Reid Leads in Nevada Senate Race – Democracy NOW! — 9:50.

Harry Reid to Bloggers at Netroots Nation: “I’m Proud of You for Taking On The Tea Party” — 9:29.

Uncertain Future for Reid Despite Rebound in Nev., ABC News Politics, July 25, 2010, by MICHAEL R. BLOOD AP Political Writer (Associated Press, quoted verbatim:

Despite Reid’s rebound in Nev. against GOP foe, Dems worry poor economy could drag him down.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid’s chances for six more years in Washington may be like tossing dice in a casino, even if he has made headway against Republican challenger Sharron Angle in a state with the nation’s highest rate of joblessness.

The four-term Reid holds a slight lead over Angle in the latest polling, thanks in part to her unsteady performance since winning the June primary and to Democratic ads portraying her as an extremist. Video of Angle scurrying away from reporters has mixed with television commercials of older voters upset about her call to phase out Social Security and Medicare.

But an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press says Reid has a “a serious problem” with voters frustrated with the economy and “receives a great deal of blame.” The July 15 memo is based on polling research conducted for Patriot Majority, a union-funded group that is running TV ads against Angle.

How did Sharron Angle blow an 11-point lead on Harry Reid in seven weeks?

How did Sharron Angle blow an 11-point lead on Harry Reid in seven weeks?, Christian Science Monitor, July 28, 2010, by Brad Knickerbocker, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Just a few weeks ago, Senate majority leader Harry Reid seemed headed for political flameout.

Nevadans were down on their senior senator, according to the polls. The “tea party” movement was zeroing in on him as representative of all that’s wrong with big-government politics back in Washington. And it looked like any of his likely GOP opponents could beat the four-term incumbent in November.

Shortly after Nevada Republicans chose former state assemblywoman Sharron Angle to run against Reid, the beleaguered Democrat was trailing his opponent by 11 percentage points in a Rasmussen Reports poll of likely Nevada voters.

But things can change in a hurry.

Reid has moved ahead of Ms. Angle in the polls – by as much as seven points in the latest Mason-Dixon Polling & Research survey for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The Angle campaign – with help from an increasingly worried national party – is having to beef up its campaign staff with outside professionals. And Angle is scrambling to change the subject regarding her earlier controversial positions and assertions.

“Reid has gone from being a very heavy underdog to being a slight favorite,” says Ted Jelen, a political scientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “The fact that Sharron Angle won the primary was a major break for him.”

Meanwhile, Republicans “are growing increasingly frustrated with Sharron Angle and her lackluster campaign … fearing she is jeopardizing what they had long viewed as a sure pickup and costing them a chance to reclaim the majority,” reports CQ Politics.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), acknowledges the challenge his party faces in Nevada.

“While running for election is not rocket science, it does require knowledgeable people, it does require some discipline, and that’s always a struggle for every first-time candidate,” Senator Cornyn told CQ Politics.

See and watch Majority Leader Reid, live from Netroots Nation, Daily Kos, July 24, 2010, by Jed Lewison, video and transcript with updates. (we gave you the audio of Reid’s comments at Netroots Nation, above.

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Tea Parties Racked By Infighting, Confusion and Dissent, Mother Jones on AlterNet, July 25, 2010, by Stephanie Mencimer, quoted verbtim:

A series of rallies meant to help unify the movement have actually sired confusion and dissent.

The tea party movement is not just a political juggernaut — it’s also become a big business. That quickly became clear following last September’s unexpectedly enormous rally in Washington organized by Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, the event that helped put the movement on the map. With crowd estimates ranging from 75,000 to 2 million, the rally was such a hit that conservative activists are planning a sequel this year. A bunch of them actually. And these competing events have led to confusion and infighting among the tea party faithful. The conflict has reached such a pitch that Glenn Beck weighed in with a plea for unity on his radio show Thursday. “I don’t care who started it,” he lectured. “We must come together.”

If nothing else, conservative activists will have plenty of opportunities this summer to publicly vent their frustrations with the Obama administration. On the afternoon of September 12, FreedomWorks plans a repeat of last year’s march on the National Mall. Another group with ties to Beck’s National 9.12 Project has decided to get in on the action as well, putting together a three-day extravaganza that weekend that includes a “liberty XPO” at a swank DC hotel and a march on the Mall on the 9th anniversary of 9/11. Then there’s the “Restoring Honor” spectacle planned by Beck himself for the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the same spot. That rally will be followed the next day by yet another protest march, this one sponsored by the Tea Party Patriots.

Despite the many offerings in the works, this may be one case where competition won’t lead to a better product. Some activists fear that the smorgasbord of events — and the fighting about them — will dilute the impact of a single rally and divert precious resources away from where they need to be: in local elections. Bemoaning all the dissention, Darla Dawald, director of ResistNet, a social networking site for “patriots” recently lamented that “the movement is caught up in a tsunami of egos, nasty attitudes, manipulation, criticism, and pseudo leaders.”

