidity on foreign policy (Pakistani country? Please), to placing his wife under such stress that she is lashing out at everything around her.

 

Rick Perry gave a major speech in South Carolina on Tuesday, laying out his “Cut, Balance and Grow” economic plan — the centerpiece of which is a tax reform proposal that would give people the choice of filing their taxes under the current code, or a 20% flat tax.

The political benefit of such a plan should be obvious: Allowing wealthier individuals to take a huge tax cut, while in theory not necessarily raising taxes on lower-income people who would not do as well under a flat tax, by at least giving them the legal option of paying a lower rate with more paperwork.

The third principle of reform is to allow young workers to invest a portion of their payroll taxes into private accounts if they so choose.

In his widely trumpeted speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation Wednesday, Republican budget guru and liberal boogeyman Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin rejected the notion that wealthier Americans should pay higher taxes to sustain or broaden a social safety net for poor and middle class workers and retirees.

Instead, he argued, policy should be geared toward allowing high earners to grow the economy, and to facilitate upward mobility for the working class.

America, he argued, exemplifies the latter model while European economies illustrate the perils of the former.

“We are an upwardly mobile society with a lot of income movement between income groups,” he argued. “Telling Americans that they’re stuck in their current station in life, that they’re a victim of circumstances beyond their control, and that the government’s role is to help them cope with it — that’s not who we are, that’s not what we do.”

That is what they do in class-riven Europe, he said, where “Top-heavy welfare states have replaced the traditional aristocracies, and masses of the long-term unemployed are locked into the new lower class. The United States was destined to break out of this bleak history.”

Turns out that is — not true.

 

Rick Santorum says U.S. needs to send a clear message to nuclear scientists...

Santorum was especially forceful regarding countries who pose a nuclear threat, advocating for the selective assassination of scientists from countries such as Russia, North Korea and Iran.

While the United States has been at odds with North Korea and Iran in recent years over nuclear weapons, it signed a treaty with Russia in 2010 to reduce their respective arsenals

 

"If they turn up dead....well that's a good thing"   VIDEO

Rick Perry is “fed up” with the “big spenders” in Washington, whether Democrat and Republican. He advocates “limited government.” But the Texas governor is selective; he doesn’t want to downsize all big government.

For Perry, like most right-wing populists, big government is bad government when it regulates and redistributes. Yet when government enforces, when it secures, the more government the better.

 Perry is fed up with DHS because this huge government bureaucracy is not doing more and doesn’t have a greater presence in Texas.  Despite the more than doubling of DHS border security operations in Texas since 2005, Perry complains that Washington’s financial commitment to border security in Texas is “puny.” He demands that President Obama commit “greater resources” to border security – without offering any advice about how to raise those additional resources.

When President Obama authorized federal payment for the deployment of 286 National Guard troops on the Texas border, Perry demanded a thousand troops. When President Obama announced last year that DHS would hire 1,000 more Border Patrol officers, Perry immediately countered, demanding at least 3,000 new patrol agents.

Steve Forbes on Monday endorsed Rick Perry for president, CNN reports.

“Steve Forbes is a well known fiscal conservative, and provided strong support and advice throughout the process of drafting my economic and jobs plans,” Perry said in a statement. “I am honored to have Steve’s endorsement of my candidacy for president.”

 

We’ve already seen the Rick Perry campaign offer a nod-and-a-wink to conservative Christians who want to make an issue of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith.

Now, Perry’s giving birthers a tip of his hat, too.

In an interview with Parade Magazine out Sunday, Perry said he had “no definitive answer” as to whether or not President Obama’s long-form birth certificate is real.

 

 Republican candidate Herman Cain's latest entry in the Clueless Economics Plan category.  Hunter even posted an image of Cain's campaign stop poster.  The poster shows the aging, decaying crumbling wreck of a building that is the old Michigan Central (railroad) Station in Detroit.

America's favorite 9-9-9 candidate tried imply that he could address urban blight, by announcing his economic plan in the shadow of Detroit's Michigan Central Railroad station. The MCS is, admittedly, an 18-story hulk of a building - once glorious, now in shambles.

The MCS is an 18-story atrocity.  Vacant since 1988, it is a prominent symbol of urban decay in a city that is chock full of such symbols.  Its awful condition in a prime city location has been a major roadblock to growth in and near downtown for years.  So it's the perfect backdrop to present Cain's "opportunity zone" plan, the Cain camp thought.  If only minimum wage laws, zoning rules, payroll taxes, and building codes weren't in the way, places like this wouldn't have to crumble, right?

