Pictured: Tony Perkins is not a fan of teabagging.

My sense has always been that the Teabagger crowd is more glibertarian than fundie, but these comments from the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins–one of the most important right-wing Christian leaders in the Bush/Rove coalition–betray a real hostility brewing.

There’s no centralized tea party organization, and anecdotes suggest that many tea party participants hold socially conservative views. But those views have been little in evidence at movement gatherings or in public statements, and are sometimes deliberately excluded from the political agenda. The groups coordinating them eschew social issues, and a new Contract From America, has become an article of concern on the social right.

The contract, sponsored by the grass-roots Tea Party Patriots as well as Washington groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Tax Reform, asks supporters to choose the 10 most important issues from a menu of 21 choices that makes no mention of socially conservative priorities such as gay marriage and abortion.

“They’re free to do it, but they can’t say [the contract] represents America,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a veteran of the Christian right. “If they do it they’re lying.”

Woah.

Tony Perkins, who had veto power over Bush’s SCOTUS picks, just called the Teabaggers a bunch of un-American liars, while pissing all over their oh-so-awesome Contract.

And how do we know this is a serious problem for the Teabaggers? Because wingnut bloggers are freaking out over this piece. For example, after failing to note the scathing remarks by Perkins and Mike Huckabee, Teabagger-in-Chief Glenn Reynolds rushes to assure everyone that everything’s just peachy.

I think they’re afraid of this movement, and since marginalizing it hasn’t worked, they’re trying to divide it.

Smells like fear to me.

Tags: Glenn Reynolds, Religious Right, Tea Party, teabaggers, Tony Perkins, Wingnuttia

FDL News has obtained the first ad from Arkansas for Change, an independent expenditure group working against Blanche Lincoln. It will start running today.

Lincoln faces a May 18 primary challenge from the state’s Lieutenant Governor, Bill Halter. Halter is not mentioned in the spot.

The ad highlights multiple Lincoln votes that they see as on the side of corporate interests rather than Arkansas workers. Lincoln voted for multiple lobbyist-written trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA, supported the pro-credit card company bankruptcy bill in 2005, and voted for TARP in 2008.

The inclusion of that last one is notable because Lincoln, in her first ad, claimed to have voted against “more money for Wall Street.” Both this ad and Lincoln’s assertions are technically true. Lincoln voted for the initial $700 billion dollar TARP bill, but against the release of the second half of the TARP funds in early 2009. That vote, a “resolution of disapproval”, failed in the Senate, and the second half of the funds were distributed anyway. Lincoln was one of nine Democrats to vote against releasing the funds. The resolution of disapproval would have had to pass the House as well, but failure in the Senate made a House vote irrelevant.

The Arkansas for Change spot closes by saying Lincoln is “working for them. Not us,” and tells the incumbent Senator to stop protecting Wall Street at the expense of the middle class.

Several groups, including labor unions, have pledged over $4 million dollars in association with the Halter-Lincoln primary. But this is the first ad released to date.

UPDATE: Just to put specifics to this, four unions – the SEIU, AFL-CIO, AFSCME and CWA – pledged $1 million dollars a piece to this primary race. In addition, Halter’s campaign has raised $250,000 on Act Blue and $1.2 million through MoveOn.

Tags: AR-Sen, Bill Halter, Blanche Lincoln, political advertising, primaries, TARP

"They smile in your face..." Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) (photo: CAP)

After Dick Durbin (D-IL) got attacked for saying that he would whip against the public option, he sent out his spokesman to lie about reconciliation in a pathetic attempt to justify Durbin’s role in trying to kill the public option. (Which is curious because we were told we could not have a public option because there were not the votes to pass it in the Senate–if there aren’t the votes, why would Durbin need to whip the no votes.) Durbin spokesman Joe Shoemaker’s illegitimate excuse for Durbin’s plan to whip against the public option is that it would change the reconciliation measure, causing it to go back to the House for a final vote after passing the Senate:

I want to be crystal clear: Sen. Durbin and the rest of the Senate Leadership will be aggressively whipping FOR the public option if it is included in the reconciliation bill the House sends over. Conversely, the Leaders will whip against any attempt to alter or amend the bill if the public option is not in it (or as your email says – whip against adding the public option as an amendment in the Senate.)