The march controversy got its start last year, when tea party groups stunned the Washington establishment by arriving en masse for FreedomWorks’ mega rally on the Capitol lawn. The event landed with such impact that a couple of days after the march, FreedomWorks’ state and federal campaign director Brendan Steinhauser applied to the US Park Service for a permit to do it all over again in 2010. What he didn’t know was that other people had the same idea, namely activists associated with the 9.12 Project Beck started last year, when he called on viewers to launch a new conservative movement. (Hundreds of local 9.12 groups sprung up as a result.)

Among those activists was Beck’s ex-sister-in-law and the administrator of his 9.12 Project, Yvonne Donnelly. She made a beeline to the Park Service on the first business day after last year’s March to apply for a Mall permit for the entire weekend of Sept. 11, 2010. Then, in November, Patrick Jenkins, the president of the National 9.12 Project, created a new organization called Unite in Action to manage the newly christened “March on DC” and related events. UIA claims to be an umbrella group for a host of “liberty” organizations, including the militant Oath Keepers, Beck’s 9.12 Project, ResistNet, and others.

Its plans for the “March on DC” weekend are grand. The three-day extravaganza “by the people and for the people” has all the trappings of a corporate trade show, and for good reason. Among the organizers is Christine Drawdy, who owns a Florida-based company called One-Step Promotions & Incentives, which specializes in trade shows and travel promotions. According to UIA, its show is “modeled after conservative political conferences but with a purely grassroots flare.” Yet the group is hardly charging grassroots prices. The cost to host an event during the expo starts at $30,000. Renting a booth goes for anywhere from $1500 to $7700. Entry to the event itself runs $50, though a premium package allowing access to VIP receptions and banquets is a steep $250.

For all its corporate veneer, the fledgling UIA nonprofit appears to be on rather shaky footing. Jenkins incorporated UIA in Florida as a 501 (c)(4), a tax-exempt political organization, meaning that donations to the group aren’t tax deductible. The group missed the May 1 filing deadline for its annual report. According to the state division of corporations, it’s in jeopardy of losing its incorporation status as a result.

Even as the group has been heavily soliciting donations (“donate” buttons dominate the “March on DC” homepage), an IRS spokesman said he could not confirm its nonprofit status, meaning that UIA may have applied for 501 (c) (4) status, but that it has either not been granted or is still being reviewed. “We have made all filings required by the IRS consistent with 501(c)(4) status,” insisted Jerry Thompson, UIA’s treasurer, in an email. Meanwhile, the group’s president, Stephani Scruggs, declined to say how much money UIA has raised so far.

Particularly problematic for UIA, and potentially troubling to donors and would-be “March on DC” attendees, is the fact that the group does not yet have an official permit for its march. While anyone can apply to hold an event on the Mall, and the Park Service doesn’t charge much beyond a $50 application fee if organizers can show that the event has a First Amendment component, arranging a march on the Mall is no easy — or cheap — feat. Organizers still have to present the Park Service with comprehensive site plan and demonstrate they have the considerable finances to pay for all the logistics: Porta Potties, emergency medical tents, sound systems, etc. When told UIA is actively promoting its event and encouraging people to make travel arrangements to come to DC, without a valid permit in hand, a Park Service spokesman told me, “That’s a pretty big gamble.”

Meanwhile, it’s unclear how many people are likely to show up. UIA’s weekend lineup is decidedly short on the kind of big-name VIPs who help draw a crowd. While attendees of the FreedomWorks march will get a pep talk from tea party favorite Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and hear from potential GOP presidential candidate Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), UIA has yet to book any marquee speakers. So far on the agenda for the weekend is a seminar by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, a group founded by Beck’s favorite Mormon constitutional historian, Cleon Skousen, author of The 5,000 Year Leap. There’s also a talk dubbed “Foreign Aid: Enslaving Nations” by Tatiana Milne, a former student at George Wythe University, the unaccredited Utah college founded by Skousen’s Mormon acolytes, who did a stint as a Mormon missionary in Latvia. UIA also says its event will feature a ton of “conservative moms.”

Conspicuously absent from the lineup is anyone or any organization representing the families and victims of 9/11, despite the fact that the march will take place on the anniversary of the attacks. Scruggs, the UIA president, said in an email:

“We are in communication with a lot of these families and to protect their privacy and respect the sacred nature of this event, we have not yet decided whether we will publically release the names of the victim’s families who are participating until the day of the event. We appreciate you respecting their privacy as well.”

The existence of two different organizations planning two different marches in DC the weekend of September 12 has left many tea party activists — many of whom attended last year’s march — scratching their heads. Andrew Ian Dodge, the Maine coordinator and advisor to the board of the Tea Party Patriots, which is co-sponsoring the 9/12 march with FreedomWorks, says that many tea party activists have been complaining. “They’re asking, ‘why are there two? Why are they not working together?’ I’m involved and I’m confused,” he says with a laugh.