Wrong and very wrong.  Not just because of the merits of Cain's plan, but because he fundamentally misunderstood what the MCS is.

But the reason it hasn't been restored is 't because of zoning problems, or building codes, or minimum wages, or problems financing the project.  The MCS building is privately owned by a local oligarch named Matty Maroun. He's worth about $1.5 billion, and personally owns the Ambassador Bridge, which is the only bridge across the Detroit River to Canada. 

Why is the MCS in such bad shape today?  Not because it's in need of extra tax breaks.  Why this embarrassment to the city crumbling?  BECAUSE THE BILLIONAIRE CHOSE TO LET IT.

The second most powerful Republican House member, Eric Cantor sent out the above disgusting video bashing AFSCME because AFSCME has targeted him as a "just say no" man to the stimulus package.

As an Italian American I understand the fascination with the mafia, yes I loved "The Godfather," but when a powerful House Republican uses it to smear hard working Americans, Italians and the Unions---I think he's crossed a big line and I'm upset.

 

- A national Tea Party group wants business owners to stop hiring! That's right. Tea Party Nation posted a pledge online Tuesday asking small business owners to stop creating jobs and sink our economy even further as a protest.

The organization says President Obama and the Senate want to destroy the country's economy so they can remake the U.S. into a socialist country. The irony is that halting job creation would destroy our economy.

 

I suppose it was inevitable that the burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement would be compared with the Tea Party, but the level of misunderstanding and myth surrounding the latter's "populist" bona fides is surprising to even the most cynical observer.

There may be surface similarities between the two uprisings, but they actually represent two opposing populist worldviews, whose only philosophical resemblance to one another is their belief that they speak for "the people" against the elites. While both movements are mainly concerned with economic issues, their beliefs about the causes and solutions they propose couldn't be more different. 

Only one month into the Obama administration, Santelli called for a "new Tea Party" to be held on tax day, April 15, and it became an instant YouTube sensation and rallying cry for the right wing. 

He was mad about bailouts alright, but not the Wall Street bailouts. What sparked his fury was the proposed plan to help average homeowners in trouble with their mortgages. Santelli raved: "Do we really want to subsidise the losers' mortgages? This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbour's mortgage? President Obama, are you listening? How about we all stop paying our mortgages! It's a moral hazard.

Santelli called for a new Tea Party in support of capitalism. He's right."

Support for capitalism - and antipathy toward government interference in it - is the very essence of Tea Party populism. There wasn't much talk about the moral hazard of a "too big to fail" banking system but there was plenty of fulminating about government interference in "the market" and righteous anger about the stimulus plan and what they characterised as the "government takeover" of the healthcare system.

It was never about corporate greed, but was about the usual right wing resentment at the government spending their tax money on people they don't think have earned it. These are not billionaire bankers - they are the people on the lower rungs of the ladder.

 

Republican Sen. Rand Paul may not have the clout in Congress to reach his goal of eliminating the Department of Education, but he can do a close second: shut down the Senatecommittee trying to pass sweeping new federal education legislation.

The Kentucky senator dug deep into the procedural arsenal Wednesday to halt the committee that was meeting to revamp the No Child Left Behind legislation.

If Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan were in effect today, the poorest 60% of taxpayers would pay an extra $2,000 while the richest 1% would get a $210,000 break, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-leaning think tank.

Cain’s plan would replace much of the existing tax code with a 9% individual income tax, a 9% business tax and a 9% national sales tax.

According to the analysis, all three of the tax types included in Cain’s plan would disproportionately impact lower-income Americans.

The 9% individual income tax would give the richest Americans -- who currently pay a tax rate of about 35% -- a break of almost $210,000 a year. But for the poorest 20% of taxpayers, Cain's proposed income tax change would mean an increase of $418 a year, the analysis found.

The many sins of the Koch brothers have been keeping Robert Greenwald and his crew at Brave New Foundation busy. Since January they've been working on their Koch Brothers Exposed video investigations, documenting the malfeasance of Koch Industries and the two-headed monster at the helm.

If Herman Cain becomes president, he’ll build an electrified border fence that could kill Mexicans who try to illegally cross into the U.S., the Republican candidate said Saturday.