The reason is simple. There can be no amendments – good or bad – to the reconciliation bill once the House passes it and sends it to the Senate. The House will not do step one (passing the Senate healthcare bill in the first place) if they do not have assurances that the fixes they want (i.e., the fixes in their reconciliation bill) will be passed unchanged by the Senate.

This excuse is pure nonsense because the House simply can never get assurances that the reconciliation bill that they pass will pass the Senate unchanged. It is almost guaranteed that it will need to go back to the House for one final vote.

It is basically impossible to create a Byrd-rule-proof reconciliation bill. No matter how hard you work on it, there will almost always be one small provision on which Republicans could call a legitimate Byrd rule point of order. That would cause the provision to be removed unless it gets 60 votes to waive the Byrd rule. Since all 41 Republicans said they will never vote to waive a Byrd rule, that means any small offending provision could be removed. That would slightly change the bill, and force it to return to the House to be voted on again so that both chambers pass the exact same bill.

The only way you could assure the House that the reconciliation bill would pass the Senate unchanged is if Vice President Joe Biden declares that he is prepared to play real hardball, using his power as President of the Senate to ignore the parliamentarian’s decision and reject all Byrd rule points of order, legitimate or not.

Of course, if Joe Biden is prepared to do that, effectively nullify the Byrd rule, there is zero reason the House Democrats need to vote for the politically toxic Senate bill as is. They could pass a “new,” merged comprehensive health care reform bill that deals with all the House’s problems using reconciliation, with Biden nullifying the Byrd rule, so it can pass the Senate unchanged with only a simple majority.

Until I hear Biden declare he is prepared to play real hardball with the reconciliation rules, the excuse from Durbin’s office stinks to high heaven.

Tags: Dick Durbin, Health care, public option, Reconciliation

(photo: ShellyS)

The good news is that Democrats might have to include some form of student loan reform in the reconciliation bill to meet the cost-saving requirements of their reconciliation instructions. From Politico:

The Senate parliamentarian notified Democratic leaders that, in order to meet the reconciliation requirements, both the Senate health and finance committees would need to produce $1 billion in deficit savings each over the next 10 years, Conrad said.

With health care alone, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee would not be able to show the items within its jurisdiction save at least $1 billion. By inserting the education package, the committee would satisfy the reconciliation instructions, Conrad said.

If this is the case, it is great news because it means student loan reform will be dealt with this year. That means billions to help students and struggling community colleges hurting because of the economic downturn. Of course, the question remains as to what kind of student loan reform it will be. Will it be like the student-friendly reform that already passed the House, or will it be some baloney Sallie Mae/JPMorgan Chase-created “compromise” that would allow them to continue ripping off billions from American taxpayers?

But the bad news is that Democrats need to add student loan reform because Democratic leadership is now in all-out war against the public option. If Democrats add a public option, which would save $25-110 billion and is under the jurisdiction of the HELP committee, they could get enough cost savings from that to not need to add student loan reform.

It is unfortunate that Democrats so desperately want to protect the private health insurance companies that they are prepared to waste an extra $25 billion of taxpayer’s money to enrich the private insurance companies by denying the American people the public option they overwhelmingly want. If the public option isn’t included in a final reconciliation package, thank Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Harry Reid (D-NV), who aren’t whipping for the public option–they are apparently whipping against it.

This begs the question: If we were told we could not have a public option because it does not have the votes, why would Reid need to whip against it?

Tags: Dick Durbin, Harry Reid, public option, Reconciliation, student loan reform

The complete list of co-sponsors is on Thomas and below:

50 CURRENT COSPONSORS : Bob Filner, Jan Schakowsky, Barney Frank, Dennis Kucinich, Donna Edwards, Jared Polis, Chellie Pingree, Sheila Jackson Lee, Carol Shea-Porter, Diane Watson, John Lewis, Anthony Weiner, Jerrold Nadler, Nydia Velazquez, Keith Ellison, Loretta Sanchez, Hank Johnson, Maxine Waters, Luis Gutierrez, Lynn Woolsey, Marcy Kaptur, Charles Rangel, Patrick Kennedy, Raul Grijalva, Donna Christian-Christensen, John Olver, Corrine Brown, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Marcia L. Fudge, Danny K. Davis, Pedro Pierluisi, Grace Napolitano, Alcee Hastings, John Hall, Shelley Berkley, John Conyers, Jim McGovern, Phil Hare, Betty Sutton, Jim McDermott, Gregorio Sablan, Maurice Hinchey, Carolyn Maloney, Barbara Lee, Elijah Cummings, Gregory Meeks, Edolphus Towns, Al Green, David Wu, and Rush Holt.