The confusion has only been enhanced by UIA, whose website and communications have been vague about who is in charge. “There are huge fights going on in the ‘tea party’ universe on who got which permit when, who is funded by whom, who is sponsoring what,” Iris Scheibl, a member of the South Florida 9-12 group, wrote on the group’s site this spring. She noted that the “March on DC” site “shows pictures from last year’s event — altho’ as far as I know — “Unite in Action” had no part in that event.”

Indeed, few of UIA’s leaders had any involvement in organizing last year’s 9/12 march, according to Steinhauser. Yet that hasn’t stopped UIA from leading people to believe it was the group behind the rally. In February, UIA issued a press release saying, “While few can logically deny that the September 12th 2009 ‘Taxpayers March on DC’ was a huge success, organizers for the 2010 event are redesigning the format, planning early and this year they promise to deliver a message to Washington DC that both houses of Congress and the Administration, Democrat, Republican or Independent, will not be able to ignore.” Such comments have only lent credence to suspicions among tea partiers that UIA is trying to stealthily capitalize on last year’s march success to boost its own fortunes (and perhaps finances as well).

None of this bodes well for the prospects of another huge tea party march in DC this fall. Nor does the evidence that tea partiers may be rallied out. Tea Party Nation, which made headlines earlier this year for landing Sarah Palin as a keynote speaker for a convention in Tennessee, was supposed to hold another “unity” event in Las Vegas this month. The event was canceled at the last minute, presumably for lack of interest. But there’s another reason to believe turnout for the September rallies could be underwhelming.

Part of last year’s success stemmed from heavy promotion by Glenn Beck. This year, though, he’s lending his star power to promote his “Restoring Honor” show with Sarah Palin . Rather than working with the group he helped spawn, he may well help suck the wind out of the “March on DC” weekend. “Some folks just can’t afford to go [to DC] twice,” says South Florida 9.12 Project member Fred Scheibl. Many conservative activists may have to choose: Dick Armey, UIA, and a bunch of conservative moms or Beck and Sarah Palin? That seems like an easy one.

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We’re In A One-and-a-half Dip Recession, Robert Reich.org, July 21,2010, by Robert Reich, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

We’re not in a double-dip recession yet. We’re in a one and a half dip recession.

Consumer confidence is down. Retail sales are down. Home sales are down. Permits for single-family starts are down. The average work week is down. The only things not down are inventories – unsold stuff is piling up in warehouses and inventories of unsold homes are rising – and defaults on loans.

The 1.5 dip recession should be causing alarm bells to ring all over official Washington. It should cause deficit hawks to stop squawking about future debt, blue-dog Democrats to stop acting like Republicans, and mainstream Democrats to get some backbone.

The 1.5 dip recession should cause the President to demand a large-scale national jobs program including a new WPA that gets millions of Americans back to work even if government has to pay their wages directly. Included would be zero-interest loans to strapped states and locales, so they didn’t have to cut vital services and raise taxes. They could repay when the economy picked up and revenues came in. The national jobs program would also include a one-year payroll tax holiday on the first $20,000 of income.

The President should stop talking and acting on anything else – not the deficit, not energy, not the environment, not immigration, not implementing the health care law, not education. He should make the whole upcoming mid-term election a national referendum on putting Americans back to work, and his jobs bill. Are you for it or against it?

But none of this is happening. The hawks and blue dogs are still commanding the attention. Herbert Hoover’s ghost seems to have captured the nation’s capital. We’re back to 1932 (or 1937) and the prevailing sentiment is government can’t and mustn’t do anything but aim to reduce the deficit, even though the economy is going down.

It looks like there’ll be an extension of unemployment benefits. (If it weren’t for the human suffering involved, I wish the Republicans had been forced to filibuster that bill all summer and show the nation just how much they care about people without jobs.) But the fiscal stimulus resulting from this will be tiny. Jobless benefits are humane but they alone don’t get jobs back.

And what about the Fed? It’s the last game in town. The 1.5 dip recession should cause Ben Bernanke to revert to buying mortgage-backed securities, buying Treasury bills, buying anything that will get more money into circulation.

But the Fed chair continues to talk about pulling money out of the system and raising short-term rates as the economy improves. During Wednesday’s appearance before Congress he made it clear monetary policy won’t be loosened; it just won’t be tightened for a while. And he reiterated that deficits were “unsustainable.”

He admitted unemployment would probably remain high for a long time, and the likelihood of growth was “weighted to the downside,” which in Fed-Speak means we’re still in trouble. And he said the Fed still has the tools to do what’s needed if the economy needs more help.

But would he use the tools now? No. “We need to look at them carefully to make sure we’re comfortable with any steps that we take.” This is like the captain of the Titanic looking carefully at his lifeboats to make sure he’s comfortable with using them as the ship starts sinking.