“It’s going to be 20 feet high. It’s going to have barbed wire on the top. It’s going to be electrified. And there’s going to be a sign on the other side saying, ‘It will kill you — Warning

Mr. Cain, speaking at a Tea Party-sponsored rally in Tennessee, made some of his most pointed remarks yet on the issue. He said he might use military troops “with real guns and real bullets” to stop intruders.

 

MICHELE BACHMANN SIGNS ANOTHER PLEDGE

By signing this one, Bachmann is promising that she will secure the border if she’s elected president.

Van Hipp of South Carolina, chairman of Americans for Securing the Borders, told me in an interview that too many candidates have paid mere “lip service” to the issue. “Nothing really gets done,” Hipp said. “We believe by having a pledge like this it really is the best way to hold the politicians’ feet to the fire so we’re calling on all federal candidates for president, for senate and for the House to sign the pledge to secure the border of this country and to make America safer.”

Continue Reading

 

According to Hipp, the group issued this “pledge” challenge in the “past week or so” and Bachmann is the first presidential candidate to sign it. “The first one with the backbone to step up to the plate and get serious about this is Michele Bachmann,” Hipp said.

 

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has lost his seat on a local committee in his home state, the Washington Post reports. Cantor was automatically removed from the committee rolls after his endorsement of Del. Bill Janis — a Republican who’s running for Henrico County attorney as an independent.

“Any Republican who supports a non-Republican in a contested race will be automatically removed,”

 

I've been down to "Occupy Wall Street" twice now, and I love it.

But... there's a but. And for me this is a deeply personal thing, because this issue of how to combat Wall Street corruption has consumed my life for years now, and it's hard for me not to see where Occupy Wall Street could be better and more dangerous. I'm guessing, for instance, that the banks were secretly thrilled in the early going of the protests, sure they'd won round one of the messaging war.

Why? Because after a decade of unparalleled thievery and corruption, with tens of millions entering the ranks of the hungry thanks to artificially inflated commodity prices, and millions more displaced from their homes by corruption in the mortgage markets, the headline from the first week of protests against the financial-services sector was an old cop macing a quartet of college girls.

But the time is rapidly approaching when the movement is going to have to offer concrete solutions to the problems posed by Wall Street. To do that, it will need a short but powerful list of demands. There are thousands one could make, but I'd suggest focusing on five:

 

Whether it's the bronze bull encountered by those occupying Wall Street, the fixation with a Chris Christie presidency not to be, or the ex post facto transformation of Ronald Reagan into Kratos by middle-aged Republican Congresspersons who practically start to giggle and spontaneously pulsate just upon hearing his name, there is one thing you can expect to encounter a lot of on the right side of the political spectrum these days: Golden Calves.

Sure, that Bible thing conservatives claim to have read and revere strictly admonishes those who take to idolatry. But then again, it also doesn't wish death upon 30-year-olds because they lack health insurance or a poorly conceived bowl-cut by a former Speaker of the House who's running just about even with the hantavirus in recent Republican presidential polling. 

These Golden Calf conservatives have taken impulses that have been long ascendant on the Right, and way-too-present in American culture overall, and transformed their entire belief system into the Cirque de Soleil of idol worship.These days their leaders worship personality, mythology, ideology, theology and an unregulated market economy. These are hailed in much the manner a dog does a bone, or Kelsey Grammar does divorce court. 

Rick Perry unveiled his campaign’s economic and energy proposals, dubbed“Energizing American Jobs and Security”, in a speech today in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And as could be expected from a governor of Texas who has advocated mass devolution of various federal powers to the states, Perry is calling for heavy deregulation of the energy sector.

“You know what I’m proposing today is the first part of an economic growth package that’ll rebuild the engine of American prosperity,” Perry said. “And the plan that I present this morning, ‘Energizing American Jobs and Security,’ will kick-start the economic growth of this country, and create 1.2 million jobs.

But today, today I offer a plan that will create more than a million good-paying American jobs, across every sector of the economy, and enhance our national security. And the best news is, it can be set in motion in the first 100 days of my administration.

“And my plan is based on this simple premise: make what Americans buy, buy what Americans make, and sell it to the world. We’re standing on top of the next American economic boom, and it’s the energy underneath this country. And the quickest way to give our economy a shot in the arm, is to deploy the American ingenuity to tap American energy. But we only do — we can only do that if environmental bureaucrats are told to stand down.”