Three of these co-sponsors, it must be said, are non-voting members from American territories. But 47 voting members, including several freshmen and member of the Blue Dog caucus Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), isn’t bad for a couple days.

Chris Bowers writes:

Every indication has always been that there is overwhelming support for a Medicare buy-in among Congressional Democrats. This could very well pass as a stand alone bill, especially in 2011 once filibuster reform has taken place. This is definitely one of the ways that progressives can viably continue the fight for real health reform no matter what happens to the current bill.

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that the public option would continue as an enduring electoral issue. Grayson’s bill, which is slightly but really not all that different, would keep it going on a legislative track as well.

Tags: Alan Grayson, Health care, Medicare buy in, public option

Former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff (source: DHS via Wikipedia)

Mark Hosenball reports that Dianne Feinstein and other Senate Dems have accused the Department of Homeland Security’s spooks of using right wing propaganda to develop finished intelligence reports on Muslims. By looking at this paragraph from last year’s intelligence authorization…

The Committee has raised a number of concerns with reports issued by the Department of Homeland Security OIA that inappropriately analyze the legitimate activities of U.S. persons. These reports raised fundamental questions about the mission of the OIA and often used certain questionable open source information as a basis of their conclusions. The Committee recommends that the next Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis conduct a comprehensive review of the quality and relevance of the intelligence products produced by the OIA, and provide this review to the congressional intelligence committees within 180 days of enactment.

And analyzing the language from this letter from Russ Feingold and Jay Rockefeller, Hosenball credibly argues that DHS used David Horowitz’ DiscoverTheNetworks.org as a source for a least one intelligence report on a US Islamic leader. (The letter cites the tagline, “identif[y] the individuals and organizations that make up the left,” a term Horowitz has used.)

Among others targeted by Horowitz’ site–though not all Islamic leaders–are Keith Ellison, Arianna Huffington, and Kos. And, ironically enough, Janet Napolitano.

Hosenball also notes that the report on the Islamic leader using Horowitz’ site was developed for DHS’s Civil Rights Office, and from there, was circulated to other intelligence agencies.

Congressional officials say the Homeland intelligence report that particularly angered Feinstein and other committee members is still classified. Nevertheless, three current and former intelligence officials, requesting anonymity when discussing sensitive information, say the report in question is a profile of an unnamed but prominent American Islamic leader and was produced by Homeland Security’s intelligence office during the latter years of the Bush administration. The report was requested by the Department’s civil rights office, whose officials were preparing to meet with the Islamic leader. But instead of sending the civil rights office a quick bio of the individual in question, Homeland’s intelligence office issued a “finished” intel report that was circulated to other intelligence agencies and, eventually, to Congressional oversight committees.

In other words, Michael Chertoff was using the Civil Rights Office at DHS as the impetus to develop finished intelligence reports based on the First Amendment activities of Americans.

Remember the firestorm last year when wingnut groups learned DHS did a report–initiated by the Bush Administration–on right wing extremist groups?

The report, “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” said right-wing extremist groups may be using the recession and the election of the nation’s first African-American president to recruit members.

The report, which was prepared in coordination with the FBI, was published last week. It was distributed to federal, state and local law enforcement officials. Mainstream media picked up the story after it was reported by conservative bloggers.

I wonder if they’ll show the same alarm with this report?

Tags: Arianna Huffington, Charles Allen, David Horowitz, Dianne Feinstein, Jay Rockefeller, Keith Ellison, Markos Moulitsas, Michael Chertoff, Russ Feingold

(photo: Old Sarge)

Obviously it hasn’t run through the legislative wringer yet, but the Local Jobs For America Act proposed by House Education and Labor Secretary George Miller looks like an exceedingly good piece of policy. It would provides through the community development block grant program $100 billion dollars to create local jobs through state and municipal budgets. Miller claims he could create or save a million jobs with that money, and I have no reason to doubt him.