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Exposed!: Post 9/11 Privatization & Conservative Failure, Campaign for America’s Future, July 20, 2010, by Terrance Heath, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

Where’s the Tea Party when you really need them? There’s a bit of investigative reporting from the Washington Post that ought to have launched a Tea Party protest, complete with signs, slogans, and speeches (from the likes of Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Rand Paul — just to name a few.)

Tax dollars spend on a Mercedes? For someone on the government payroll? It seems right up their alley. Come on people. The placards and impassioned speeches practically write themselves.

So far, though. Nothing. Maybe they’re too busy demanding that the government hold BP accountable for the oil disaster in the Gulf.

Oh. Wait.

Maybe it’s because the wasteful government spending happened not only on the previous conservatives administration’s (and the previous conservative Congress’ watch), but as a result of a right-wing American article of faith: privatization.

The Post’s two-year investigative reporting project focuses on “The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,” which it describes as having become “so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

The first article in the series concerns itself with the government’s role in the “expanding enterprise” of national security. Today’s article, focuses on the phenomenon of private contractors working in the homeland security and intelligence industries.

To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest — and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. In interviews last week, both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta said they agreed with such concerns.

The Post investigation uncovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America created since 9/11 that is hidden from public view, lacking in thorough oversight and so unwieldy that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

In particular it tells the story of SGIS, a company that started in its founder’s living room in 2002, won its first defense contract four months later, and by 2006 had revenues of $30.6 million — some of which it invested in hiring employees specializing in government contracts. To help it land more such contracts of course. The company was selected for Inc. magazine’s 2009 list of the 5000 fastest growing companies, coming in at 1,371.

Near as I can tell, the company’s sole client — and thus its sole source of revenue — is the government. So, some of that $30.6 million in 2006 ($88 million by 2008) was spent on getting more contracts — or rather, invested in making sure the company kept its sole client. That is, some portion of the tax dollars paid to the company was spent to make sure that more tax dollars would come SGIS’s way in the future.

Some of it went towards some rather extravagant compensation for the company’s employees.

Eight years after it began, SGIS was up to revenue of $101 million, 14 offices and 675 employees. Those with top-secret clearances worked for 11 government agencies, according to The Post’s database.The company’s marketing efforts had grown, too, both in size and sophistication. Its Web site, for example, showed an image of Navy sailors lined up on a battleship over the words “Proud to serve” and another image of a Navy helicopter flying near the Statue of Liberty over the words “Preserving freedom.” And if it seemed hard to distinguish SGIS’s work from the government’s, it’s because they were doing so many of the same things. SGIS employees replaced military personnel at the Pentagon’s 24/7 telecommunications center. SGIS employees conducted terrorist threat analysis. SGIS employees provided help-desk support for federal computer systems.

Still, as alike as they seemed, there were crucial differences.

For one, unlike in government, if an SGIS employee did a good job, he might walk into the parking lot one day and be surprised by co-workers clapping at his latest bonus: a leased, dark-blue Mercedes convertible. And he might say, as a video camera recorded him sliding into the soft leather driver’s seat, “Ahhhh . . . this is spectacular.”

OK. Stop. Wait a minute. How did we get here? How did we become a country with a that can hand tax dollars to companies that spend them on Mercedes for employees, but can’t won’t extend unemployment benefits to the jobless, and can increase spending on wars in Afghanistan, but can’t won’t spend money to keep teachers on the job or keep 900,000 state government employees employed?

It’s an old story, of course, that 9/11 led to a “big government boom,” and government actually got bigger.

FactCheck.org calculates that the discretionary sums contained in appropriations bills signed by Bush for the current fiscal year — including the $87 billion supplemental appropriation for Iraq — amount to nearly a 36% increase over Clinton’s last year.

Most of the increase has indeed come from military spending (including wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) and activities that the administration classifies as homeland security. But that still leaves a 16% increase in funding for other discretionary programs.

That 3-year increase in discretionary spending, including a 180% increase for Homeland Security, tells the rest of the story. Bush started a government spending spree that left Clinton in the dust. (The Cato and WND links are for the teabaggers, so they don’t just have to take my word for it.) Not long after, private companies quickly figures out that fear was a profitable business, and beat a path to Washington to cash in on the huge increase in government spending.

After all, it was a conservative president doing the spending — with the relative silence, if not the blessing, of many congressional conservatives. And big government conservatism comes with a healthy (or unhealthy, depending on which end of the deal you’re on) serving of privatization.

Once in line for the government privatization gravy train, companies also found themselves in the enviable position to profit from government spending without government oversight. The Center for Public Integrity did a great job of researching and reporting on how this played out across the country.

This seems to have been, for the private companies that came to Washington looking for an angle on homeland security, the business equivalent of getting dessert without having to eat their vegetables. According to the House Committee on Government and Oversight Reform that’s exactly what happened.