 

 

Democrats and their allies think they can win next year on the message that the House Republican caucus has spent time trying to restrict abortion rather than pass economic legislation the public wants like President Obama’s jobs act.

And so, as the House GOP voted to send HR 358 — which critics say would allow hospitals to let a woman die rather than receive an abortion that could save her life — to the Senate Thursday night, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was already targeting the Republicans who supported it.

Here’s what that sounds like, from a version of a DCCC letter sent to vulnerable Republican districts Thursday targeting Rep. Allen West (R-FL):

Instead of working to create jobs and help small businesses, Representative Allen West (FL-22) voted for House Republicans’ radical social agenda that would allow hospitals to deny lifesaving healthcare to women and even restrict a woman’s ability to use her own private insurance for her healthcare.

West “joined John Boehner and Eric Cantor to demagogue women’s healthcare and their right to make their own reproductive decisions instead of working to create jobs and grow small businesses,”

 

 

President Obama threatened on Wednesday to veto any bill that would restrict insurers from paying for abortions, saying it goes too far.

"Longstanding federal policy prohibits federal funds from being used for abortions, except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered," the White House said in a statement.

The House is scheduled to take up the bill on Thursday. This bill, like the other antiabortion legislation passed earlier this year, will almost certainly pass the House but won’t get anywhere in the Democratic–controlled Senate. 

Senate Republicans have even failed to force a floor vote on any of the House-passed antiabortion legislation, including a bill from Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., that permanently bans the use of federal funds for abortions. Instead, these pieces of legislation are negotiating chips Republicans can potentially attach to must-pass bills.

“It seems like whenever there’s a lull in the action, the House brings out some antiwoman thing,” Judy Waxman, vice president of health and reproductive rights at the National Women’s Law Center, said in an interview. “They now have a whole list of antiwoman legislation they have in their back pocket passed by the House … and they really do intend to attach to some pieces of legislation that must pass.”

 

On the matter of his 9-9-9 tax plan -- a tax reduction plan that would impose a 9 percent national sales tax while reducing personal and corporate taxes to 9 percent -- Cain was cagey with regard to its provenance, and to the set of calculations on which it is based. When Bloomberg reporter Julianna Goldman suggested that a Bloomberg analysis of the Cain plan cast doubts on its ability to meet revenue goals, and cast it as regressive to the fortunes of middle- and low-income Americans. 

"The problem with your analysis is that it is incorrect," Cain said to an audience amused by his directness. Bloomberg, he said, based its analysis on the wrong assumptions. But he declined to reveal the set of economic data on which his plan was based.

When asked to name the economic experts who drew up his 9-9-9 plan, Cain would name only one: a Rich Lowrie of Cleveland, Ohio, who turns out to be a wealth management strategist for the Wells Fargo Bank. So, one might imagine the plan to be a boon to those who have wealth to manage

Questioned after the debate by Bloomberg's Margaret Brennan, Cain explained that his 9 percent national sales tax was not regressive for this reason: "If you look at it closely -- we had it evaluated using dynamic analysis -- prices don't go up. Plus, consumers have the option to stretch their dollar because of buying used goods versus new." So there's your new economic plan, Koch style: prices won't go up because I say so, but if they do, just buy the kids' school clothes in the Salvation Army.

Michele Bachmann took her own shot at Cain's 9-9-9 plan: "When you take the 9-9-9 plan and you turn it upside down, I think the devil's in the details." An upside-down 999, of course, is 666 -- the mark of the Beast in the New Testament Book of Revelation, a.k.a., the anti-Christ. Hmmm...naming the black guy in the race the anti-Christ. 

Conservatives love saying that Occupy Wall Street has no coherent idea of what it wants. But it is pretty clear that though demonstrators may disagree on the details, the protests are driven by a bad economy, growing income inequality and the fact that a lot of people can't get jobs.

So how have Republicans, tea partiers and Fox News hosts responded? By telling demonstrators to stop complaining and get a job...

This week Erick Erickson, the blogger for the right-wing Red State, streamlined this already popular talking point by helping to start "We Are The 53 Percent," a Tumblr presented as a conservative alternative to Occupy Wall Street. The 53% references the 53% of Americans who pay federal income tax, ostensibly in contrast to the protesters who do not.