Specifically, the Local Jobs for America Act invests:

$75 billion over two years to local communities to hire vital staff
Funding for 50,000 on-the-job private-sector training positions

The bill also includes provisions already approved by the House:

$23 billion this year to help states support 250,000 education jobs
$1.18 billion to put 5,500 law enforcement officers on the beat
$500 million to retain, rehire, and hire firefighters

The money would go directly to local governments:

The House proposal also lacks specific infrastructure funding, but its structure reflects a shift that could hearten urban planners and other advocates for a more city-centric approach to federal transportation funding. Three-quarters of the bill’s estimated $100 billion in aid would go directly to cities and counties to help avert layoffs of firefighters, police, and other workers.

Mayors had pressed for more transportation stimulus spending to go directly to cities but lost the political battle, as the lion’s share of the $48 billion in road and transit aid in last year’s recovery package was diverted through state DOTs. Many urban governments anticipate budget shortfalls in 2010 that could exceed those at the height of the financial crisis, with transit cuts and delays in infrastructure projects looming as consequences of the cash crunch.

That makes this bill not necessarily a left-right issue. Local mayors are hard to ignore for members of Congress. They may represent your next opponent. They may represent a key GOTV group. And they’re all going to want this money, be they Democratic or Republican. Mayors will head to DC to lobby for this bill next week.

This would help close serious budget gaps and increase aggregate demand, particularly where it’s most strained right now, at the level of public services. And Miller would not fund this with offsets, although Blue Dogs may howl. The way to increase demand is to actually increase demand.

“I think this should be considered part of the recovery,” Miller said. “In this economic downturn, this should be funded out of the deficit.”

Miller argued that the deficit would be worse if Congress allows local governments to continue to lay off workers in order to balance their budgets — in addition to raising taxes.

“We are not going to cure this deficit if we continue to lay people off,” Miller said. “You cannot cure a deficit when you are running with 15 million people unemployed in the country, and you cannot cure it at the local level by laying people off and raising taxes.”

Between this, the job creation tax credit bill and the $140 billion in tax extenders and social-safety net spending, you’re talking about close to $300 billion, and that’s without the HomeStar program on energy retrofit rebates. That approaches the annual funding level of the stimulus package, which has worked, although it was a bit too small.

You can hear a conference call with Miller and Rep. Keith Ellison, talking about the Local Jobs For America Act, at this link.

Tags: employment, George Miller, jobs, Keith Ellison, local government, state spending, stimulus package

While Democrats fret over whether we should investigate BushCo torture, Republicans move to investigate teh gay.

The scandal around disgraced ex-Rep. Eric Massa rocked Capitol Hill again Thursday as Republicans forced ethics officials to take another look at sordid charges of sexual harassment – and how they were handled. [...]

“Speaker Pelosi once promised the American people ‘the most open and ethical’ Congress in history, but she has broken that promise,” Boehner said.

And so it goes.

Tags: Early Morning Swim, Nancy Pelosi

This will not set well with alleged media critic Howard Kurtz as it will take away from his Tiger Woods/Eric Massa-related twitter time.

…some say a distinction must be made between Fox’s opinion shows (O’Reilly, Beck, Hannity) and its news programming.

Well, I say this Mr. or Ms. “Some” is a real asshole, which must be why Kurtz respects their opinion.

A distinction between the opinion shows as O’Reilly, Beck, and Hannity and the news programming?

Which is what?

Fox & Friends, where every morning is three hours of agenda setting on right-wing talking points? Where it is a legitimate for interviewees to appear as pimps for faked news stories (no correction for that yet, right?).

Or perhaps it’s just the rest of the “fair” and “balanced” “news” programming, like Megyn Kelly’s finding a broad swath of the public constituted by four white people at a retirement community?

Keb’ Mo’ — Dirty Lowdown and Bad.

What’s on your mind?

Tags: Dirty Lowdown and Bad, Keb Mo’, late late nite firedoglake, live music, YouTube