Under the Bush Administration, the “shadow government” of private companies working under federal contract has exploded in size. Between 2000 and 2005, procurement spending increased by over $175 billion dollars, making federal contracts the fastest growing component of federal discretionary spending.

This growth in federal procurement has enriched private contractors. But it has also come at a steep cost for federal taxpayers. Overcharging has been frequent, and billions of dollars of taxpayer money have been squandered.

At the request of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, this report is the first comprehensive assessment of federal contracting under the Bush Administration. The report reaches three primary conclusions:

1. Procurement Spending Is Accelerating Rapidly. Between 2000 and 2005, procurement spending rose by 86% to $377.5 billion annually. Spending on federal contracts grew over twice as fast as other discretionary federal spending. Under President Bush, the federal government is now spending nearly 40 cents of every discretionary dollar on contracts with private companies, a record level.
2. Contract Mismanagement Is Widespread. The growth in federal contracts has been accompanied by pervasive mismanagement. Mistakes have been made in virtually every step of the contracting process: from pre-contract planning through contract award and oversight to recovery of contract overcharges.
3. The Costs to the Taxpayer Are Enormous. The report identifies 118 federal contracts worth $745.5 billion that have been found by government officials to include significant waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement. Each of the Bush Administration’s three signature initiatives — homeland security, the war and reconstruction in Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina recovery — has been characterized by wasteful contract spending

Anyone who’s not asking how we got here, and demanding that we change course, either isn’t paying attention or doesn’t care.

That brings me — on the off chance that some of them might read — back to the teabaggers with a simple question: Which is it?

Terrance Heath is the Online Producer at Campaign for America’s Future. Prior to his current position he worked as a Blogging and Social Media Consultant for a number of organizations and agencies, as an outgrowth of his work as Blogmaster for EchoDitto, Inc. He stumbled into blogging and social media after starting his own blog, The Republic of T., but cut his teeth as an activist working on LGBT equality and HIV/AIDS issues. In that capacity he worked for the Human Rights Campaign and the National Minority AIDS Council. Terrance has kindly allowed Evans Liberal Politics to publish his works on an ongoing basis. He sums himself up: Black. Gay. Father. Vegetarian. Buddhist. Liberal.

See Report: Tab for ‘War on terrorism’ tops $1 trillion, CNN Politics, July 20, 2010, by CNN Wire Staff.

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Extension of Benefits for the Jobless Clears Senate Hurdle, © The New York Times, July 20, 2010, by Carl Hulse, excerpt quoted verbatim:

WASHINGTON — The Senate broke a stalemate on Tuesday over extending unemployment benefits for Americans who have been out of work for six months or more, voting to override Republican objections that the bill’s costs would add to the federal deficit.

On a vote of 60 to 40, the Democratic-led Senate agreed to cut off debate on the $34 billion plan to distribute added unemployment compensation through November for those who have exhausted their standard 26 weeks of aid.

The 60 yes votes were the minimum required to overcome the threat of a filibuster and advance the bill to a final vote, expected later on Tuesday, when it is all but certain to pass. Two Republicans, Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, joined 56 Democrats and two independents in voting for the legislation; 39 Republicans and one Democrat, Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, opposed it.

An estimated 2 million Americans have seen their benefits run out over the past two months while the legislation has been stalled in the partisan impasse.

“Finally, finally, finally,” said Senator Barbara Milkuski, Democrat of Maryland. She called the unemployment insurance program a social compact with American workers that means, “when you hit a speed bump and have to be laid off through no fault of your own, there will be a safety net so that you do not fall.”

Republicans said they backed the idea of extending benefits, but were determined to prevent the costs from being piled onto the mounting deficit.

“We believe the federal debt has grown to an alarming level, where it is threatening the future of our children and grandchildren,” said Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate.

After the Senate completes its final vote on the measure, the House must still act on it, a vote that is expected to come on Wednesday. President Obama would then quickly sign the bill into law at the White House, freeing the aid.

The Senate action came just minutes after Carte Goodwin was sworn in as the new Democratic senator from West Virginia, replacing the late Robert C. Byrd. While the seat was vacant, Democrats lacked the votes to overcome the Republican filibuster.

At age 36, Mr. Goodwin, a former legal adviser to Governor Joe Manchin III, becomes the youngest member of the Senate, replacing the eldest.

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Cornyn unable to name one GOP fiscal policy change since Bush era, The Raw Story, July 18, 2010, by Daniel Tencer, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) couldn’t find a straight answer to give Sunday when he was asked how Republican fiscal policies today differ from their policies during the Bush era.

“What does distinguish the Republican Party of today from the Republican Party under President Bush’s rule with regards to spending, which is where it got out of control — under Republican rule,” asked host David Gregory on NBC’s Meet The Press.

“Let’s look at a few facts — thank you for the opportunity, because I want to respond to what Chris said. The last year that President Bush was in office, 2008, the deficit was 3.2 percent of the gross domestic product. Today it’s ten percent. We just hit the $13 trillion cap on national debt,” Cornyn said.

“Where did some of that debt come from?” Gregory asked. “The President of the United States was George Bush when they passed a huge TARP, which was to bail out the banks. I mean that’s what ran up a lot of debt as well. Are you saying a Republican was somehow different?”

“You’re ignoring the stimulus that … failed according to the president’s own standards,” Cornyn replied. “He said he was supposed to keep unemployment to eight percent.”

But Gregory persisted in his original question. “So my question is still: What is the distinction of the Republican Party of today versus the Bush record that you’re defending?”

“Well, I think what people are looking for, David, are checks and balances,” Cornyn said. “They’ve had single-party government and it’s scaring the living daylights out of them, and it’s keeping job creators on the sidelines rather than investing and creating jobs. That’s why the private sector isn’t creating jobs.”

“In other words,” comments the AlterPolitics blog, which posted the Cornyn interview online, “they intend to resume Bush’s policies of increasing the national debt to pay for deeper tax cuts for the rich, to bail out Wall Street fat cats, and to wage more endless and unnecessary wars.”

Cornyn’s lack of detail will give ammunition to critics of Republican policies who argue the party is determined to roll ahead with the same policies that some economists now blame for the economic meltdown — things such as the Bush tax cuts, which some argue contributed to the federal government’s debt burden and resulted in a greater share of wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few.

Many critics point to the GOP’s campaign to extend the Bush tax cuts as proof of this. Last week, Arizona Republican Sen. John Kyl came in for heavy criticism when he argued that the extension of the Bush tax cuts — unlike health care reform and jobless benefits — shouldn’t be offset by spending cuts. It’s estimated that extending the tax cuts, which expire at the end of this year, would cost the US $2.2 trillion. Extending only the part applying to people earning over $250,000 would cost $678 billion.

On Saturday, President Barack Obama took an aggressive stance against Republican tactics and policies, saying the party was harming the unemployed to look fiscally responsible.

“They say we shouldn’t provide unemployment insurance because it costs money,” Obama said during his weekly radio address. “So after years of championing policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, they’ve finally decided to make their stand on the backs of the unemployed.”

The following video was broadcast on NBC’s Meet The Press Sunday July 18, 2010, and uploaded to YouTube by DemRapidResponse.

*****

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The World’s Craziest Conservatives?, Campaign for America’s Future, July 15, 2010, by Terrance Heath, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

Note by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Here’s is Terrance Heath’s collection of some of the worst conservative statements and beliefs since June began from around the web. Right now we at Evans Liberal Politics are having some issues with display of videos on our site and we appreciate your patience about this. Hopefully we will have this problem fixed soon…. but some of these conservative statements and the articles they are in really boggle the mind. Thanks to Terrance Heath for permission to republish his articles on an ongoing basis. Here’s what he found out:

It would be funny, if only it wasn’t reality. That’s what I thought when I came across this while perusing videos on my iPhone recently.

It’s a pretty good compilation of the recent insanity. It’s good political satire. If it was an obvious parody, I could laugh. But it’s not. And as good as it is, the video doesn’t begin to capture the breadth and depth of the present political insanity. (After all, there’s only so much one can cram into three minutes or less.)

There’s no shortage of this stuff. Case in point: there’s been even more insanity, in the few days between watching this video and publishing this post. In fact, there’s enough material for a television show kind of like The Smoking Gun’s “World’s Dumbest.” (It could even be a kind of jobs program, that does for has-been, D-list conservatives pols what the Smoking Gun series has done for entertainment-world celebrities of the same varieties.)

Here’s what I was able to compile.

Watch The Right Wing Unhinged!

As you can see, there’s no end to this stuff. I finally had to stop gathering it if this post was ever going up, even though I know there’s stuff I didn’t include.

Here’s what I couldn’t capture on video:

• The Taliban have sharks with lasers attached to their heads.
• Serial Butt-Biting GOP Operative Sinks Teeth Into Texas Race
• Bachmann calls for constitutional conservative takeover to free ‘nation of slaves’
• Right-wing machine attacks Michelle for focusing on childhood obesity
  
• How American Right-Wing Christians Are Waging ‘Spiritual Warfare’ in Northern Iraq
• Conservative Pastor Wants You to Know Jesus Wasn’t a Sissy
• Republican senator says he backs birther lawsuits
• Extremist Christians Aim to Create Armed Militias Against “Godless” Federal Government
• Headless bodies and other immigration tall tales in Arizona
• Corbett says some would rather get unemployment checks than work
• GOP Rep. Dean Heller claims extending unemployment benefits is creating ‘hobos.’
• When Life Gives You Lemonade, Conservatives Make Lemons
• GOP: “We don’t need any more monuments”
• Don Young: Gulf spill ‘not an environmental disaster’
• MN GOP’s Emmer: Cut Minimum Wage For Waiters
• FLASHBACK: GOPer Angle Spoke Out Against Fluoride In Water Supply
• Republicans Take Brave Stand Against “Tan Tax”
• End the Liberal Bias Against Slavery
• The little-know but sinister link between socialism and fear of opposable thumbs
• Republicans Take Brave Stand Against “Tan Tax”
• Republican Senate wants homeless vets’ families to stay homeless
• Rand Paul Passes When Asked About The Age Of The Earth
• Gun Proponents Take Aim at Domestic Violence Survivors
• GOP Sen. Bob Bennett Says His Own Party Is Short On Policy Ideas
• John Boehner: Raise Retirement Age To 70; Wall Street Reform Is Like ‘Killing An Ant With A Nuclear Weapon’
• Sharron Angle’s energy plan: Deregulate the ‘mining industry,’ as well as the ‘oil and petroleum industry’
• “Blacks Don’t Own Martin Luther King”
• Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny?
• Widespread GOP Comfort With Sowell’s Hitler Comparison….
• Rand Paul at Christian Homeschoolers Conference: Schools and Hospitals Now Part of Our ‘Welfare State’
• Obama still a furriner, say 24%
• Conservatives Castigate Public Infrastructure Spending, BP Escrow Fund, as Nazi-Inspired
• Joe Barton Touts A Defense Of His BP Comments, Minutes After Apologizing To GOP For Them
• When It Doubt, the Right Goes With the Hitler Comparison….
• Ron Paul calls $20 billion BP escrow fund a ‘PR stunt,’ ‘suspicious’
• Rand Paul: ‘I Don’t Think The 14th Amendment Was Meant To Apply To Illegal Aliens’
• Republican Admits GOP Plan: Protect Corporations, Take Down the President
• GOP Nutcase Steve King’s Immigration Solution: Deport Liberals
• The BP Party: GOP Stands Behind Congressman Who Apologized to BP
• The Right Celebrates The End Of The American Dream
• The Right-Wing Lie Behind Haley Barbour’s BP Talking-Point
• The Constitution Party: Delusional Religious Fanatics Pushing for Christian Tyranny
• Jim DeMint, ‘Biblical Law’ Christians Unite in Fundraising for Angle
• GOPer’s Groveling Apology to BP CEO Sets Off Firestorm — Florida Republican Tells Him to Resign
• Sarah Palin Blames Environmentalists For Gulf Oil Disaster
• Boehner Wants You to Pick up the Tab

There. That gets us as far back as the beginning of summer — the point at which I drew an arbitrary line, because I couldn’t keep going indefinitely. (If I had the time, I could. The material is there.)

The point of compiling all of this isn’t to continue the “Stupid Republicans” meme, or to be dismissive of tea party types. Quite the opposite, actually. The point is that they should be taken seriously, as they are quite serious about what they believe, and all of the above is a mere preview of what we can expect if this brand of radicalized conservatism wins in November.

The point is: This is how they will govern.

Progressives — us complicated people who believe in “creating a world that works for everyone” — need to remember this much, no matter how frustrated, disappointed, or even angry we are about reforms that aren’t everything that they should be and that the country needs them to be. The inmates haven’t just taken over the asylum. They have breached its gates, organized, and are now threatening to take over the government.

What’s changed is that the nutcases on the right are capable of beating a sane Republican incumbent by 42 points if they step out of line. Believe me, every member of the GOP in Congress is aware of this fact. They have to eat chicken dinners with these people and ask them for money. Arlen Specter knew his goose was cooked as soon as he saw the reaction to Sarah Palin. In fact, it was the selection of Sarah Palin to be a vice-presidential candidate that put this Tea Party movement into overdrive. Up to that point all their energy was being put into Ron Paul’s delegate-deprived run for the presidency. McCain made the single most irresponsible political decision since a lame-duck James Buchanan sat silently while half the country seceded from the Union.

But I’m getting off my point. My point is that, while Scher is correct to point out the Tea Party is merely the latest incarnation of the right’s rage at being governed by a Democratic President, and to point out their overall numbers are small, he’s wrong to give the impression that we’re not dealing with something extremely dangerous. Because, if you haven’t noticed, the Republicans are voting in absolute lockstep, and they’re dancing to the Tea Partiers tune. They are terrified of opposing them. And even when they do oppose them we see outcomes like Rand Paul crushing the establishment candidate in a socially conservative (i.e., not a libertarian) state.

I’ve never seen a fringe movement take control of a party’s soul and mind like this before. I was hoping that the governance of Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and Karl Rove was the worst the right could offer, but it’s not even close. The Republicans have been cynical so long that they’ve been taken over by the duped.

Actual Republican congresspeople (with a handful of exceptions) have no interest in the Tea Party’s priorities. Want proof? Read the Mission & Platform just passed by Maine’s GOP. It’s cuckoo land. And that might be the saving grace for this country, because the establishment GOP doesn’t intend to become the party of Rand Paul. They just want to use that energy to get back into power and take the gavels back from the Democrats. But, first of all, we just saw what ‘reasonable’ establishment Republican politics can do to our country, so we can’t take much solace from the fact that that establishment is taking their cynicism to eleven by playing footsie with these people. Secondly, a bunch of the new Republicans elected this November are going to be certifiably Michele Bachmann-insane. And just like with the Republican Class of 1994, sixteen years later some of the people will be governors and senators.

They might just be the “world’s craziest conservatives,” but they could be “coming soon to a Congress near you,” if progressives — out of frustration, despair, or a lack of enthusiasm — decide to “sit this one out.” Because I can guarantee you, the tea-party types and the far right fringe won’t. As Bill pointed out, the current overheated right-wing fringe movement called the Tea Party has deep roots.

Was GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham correct when he told the New York Times Magazine that the Tea Party would “die out” because “they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country”?

It would be nice if that were the basis on which political parties and movements survived or collapsed. But the Republican Party did not have a coherent vision for governing the country between 2001 and 2008, and it is still around. (Michael Steele notwithstanding.)

The Tea Party can easily survive on blind hatred for responsive government, revulsion of shared responsibility, rampant misinformation and conspiracy theories.

How do I know? Because it has survived for decades.

The Tea Party is nothing new. It is merely the latest incarnation of the right-wing fringe that predictably overheats whenever a left-of-center reformer is elected to the presidency. It was the John Birch Society and the National Indignation Convention in the early 1960s, the Moral Majority and other “New Right” groups in the late 1970s, and Rush Limbaugh’s “dittoheads” and the militia movement in the 1990s.

The name has changed, along with a few other details, but the movement is the same one that rises up every time we take a step closer to “a world that works for everyone,” the same movement that “stands athwart history yelling stop” every time a progressive movement brings America closer to living up to all it promises to be on paper for all of its citizens.

That the same old movement has reared its head again suggests we’ve had more victories than perhaps we’re inclined to acknowledge, due to a progressive tendency to always seek more justice, more inclusion, more equality, etc. Clearly we’re not “there” yet, but we’re close than we were and we have an opportunity to get even closer.

Unless. Unless we throw our hands up in frustration at the winding route and painfully slow pace and decide not to make the trip at all.

That would separate us from previous progressive movements that made it possible for someone like Barack Obama to be president, and someone like Hillary Clinton to make 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling that will someday shatter — taking with it another barrier between us and “there,” our destination of “a world that works for everyone.” None of which would have happened if our progressive forebears had given up when they set out for “a world that world for everyone” and ended up with a piece of the world that worked a bit better for some than it did before.

In short, we wouldn’t be at this juncture if they had abandoned their fellow citizens and future generations — us — to an opposition that declare “no further” and promised to push back what gains had been made. Can we, in good conscience, abandon those whose lives will be made worse if today’s reactionary conservative movement grabs the reins and turns their battle cry of “Hell no” or “Hell, no you can’t” into policy. Can we in good conscience abandon 15 million unemployed Americans to the will of a movement and politicians who withhold the unemployment benefits they need for basic necessities, to score political points?

We’re dealing with a movement that is as dangerous as it was generations ago — and not in terms of violence, threats of violence, or justification of both — but in terms of what it means for Americans now and for generations to come if todays radicalized, reactionary conservative movement succeeds in grabbing power in the midst of a crisis, bringing more pain to more Americans, and inflicting likely permanent damage on our economy, culture, and society.

All that’s required, to borrow (ironically) a quote from “the father of modern conservatism,” is for us to do nothing.

This November, I’ll probably go to the ballot box with the words of my late father ringing in my ears. He and my mom stressed to us the importance of voting, of taking part in the political process — however frustrating and dispiriting it may be at times — and not “sitting it out.” They knew whereof they spoke, because they saw their country change from an America where they could not vote to one that enshrined their right to vote in law, and they knew the long fight required to get there.

I reach voting age in the 1980s, having grown up in the Reagan era, and seen the south where I grew up turn a deep shade of “red.” So, I knew what my father meant when he said to me, “Always vote. If you can’t find someone to vote for, find someone to vote against, but vote.” That was how he’d managed to keep going back to the polls, by framing his choice in terms of which candidate or which policies might do the least harm, if not the most good.

But this year I’m going to frame my vote (my volunteer activities and donations) as support for “the world as it should be” or “a world that works for everyone” and the candidates and policies that will get us, if not all the way there, then closer than we were before 2008 and closer than we are now — instead of framing my vote against “the world’s craziest conservatives.”

*****

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